The difficulty about this definition is that, while it describes the matter of a good many dramas, it does not lay down any true differentia--any characteristic common to all drama, and possessed by no other form of fiction. Many of the greatest plays in the world can with difficulty be brought under the formula, while the majority of romances and other stories come under it with ease. Where, for instance, is the struggle in the _Agamemnon_? There is no more struggle between Clytemnestra and Agamemnon than there is between the spider and the fly who walks into his net. There is not even a struggle in Clytemnestra's mind. Agamemnon's doom is sealed from the outset, and she merely carries out a pre-arranged plot. There is contest indeed in the succeeding plays of the trilogy; but it will scarcely be argued that the _Agamemnon_, taken alone, is not a great drama. Even the _Oedipus_ of Sophocles, though it may at first sight seem a typical instance of a struggle against Destiny, does not really come under the definition. Oedipus, in fact, does not struggle at all. His struggles, in so far as that word can be applied to his misguided efforts to escape from the toils of fate, are all things of the past; in the actual course of the tragedy he simply writhes under one revelation after another of bygone error and unwitting crime. It would be a mere play upon words to recognize as a dramatic "struggle" the writhing of a worm on a hook. And does not this description apply very closely to the part played by another great protagonist--Othello to wit? There is no struggle, no conflict, between him and Iago. It is Iago alone who exerts any will; neither Othello nor Desdemona makes the smallest fight. From the moment when Iago sets his machination to work, they are like people sliding down an ice-slope to an inevitable abyss. Where is the conflict in _As You Like It_? No one, surely, will pretend that any part of the interest or charm of the play arises from the struggle between the banished Duke and the Usurper, or between Orlando and Oliver. There is not even the conflict, if so it can be called, which nominally brings so many hundreds of plays under the Brunetière canon--the conflict between an eager lover and a more or less reluctant maid. Or take, again, Ibsen's _Ghosts_--in what valid sense can it be said that that tragedy shows us will struggling against obstacles? Oswald, doubtless, wishes to live, and his mother desires that he should live; but this mere will for life cannot be the differentia that makes of _Ghosts_ a drama. If the reluctant descent of the "downward path to death" constituted drama, then Tolstoy's _Death of Ivan Ilytch_ would be one of the greatest dramas ever written--which it certainly is not. Yet again, if we want to see will struggling against obstacles, the classic to turn to is not _Hamlet_, not _Lear_, but _Robinson Crusoe_; yet no one, except a pantomime librettist, ever saw a drama in Defoe's narrative. In a Platonic dialogue, in _Paradise Lost_, in _John Gilpin_, there is a struggle of will against obstacles; there is none in _Hannele_, which, nevertheless, is a deeply-moving drama. Such a struggle is characteristic of all great fiction, from _Clarissa Harlowe_ to _The House with the Green Shutters_; whereas in many plays the struggle, if there be any at all, is the merest matter of form (for instance, a quite conventional love-story), while the real interest resides in something quite different.