ad no
consciousness that the scene was not original with him.

In one of his conversations with Eckermann, Goethe declared that Byron
had not known how to meet the charge of levying on the earlier poets.
The German sage asserted that the English bard should have been far
bolder in his own defence, and far franker also. Byron should have said:
"What is there, is mine; and whether I got it from a book or from life,
is of no consequence; the only point is, whether I have made a right use
of it." And then Goethe added that in one of the Waverley novels Scott
had appropriated a scene from 'Egmont'; "and he had a right to do so;
and because he did it well, he deserves praise." Goethe seemed to think
that the privilege of using again what had been invented by another was
justified only when the later author improved on the earlier, or at
least attained to an equal level. He noted that Scott had taken Mignon
in 'Wilhelm Meister' as the model of Fenella in 'Peveril of the
Peak'--"but whether with equal judgment is another question."

Goethe was wise enough to know that human invention is finite and that
the number of possible effects is limited. He once told Eckermann and
Soret that the Italian playwright, Gozzi, had asserted the existence of
only thirty-six possible tragic situations, and that Schiller had taken
much trouble in trying to prove that there were more, only in the end to
find himself unable to gather even so many as Gozzi had collected. "It
is almost impossible, in the present day," commented Goethe, "to find a
situation which is thoroly new. Only the manner of looking at it can be
new, and the art of treating it and representing it."

Unfortunately, we have not Gozzi's list of the three dozen situations,
nor Schiller's smaller catalog to compare with it. Gerard de
Nerval--that strangest figure of a strange period--considered the matter
anew in the fervid days of French romanticism, and decided that there
were in reality only twenty-four typical situations available for the
theater; but his classification has also failed to come down to us.
However, in the last decade of the nineteenth century an ingenious
Frenchman, M. Georges Polti, accepting the number originally proposed by
Gozzi, examined the plots of several thousand plays, classified the
result of his arduous investigation, and published a little book of two
hundred pages on the '36 Situations Dramatiques.'

Highly interesting as is M. Polti's book, there