walk in, as I believed, creating out of nothing at all a dramatic story.  When at last I had modelled it into some sort of coherency, I stepped back from it in my mind, as it were, and contemplated it as a whole.  No sooner had I done so than it began to seem vaguely familiar.  “Where have I seen this story before?” I asked myself; and it was only after cudgelling my brains for several minutes that I found I had re-invented Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler.  Thus, when we think we are choosing a plot out of the void, we are very apt to be, in fact, ransacking the store-house of memory.  The plot which chooses us is much more to be depended upon—­the idea which comes when we least expect it, perhaps from the most unlikely quarter, clamours at the gates of birth, and will not let us rest till it be clothed in dramatic flesh and blood.[5] It may very well happen, of course, that it has to wait—­that it has to be pigeon-holed for a time, until its due turn comes.[6] Occasionally, perhaps, it may slip out of its pigeon-hole for an airing, only to be put back again in a slightly more developed form.  Then at last its convenient season will arrive, and the play will be worked out, written, and launched into the struggle for life.  In the sense of selecting from among a number of embryonic themes stored in his mind, the playwright has often to make a deliberate choice; but when, moved by a purely abstract impulse, he goes out of set purpose to look for a theme, it may be doubted whether he is likely to return with any very valuable treasure-trove.[7]

The same principle holds good in the case of the ready-made poetic or historical themes, which are—­rightly or wrongly—­considered suitable for treatment in blank verse.  Whether, and how far, the blank verse drama can nowadays be regarded as a vital and viable form is a question to be considered later.  In the meantime it is sufficient to say that whatever principles of conception and construction apply to the modern prose drama, apply with equal cogency to the poetic drama.  The verse-poet may perhaps take one or two licenses denied to the prose-poet.  For instance, we may find reason to think the soliloquy more excusable in verse than in prose.  But fundamentally, the two forms are ruled by the same set of conditions, which the verse-poet, no less than the prose-poet, can ignore only at his peril.  Unless, indeed, he renounces from the outset all thought of the stage and chooses to produce that cumbrous nondescript, a “closet drama.”  Of such we do not speak, but glance and pass on.  What laws, indeed, can apply to a form which has no proper element, but, like the amphibious animal described by the sailor, “cannot live on land and dies in the water”?