inst
obstacles, the classic to turn to is not _Hamlet_, not _Lear_, but
_Robinson Crusoe_; yet no one, except a pantomime librettist, ever saw a
drama in Defoe's narrative. In a Platonic dialogue, in _Paradise Lost_,
in _John Gilpin_, there is a struggle of will against obstacles; there
is none in _Hannele_, which, nevertheless, is a deeply-moving drama.
Such a struggle is characteristic of all great fiction, from _Clarissa
Harlowe_ to _The House with the Green Shutters_; whereas in many plays
the struggle, if there be any at all, is the merest matter of form (for
instance, a quite conventional love-story), while the real interest
resides in something quite different.

The plain truth seems to be that conflict is _one_ of the most dramatic
elements in life, and that many dramas--perhaps most--do, as a matter
of fact, turn upon strife of one sort or another. But it is clearly an
error to make conflict indispensable to drama, and especially to
insist--as do some of Brunetiere's followers--that the conflict must be
between will and will. A stand-up fight between will and will--such a
fight as occurs in, say, the _Hippolytus_ of Euripides, or Racine's
_Andromaque_, or Moliere's _Tartufe_, or Ibsen's _Pretenders_, or
Dumas's _Francillon_, or Sudermann's _Heimat_, or Sir Arthur Pinero's
_Gay Lord Quex_, or Mr. Shaw's _Candida_, or Mr. Galsworthy's
_Strife_--such a stand-up fight, I say, is no doubt one of the intensest
forms of drama. But it is comparatively rare at any rate as the formula
of a whole play. In individual scenes a conflict of will is frequent
enough; but it is, after all, only one among a multitude of equally
telling forms of drama. No one can say that the Balcony Scene in _Romeo
and Juliet_ is undramatic, or the "Galeoto fu il libro" scene in Mr.
Stephen Phillips's _Paolo and Francesca_; yet the point of these scenes
is not a clash, but an ecstatic concordance, of wills. Is the
death-scene of Cleopatra undramatic? Or the Banquet scene in _Macbeth_?
Or the pastoral act in _The Winter's Tale_? Yet in none of these is
there any conflict of wills. In the whole range of drama there is
scarcely a passage which one would call more specifically dramatic than
the Screen Scene in _The School for Scandal_; yet it would be the
veriest quibbling to argue that any appreciable part of its effect
arises from the clash of will against will. This whole comedy, indeed,
suffices to show the emptiness of the theory. With a little