produced primarily based upon "taking people with characteristics and
letting them work out their own play." It is obvious that people, even
people with strongly marked characteristics, can live for years in
juxtaposition without their relation to one another resulting in
anything dramatic, or even theatrical. Paula Tanqueray and her husband
might have lived and died unhappily together without offering any
materials to the playwright, and so indeed might any of the characters
in any of the plays by the brilliant author. Only when facts exterior to
them begin to play upon the characters dramatically is there room for
drama. There is an enormous amount of plot, psychological or physical,
in every play.

Next to the first, the second category produces the plays most clearly
defined. One might take the plays of Brieux, and some of the
dead-and-gone dramas of Charles Reade. Here we have dramas of idea,
more accurately of subject, still more accurately of problem. They are
works in which the dramatist tries to prove something, or, at least,
present some problem of social life, leaving to the audience the task of
coming to a conclusion.

However, even M. Brieux cannot get on without category number one,
whilst he puts as much of category number three in his work as he can.
He invents a story, and he chooses and endeavours to display characters
as a vehicle for exhibiting his subject. Sometimes, to be just, he gets
along--in a fashion--with a surprisingly small amount of plot, as in
_Les Bienfaiteurs_. Even then the necessity of having some sort of form
makes a good deal of story necessary. Jean Jullien, the inventor of the
phrase "Une tranche de la vie," endeavoured to give plays without formal
beginning or end, unconsciously, perhaps, tried to carry out a desire of
Merimee's to write a play in respect of which the audience needs no
knowledge of antecedent facts; but his success--in more senses than
one--was only partial.

The English dramatists of what one might call the Independent Theatre,
Stage Society, and Court Theatre management have struggled to avoid the
anecdotal play, sometimes with a brilliant result, as in _The Voysey
Inheritance_, _John Bull's Other Island_, or _Strife_; Mr J.M. Barrie in
several successful works has minimised the story as much as possible.

Why does "Percival" ignore them? Has he overlooked the fact that most of
the French dramas successfully adapted belong primarily to the category
he conde