is a bandit and an outlaw, and he is doomed to failure
because of the superior power of organised society arrayed against him. So
many minor victories were won at that famous _premiere_ of _Hernani_ that
even Hugo's followers were too excited to perceive that he had given the
drama a new subject and the theatre a new theme; but this epoch-making fact
may now be clearly recognised in retrospect. _Hernani_, and all of Victor
Hugo's subsequent dramas, dealt, however, with distant times and lands; and
it was left to another great romantic, Alexander Dumas _pere_, to be the
first to give the modern theme a modern setting. In his best play,
_Antony_, which exhibits the struggle of a bastard to establish himself in
the so-called best society, Dumas brought the discussion home to his own
country and his own period. In the hands of that extremely gifted
dramatist, Emile Augier, the new type of serious drama passed over into
the possession of the realists, and so downward to the latter-day realistic
dramatists of France and England, Germany and Scandinavia. The supreme and
the most typical creative figure of the entire period is, of course, the
Norwegian Henrik Ibsen, who--such is the irony of progress--despised the
romantics of 1830, and frequently expressed a bitter scorn for those
predecessors who discovered and developed the type of tragedy which he
perfected.

III

We are now prepared to inquire more closely into the specific sort of
subject which the modern social drama imposes on the dramatist. The
existence of any struggle between an individual and the conventions of
society presupposes that the individual is unconventional. If the hero were
in accord with society, there would be no conflict of contending forces: he
must therefore be one of society's outlaws, or else there can be no play.
In modern times, therefore, the serious drama has been forced to select as
its leading figures men and women outcast and condemned by conventional
society. It has dealt with courtesans (_La Dame Aux Camelias_),
demi-mondaines (_Le Demi-Monde_), erring wives (_Frou-Frou_), women with a
past (_The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_), free lovers (_The Notorious Mrs.
Ebbsmith_), bastards (_Antony_; _Le Fils Naturel_), ex-convicts (_John
Gabriel Borkman_), people with ideas in advance of their time (_Ghosts_),
and a host of other characters that are usually considered dangerous to
society. In order that the dramatic struggle might be tense, the dramat