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 and "le bon poete Lucrece"
express it, the love of the parent for the child becomes a devouring
mania, to which everything else is sacrificed, while the love of the
child for the parent is a tame and essentially selfish emotion,
absolutely powerless when it comes into competition with the passions
which are concerned with the transmission of the vital flame. This
theorem having been stated, what is the first obligatory scene?
Evidently one in which a mother shall refuse a second marriage, with a
man whom she loves, because it would injure the prospects and wound the
feelings of her adored daughter.
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