use' (which supplied the plot for the opera of 'Rigoletto') and he
insists further that one or another subdivision of this situation has
been employed by Hugo at least five times in the single drama of
'Lucrece Borgia.' If there are still any who hold that Hugo as a
dramatist was "of the race and lineage of Shakspere," they may find
instruction in the fact that this highly artificial situation, which the
superb French lyrist was seemingly unable to leave out of his
arbitrarily complicated plots, was not employed even once by the great
English dramatist.

Probably nothing would have more disagreeably surprized Hugo--who held
himself to be extraordinarily prolific and various, and who indeed had
abundant reason for this belief--than the disclosure of the fact that he
had made use so often of a single situation. And this is evidence, if
any was needed, that the repetition of the same situation by the same
author, or even by a succession of authors down thru the ages, is more
often than not wholly unconscious, and that it is the result, not so
much of any poverty of invention, as of the absolute limitation of the
number of possible situations. The utmost of novelty that any plot-maker
may hope to attain now in the twentieth century is only the result of
his own shuffling of the same pack with which all the plot-makers of the
past have been playing. A new principle he can scarcely hope to invent
for himself; and all that he can safely claim for his most original
sequence of scenes is a patent on the combination.

M. Polti, indeed, has bravely offered to supply ten thousand new plots,
put together by combining and recombining the manifold subdivisions of
his thirty-six situations, some of which he has ascertained to have been
sadly neglected by the playwrights of our time. One may venture to doubt
whether there would be profit in taking advantage of this generous
offer, for if certain situations essayed in the past have not been
popular of late, there is warrant for wondering whether this neglect is
not due to an instinctive feeling on the part of the playwright of the
present that these situations would fail to excite the interest of the
playgoers of our own time and to evoke an emotional response. To insure
the success of a play, it is not enough that the author should combine
an ingenious sequence of striking scenes; he has always the spectators
to reckon with also, their likes and dislikes. The practical playwright
knows