test profit. Not
that the student should mechanically imitate even Ibsen's routine of
composition, which, indeed, varied considerably from play to play. The
great lesson to be learnt from Ibsen's practice is that the play should
be kept fluid or plastic as long as possible, and not suffered to become
immutably fixed, either in the author's mind or on paper, before it has
had time to grow and ripen. Many, if not most, of Ibsen's greatest
individual inspirations came to him as afterthoughts, after the play had
reached a point of development at which many authors would have held the
process of gestation ended, and the work of art ripe for birth. Among
these inspired afterthoughts may be reckoned Nora's great line,
"Millions of women have done that"--the most crushing repartee in
literature--Hedvig's threatened blindness, with all that ensues from it,
and Little Eyolf's crutch, used to such purpose as we have already seen.

This is not to say that the drawing-up of a tentative scenario ought not
to be one of the playwright's first proceedings. Indeed, if he is able
to dispense with a scenario on paper, it can only be because his mind is
so clear, and so retentive of its own ideas, as to enable him to carry
in his head, always ready for reference, a more or less detailed scheme.
Go-as-you-please composition may be possible for the novelist, perhaps
even for the writer of a one-act play, a mere piece of dialogue; but in
a dramatic structure of any considerable extent, proportion, balance,
and the interconnection of parts are so essential that a scenario is
almost as indispensable to a dramatist as a set of plans to an
architect. There is one dramatist of note whom one suspects of sometimes
working without any definite scenario, and inventing as he goes along.
That dramatist, I need scarcely say, is Mr. Bernard Shaw. I have no
absolute knowledge of his method; but if he schemed out any scenario for
_Getting Married_ or _Misalliance_, he has sedulously concealed the
fact--to the detriment of the plays.[1]

The scenario or skeleton is so manifestly the natural ground-work of a
dramatic performance that the playwrights of the Italian _commedia dell'
arte_ wrote nothing more than a scheme of scenes, and left the actors to
do the rest. The same practice prevailed in early Elizabethan days, as
one or two MS. "Plats," designed to be hung up in the wings, are extant
to testify. The transition from extempore acting regulated by a scena