other of Johan and Betty;[5] in which case we should have had
the simple family group of two brothers and two sisters, instead of the
comparatively complex relationship of a brother and sister, a
half-sister and a cousin.

These may seem very trivial considerations: but nothing is really
trivial when it comes to be placed under the powerful lens of theatrical
presentation. Any given audience has only a certain measure of attention
at command, and to claim attention for inessentials is to diminish the
stock available for essentials. In only one other play does Ibsen
introduce any complexity of relationship, and in that case it does not
appear in the exposition, but is revealed at a critical moment towards
the close. In _Little Eyolf_, Asta and Allmers are introduced to us at
first as half-sister and half-brother; and only at the end of the second
act does it appear that Asta's mother (Allmers' stepmother) was
unfaithful to her husband, and that, Asta being the fruit of this
infidelity, there is no blood kinship between her and Allmers. The
danger of relying upon such complexities is shown by the fact that so
acute a critic as M. Jules Lemaitre, in writing of _Little Eyolf_,
mistook the situation, and thought that Asta fled from Allmers because
he was her brother, whereas in fact she fled because he was not. I had
the honour of calling M. Lemaitre's attention to this error, which he
handsomely acknowledged.

Complexities of kinship are, of course, not the only complexities which
should, so far as possible, be avoided. Every complexity of relation or
of antecedent circumstance is in itself a weakness, which, if it cannot
be eliminated, must, so to speak, be lived down. No dramatic critic, I
think, can have failed to notice that the good plays are those of which
the story can be clearly indicated in ten lines; while it very often
takes a column to give even a confused idea of the plot of a bad play.
Here, then, is a preliminary test which may be commended to the would-be
playwright, in order to ascertain whether the subject he is
contemplating is or is not a good one: can he state the gist of it in a
hundred words or so, like the "argument" of a Boccaccian novella? The
test, of course, is far from being infallible; for a theme may err on
the side of over-simplicity or emptiness, no less than on the side of
over-complexity. But it is, at any rate, negatively useful: if the
playwright finds that he cannot make his story comp