L26 THIRTY-SIX DRAMATIC SITUATIONS As to the methods of the Art of Combining, the truth may be grasped by one bold look, one triumphant glance at all these phantoms of trite thought, as they stand in their respective places in the foregoing categories. Any writer may have here a starting-point for observa- tion and creation, outside the world of paper and print, a starting-point personal to himself, original in short, — which does not in the least mean improbable or uncon- vincing, since many stituations which have today an appearance of improbablity have merely been disfigured by persons who, not knowing how to create new ones, have complicated the old, entangling themselves in their own threads. Especially will the invention of an unusual story, the discovery of a "virgin field," (to use the naturalists' term) be made so easy as to be almost valueless. We are not unaware of the importance, in the perfecting of Greek art, of the fact that it was circumscribed and restricted to a small number of legends (CEdipus, Agamemnon, Phaedra, etc.,), which each poet had in his turn to treat, thus being unable to escape compari- son, step by step, with each of his predecessors, so that even the least critical of spectators could see what part his personality and taste had in the new work. The worst which may be said of this tradition is that it ren- dered originality more difficult. By a study of the Thirty-Six Situations and their results, the same advan- tage may be obtained without its accompanying incon- venience. Thenceforth Proportion alone will assume significance. By proportion I mean, not a collection of measured formulae which evoke familiar memories, but the bringing into battle, under command of the writer, of the infinite army of possible combinations, ranged accord- ing to their probabilities. Thus, to make manifest the truth or the impression which, until now, has been perceptible to him alone, the author will have to over- look in a rapid review the field before him, and to choose such of the situations and such of the details as are most appropriate to his purpose. This method — or,
