r emerge unbidden from the vague limbo of sub-consciousness?" A.B.
Walkley, _Drama and Life_, p. 85.]

[Footnote 6: Sardou kept a file of about fifty _dossiers_, each bearing
the name of an unwritten play, and containing notes and sketches for it.
Dumas, on the other hand, always finished one play before he began to
think of another. See _L'Annee Psychologique_, 1894, pp. 67, 76.]

[Footnote 7: "My experience is," a dramatist writes to me, "that you
never deliberately choose a theme. You lie awake, or you go walking, and
suddenly there flashes into your mind a contrast, a piece of spiritual
irony, an old incident carrying some general significance. Round this
your mind broods, and there is the germ of your play." Again be writes:
"It is not advisable for a playwright to start out at all unless he has
so felt or seen something, that he feels, as it matures in his mind,
that he must express it, and in dramatic form."]

_CHAPTER III_

DRAMATIC AND UNDRAMATIC

It may be well, at this point, to consider for a little what we mean
when we use the term "dramatic." We shall probably not arrive at any
definition which can be applied as an infallible touchstone to
distinguish the dramatic from the undramatic. Perhaps, indeed, the
upshot may rather be to place the student on his guard against troubling
too much about the formal definitions of critical theorists.

The orthodox opinion of the present time is that which is generally
associated with the name of the late Ferdinand Brunetiere. "The theatre
in general," said that critic, "is nothing but the place for the
development of the human will, attacking the obstacles opposed to it by
destiny, fortune, or circumstances." And again: "Drama is a
representation of the will of man in conflict with the mysterious powers
or natural forces which limit and belittle us; it is one of us thrown
living upon the stage, there to struggle against fatality, against
social law, against one of his fellow-mortals, against himself, if need
be, against the ambitions, the interests, the prejudices, the folly, the
malevolence of those who surround him."[1]

The difficulty about this definition is that, while it describes the
matter of a good many dramas, it does not lay down any true
differentia--any characteristic common to all drama, and possessed by no
other form of fiction. Many of the greatest plays in the world can with
difficulty be brought under the formula, while the majority of r