Ivan Ilytch_ would be one of the greatest dramas ever written--which it
certainly is not. Yet again, if we want to see will struggling against
obstacles, the classic to turn to is not _Hamlet_, not _Lear_, but
_Robinson Crusoe_; yet no one, except a pantomime librettist, ever saw a
drama in Defoe's narrative. In a Platonic dialogue, in _Paradise Lost_,
in _John Gilpin_, there is a struggle of will against obstacles; there
is none in _Hannele_, which, nevertheless, is a deeply-moving drama.
Such a struggle is characteristic of all great fiction, from _Clarissa
Harlowe_ to _The House with the Green Shutters_; whereas in many plays
the struggle, if there be any at all, is the merest matter of form (for
instance, a quite conventional love-story), while the real interest
resides in something quite different.

The plain truth seems to be that conflict is _one_ of the most dramatic
elements in life, and that many dramas--perhaps most--do, as a matter
of fact, turn upon strife of one sort or another. But it is clearly an
error to make conflict indispensable to drama, and especially to
insist--as do some of Brunetière's followers--that the conflict must be
between will and will. A stand-up fight between will and will--such a
fight as occurs in, say, the _Hippolytus_ of Euripides, or Racine's
_Andromaque_, or Molière's _Tartufe_, or Ibsen's _Pretenders_, or
Dumas's _Françillon_, or Sudermann's _Heimat_, or Sir Arthur Pinero's
_Gay Lord Quex_, or Mr. Shaw's _Candida_, or Mr. Galsworthy's
_Strife_--such a stand-up fight, I say, is no doubt one of the intensest
forms of drama. But it is comparatively rare at any rate as the formula
of a whole play. In individual scenes a conflict of will is frequent
enough; but it is, after all, only one among a multitude of equally
telling forms of drama. No one can say that the Balcony Scene in _Romeo
and Juliet_ is undramatic, or the "Galeoto fú il libro" scene in Mr.
Stephen Phillips's _Paolo and Francesca_; yet the point of these scenes