Rapidly a repertoire had arisen so that about twenty plays were performed in a year, and naturalism which had been declared impossible on the stage by critics and other timid persons, now asserted itself triumphantly there. Already one sees indications of a search for a form which seems to take the new drama in a direction somewhat different from the first attempts in Thérèse Raquin and which breaks away completely from Zola's adaptations of both L'Assommoir and Germinal with their crowd effects and elaborate theatrical apparatus.

Hardly a full-length play is seen, and Zola himself makes his debut with a one-act play; and when three-act plays were performed, a strong predilection for the unities of time and place was noticeable. Besides, intrigue seems to have been abandoned and the main interest focused on the psychological description of character.

In old Greek the word drama seems to have meant event, not action or what we call conscious intrigue. For life does not move as regularly as a constructed drama, and conscious spinners of intrigue very seldom get a chance to carry out their plans in detail. Thus we no longer believe in these cunning plotters who, unhindered, are permitted to control people's destinies, so that the villain in his conscious falseness merely arouses our ridicule as not being true to life.


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