a of the
"well-made play,--" _la piece bien faite_,--in which the exposition was
leisurely and careful, in which the interest of expectancy was aroused
early and sustained to the end, in which the vital scenes of the
essential struggle,--the _scenes a faire_,--were shown on the stage at
the very moment of the story when they would be most effective, and in
which a logical conclusion dimly foreseen, but ardently desired, was
happily brought about by devices of unexpected ingenuity. In perfecting
the formula of the "well-made play" Scribe may have taken hints from
Beaumarchais, especially from the final act of the 'Marriage of Figaro';
and he had found his profit also in a study of the methods of the
melodrama, which had been elaborated in the theaters of the Parisian
boulevards at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and which had
been imitated already by Hugo and the elder Dumas. At its best, the
"well-made play" was an amusing piece of mechanism, a clockwork toy
which had a mere semblance of life, but which did precisely what its
maker had constructed it to do.

The piece put together according to this formula was sufficient to
itself, with its wheels within wheels; and its maker had no need of
style or of poetry, of psychology or of philosophy. So long as the
playwright was content to be a playwright only and did not aspire to be
a dramatist with his own views of life, the formula was satisfactory
enough; but when the younger Dumas and Augier came on the stage they
wanted to put a broader humanity into their plays, and they could make
room for this only by simplifying the machinery. Yet, while they were
delivering each his own message, they accepted the model of the
"well-made play"; and it is to this that we may ascribe the
artificiality we begin to discern even in such masterpieces of
dramaturgic craftsmanship as the 'Gendre de M. Poirier' and the
'Demi-monde.'

Upon Ibsen also the influence of Scribe is as obvious as it is upon
Augier and Dumas _fils_. The earliest of his social dramas, the 'League
of Youth' and the 'Pillars of Society' are composed according to the
formula of the "well-made play," with its leisurely exposition, its
intricate complications of recoiling intrigue, its ingeniously contrived
conclusion. If we compare the 'League of Youth' with Scribe's 'Bertrand
et Raton,' or with Sardou's 'Rabagas'; if we compare the 'Pillars of
Society' with Dumas's 'Etrangere,' or Augier's 'Effrontes' we canno