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.]

[Footnote 5: "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.]

[Footnote 6: Sardou kept a file of about fifty _dossiers_, each bearing
the name of an unwritten play, and containing notes and sketches for it.
Dumas, on the other hand, always finished one play before he began to
think of another. See _L'Année Psychologique_, 1894, pp. 67, 76.]

[Footnote 7: "My experience is," a dramatist writes to me, "that you
never deliberately choose a theme. You lie awake, or you go walking, and
suddenly there flashes into your mind a contrast, a piece of spiritual
irony, an old incident carrying some general significance. Round this
your mind broods, and there is the germ of your play." Again be writes:
"It is not advisable for a playwright to start out at all unless he has
so felt or seen something, that he feels, as it matures in his mind,
that he must express it, and in dramatic form."]




_CHAPTER III_