For instance, Il ne faut jurer de rien. Il faut qu'une porte soit ouverte où fermée. Un bienfait n'est jamais perdu. There is also a large class of pieces of which the title, though not itself a proverb, makes direct allusion to some fable or proverbial saying: for example, Les Brebis de Panurge, La Chasse aux Corbeaux, La Cigale chez les Fourmis.
I learn, on the best authority, that I am wrong, in point of fact, as to the origin of Strife. The play arose in Mr. Galsworthy's mind from his actually having seen in conflict the two men who were the prototypes of Anthony and Roberts, and thus noted the waste and inefficacy arising from the clash of strong characters unaccompanied by balance. It was accident that led him to place the two men in an environment of capital and labour. In reality, both of them were, if not capitalists, at any rate on the side of capital. This interesting correction of fact does not invalidate the theory above stated.
Mr. Henry Arthur Jones writes to me: "Sometimes I start with a scene only, sometimes with a complete idea. Sometimes a play splits into two plays, sometimes two or three ideas combine into a concrete whole. Always the final play is altered out of all knowledge from its first idea." An interesting account of the way in which two very different plays by M. de Curel: L'Envers d'une Sainte and L'Invitée,--grew out of one and the same initial idea, may be found in L'Année Psychologique, 1894, p. 121.
In my discussion of this point, I have rather simplified Aristotle's position. He appears to make action the essential element in tragedy and not merely the necessary vehicle of character. "In a play," he says, "they do not act in order to portray the characters, they include the characters for the sake of the action. So that it is the action in it, i.e. its Fable or Plot, that is the end and purpose of the tragedy, and the end is everywhere the chief thing. Besides this, a tragedy is impossible without action, but there may be one without character." (Bywater's Translation.) The last sentence is, in my view, the gist of the matter; the preceding sentences greatly overstate the case. There was a lively controversy on the subject in the Times Literary Supplement in May, 1902. It arose from a review of Mr. Phillips's Paolo and Francesco, and Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. Churton Collins, and Mr. A.B. Walkley took part in it.
"Are the first beginnings of imaginative conception directed by the will? Are they, indeed, conscious at all? Do they not rather emerge unbidden from the vague limbo of sub-consciousness?" A.B. Walkley, Drama and Life, p. 85.