Such plays are most of M. Brieux's; such plays are Mr.
Galsworthy's _Strife_ and _Justice_. The French plays, in my judgment,
suffer artistically from the obtrusive predominance of the theme--that
is to say, the abstract element--over the human and concrete factors in
the composition. Mr. Galsworthy's more delicate and unemphatic art
eludes this danger, at any rate in _Strife_. We do not remember until
all is over that his characters represent classes, and his action is,
one might almost say, a sociological symbol. If, then, the theme does,
as a matter of fact, come first in the author's conception, he will do
well either to make it patently and confessedly dominant, as in the
_proverbe_, or to take care that, as in _Strife_, it be not suffered to
make its domination felt, except as an afterthought.[2] No outside force
should appear to control the free rhythm of the action.
The theme may sometimes be, not an idea, an abstraction or a principle,
but rather an environment, a social phenomenon of one sort or another.
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