A play manifestly suggested by a theme of temporary interest will often
have a great but no less temporary success. For instance, though there
was a good deal of clever character-drawing in _An Englishman's Home_,
by Major du Maurier, the theme was so evidently the source and
inspiration of the play that it will scarcely bear revival. In America,
where the theme was of no interest, the play failed.

It is possible, no doubt, to name excellent plays in which the theme, in
all probability, preceded both the story and the characters in the
author's mind. Such plays are most of M. Brieux's; such plays are Mr.
Galsworthy's _Strife_ and _Justice_. The French plays, in my judgment,
suffer artistically from the obtrusive predominance of the theme--that
is to say, the abstract element--over the human and concrete factors in
the composition. Mr. Galsworthy's more delicate and unemphatic art
eludes this danger, at any rate in _Strife_. We do not remember until
all is over that his characters represent classes, and his action is,
one might almost say, a sociological symbol. If, then, the theme does,
as a matter of fact, come first in the author's conception, he will do
well either to make it patently and confessedly dominant, as in the
_proverbe_, or to take care that, as in _Strife_, it be not suffered to
make its domination felt, except as an afterthought.[2] No outside force
should appear to control the free rhythm of the action.

The theme may sometimes be, not an idea, an abstraction or a principle,
but rather an environment, a social phenomenon of one sort or another.
The author's primary object in such a case is, not to portray any
individual character or tell any definite story, but to transfer to the
stage an animated picture of some broad aspect or phase of life, without
concentrating the interest on any one figure or group. There are
theorists who would, by definition, exclude from the domain of drama any