*

Obligatory scenes of the first type--those necessitated by the inherent
logic of the theme--can naturally arise only in plays to which a
definite theme can be assigned. If we say that woman's claim to possess
a soul of her own, even in marriage, is the theme of _A Doll's House_,
then evidently the last great balancing of accounts between Nora and
Helmer is an obligatory scene. It would have been quite possible for
Ibsen to have completed the play without any such scene: he might, for
instance, have let Nora fulfil her intention of drowning herself; but in
that case his play would have been merely a tragic anecdote with the
point omitted. We should have felt vague intimations of a general idea
hovering in the air, but it would have remained undefined and
undeveloped. As we review, however, the series of Ibsen's plays, and
notice how difficult it is to point to any individual scene and say,
"This was clearly the _scene a faire_," we feel that, though the phrase
may express a useful idea in a conveniently brief form, there is no
possibility of making the presence or absence of a _scene a faire_ a
general test of dramatic merit. In _The Wild Duck_, who would not say
that, theoretically, the scene in which Gregers opens Hialmar's eyes to
the true history of his marriage was obligatory in the highest degree?
Yet Ibsen, as a matter of fact, does not present it to us: he sends the
two men off for "a long walk" together: and who does not feel that this
is a stroke of consummate art? In _Rosmersholm_, as we know, he has
been accused of neglecting, not merely the scene, but the play, _a
faire_; but who will now maintain that accusation? In _John Gabriel
Borhman_, if we define the theme as the clash of two devouring egoisms,
Ibsen has, in the third act, given us the obligatory scene; but he has
done it, unfortunately, with an enfeebled hand; whereas the first and
second acts, though largely expository, and even (in the Foldal scene)
episodic, rank with his greatest achievements.

For abundant examples of scenes rendered obligatory by the logic of the
theme, we have only to turn to the works of those remorseless
dialecticians, MM. Hervieu and Brieux. In such a play as _La Course du
Flambeau_, there is scarcely a scene that may not be called an
obligatory deduction from the thesis duly enunciated, with no small
parade of erudition, in the first ten minutes of the play. It is that,
in handing on the _vital lampada_, as Plato a