Class Boot Copyrights COPYRIGHT DEPOSm THE CHANGING DRAMA Stewart &. Kidd Dramatic Series The Portmanteau Plays By Stuart Walker Edited and with an Introduction by Edward Hale Bierstadt Vol. 1— Portmanteau Plays Introduction The Trimplet Nevertheless Six Who Pass While the Lintels Boil Medicine Show Vol. 2— More Portmanteau Plays Introduction The Lady of the Weeping Wil- low Tree The Very Naked Boy Jonathan Makes a Wish Vol. 3— Portmanteau Adapta- tions Introduction Gammer Gurton's Needle The Birthday of the Infanta "Seventeen" Each of the above three volumes handsomely bound and illustrated. Per volume net $1.75 STEWART & KIDD CO., PUBLISHERS THE CHANGING DRAMA CONTRIBUTIONS AND TENDENCIES BY ARCHIBALD HENDERSON 1 1 AUTHOR OF "GEORGB BERNARD SHAW : HIS LIFE AND WORKS' "EUROPEAN DRAMATISTS," ETC. CINCINNATI STEWART & KIDD COMPANY 1919 Copyright, 1914, by Henry Holt and Company Copyright, 19X9, by STEWART & KIDD COMPANY All rights reserved Copyright in England ©CU530239 JUL 17 1919 *wC i" lay tlds look upon her shrine Whose lifted torch has lighted mine. Sweet Heart— great Heart of tenderness: Strong Hands to help— dear Hands to blessi Clear Brain whose vision dwells in light: Fire Spirit, winged flame of white: Oh! Soul — true Sword Excalibur: Body— fit sheath for soul of her I Hay this book upon her shrine — Hers— since herself has made it mine. INTRODUCTION TO NEW EDITION This book appeared in the year which saw the outbreak of the Great War. A new edition now appears in the year which bids fair at this moment to mark the conclusion of peace. At the time when this book was completed, the new movement in the drama was marked by rich promise and great strength. Yet within a few short months thereafter, there could be observed something like a complete arrest of productive movement in the drama, in the greatest drama producing countries of the world. The arts of peace succumbed to the science of war. Theatres closed their doors ; dramatists and poets exchanged the pen for the sword. After two years of war, a distinguished English critic wrote me " A new vision has come into life altogether. At this moment drama is dead in this country. Intellectualism itself is dead. We have become a nation of warriors, strategists and patriots." What the new era following the war may bring forth in literature, we cannot say. Before the war was over, the query was being raised in regard to INTRODUCTION TO NEW EDITION the permanent changes likely to be wrought in the fabric of world literature through the influence of war and its atmosphere, the challenge to faith and the triumph of democracy. However such a query be answered, there is little reason to doubt that a new beginning in dramatic history will date from the year 1919. This book appears opportunely, then, in a new edition — affording as it does a sur- vey of the modern dramatic movement to a point at which the Great War put a period and exhibiting the foundations upon which the new dramatist must build. Archibald Henderson. Chapel Hill, North Carolina, April 28, 1919. PREFATORY NOTE The contemporary drama awaits its historian and interpreter. There is no dearth of critical studies of the drama of the period. But the pub- lished works deal for the most part with individual figures, or else with movements limited either to a brief period of time or to a single country. Every one who is truly interested in the drama as a life form, in reference to the theater and to literature, must realize the need for the work which, from the critical and historical standpoints, takes account of the drama during the past half- century and more, as the symbol of a general movement in human consciousness. For this great spiritual drama of to-day is warp and woof of the fabric of modern life. At the door of all our hearts knocks this new drama of pity and revolt. Pity for the lot of those less favored than ourselves, revolt against the injus- tices of the social order — these sentiments of so- cial altruism and social justice animate most modern literature and most modern thinking. The drama of our era has played a pre-eminent role in stirring us to the assertion of individual vii viii PREFATORY NOTE freedom, awaking our sense of social obligation, and holding the balance true between our in- dividual rights and our social duties. In the present volume, the attempt is made, on a very modest scale, to discover and to disclose the real contributions of the modern school of dramatists. These are studied primarily in re- lation to the life and the thinking of to-day. The evolution of form and technic, the re-alignment of criticism in regard to dramatic, esthetic, and ethical values, the general widening of outlook, the enlarged social content, the appraisal of gen- uine contributions, and the analysis of prevailing tendencies in the drama — such, within definitely chosen limits, is the intended scope of the present volume. From this scheme the poetic drama is excluded. Because, in my judgment, the poetic drama of the contemporary period, for all its beauties and ingenuities, to which I have been always ready to pay tribute, embodies no dis- tinctive or considerable contribution to the art or the practice of play-writing. Within the limits set, this book is believed to be the first work yet to appear in any language dealing with the contemporary drama, not as a kingdom subdivided between a dozen leading play- wrights, but as a great movement, exhibiting the evolutional growth of the human spirit and the enlargement of the domain of esthetics. Perhaps PREFATORY NOTE ix it may serve, in a sense, as a reflection of the spirit and tendency of the life of our era, which the contemporary drama has sought and still seeks so faithfully to interpret. Archibald Henderson. Chapel Hill, N. C, June, 19, 1914. CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAGE Drama in the New Age 3 Modern art — Cosmic solidarity — Symbol of the growth of the human spirit — The coming of cos- mopolitanism — Era of world literature — The study of nature — Science and philosophy the handmaidens of art — The world as audience — Nationalism and internationalism — The transit of social idealism — The Zeitgeist progenitor of mod- ern play — The new conscience — The sophisticated public — Shakespeare, Moliere, Ibsen, Brieux— The social awakening — Society made for man — Society as tyrant — Society as culprit — Social humanitarianism — Dramatic art and personal con- duct — The drama as social force — Gloom of new drama — A light in the darkness — Art and moral- ity — The spirit of intention — " Social predica- tion" — The new futurism. CHAPTER II The New Criticism and the New Ethics . . 25 The demand for a new dramatic criticism — The disappearance of " the public " — The differen- tiation of " the public " into many publics — America's untutored throng — Criticism distanced by creativeness — The prolific nature of art — The bankruptcy of formalism — The " laws " of the drama — The newer interpretation of so-called laws — The vital quality of art — Criticism and science — The law of change — Change in outlook — " The trans valuation of all values " — Utilitarian and ethical conceptions — The conflict between ethics and esthetics — The modern view. xii CONTENTS CHAPTER III PAGE Science and the New Drama 43 The decay of "authority" — The drama a life form — The law of evolution — The biological anal- ogy — The personal factor — Scientific criticism — Darwin and De Vries — The drama as a literary species — The origin and evolution of dramatic species — The phenomenon of survival — The com- petition of literary species — Content versus form — Evolution, variation, and mutation — " Laws " as scientific generalizations from esthetic facts — The method of science — The three tests — The three unities, with a difference — A backward glance — Aristotle — The Italian critics — Castelvetro — The modern attitude — Ibsen — Real time and "ideal" time — " Esthetic advantage " — The fourth unity — The creation of atmosphere — Maeterlinck, Strind- berg, D'Annunzio — The practice of contemporary dramatists — Ibsen, Shaw, Giacosa, Hauptmann, Galsworthy, St. John Hankin — Mood conquers material — The scene undividable — Analytic treat- ment and synthetic treatment — The drama of recessive action — Identification of action with ex- position — The drama of explication — The device of " devoilement " — The methods of fiction — The tyranny" of the past — Narration supplants action — Prophecy versus retrospection. CHAPTER IV The New Forms — Realism and the Pulpit Stage 83 The new forms — The drama of immediate actuality — Classic and modern art — The advent of Ibsen — Real people in natural situations — " The secret of the literature of modern times " — The bridging of " the chasm between the pro- ducing and the receiving mind " — Fashionable dramatic material worn out — Drama of ideas — The psychology of the crowd — Following after strange gods — Thfi-JQ £W futurism; — Art for life's sake — The methods of Ibsen — The thesis-drama — Art an esthetic process, not a scientific pro- cedure — The general idea and the particular instance — "Slices of life" — Drama a stimulant CONTENTS xiii PAGE to action — Induced social consciousness — Drama as social dynamic — The social drama — Modern art redemptive as well as revelative — Galsworthy — The drama of social implication — The next step — The drama of sociologic injunction — Types of serious drama — Tragi-comedy — Pure social comedy — The sense of social obligation — The theater and the church — The new challenge — Art and morality— The dramatist as interpreter of life— The dramatist as social preacher— The pulpit stage — The sense of incrimination — The new social conscience. CHAPTER V The New Forms — Naturalism and the Free Theaters 113 The Theatre Libre— Cuvier, Taine, Zola— The document and the man — The " odor of the people" — Science and naturalism — Dumas fils — Augier — The triumph of naturalism — Antoine — The new acting — Paris the theater of conflict — Zola, Strindberg — Brieux — Germany and natural- ism — The Freie Biihne — The drama of pure natu- ralism — " Evolution by explosion " — De Vries — The newer scientific theories as exemplified in the work of Hauptmann — The treasure of the humble — The miracle of the commonplace — The supreme defect of naturalism — The dregs of society — The abnormal and the degenerate as sub- jects for art — The great naturalistic dramas — The passing of naturalism — The changed temper of the age — Static characters in scenes chronologi- cally sequent — The contributions of naturalism to universal ar{ — Science and art — The intimate theater — " Chamber music " — Two new dramatic species — Hebbel and the drama of explication — The dramatization of the exposition — Ibsen and A Doll's House — The awakening — The drama of discussion — Shaw and Brieux — The new dialectic — The drama of suggestion — Maeterlinck — Poe — The dramatized short-story — The dialogue of sec- ondary intention — The weakening of action — The cessation of struggle — Era of experimentalism — Symbolic romance. — ■ » / xiv CONTENTS CHAPTER VI PAGB The Battle with Illusions — The Ancient Bond- age and the New Freedom 145 The " elastic categories " — The bursting of the definitions — Aristotle's views of plot, action, char- acter — His confusion of thought — Hauptmann — Action a " worthless accident " — Brunetiere — " No conflict, no drama" — Conflict not the differentiat- ing characteristic of the stage play — Crisis versus conflict — Invalid distinction — Neither crisis nor conflict indispensable — Struggle of human wills furnishes most dynamic species of play — Dra- matic action and crowd psychology — Mass con- sciousness — The errors of the disciples of Tarde and Le Bon — The theater not the cradle of atavism — Appeal to universal, not primitive, type — Crowd sense — Heightens intensity, without altering na- ture, of emotion — Modern spectator sits tight — Repression the keynote of modern drama — Rev- elation of underlying motives — Artistic foreshort- ening — Pictorial and plastic attributes of the play — The appeal to the higher emotio s — Drama as argument — Increased impassibility — The conflict of ideas and sentiments — The battle with illu- sions — A new species of comedy — The drama of discussion — The decadence of the dramatic — The play — A new definition — Distinctive qualities. CHAPTER VII The New Technic 185 The tacit acceptance of convention — Voluntary credulity — Planes of convention — Art rests upon convention — Illustrations of artistic conventions — Art different from reality — Style in dialogue — Style a function of ideality — The broken scepter of verse — Artistic efficiency — The banishment of accident — The loss of finality — The soliloquy and its modern variants — Modern technical ingenuity — The form of the playhouse — Did it banish the soliloquy? — The true explanation — Strindberg's suggestion — The aside — The apart — The confi- dant — Indispensable — The new alternatives — The raisonneur or expositor — The note of imparti- ality — The modern tendency. CONTENTS xv CHAPTER VIII PAGE The Play and the Reader .221 The publication of plays — The changed atti- tude — Twenty years ago and now — Literature and the drama — The rirpa T^frue of America— The old scenic chirography — The jargon of the s^age — Ibsen and naturalness — Approximation to real- ity — Stage directions with the stage left out — Increased particularity — Character description — Thumb-nail sketches — Art versus specifications — Hauptmann, Schnitzler, Bahr, Pinero, D'Annunzio — Wilde and the artistic sense — The fault of the personal — Bernard Shaw — A master of the new technic — Complete visualization of the stage — The barrier of the actor — Stage directions as social essays — Imperfect objectivity — The ideal specta- tor — A new interpretation — Stereoscopic imagina- tion — The mutual reaction between artist and public — The resulting elevation of standards — Refinement in taste. CHAPTER IX The New Content 253 The drama an image of the epoch — Every-day life accepted as normal dramatic material— The ancient view — The aristocracy of classic tragedy — Great events associated with personages of lofty station — Aristotle — Puttenham — Shakespeare — The poet of courts and princes — Indifference to social status of working classes — George Lillo — The pro- genitor of the bourgeois drama — Lessing — Schiller — The development of class consciousness — France — Voltaire — Larmoyant comedy — Diderot — Mercier — Sedaine — Miss Sara Sampson — Hebbel, the forerunner — Partial envisagement of true do- mestic drama — Hauptmann — Ibsen — B j ornson — " Scenes from private life " — The secrets of the alcove — Influence of modern fiction — The subur- ban note — Fresh air — The true drama of middle- class life — The decadence of romance — A trans- valuation of values — The degeneration of the hero — The triumph of democracy — The dominance . of the heroine — The bankruptcy of stage he- xvi CONTENTS PAGE roism — The age of prose — The microscope versus ^ the telescope — The development of mass conscious- ness — The new hero — The crowd — The ideal as hero — Atmosphere, environment, supplant the hero — "Scientific natural history" — Poetic jus- tice — Plato — Aristotle — Elizabethan practice — The long conflict — The new sense of justice — The loss of faith in intentional justice — Nature has no systems of morality — Justice achieved through humanity. CHAPTER X The Newer Tendencies 291 y The new age — Evolution in form — Revolution in spirit — Drama as synthesis of all th* a^ts — Castelvetro — Croce — A new revelation — Genius and taste — The drama as criticism — The economic ten - dency^— Science versus creativen£ S&— The drama conditioned, not determined, by accessories — The historical view — The dramatist and physical limita- tion — The materialistic influence — The new dis- covery — Constructive synthesis of the arts — The co-operation of theater and drama — Totality of effect — Art and nature — T hg^new experiment^ , - ism — Stimmung — The rise of the regisseur — The *arT"of stage management — The prophecy of sym- bolic poetry — The organization of the theatre — Repertory — Types of audience — The Dranja, kg g . giip of America again — Democracy and the drama — The drama as a social institution — The drama and the state — Summary. THE CHANGING DRAMA "The critic will be a small genius, the artist a great genius; the one will have the strength of ten, the other of a hundred; the former, in order to raise himself to the alti- tude of the latter, will have need of his assistance; but the nature of both must be the same. In order to judge Dante, we must raise ourselves to his level: let it be well under- stood that empirically we are not Dante, nor Dante we ; but in that moment of judgment and contemplation, our spirit is one with that of the poet, and in that moment we and he are one single thing. In this identity alone resides the pos- sibility that our little souls can unite with the great souls, and become great with them, in the universality of the spirit." — Benedetto Cboce. DRAMA IN THE NEW AGE "What is the problem of culture? To live and to work in the noblest strivings of one's nation and of humanity. Not only, therefore, to receive and to learn, but to live. To free one's age and people from wrong tendencies, to have one's ideal before one r s eyes." — Fried- rich Nietzsche. "Art knows the true ideal of our times, and tends towards it." — Lyof Tolstoy. The contemplation of any period of human activity at first sight reveals a vast network of intersecting interests. We observe a web inter- woven with apparently independent threads of ideas and passions, of ideals and sentiments. This is especially the case in the domain of es- thetics, where evolutionary process is continually retarded, arrested, or accelerated by the pristine energy of the human factor. Every artist im- parts the illusion of individuality. The ego, con- ditioned by race, place, and moment, seems to operate within the prescribed circle of his imme- diate limitation. Yet viewed in historical per- spective, the work of art inevitably falls into defi- nite position in the creation of the cosmic pattern of world literature. The tragi-comedy of Ibsen, 3 4 THE CHANGING DRAMA the symbolist drama of Maeterlinck, the sociologic comedy of Shaw, the motionless pictures of Tchek- hov, the lyric romances of D'Annunzio, the thesis- melodramas of Echegaray, the temperamental comediettas of Schnitzler, significant as illustra- tions, co-operate in bodying forth the variegated design of the contemporary drama. A work of literary criticism is a true work of art only on the condition that it disclose in full illumination the guiding and shaping principles which express the true spiritual meaning of the epoch. Beneath the welter and confusion of con- flicting and apparently dissociate literary phe- nomena, criticism must reveal the life forces puls- ing through the literature of to-day. Only thus may the critic render intelligible and coherent the contemporary epoch in human consciousness. Only thus may the critic truly appraise literature as an organic expression of the growth of the human spirit. A critical survey of the literature of the past three-quarters of a century or less projects into the light the vast debt that literature viewed as a factor in national culture and world civilization owes to science and the doctrine of evolution. To give precision to our ideas, let us especially direct our attention to the contemporary drama, that branch of literature which is the subject of our inquiry. In the world of industry, the barriers DRAMA IN THE NEW AGE 5 have fallen one by one beneath the patient, per- sistent blows of science, of invention, of discovery. 'Twas but yesterday that the American awoke with a start to discover the disappearance of the frontier. Civilization had pushed on to the far- thest verge. The marvel of the Atlantic cable pales before the miracle of wireless telegraphy. A vast shudder shook England when a Frenchman obliterated with his aeroplane the ancient barrier of the Channel. The imaginative fancy of Jules Verne is dwarfed by the actual achievements in world circumnavigation of this very hour. Through the transforming magic of science, the nations of the world stand in perpetual inter- communication. Customs, costumes, habits of thought, modes of expression, once peculiar to locality and to nationality, are rapidly becoming world property. Cosmic solidarity is one of the supreme facts, the fertile contributions of the epoch. Only industry and research have fully realized this accomplishment. Trade is bounded only by the limitation of the globe. Science pro- gresses unhaltingly, enlarging the domain of knowledge through the simultaneous scientific contributions of research everywhere. The scientist, be he mathematician, chemist, physicist, biologist, geologist, fixes his attention endlessly upon a single subject. That one sublime subject, upon which the eyes of science are fixed, 6 THE CHANGING DRAMA is Nature. This cosmic example, as well as the means for applying its lessons to other fields, is the example which science now sets literature. The artist in all ages has striven to express and reveal the soul of the individual. Within our epoch, the new spirit of science has breathed into the body of the artist the breath of the world's • life. Art and literature are beginning to speak with the international mind, the cosmopolitan soul. We feel in the air that "• epoch of world literature " which Goethe heralded and summoned. Nationality has not lost its meaning. The artist still recognizes that the more completely he realizes the national soul in literature the more surely will his work cross national frontiers. At the same time,, science has taught the artist that a consciousness of the feelings common to the citi- zens of civilized nations is more potent in winning the widest hearing and in attaining the most last- ing repute than a consciousness simply of the feelings peculiar to his fellow-countrymen. Slowly precipitating everywhere, in the retort of con- temporary life, is a basic substance of cosmopoli- tan culture, ideas, and inclinations. Contemporary literature is unique in one dif- ferentiating feature. The world author during his own lifetime has actually attained the hearing of a world audience. Nay more, he has but to speak in the accents of genius and the words echo DRAMA IN THE NEW AGE 7 from the remotest fastnesses of the world. The genial humanity of a Mark Twain's good humor is reflected in countless tongues, even in the dia- lect of the savage. The trumpet challenge of a Rudyard Kipling resounds through the bounds of civilization. The bon mots of a Bernard Shaw are immediately caught up and repeated in New York and Berlin, Paris and St. Petersburg. The philosopher who is perchance 1 an artist as well, a Friedrich Nietzsche, a William James, or a Henri Bergson, gives cosmopolitan vogue to his theories and discoveries, and enriches the thinking of to- day with the terminology and concept of the Superman, of Pragmatism, and of Creative Evolu- tion. A Henrik Ibsen, isolate, cloistral, moves forward for all people the boundary posts of the world's drama. A Lyof Tolstoy austerely con- demns the classics of the world, even his own ; and points to the future in his formulation of a new meaning for art. A Richard Wagner prophesies the new art of a new social order, in which the " art work of the future " shall be the expression of the collective energy of a whole age, enlight- ened, individually, socially, morally. It is no longer possible to speak with the same significance, as formerly, of English literature or French literature or Scandinavian literature. Their one-time individuality is modified through elements, common to all. Criticism itself, since 8 THE CHANGING DRAMA Taine, has become scientific — and so, cosmo- politan — in its aspect. The work of Strindberg stirs Paris; Sudermann wrings tears from Chi- cago ; Shaw ravishes Berlin with his mocking laughter; Brieux confounds New York with his unashamed social antiseptics. Criticism frankly accepts these phenomena as typical of the new spirit. It is not that the artist loses his individu- ality, his sense of race, his consciousness of en- vironment. These things have always been felt by the artist, more or less keenly, in all ages. There is, however, in this modern air that the artist breathes, something which imparts a more poign- ant sensitiveness to the pressure of the force of solidarity. Even in such a matter as technic, the artist realizes to-day as never before the impera- tive obligation to measure up to the most ad- vanced demands of architectonics, of drama- turgies. Culture is coming to mean, not merely the enlargement of the actual domain of knowl- edge, but, what is perhaps no less important in the advancement of civilization, universal diffusion of knowledge of all great intellectual and spiritual phenomena. The dramatist must run the gauntlet of merci- less inspection and criticism at the hands of his fellow-craftsmen. Furthermore, with a public ever attaining to higher levels of sophistication and developing more rigorous canons of taste DRAMA IN THE NEW AGE 9 through contact with the best representative ex- amples afforded by other nationalities, the dra- matist of to-day must possess not only wide knowl- edge of his art, but astute mastery of its technic. Above all, with a knowledge of human nature more circumstantial, more minute, than ever be- fore — a knowledge contributed perhaps not less by science than by psychology, philosophy, or literature — the contemporary auditor is quick to seize, quick to condemn, a lapse on the part of the dramatic artist from the fundamental verities — the insuperable maxima, the irreducible minima — of human experience and potentiality. The dramatic artists of to-day, of all races and all climes, have a sense of common purpose, a certain unity of aim. This may best be described as the intention of advancing the cause of civilization. It is just at this moment that our eyes are opened to the inner significance of this discovery. The ancient Greeks realized that man was a po- litical animal. The France of Moliere realized that man was a social animal. The limitation of Moliere — a limitation which sometimes his genius enabled him to transcend — was inherent in his reverence for society. It was not the structure of society itself which was at fault, in Moliere's view. It was man who, in violating the laws of society, originated his own tragedy, his own ruin. Moliere teaches man the ancient lesson that he 10 THE CHANGING DRAMA must not violate the fundamental principles of life and that his most urgent need is to conform to nature. The guiding principle back of this human, this humane sentiment, is the social prin- ciple that society's claims must never be ignored. Man was not made for laws, conventions, morals, inhibitions of a thousand varieties. These laws, conventions, morals, inhibitions were made for man. Indeed, they were made in the interest of an artificial complex, perpetually in a state of flux and evolution, which we call society. In a certain sense, there is just ground for the modern man's dissatisfaction with Shakespeare and his conception of the world. For Olympian that he was, Shakespeare was assuredly not what we are accustomed to call a social philosopher. Before sociology, Shakespeare was. His is a drama of supermen and superwomen ; they move in grand silhouette against the sky-line of the uni- verse. His heroes and heroines come nobly to the grapple with that force or power which is labeled Fate, Destiny, Providence, or the Divine Order. His dramas present the clash of the supreme struggle — Man at odds with the Universe. It may be admitted by the modern critic that Shakespeare created, in his dramatic hero, a more valid, a more credible superman than was ever previsaged in the convolute brain of a Nietzsche. The Shake- spearean tragedy is a personal tragedy. We feel DRAMA IN THE NEW AGE II both pity and terror in these spectacles of the disintegration of moral, the bankruptcy of char- acter, the degeneration of will, the atrophy of conscience, the obsession of sexuality. In Shake- speare's conception of the tragic we discern a revolutionary sense of protest against the moral order of the universe. We are darkly aware of the delicate balancing of the divine scales in the passing of judgment upon a universe dense- packed with cruelty, hatred, injustice, failure. In both Shakespeare and Moliere there is lack- ing that differentiating quality which character- izes the dramatist of the contemporary era. With all his passionate sense of revolt against the tragic cast of the universal life, Shakespeare lacked any ingrained conviction of social organiza- tion as a giant participant in the tragedy of human destiny. With all his shrewd and saga- cious exposure of folly, fraud, imposture, quack- ery, and personal hypocrisies, Moliere never once bethought him of the crimes committed by society in the name of humanity. Whilst it may be urged with considerable justice that Shakespeare was no mere court sycophant, certainly it cannot be doubted that he was totally lacking in sympathy for the lot of. the common man. With all his wit and raillery at the fantastic creatures of French social life, Moliere exhibited deep-dyed racial respect for society, its interests, its laws, 12 THE CHANGING DRAMA its obligations. The era of social democracy was not yet. But it was inevitable in the course of civilization that a day must dawn upon a world grown sick of the individual, the confessor, the autobiographer. With that day came the philos- ophy of sociology. To-day the world is envisaged in social guise as a vast structure of social laws, formulas, traditions, erected by man in his own interest for the sake of the State, the Family, the Race. The great discovery of modern life, the most potent influence which thus far has projected it- self into contemporary consciousness, is the dawn- ing suspicion, gradually solidified into belief and fortified into conviction, that society has become the tyrant of the universe. Error is imperfect knowledge. In the equation of truth certain indis- pensable factors are missing. Crime is not solely a religious or moral question. It is a social ques- tion. Indeed, crime may be defined as the product of imperfect social knowledge. In the equation of conduct certain indispensable social factors are missing. Not crime only, but the petty annoy- ances, the grave injustices, the hideous inconsist- encies of life, must be laid at the door, not of the individual man, but of our social institutions. The real progenitor of the plays of the modern era is not an individual, but the Zeitgeist. Thoughts which have been in the air, sentiments, DRAMA IN THE NEW AGE 13 passions, predilections, emanating from advanced individuals with enlightened social consciences, be- come gradually disseminated, and slowly diffuse themselves throughout the world. Many think- ers, many idealists are responsible for the con- temporary era. But there are four figures with accusing faces which emerge above the crowd of witnesses. Les Miserables was the first great beacon of fiction to light the path of the broken outcasts of society. George Eliot, positivist, sociologist in fiction, assisted in laying the founda- tions of this new fiction of tendency, the novel with a purpose — reformative, humanitarian pur- pose. Such fiction is popular in the original, un- defined sense — democratic — " of the people, by the people, for the people." This social fiction laid down as its first principle an enlightened concep- tion of social duties, social obligations, and human brotherhood. The author of Anna Karenina it was who said: " However differently in form peo- ple belonging to our Christian world may define the destiny of man ; whether they see it in human progress in whatever sense of the words, in the union of all men in a socialistic realm, or in the establishment of a commune ; whether they look forward to the union of mankind under the guid- ance of one universal church, or to the federation of the world, — however various in form their defi- nitions of the destination of human life may be, all 14 THE CHANGING DRAMA men in our times already admit that the highest well-being attainable by man is to be reached by their union with one another." As early as 1860, Henrik Ibsen, yet to Write his monumental series of social dramas, was pointing out to the Norwegian government the educative influence of the drama. " The experience of all countries," he said, " has sufficiently established the fact that dramatic art, in every age in which it has been cultivated, has, in a higher degree than any other, shown itself an important factor in the education of the people — a very obvious explanation of which fact is to be found in the drama's more intimate and direct relation to reality; in other words, in its greater intelligibility and in its easier and more general accessibility to the whole people." Twenty years later he was writing these pregnant words : " A man shares the responsi- bility and the guilt of the society to which he belongs. Hence I once wrote: "To live — is to war with fiends That infest the brain and the heart; To write — is to summon one's self, And play the judge's part." In the expression of such a view do we find a clue to the artistic revolution in the drama of our own day. To share the responsibility and the guilt of society is, at a single step, to arrive at the realization that society is the culprit. A DRAMA IN THE NEW AGE 15 Shakespeare maintains that the fault is in us that we are underlings. An Ibsen asserts that the fault is in society. The most acute and enlightened intelligences of our period have devoted themselves to the demonstration of the fact that our social institutions are in the wrong. That is nothing more nor less than to convict mankind of social wrong-doing for which he himself is responsible. Social institutions are the work of man; and upon man falls the responsibility for their imper- fect and wrongful workings, the injustices they foster, the social inequalities they create. The prime function of the dramatist of to-day is to bring man to a consciousness of his responsibility and to incite him to constructive measures for social reform. It is incontestable that Moliere was a social critic — in a sense. But certainly Moliere was not a social critic in the sense in which the term is employed to-day. Moliere's definition of comedy, in his preface to Tartuffe, is definitive in its exposition of Moliere : " A comedy is nothing more than an ingenious poem which, by agreeable lessons, takes man to task for his defects." Comedy then, as Moliere saw it, was an ironic mode of education and castigation of humanity for man's defects as an individual, even as an individual in society. The contemporary dra- matist considers the drama an instrumentality for 16 THE CHANGING DRAMA showing man, whether by pleasant or unpleasant means, his fault as moral being, as social creature, as guilty partner in the defective business of modern social organization. Such a conception brings us at once into sharp conflict with Moliere's doctrine that the funda- mental purpose of every work of art, the rule of all rules, is to please. The lesson of Tolstoy, of Dostoievsky, of Hugo, of Dumas fils, of George Eliot, Dickens, Ruskin, is that the work of art is moral in its essence and has for its fundamental purpose not pleasure, but edification, purification, social enlightenment. Such a conception auto- matically imparts to art a specifically moral and ethical basis. Emerson even goes so far as to aver that every fact has a two-fold appeal: to sensa- tion on the one side, to morality on the other. Infinitely magnified is this appeal in the case of the drama, in which facts, carefully selected from the welter of life's purposelessness, are integrated by the playwright into a work of art. " Fine art," says so astute a critic of the drama as Bernard Shaw, " is the subtlest, the most seduc- tive, the most effective means of moral propa- gandism in the world, excepting only the example of personal conduct ; and I waive even this excep- tion in favor of the art of the stage, because it works by exhibiting examples of personal conduct made intelligible and moving to crowds of unob- DRAMA IN THE NEW AGE 17 servant, unreflecting people to whom real life means nothing." Oscar Wilde's most original con- tribution to criticism was the theory that life imitates art. And surely comparison of the wan- ing influence of the church with the waxing influ- ence of the theater as a guide to conduct is a conspicuous verification of Wilde's suggestive theory. Miss Jane Addams, who speaks with exact knowledge of the inner' springs of conduct among certain social classes, has recently said: " In moments of moral crisis now the great theater-going public turns to the sayings of the hero who found himself in a similar plight. The sayings may not be profound, but they are at least applicable to conduct." Indeed, we may go even further and assert that people of all classes, in moments of emotional stress, often un- consciously reproduce the expressions which they have heard their favorite heroes, heroines, or even villains utter in like situations. Only a genius in the simple expression of elemental feeling, when confronted by a crucial situation, is capable of giving voice to his natural feelings as if he had never witnessed a work of dramatic or Active art. Even a large proportion of cultivated people, unconsciously imitative, follow in expression the line of art. Conduct is often conditioned, even determined, more by the expression we give to our feelings than by the moral or religious influ- 18 THE CHANGING DRAMA ences which are presumed to give rise to these feelings. The art of Ibsen and his followers has thrown open the doors to a new domain. This is the domain of social ethics. There is much that is sinister and dour in this new literature — with the attention perpetually fixed upon social evil and social tragedy. At times one revolts against the persistent depression of its tone — the horrors of heredity, the stigma of degeneracy, the decadence of morals, the conspiracy of social malfeasance. Despite this depressing influence, the moral basis of such works is a certain incorrigible optimism, a hopefulness which shines forth like a ray of light athwart the gloom. For morality, whether per- sonal or social, has at the back of it an optimistic urge. A challenge to reformation is there. For morality is ever forward-looking, and presupposes conscious exertion toward remedial and reforma- tory measures. Art is the fortunate synthesis of form and spirit, of style and moral purpose. The modern artist does homage, with George Eliot, not only to " the divine perfection of form," but also to " the secrets of a profound social sympathy." For he sees in his art work a means of improving the prevailing order of the world. Art becomes the means of evoking the social consciousness and awaking the social conscience. " It cannot be DRAMA IN THE NEW AGE 19 denied," says Brunetiere, " that La Femme de Claude or An Enemy of the People is a true drama, nor that there are few novels superior to Anna Karenina. They constitute the proof that neither the theater nor the novel is incapable of handling social questions. There is requisite for the task simply more talent and greater art. Whoever has the very high ambition of treating social questions in the theater or in the novel need only bring to it, with the entire control of the materials of his craft, a personal experience, a detailed experience, a carefully reasoned ex- perience, of life. The number of literators thereby will be diminished, but the dignity of literature will be by just so much enhanced, and even still more the effectiveness of its influence." We shall acquire no true comprehension of the dramatic art of our own time if we do not take into account these three persistent streams of tendency in contemporary thinking. The phe- nomenon of cosmopolitanism, first and foremost, confronts one upon every turn, and makes in- creasingly evident the broadened and heightened standards to which the contemporary artist must attain. " The man who expects to rise above mediocrity in this age," observes that spiritual critic, Francis Grierson, " must not only become familiar with the characteristics of his own peo- ple, but he must acquaint himself with the virtues 20 THE CHANGING DRAMA and vanities of other nations in order to wear off the provincial veneer which adheres to all individ- uals without practical experience, and mocks one in a too conscious security of contentment and indifference." The growth of cosmopolitanism, the centripetal force, has been balanced with cun- ning economy by means of a steadily increasing sense of nationality, the centrifugal force in mod- ern culture. There is a marked similarity, often identity of form in the dramas of men and women of different nationalities. The variety and ver- satility they display finds its inspiration in the national spirit. Ibsen attained spiritual freedom in the atmosphere of Rome, Dresden, and Berlin; but the Norwegian spirit, the national impulse, beats like a heart at the center of his art work. Strindberg, a very Bohemian in his cosmopolitan- ism, continually exhibits the character, the out- look upon life, of the Swede. I have seen The Doctor's Dilemma delight the cosmopolitan audi- ence of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin; but it was Celtic extravagance, Irish wit, which gave it verve and carrying power. Anatol titillates the sophisticated palates of New York and London; yet we realize that such sprightly raillery, such erotic melancholy, could emerge only from the fashionable purlieus of Vienna. The Great Divide sounds the note of universal passion and restraint ; yet it vibrates with the barbaric energy and Puri- DRAMA IN THE NEW AGE 91 tan conscientiousness of America. Constructed upon like models, technically similar, the dramas of to-day exhibit striking dissimilarities due not only to differences of personal temperament, but also to racial and national distinctions in spirit. Along with this diffusion of the international spirit, this intensification of national characteris- tics, has proceeded the second current of influence. Beneath the pressure of social and humanitarian ideals, the literature of to-day has become sur- charged with intention. The man of letters, turned publicist, has become animated by a spirit of service in behalf of society, of the present and of the future. This may be interpreted, in esthet- ics, as a reaction from the doctrine of " art for art's sake." Such a doctrine was essentially the doctrine of the painter, the creator of those works of art least susceptible of moral intention. Baude- laire maintained that " no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name of a poem, as that which has been written solely for the pleasure of writing a poem." Whistler airily dis- placed the noble muse in favor of a " tricksy jade"; and Oscar Wilde nonchalantly asserted: " All art is quite useless." Flaubert went so far as to inquire if a book, " irrespective of what it says" might not possess sovereign beauty. To George Sand, rather than to Ibsen, are we in- debted for the modern revolt against the doctrine 22 THE CHANGING DRAMA of art for art's sake. " I am aware," she writes to Flaubert, " that you are opposed to the exposi- tion of personal doctrine in literature. Are you right? Does not your opposition proceed rather from a want of conviction than from a principle of esthetics? If we have any philosophy in our brain it must needs break forth in our writ- ings." . . . Ibsen, with not wholly credible naivete, ex- pressed his surprise that he himself, " who had made it his life-task to depict human characters and destinies, should, without conscious or direct intention, have arrived in several matters at the same conclusions as the social-democratic philoso- phers had arrived at by scientific processes." Al- though Ibsen takes care to disclaim " conscious or direct intention," the whole series of his social dramas belies the statement. Preferring to be regarded as poet rather than as philosopher, Ibsen nevertheless shares with Tolstoy the doctrine that it is the duty of the artist to seek to improve the prevailing order of the world. The philosophy, the social philosophy, in the brain of the modern dramatists has assuredly " broken forth in their writings." And to-day we confront an epoch in art devoted to the task of holding up the mirror to society, exposing social abuse, and inspiring efforts towards the improvement of the existent social order. DRAMA IN THE NEW AGE 28 Finally, then, we see how contemporary drama allies itself with the future. A drama of " social predication " is a drama which presupposes im- perfections in the social structure. Such a drama serves as a direct excitant to social reform. The moral force of this manifest socialization of liter- ature is unmistakable. Men everywhere now, in the dynamic art of drama, are bending their ef- forts to the perfecting of civil life, the enlargement of the freedom of the individual consonant with the higher social interests, the improvement of the prevailing social and moral order of the world, in the interest of society of to-day and of the future. Long before Marinetti sent his multi- colored manifestoes fluttering down into the Piazza San Marco, a new social futurism had been born in the manger of modern art. The epitome of this new social futurism in art is found in the toast which Ibsen drank at a banquet in inauguration of the coming age: "To that which is to be: To that which shall come." II THE NEW CRITICISM AND THE NEW ETHICS "Do you really attach much value to categories? I, for my part, believe that the 'dramatic categories are elastic, and that they must accommodate themselves to the literary facts — not vice versa." — Henrik Ibsen. " ' The true ' — is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ' the right ' is the expedient in the way of our behaving." — William James. At a moment like this, when a new outburst of dramatic activity among English-speaking peo- ples is imminent if not actually present, it is a singular fact that criticism has not paved the way to popular understanding of the new drama. It is surely the function of the critic, if Croce be right, to identify himself with the artist in so complete and sensitive a way as actually to repro- duce within himself those creative processes which go to the making of the work of art. Esthetic judgment strives ever to become more and more closely identified with creative art. Dramatic criticism, as a consequence, should be able to trace these new dramatic life forms as they emerge from the brain of the artist. We should then be en- 25 26 THE CHANGING DRAMA abled to learn the actual evolution of the contem- porary drama throughout the course of its va- rious changes — its evolution in form, technic, and content. America is teeming with a vast horde of infi- nitely ambitious playgoers, no longer merely con- tent with seeing and enjoying plays, but intent upon understanding them. There are many pub- lics, each of which has a certain character, a cer- tain distinguishing attribute ; but there is one vast public which is untrained, untutored in esthetics, swinging, now this way, now that, in search of that which shall gratify their fancy and delight their senses, tickle them into laughter, stir them to sympathy, move them to tears. This untutored throng, in its sometimes unconscious aspiration for " culture," wants to be taught what the mod- ern drama is, what benefits it may confer, what advantages it affords as a means of social enlight- enment. Some new movement in literary art — fic- tion or drama, it matters not — was recently pro- posed in a great city of the Middle West, and there was a delightful naivete, indicative of the aspiring proletarian attitude, in the assertion that " if the thing went through, we would make cul- ture hum "/ More remotely, perhaps, but no less positively, this untutored throng needs to know the significance of the drama, the reasons for its structure, its tone, its intellectual cast. NEW CRITICISM AND NEW ETHICS 27 Our critics of the drama are unfortunately classic in predilection. Their academic spirit dis- dains to touch the drama of our own day as a distinct world movement, embracing the Scandi- navian countries, Europe, England, and the United States., They prefer to remain on the safe ground of accomplished fact. The works already produced in the field of dramatic criticism have been, for the most part, marked by refined scholar- ship, wide learning, and indefatigable research into origins. Such work is necessary and valuable, in that it lays the foundation for a proper under- standing of the historical basis of the drama. But it cannot be too earnestly urged that Amer- ica still awaits the dramatic critic, liberal in spirit, catholic in taste, who will set forth delib- erately, clearly, and without prejudice, the his- tory of the contemporary drama from the period of Ibsen down to the present moment. Already many signs are present that the time is ripe, the conditions favorable, for the arrival of this criti- cism. Only through the medium of such interpre- tation will it be possible to effect a rational orientation in regard to the drama of to-day, and to achieve a proper outlook for the drama which promises in the future to flourish in our midst. In the contemporary dramatic movement, noth- ing is more certain than the uncertainty of criti- cism in regard to the form, fundamental struc- 28 THE CHANGING DRAMA ture, and content, — intellectual, esthetic, emo- tional, social, moral, — of a contemporary work of dramatic art. The iconoclasm of modern dra- matic practice, the revolt of the modern craftsman and his demand for freedom to enable him to open new paths for the passage of the creative consciousness, have proved vastly unsettling through the destruction of ancient superstitions, the shattering of outworn conventions, and the inauguration of new heresies. Gustav Freytag, presumably a modern authority upon the technic of the drama, wrote his Technik des Dramas scarcely four decades ago. It is significant to observe that when this book was written, Henrik Ibsen had not yet stirred modern consciousness with his formidable array of social dramas. The whole new realm of art disclosed by Ibsen and his successors was excluded from the field of Frey- tag's vision. It is this very realm which, by the richness of its intellectual content, the novelty and variety of its technic, the profusion of its newly created forms, awaits an interpreter and historian. Until near the close of the nineteenth century English dramatic criticism achieved notoriety, rather than notability, for its failure to recognize and to realize the great masters in drama for our epoch — Ibsen and Wagner. This failure indubit- ably ensued because Ibsen and Wagner, icono- NEW CRITICISM AND NEW ETHICS 29 clasts in their respective fields of art, broke vio- lently with the traditions. The vital defect of English criticism was the inability to recognize that Ibsen and Wagner, for all their iconoclasm, succeeded in establishing standards of rigor in craftsmanship, seldom, if ever, equaled upon the ancient stage. There is always something of the iconoclast in the genius: the iconoclast and the reformer are phases of one and the same life. The genius still defies definition. That is an in- complete and partial definition which assarts that greatness consists simply in doing what other people have done but doing it better. To-day we should define this, not as genius, but as efficiency. Such a definition cripples the genius, clips his wings, bars all doors to creative imagination and constructive fancy. Since Taine, we have come to recognize that, in a certain specific sense, the work of art, no less than the human being, has its heredity, its origins, its transmitted qualities. But we also know that it is free to acquire new characteristics, to take new shapes, to compel the formulation of new laws. Genius is protean, crea- tive, subject to a vital urge which fructifies in its advance, resulting in the throwing off of new and hitherto unsuspected varieties. Genius in the Bergsonian sense is the creative faculty of doing what no one else has ever done before, and thereby setting new standards to be formulated by poster- 80 THE CHANGING DRAMA ity. " The greatest artist," Bernard Shaw rightly maintains, " is he who goes a step beyond the demand, and by supplying works of a higher beauty and a higher interest than have yet been perceived succeeds, after a brief struggle with its strangeness, in adding this fresh extension of sense to the heritage of the race." The drama is an evolutionary form. It is sub- ject to modification under the pressure of genius, and through cross-fertilization from the impact of other forms. It develops, grows in accord with the evolving standards of society. True drama springs from the inner essential compulsion of the dramatic artist to creative self-expression, and not from any motive, however laudable and worthy, to conform to classical traditions or to current canons of taste. This is not to say that the artist can ignore the inherent limitations of the drama as an art form, or defy such rules as are unalterably fixed by the individuality of his medium. The true artist, however original or iconoclastic, can ignore only at his peril what Pater calls " the responsibility of the artist to his materials." It cannot, however, be too vigorously affirmed that while the drama is essentially a democratic form of art, in the last analysis it is not the pub- lic, but the artist, who dictates the dramatic form. That revolution in dramatic art, which Mr. Walk- NEW CRITICISM AND NEW ETHICS 31 ley lightly refers to as " the Ibsen episode," is clear in its demonstration that Ibsen dictated to the public for its adoption the form of the drama, subject to individual and racial modification, for an indefinite period. Ibsen's own plays have never swayed and carried with them the great public in English-speaking countries ; but the plays of his followers in all civilized countries con- stitute the dramatic output of our time. This is a most significant circumstance, demonstrating that, regardless of popular approbation, the dra- matist and not the public is the ultimate authority in the dictation of dramatic form. Oscar Wilde was quite right in fact, if not in tone, when he asserted that the public is not the munificent patron of the artist, but that the artist is the munificent patron of the public. That fresh ex- tension of sense to the heritage of the race, of which Shaw speaks, is the contribution of neither critic nor public: it is the contribution of the creative artist himself. Since the " laws " of the drama were formulated by Aristotle, they have evolved ceaselessly throughout the ages. The dramatists of to-day chafe under the manifest injustice of having their works measured by the Aristotelian yardstick, long since recognized as two thousand years out of date. No matter how remarkable Aristotle may have been in perception, intuition, and analy- 32 THE CHANGING DRAMA sis, his formulation of the results of the practice of dramatists until his time are to-day invalid if only on the score of incompleteness. They can- not serve as " laws " for the governance and re- straint of contemporary genius. There is jus- tice in the protest of a man like Granville Barker : " In the drama we are constantly referred to the sayings of a person called Aristotle. I have noth- ing to urge against them, and their quotation when one of Gilbert Murray's translations of Euripides appears would seem to me entirely ap- propriate, though even then I might prefer Euripides wrong to Aristotle right. But if the first words about the drama, however illuminating, are to be treated in any way whatsoever as if they must be the last, then I protest. The drama is alive, and about life there is nothing final to be said. I protest that in art nothing but its physical boundaries should be taken for granted. . . . Surely the sign of life in art has always been the revolt against tradition, the determination to re- mold the old forms which will no longer perfectly contain or express the new spirit." The way-breaker in art, it must be granted, is at once disciple and master of his age. Disciple, because he must study and realize his age in order to be its interpreter and exponent. Master, be- cause he imparts to his product something per- sonal, incommunicable, inalienable — and thereby NEW CRITICISM AND NEW ETHICS 33 dominates the thought and stimulates the emotions of his contemporaries. The technic of Ibsen has become the common mold into which the most noteworthy dramas of to-day are cast ; but the genius, the spirit, of Ibsen no one has been able to imitate with success. The evolutional trend of all art, imaginative and realistic, impera- tively obliges the dramatist to make himself con- versant with — which is not at all the same thing as slavishly subservient to — the prevailing con- ditions of his art as practised by his fellow-crafts- men. If he is to reap to the full the benefit of both past progress and present innovation, the dramatist must squarely take account of all that has been done before him. The works of his fore- runners may furnish the new dramatist inspira- tion for fresh endeavors. These works may, on the other hand, hold up fingers of warning against the errors into which the authors fell. " To Alexander Dumas I owe nothing, as regards dramatic form," said Ibsen in answer to the inquiry of Brandes — manifestly an unconscious prevarication prompted by pique — but he significantly adds, " except that I have learned from his plays to avoid several very awkward faults and blunders, of which he is not infrequently guilty." " The drama," says Pinero, " is not stationary, but progressive. By this I do not mean that it is always improving; what I do mean is that its conditions are always 34 THE CHANGING DRAMA changing, and that every dramatist whose ambi- tion it is to produce live plays is absolutely bound to study carefully the conditions that hold good for his own day and generation." In the present time, when such practical scien- tists as De Vries and Burbank have shown that evolution proceeds, not invariably by infinitely slow processes extending through aeons of time, but occasionally by sudden and startling muta- tions, one need not be surprised to find valid parallels in the domain of art and letters. Indeed, a resurvey of the history of the drama in the light of modern scientific theory indicates that its types, in the course of their evolution, have ex- hibited sudden and revolutionary changes, in par- ticular during periods when the drama flourished as the most potent of the literary art forms. The history of the drama is made up at once of the biographies of great men and of the biogra- phies of great movements — individual, personal factors and their inevitable consequence, direct and spontaneous outbursts of creative energy. If it be true that the drama is the meeting place of art and life, then there need be no surprise in the discovery that the drama is responsive to the conditions and attributes of the civilization which gives it birth. Aristophanes knew as little of the captain of industry or the conservation of natural resources as Shakespeare knew of wireless NEW CRITICISM AND NEW ETHICS 35 telegraphy, Moliere of Darwinism, or Hugo of Pragmatism. It would have been as impossible for Corneille to write a Ghosts or Calderon a Waste* as it would be to-day for Bernard Shaw to say what society will be like under Socialism. Shakespeare's conception of tragedy differs as much from Aristotle's as Ibsen's differs from Dryden's. Centuries separate the intimate the- ater of Strindberg, the 'one-act dramolet of Schnitzler, from the Greek drama, in that Olym- pian home of the plastic arts, and from the sprawling Chronicle play of the pre-Elizabethan period. This law of change finds instructive, often amusing, exemplification in the circumstance that plays, like people, have a way of aging. In a revival, Our Boys may give all the appearance of a wonderfully preserved, but absurdly conserva- tive, old man. When Dundreary comes once more to the fore after a lapse of forty years, we are reminded of nothing so much as of a decayed gen- tleman. The artist of one age is the artisan in the eyes of the next. The rigid conventions of one period of art culture become the threadbare con- ventionalities of a more advanced epoch. The lyric romanticism of yesterday seems but the most artificial affectation to-day. Customs, man- ners, and even morals all become obsolete in the course of time. Human nature, in a word char- 36 THE CHANGING DRAMA acter, alone remains the same. Plus ca change, plus c'est la mime chose is an aphorism that breaks down for the drama in its structural and physical aspects. The face of society and the conventions of technic perpetually change in a like ratio ; and once changed, progress seldom per- mits reversion to type. From time to time there may be a species of atavism, the " throw back " of Ghosts to the type of (Edipus, for example, of Maeterlinck to Shakespeare and the pre-Shake- spearean tragedy of blood. But in general prog- ress is evolutional; and plays, after a certain length of time, varying with conditions and cir- cumstances, begin to " date " in a hopeless and deplorable fashion. " Everything has its own rate of change," says Bernard Shaw. " Fashions change more quickly than manners, manners more quickly than morals, morals more quickly than passions, and, in general, the conscious reasonable life more quickly than the instinctive, wilful, af- fectionate one. The dramatist who deals with the irony and humor of the relatively durable sides of life, or with their pity and terror, is the one whose comedies and tragedies will last longest — sometimes so long as to lead a book-struck gen- eration to dub him * Immortal ' ; and proclaim him as * not for an age, but for all time.' " In precisely the same way, the fundamental tone of the drama, its outlook on life, in the NEW CRITICISM AND NEW ETHICS 37 course of time undergoes alteration through the influence of the evolutionary trend of human ideals. " It has been said of me on different oc- casions that I am a pessimist," said Ibsen in a speech at a banquet in Stockholm in 1887. " And so I am in so far as I do not believe in the ever- lastingness of human ideals. But I am also an optimist in so far as I firmly believe in the ca- pacity for procreation and development of ideals." As ideals in one stage of civilization tend to dis- integrate, they are replaced by ideals which are more progressive, more in conformity with the spirit of the coming age. Beautiful in sentiment, false in thesis, are the lines : "All passes. Art alone Enduring stays to us; The Bust outlasts the throne, — The Coin, Tiberius ; Even the gods must go; Only the lofty Rime Not countless years o'erthrow, — Nor long array of Time." ' We are coming to see nowadays that art, in its monuments, does not enduring stay to us ; that the principles which art embodies, the morals it enshrines, under changed conditions, tend slowly toward loss of appeal, toward loss of validity, so that the worth of the art work as a symbol of the enduring is ultimately vitiated. Nietzsche in- sisted upon a " transvaluation of all values." By 38 THE CHANGING DRAMA transvaluation he meant re-valuation — with a difference. In such a process we are transported out of the old region of conventional valuation, across the boundary line, into a new realm of juster judgment and more clear-sighted appraisal. Transvaluation in ideals, in morals, necessarily en- forces a partial transvaluation in esthetic values — in that all art has a two-fold appeal, moral as well as esthetic. " It is not without deep pain," confesses Nietzsche, consummate artist as well as philosopher and moralist, " that we acknowledge the fact that in their loftiest soarings artists of all ages have exalted and divinely transfigured precisely those ideas which we now recognize as false; they are the glorifiers of humanity's relig- ions and philosophical errors ; and they could not have been this without belief in the absolute truth of these errors." As we advance in civilization, we lose our reverence for those ideals, moral quali- ties, individual virtues, social predispositions which were once regarded as universally valid and obligatory. There is a corresponding, though not a fixed or measurable, waning of interest in works of art embodying these outworn values. The ancient values are replaced by new and more enlightened values, according more precisely with the spirit of the age. Dramatists like Ibsen, Galsworthy, Brieux, and Shaw ruthlessly expose the tragic consequences of adherence to " duties " NEW CRITICISM AND NEW ETHICS 39 which are no longer obligatory; enjoin upon us the necessity of revolt against the tyranny of out- worn customs ; inspire us to shatter the ancient social petrifactions which destroy the vitality and initiative of human impulse. The callous cynicism and brutal tyranny which make possible a Patient Griselda only shock a generation busied in granting to woman the rights of common hu- manity, of political and economic freedom — the right, in a word, to normal development as in- dividual. As social and ethical ideas and ideals evolve through the course of the centuries, the so-called classics of the past steadily weaken their hold upon the consciousness of humanity. But it must be pointed out that this loss is counterbalanced by the persistence of the esthetic principles which the art work embodies. We must not confuse the categories of ethics and esthetics. Historical criticism demands that the work of art shall be judged in the light of the ideals which produced it. " Art," says Alfred Stevens, " is nature seen through the prism of an emotion " ; and a true work of art, the vitally moving vision of nature, is dateless and eternal. It survives as a living monument of the buried life of the past. It as- suredly tends to lose its esthetic procreative func- tion — its power of giving rise to other works of art. We may admire and jealously preserve art 40 THE CHANGING DRAMA works which we would never dream of imitating. Art as art is wholly independent of either utility or morality, possessing a value that is intrinsic. But when we create a work of art, we are ani- mated by a conscious or an unconscious moral motive. " We select from the crowd of intuitions which are formed or at least sketched within us," says Croce ; " and the selection is governed by selection of the economic conditions of life and of its moral direction. Therefore, when we have formed an intuition, it remains to decide whether or no we should communicate it to others, and to whom, and when, and how ; all of which considera- tions fall equally under the utilitarian and ethical conception." Procreative art works contain within themselves the germ of esthetic development, of utilitarian and ethical application. Imitation of the classics ceases when the classics reveal themselves as out- worn repositories of ideas, feelings, views of life which have lost their validity, verity and force for the modern world. The thinking of to-day has grown sanely pragmatic. Truth itself now has an utilitarian attribute : it must " make good." Beauty is judged in the same way. The con* temporary artist has abandoned the esthetic treat- ment of false ideas, however hallowed, enshrined in classic literature. For this day, such ideas are false because they won't " work." NEW CRITICISM AND NEW ETHICS 41 The questions, of form, of technic, of content, raised by the persistent practice of dramatists during the past half century, demand conscientious treatment and adequate solution at the hands of contemporary dramatic criticism. New ideas have forced their way to the front; new forms of art have met acceptance at the hands of the public; new dramatic conventions have replaced the out- worn and theatrical conventionalities of an earlier epoch. The pressure of realism and the impulsive thrust of the new social order have basically af- fected the structure, tenor, and content of the drama. The psychology of the crowd helps us to a more rational comprehension of the secrets of popular appeal. The architectural features of the modern playhouse are not without their subtle but unmistakable influence in conditioning the form of the modern drama. More irrevocable than ever before is the divorce of play from public, actors from audience. Gone is the court-yard stage of Shakespeare, gone the tennis-court stage of the Grand Monarque, gone the semi-circular platform of but a century ago. To-day the illu- sion of objectivity is immense, the pictorial appeal inescapable. We gaze through a picture-frame encircling the farce or the melodrama, the comedy or the tragedy, of this, our time. in SCIENCE AND THE NEW DRAMA " In order to survive, a literary form must be as- similated by society, must demonstrate its utility by ex- pressing better that society's view of what is real and true in life." — John Preston Hoskins. Any profound study of the evolution of the drama in relation to its formal development in- evitably leads to a readjustment of view in regard to those marvelous, hypothetical formulas which the night-by-night chronicler of the passing show glibly and unquestioningly terms the " laws of the drama." Less than a century ago, prior to Dar- win's formulation of the theory of evolution, and long antecedent to De Vries' exposition of the phe- nomena of mutation, and William James' enuncia- tion of the doctrine of Pragmatism, such hamper- ing restrictions as the postulates of the three unities stood virtually unchallenged as obligatory laws of the drama. Only three decades ago, Brunetiere dogmatically enunciated the " unique law of the drama." And to-day, the dead hand of formalism in drama still weighs heavily, a retarding force upon a noble art. Authority, 43 44 THE CHANGING DRAMA masked in the garb of Aristotle, of Lessing, of Freytag, of Brunetiere, is invoked to crush the new movement toward freedom — the freedom for the exercise of the creative function in the pro- duction of new forms. The drama is a life form, as well as an art form. As such, it is a function of the human spirit. Science, then, includes it within its survey ; and properly regards it as a species subject to variation and mutation. A vast domain opens before the new art criticism, which shall draw its analogies from the field of biological science — these analogies modified in accordance with the peculiar restrictions of the work of art as a life form. History affords innumerable illustrations of the variations of literary species in accordance with certain principles cognate, if not identical, with the laws governing biological phenomena. A given variety of dramatic form, — the fate tragedy of the Greeks, the blood-and-thunder drama of the pre-Elizabethans, the well-made play of Scribe, — undergoes a process of active evolution. This variety, by reason of its social utility, through insensible gradations, a continuous improvement and stratification, fixes itself as an accepted type of drama. When this variety has reached the stage of universal acceptance, the dramatist, the original human factor, introduces some new unit character into the group of units which constitute SCIENCE AND THE NEW DRAMA 45 this particular type of variety. This originality of individual genius is as yet a complex and not altogether comprehensible phenomenon. Immedi- ately, a sharp mutation takes place: a new variety, individually distinct from the old, comes into being. The Greek dramatist created the species of fate-tragedy with the unit idea of human panic and dread in face of the unplumbed mysteries of man's origin, purpose, and destiny. Marlowe and Shakespeare, reflecting the deeper instincts of Protestant theology, incorporated into the drama the unit idea of individual responsibility. The conception was so revolutionary, the transference of the controlling will of the world from God to man so anarchic, that a new species originated. This was the drama of individual fatality, in which fate becomes synonymous with individual character and conscience. From the doctrine of evolution, Ibsen imports into the drama a new unit idea : the idea that the individual is the crea- ture of the historical moment, of social environ- ment, of physical heredity. A transformation takes place, giving rise to the new species: the drama of naturalism. From the philosophy of mysticism, the contemplative sphere of Novalis, Ruysbroeck, and Emerson, Maeterlinck selects a unit idea : the idea that passive virtue has a higher ideal value than constructive deeds. This unit 46 THE CHANGING DRAMA idea, projected into drama, leads in criticism to the theory of the static drama ; in dramaturgy to the emergence of a new variety : the drama of im- mobility. From the field of politics, Shaw imports into the drama the idea that words, the expression of inspired conviction, are not only as valuable as actions, but are themselves actions in the sense of being creative and constructive agencies for the influence and alteration of other people's opin- ions. A new species is thus originated: the drama of discussion, in which volitional activity is ex- pressed by means of the free expression of opinion. These new species, as they come into existence, are brought into competition with already exist- ing species. This competition is fundamentally different from the biological phenomenon of the " struggle for existence," though it bears a super- ficial similarity to it. The true life form, in the biological realm, throughout the course of the earlier ages, did actually struggle, instinctively or volitionally, to maintain its existence in competi- tion with other rival, life forms. But Hoskins lias astutely pointed out that different literary species can compete only for assimilation by the public. So long as a given species conforms gen- erally to society's conception of ideal truth and psychological reality, so long will that species continue to exist in demonstration of its social utility. Furthermore, a species, by reason of its SCIENCE AND THE NEW DRAMA 47 perfection of form, may continue to survive, long after its social utility has been impaired and its ideas recognized as imperfect, outworn, or even trivial. The Iliad, as epic, survives as a literary monument, not as a creative art form; the well- made piece survives by reason of the dexterity of its dramaturgies, in face of its singular poverty of ideas. No real struggle for existence, for the supplanting and destruction of another species, can be said to take place in literature. For since the power of assimilation by the public is un- limited, the " competition " of one literary species consists in its adaptation to intellectual and social environment, and in no sense involves as a conse- quence the elimination of another literary species. The people in the theater who sit as guilty par- ticipants in the social evils depicted by Haupt- mann still rejoice in the enlargement and in- vigoration of the human ego afforded by the in- dividualistic drama of Shakespeare and Schiller. The same individual is capable of experiencing, with pleasurable emotion, at once the acceleration of pulse evoked by the romantic comedy of Rostand, the mental cerebration set up by the dialectic comedy of Shaw, the sociologic indigna- tion aroused by the tragi-comedy of Ibsen. In a genuine, and profound sense, a literary species may illustrate phenomena of survival, cognate to the biological phenomena of survival. 48 THE CHANGING DRAMA A literary species possesses fecundity in two senses. First, as already shown, through its apti- tude for passive assimilation by society. Second, through its power of creativeness. In the latter sense, a literary species survives when it possesses within itself the germs of reproductive imitation. That is to say, it possesses the qualities of perma- nent virility which result in inspiring the creation of similar works after its own model. An Ibsen creates a new species of drama; and this species as a model inspires countless followers of Ibsen to imitation and reproduction, with minor varia- tions. Both novelty of form and novelty of content are instrumentalities in prolonging the life of a species. A question which naturally arises in this connection is this: which attribute, form or con- tent, is the more virile, the better calculated to assure the survival of a given species? A work of art, long after its powers of reproductive stimulation are entirely exhausted, survives for the sake of its form, as a noteworthy literary achievement. It is interesting in the history of literature as the fossil remains of the dinosaur are interesting in the history of science — as marking a transition in the evolution of species. Content, on the other hand, is a vital, living force — more accessible and more easily understood by the public than artistic form, which in its last SCIENCE AND THE NEW DRAMA 49 analysis is mechanistic. The variation exhibited in any new literary species is effected by ideas imported from other realms of thought, and not from ideas already existent in the sphere of liter- ature. Since content, expression of ideas, appeals to society as a living, active issue, while style, form, is merely a passive virtue, it is logical to infer that content wields a wicjer and deeper influ- ence upon the life of literature than form. Per- fection of form serves as a preservative against the corrosive test of time. But content, an ex- pression of the universal life of the race, may exert vast influence even when the form is im- perfect. And furthermore, it seldom fails to contain the vital stimulant to imitative reproduc- tion so rarely lodged in form. In any consideration of the formal development of the drama, the new dramatic critic, with the enlarged view afforded by the most recent scien- tific discoveries, in particular the theories of Dar- win and De Vries, views with suspicion the attempt to formulate absolute laws governing literary species. Indeed, the drama, viewed in the light of the doctrine of evolution, cannot be subject to a group of absolute rules or laws posited in advance. For since the drama, through the in- fluence of the historical moment, the pressure of social thought, the advance of civilization, under- goes a continuous process of evolution, the " laws " 50 THE CHANGING DRAMA of to-day may at any moment emerge into light as the false generalizations of criticism based upon insufficient data. The perpetual intervention of that transforming force, the individual dramatist, in the realm of existent drama, gives rise to sudden mutations and variations utterly unforeseen and, indeed, not to be foreseen by the most astute criti- cism. The critic is estopped from formulating hard and fast rules, the so-called " laws " of the drama. It were idle to formulate theories, and afterward endeavor to force facts to conform to those theories. The modern philosopher, of the type of James and Bergson, concerns himself primarily with facts, phenomena ; and his concern is to devise theories, which shall satisfactorily and completely explain these facts and phenomena. The modern scientist, in particular the pure scientist, employs a machinery of reasoning which organizes itself steadily toward greater and greater accuracy in the determination of truth. The mathematician, the geometer, the physicist, can no longer satisfy himself with the bald enun- ciation of the general laws conditioning certain phenomena. For these conditions, unless minutely analyzed, may be deficient in two respects: they may not wholly suffice to explain the phenomena, or else they may over-explain it, and so involve redundancies. The principle of scientific effi- ciency demands that the scientist, in explaining SCIENCE AND THE NEW DRAMA 51 phenomena, shall formulate his conditions in such a way as to fulfil three tests : they must be neces- sary ; they must be sufficient ; and they must con- tain no redundancies. They must be neither more nor less than, but exactly, enough to explain and produce the given phenomena. In the sphere of art, criticism must recognize the necessity for employing a like, an equal, scientific accuracy in formulating the " laws " conditioning literary phenomena. And furthermore, whether he be a Pragmatist or not, only at his peril will he evade the consequences of that doctrine. Only those principles of drama which survive the test of time can be termed the true principles of the drama. It is the business of the critic, if he can, to dis- cover the course of the evolution of the drama. That, and not any abstract, absolute law, posited in advance, shall be the test of the drama. The true drama, then, is the drama which prevails ; and it is the critic's business to discover whether a drama of given form and content will in the long run prevail. Survival as the test of right, of truth, involves the obligation to include within one's survey the entire scope of history, and to make one's gen- eralizations from the largest attainable group of facts. The most that the critic can do, at any given moment, is to draw up a series of generaliza- tions based upon a series of scientifically accurate 52 THE CHANGING DRAMA observations. From all the considerable arid note- worthy examples of drama which history presents he must disengage those principles and attributes which are common to all. Furthermore he must align other generalizations with the trend of the drama contemporary with himself. " Laws of the drama," so-called, are empirical generaliza- tions, critical integrations of the practice of all dramatists worthy of consideration up to the present time. The most noteworthy illustration of this state- ment is the classic illustration of the three unities. In the light of modern criticism, based on scien- tifically accurate observation of the drama and of dramatic criticism of all time, it is obvious that Aristotle wrote primarily for his own epoch, and not for ours. Indeed, one may well question whether he was final in his Poetics, even for his own epoch. Certain it is that this " master of those who know " was no mere theory-spinner, advancing intricate hypotheses concerning the drama to exhibit his own intellectual virtuosity. Aristotle was an accurate thinker, basing his formulations of the principles of the drama upon a series of close deductions from a study of the plays of the Greeks. The enormous field for com- parison presented to the dramatic critic of to-day in the dramatic literatures of all great art-pro- ducing races throughout all recorded history was SCIENCE AND THE NEW DRAMA 53 not open to him. His criticism inevitably exhibits the limitations imposed upon him by the fact that he was restricted solely to an intensive study of the drama of the Greeks. Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that he spoke with authority for his own epoch. And there be those who still tediously maintain that he spoke with final au- thority for ours. A profound student of the drama of actual representation, that is, the play in a theater performed by actors before an au- dience, he arrived at many conclusions which were valid, not only for the drama of his own day, but for the drama of all time. On the other hand, as a simple illustration will show, he made ex cathedra generalizations which were scarcely valid even for the drama of the Greeks. " As for the story," he says, " whether the poet takes it ready made or constructs it for himself, he should first sketch its general outline, and then fill in the episodes and amplify in detail." The confessions of numerous modern dramatists, from Ibsen down, demonstrate that there are a variety of ways, which may be in- numerable, in which one may construct a play. In an analysis of the preliminary drafts for Ib- sen's plays, which is found in my European Dra~ matistSy it is shown that Ibsen pursued methods which varied according to varying circumstances : the nature of the play, the philosophic idea he had 54 THE CHANGING DRAMA matured, the incidents from life which furnished the starting point or germ of a drama, the pecul- iar temperament of some particular individual or group of individuals of his acquaintance, cer- tain scientific discoveries, the atmosphere which he wished to create. We have record of the con- fessions of various practical craftsmen, showing both variety and contrariety in the task of writ- ing a drama. The injunction of Aristotle, nar- row and false as it is, sounds rather more like warning than advice — a warning against the Greek tendency toward a certain plastic immobil- ity. Aristotle may perhaps have realized that he was writing for all time ; he was assuredly shrewd enough to realize that it was his immediate busi- ness to write with reference to the stage of his own day. Writing before an age like our own, grown skeptical of the practical utility of dra- matic criticism, he took himself seriously, and wrote for the profit and service of the dramatists who were his contemporaries. The three unities — the unities of time, of place, and of action — are still inaccurately referred to as the " unities of Aristotle." Modern criticism has demonstrated that, in his Poetics, Aristotle insists upon only one unity — unity of action. He actually does not lay down the preservation of the unities of time and place as fundamental " laws " of the drama. Unity of place is not SCIENCE AND THE NEW DRAMA 55 adverted to in the Poetics; and his disquisitions upon unity of time, as analysis shows, quite nat- urally prove to be merely his critical deductions, drawn from patient interrogation of the habitual practice of the ablest dramatists up to his time. Since his time; the critical controversies over the question of the preservation of the unities, which have transpired in all countries where the drama has flourished as an art, furnishes the subject for one of those elaborate, yet so far as the contem- porary dramatist is concerned, largely profitless disquisitions over questions which have passed from the field of practical utility. Not without its piquant humor is the memory that, in the days of Corneille, the odium dramaticum burned almost as fiercely as the odium theologicum. No drama- tist was awarded the critical seal of approval un- less he conformed to the three sacrosanct unities. Boileau, the spokesman of critical authority, re- formulated what he conceived to be the Aristote- lian principles in the terse and succinct declaration that a tragedy must show " one action in one day and in one place." So convinced were the critics of the period, and of the two or three succeeding centuries, of the validity and universal pertinency of the " Aristotelian principles," that they be- lieved that, had the Poetics been destroyed in an- cient times, it would have been necessary to rein- vent, or rather, recodify, the same principles. 56 THE CHANGING DRAMA Unity of time, so-called, was recognized by Aristotle as a characteristic of the dramas of the Greeks, and not at all as a distinctive attribute of the dramatic species. His words are eloquent on this point : " Tragedy endeavors, so far as pos- sible, to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun, or but slightly to exceed this limit." Author- ity, in the person of the Italian critics of the Renascence, Cynthio, Robortelli, and Trissino, as Spingarn has pointed out, stratified Aristotle's empirical generalization upon the Greek dramas into an obligatory law for the drama as a liter- ary species. Indeed, they went even further and limited the time for the dramatic action to " one artificial day." The generalization as to the unity of place is but an analogy after the model of unity of time ; and was erected into a " law " by one of the most subtle and profound of dramatic critics, Castelvetro. Two conceptions of the drama and its influence underlay Castelvetro's theories in regard to the unities. In the first place, he con- ceived of the theater as a public institution, the drama as democratic by nature. In the second place, he anticipated the realistic temper of the audience of to-day in his conviction that people in a theater desire to see convention reduced to a minimum and reality raised to a maximum. He insisted that the dramatist, as a purveyor of ar- tistic pleasure, must defer to the public and its SCIENCE AND THE NEW DRAMA 57 desires. This deference must be shown in obser- vation of the principle now termed the principle of economy of attention. Hence Castelvetro form- ulated the principle of the unity of place as well as that of time, under the sincere conviction that only by avoiding a change of place — with its fancied distraction and dissipation of attention — might the interest of the audience be fixed, con- centrated and maintained. These theories of the unities, erected into " principles " by the guardians of the academic school, obtained in the drama of Europe, with sin- gular and amazing effectiveness, down to the first decade of the nineteenth century. The plausible theories of the subtle Italian critics were dexter- ously put into practice by the French dramatists ; the assured artistic eminence of France in the drama exercised authoritative influence upon other European literatures. Shakespeare and the Eliza- bethans, Lope de Vega and his fellow-craftsmen in Spain, deliberately disregarded the unities, in es- pecial those of time and place, discovering as prac- tical playwrights that no loss in popular support of their dramas was entailed through their re- fusal to be subjected to the hampering restrictions of these unities. The Gallic spirit, bred in the school of formalism and erecting the principle of artistic correctness into a formula, rejoiced in working in a carefully restricted medium and in 58 THE CHANGING DRAMA conquering the difficulties imposed by dramatic criticism. When with a burst of lyric fervor Ro- manticism culminated in France with Victor Hugo, the anarchic spirit of the new libertarianism burst the bonds of the old formalism. In the famous preface to his Cromwell, Hugo formulated the code of the new freedom in dramatic art, and boldly disavowed the unities of time and place. The contemporary dramatists, from Ibsen until to-day, no longer accept the unities of time and place as obligatory laws. Nevertheless, in certain important respects, the practice of the contem- porary playwright demonstrates the occasional efficacy, if not the necessity, of preserving the unity of time and even the unity of place. The fancy of the spectator, it is true, enables him to effect the transition from place to place without shattering the illusion of actuality, provided the unity of action is fully maintained. Yet a cer- tain intensiveness of treatment, with a consequent maintenance of concentration of attention, is un- questionably advantageous. This, in fact, is an actual and indispensable quality of the drama of recessive action. The play representing the culmination of a long series of events which have transpired prior to its beginning, gains in focal interest and directness of appeal when the action is confined to a given place or locality. Moreover, the same considerations bespeak the ad- SCIENCE AND THE NEW DRAMA 59 vantages of the preservation of the unity of time. Not perhaps in the actual sense; for it is seldom if ever the case that the drama, in actual repre- sentation, takes exactly the time consumed by the happening of these same events in real life. But the contemporary dramatist often employs the principle of " idealized time " with excellent effect. In the speech of the chorus ( to the public, in the Prologue to King Henry V, Shakespeare voices the artistic principle of the true dramatist in regard to idealized time when he speaks of "... jumping o'er times, Turning the accomplishment of many years Into an hour-glass ..." The spectator readily conspires to ignore brief intervals of time, in which no incident inherently relevant to the progress of the action has taken place. Indeed, there is a certain rational basis for the principles of the unities of both time and place. For they may both be regarded as sub- sidiary features of the unity of action. Unity of action may, at times, be best secured by preserving the unities of both time and place; since needless lapses of time may weaken the attention of the spectators, and auxiliary incidents in a sub-plot, requiring a change of place, may distract the in- terest of the audience from the central theme of the drama. Furthermore, as Grillparzer has as- tutely pointed out, the question of time is inti- 60 THE CHANGING DRAMA mately associated with action, dealing with the feelings and the passions which weaken in intens- ity, force, and appeal with the passage of undue lapses of time. While unity of place for the entire drama is no longer regarded as obligatory by the contem- porary dramatist, it is a generally accepted prin- ciple that there must- be no changes of scene within a single act. For, in the rigorous technic of modern dramaturgy, each act is conceived as a unit, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The totality of effect, the unity of impression, is best achieved from the act which is itself a unit, not a concatenation of broken parts. Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that, occasionally, note- worthy dramatic effects are achieved through changes of scene within an act. The pressure of modern realistic methods and the length of time consumed in an elaborate resetting of the scene make it highly impracticable to effect changes of scene within a single act. On the Continental stage, this latter difficulty is avoided through the employment of the mechanism of the revolving platform, enabling several scenes to be set sim- ultaneously and obviating the necessity for dreary waits between scenes. But there is reason to ques- tion the value of the supposed advantage gained by the use of this mechanism, for the theoretical considerations already submitted. The practice SCIENCE AND THE NEW DRAMA 61 was long ago condemned by Corneille ; and Lessing protested against this strain upon the credulity of the audience, caused by rapid scenic changes which could only smack of the miraculous. The one unity considered indispensable — and, indeed, in a sense rightly understood, truly indis- pensable — is known as the "unity of action." The inadequacy of the term is peculiarly apparent to-day, in view of the uncertainty of criticism in regard to the meaning, purport, and content of action. Aristotle rightly points out that the true drama must be an organic whole, to which all the constituent parts are vital. In so many words, he makes the apparently gratuitous observation that a dramatic action must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. But the entire structure of the three unities tumbles to the ground when we realize that unity of action is, no more than the unities of time and place, a differentiating char- acteristic of the drama. Every work of art, no matter of what kind, endowed with that type of structural unity which best holds the concentrated attention of the spectator, possesses antiseptic and preservative quality. It is not only art which is concerned for the preservation of unity: it is unity which is concerned for the preservation of art. In every literary type, from the homeo- pathic short story to the allopathic novel, from the dramolet to the epic, there is ever to be gained 62 THE CHANGING DRAMA artistic advantage through the elimination of the non-essential. A machine is judged for its efficiency on the basis of " mechanical advantage," which is noth- ing more than the ratio of the useful to the use- less work it may be made to accomplish. This scientific terminology is certainly applicable to art ; and by analogy the " esthetic advantage " of a work of art may be defined as the ratio of those instrumentalities which create to those which fail to create the desired effects. Unity of action, so-called, is indispensable only in this precise sense: the esthetic advantage of the work of art shall be of such a nature that the instru- mentalities which create shall vastly preponderate over those which fail to create the desired ef- fects. It is clear, to-day, that a drama need not have a single action, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Nor can it possess unity of action when it cannot be said to contain action in the sense suc- cinctly expressed and narrowly understood by Aristotle. There is one word which best expresses the temper of modern art: Stimmung. There is no just English equivalent for this term. Mood possesses the unfortunate connotation of transi- toriness and evanescence ; temperament is usually thought of as a personal attribute. The creative craftsman of to-day may be said to have added SCIENCE AND THE NEW DRAMA 63 to the three unities of time, place, and action a fourth unity: unity of impression. This type of unity is most effectively achieved in dramas which, on the side of physical activity, are static rather than dynamic. Variety and diversity of " action " usually tend to -shatter unity of impression. The more " action," the less unity of impression. In a word, unity of impression is a unity of inaction rather than a unity of action. The skill of Maeterlinck in achieving unity of impression in his static dramas is a case in point. Yet it must be acknowledged that Strindberg in his Dance of Death, Von Hofmannsthal in his Elek- tra, Wilde in his Salome, D'Annunzio in his Fran- cesca da Rimini have achieved a certain definite unity of impression. And yet these are plays by no means deficient in " action," in the sense com- monly understood. The modern play which achieves true unity of impression is suggestively described by the mu- sician as a tonal poem. One tone sounds through- out the piece. Such a play would doubtless be described by the painter as a symphony — a sym- phony in green, or blue, or gray, let us say. A chosen color scheme, with nuances of a single primary color, may interpret the dominant mood of the piece. The relation between sounds and sensibilities, between colors and emotions, is a very intimate, though very subtle, relation. The mod- 64 THE CHANGING DRAMA era realization of these intimate inter-relations may be said to account for the appearance of the stage manager. The very professional terms in current use convey this growing sense of the inter- relationship of the arts. The drama for the inti- mate theater is constructed after the analogy of chamber music. The drama, enacted within the field of the picture-frame of the proscenium arch, relies for many of its finer effects upon its qualities of pictorial appeal. Many a modern play, to em- ploy the phrase used by Wilde to describe his novel, may be termed " an essay in decorative art." To-day, the creation of atmosphere has become the business of the dramatist no less than the problem of illuminative, co-operative setting has become the business of the artist-technician. Ibsen, Strindberg, D'Annunzio, and Maeterlinck tread hard upon the heels of Craig, Reinhardt, Stanislavsky, and Foster Piatt. The author of Hamlet, of Macbeth, was the first and greatest of the modern dramatists in the art of achieving unity of impression and continuity of effect. The most tragic artistic incident of modern times is the chronological mischance that the author of The Fall of the House of Usher, the supreme master of atmospheric illusion, came too soon to write for the intimate art theater of to-day, and of to-morrow. The treatment of an incident, de- SCIENCE AND THE NEW DRAMA 65 spite the drastic pronouncements of the natural- ists, can never be a matter of mere record. The most extravagant theorist of the naturalists, Zola himself, realized the personal, subjective ele- ment of all art in the definition that a work of art is a corner of life seen through the prism of a temperament. The transforming quality of art, falsely termed idealization, is the creation of a specific effect, attained by the artist himself and esthetically communicated to others through the prism of the artist's temperament. Facts, then, only afford the raw materials : they do not impose a specific mode of treatment. It is the mood of the artist which determines the treatment of his materials. A glance at conspicuous works of the most notable contemporary dramatists will convey, better than any theorizing, a true impression of modern practice in regard to the unities of time, place, and action, and the unity of impression, or Stimmung, which is the particular contribution of modern dramaturgy. Ibsen, to whom one nat- urally first turns for revolutionary advances in technic, far from breaking away from the unities simply because they were limitations upon free- dom, conformed to them whenever his materials and their handling gained artistically through such conformity. The true dramatist, as the French have demonstrated, best exhibits his mas- 66 THE CHANGING DRAMA tery by working within limits. The social dramas of Ibsen are, as we shall see later, culminations of a complex crisis ; and this intensiveness of treatment is best secured by conforming to the unities of time and place, as well as of action. The supreme achievement of Ibsen, the creation of unity of tone or mood, was best attained by utilizing the other three unities in a perfectly lib- eral way. Unity of place is preserved whenever, by so doing, the unity of impression is best se- cured; it is violated with equal readiness when- ever the materials and the chosen treatment re- quire its violation. In The League of Youth, there are no changes within an act and the action takes place entirely within the limits of a single village. In The Pillars of Society, A DolVs House, and Ghosts a single room suffices; in An Enemy of the People, three rooms in the same city ; in The Wild Duck, two rooms ; in Rosmers- holm, two rooms in the same house ; in The Lady from the Sea, different spots in the same locality ; in Hedda Gaoler, a single room; in The Master Builder, two rooms and the veranda of the same house ; in Little Eyolf, the house and garden of the same country place ; and in John Gabriel Borkman, two stories of the same dwelling and the front yard. When We Dead Awaken, being a play of pure symbolism, though involving the change of scene from the coast to the mountains, really has SCIENCE AND THE NEW DRAMA 67 no geography in the strict sense. With only this exception, which from its nature cannot be re- garded as a real exception, unity of place is pre- served in all of Ibsen's social dramas. There is a change of immediate place, whenever occasion demands ; never a change of locality. The same compression of treatment, artistic foreshortening, which demands unity of place de- mands even more imperatively unity of time. Dramas which are convergent and culminant in treatment embody incidents which move rapidly to a crisis. The action of The Comedy of Love, which may be regarded as the first of Ibsen's social dramas, requires less than twenty-four hours ; and of the earlier heroic dramas, Lady Inger of Oestraat requires only five. Only a day may in- tervene between the acts of the comedy of intrigue, The League of Youth; The Pillars of Society, A DolVs House and The Lady from the Sea require about sixty hours each ; Rosmersholm, fifty-two ; The Wild Duck, forty; Hedda Gaoler and Little Eyolf, thirty-six. For The Master Builder fewer than twenty-four hours suffice ; for Ghosts only sixteen; for John Gabriel Borkmari a bare three. The last-mentioned play exhibits the greatest com- pression in time. The time required for producing the play, on account of the changes of scene be- tween the acts (unless the revolving stage is em- ployed), is actually greater than the time con- 68 THE CHANGING DRAMA sumed by the events represented, which are of unbroken sequence. Even An Enemy of the Peo- ple, in which the dramatic action conditions delay, may be imagined to transpire within the space of less than two days. It must not, however, be inferred, from the above examples, that Ibsen was hampered by the restrictions of the unities of time and place. In historic and fantastic dramas, fre- quent changes of place and long lapses of time are entirely legitimate; and Ibsen freely uses ten changes of scene in The Pretenders; there are seven or eight scenes in Brand; in Peer Gynt ap- proximately forty! The Pretenders, Brand, and Emperor and Galilean cover long periods of time, counted in years ; and Peer Gynt covers the quin- decennium of a lifetime. The greatest freedom and variety, in the matter of time and place, is exhibited in the works of con- temporary dramatists. The most conspicuous break with traditions is Bennett's Milestones, which deals successively with three successive gen- erations. No one consistently shows so close an observance of these unities as Ibsen; indeed, no dramatist since Ibsen has exhibited so com- plete a mastery or so persistent an employ- ment of the analytic method. Yet it is to be observed that in many of the most significant works of leading dramatists, especially in social dramas showing a culmination or closely knit com- SCIENCE AND {THE NEW DRAMA 69 pound of motives, the unities of both time and place are observed with scrupulous care. Obvi- ously the reason for this is inherent in the subject and its just mode of treatment, not in any servile adherence on the dramatist's part to artificial " rules." Shaw's Candida requires for its action only a single room, and about twelve hours; so also does Strindberg's The Father — though each is handled synthetically. The action of Giacosa's Hapless Love transpires in a single room within a single day. In certain of the purely natural- istic dramas of Hauptmann, designed to present a consecutive series of events, the unities of both time and place are rationally observed. In Das Friedensfest, notably, the tragedy is en- acted in a single room during the latter half of a single day. In the most notable of Galsworthy's dramas, Strife, " the action takes place on Feb- ruary 7th between the hours of noon and six in the afternoon, close to the Trenartha Tin Plate Works, on the borders of England and Wales, where a strike has been in progress throughout the winter." In The Two Mr. Wetherbys of St. John Hankin, the scene is Mr. James Wetherby's house, and the action takes some twenty hours, from the afternoon of one day to the afternoon of the next. These, and innumerable other illustra- tions from the plays of modern dramatists which might be given, only go to demonstrate the true 70 THE CHANGING DRAMA rationale of the unities of time and place, their genuine efficacy in the compact handling of cul- minant situations. Certain substitutes for the " ideal " treatment of time, common in the Continental drama of the last century, have been employed with excellent effect by certain contemporary dramatists. In The Two Mr. Wetherbys " the curtain is dropped for a moment halfway through Act II to represent the lapse of three hours," the same device is em- ployed by Finer o in Iris, by Barker in Waste, by Galsworthy in The Silver Box. The most signifi- cant employment of the unity of time, as a new technical treatment, is the representation of an action which takes a longer time in production than would the events or conversations in actual life. Ibsen furnished an illustration of this in a por- tion of John Gabriel Borkman. Another technical innovation is the " scene individable," the action in time, though broken by curtains, being con- tinuous. Kennedy's The Servant in the House, a conspicuous illustration, was a pioneer in the em- ployment of this technical device in English drama. Modern dramatists, notably Strauss and von Hofmannsthal in Elektra, Strindberg in Cred- itors, Shaw in Getting Married, to mention a few examples, exhibit a scene in which the time is un- broken. In the case of the last-mentioned play, the curtain was lowered twice during the course SCIENCE AND THE NEW DRAMA 71 of the production — not because the action in- volved any intervals, but only a§ a concession to the need for relaxation on the part of the audi- ence, liable to fatigue through the strain of unduly prolonged attention. Dramatists like Hauptmann and Shaw, after Ibsen, have dispensed with the division of acts into scenes; and it is but the next step in technical advance to abolish division of a play into acts. In the preface to Miss Julia, Strindberg says : " I have tried to abolish the division into acts. And I have done so because I have come to fear that our decreasing capacity for illusion might be un- favorably affected by intermissions during which the spectator would have time to reflect and to get away from the suggestive influence of the author-hypnotist. My play will probably last an hour and a half, and as it is possible to listen that length of time, or longer, to a lecture, a sermon, or a debate, I have imagined that a theatrical per- formance could not become fatiguing in the same time. . . . My hope is still for a public educated to the point when it can sit through a whole- evening performance in a single act. But that point cannot be reached without a great deal of experimentation." The most remarkable result of such experimentation is the opera Elektra. As conducted by Strauss himself in Berlin, Elektra gave me the most tremendous emotional experience. 72 THE CHANGING DRAMA It leaves one emotionally drenched, physically ex- hausted. The dramatic evocation of mood, sus- tained without intermission for two hours and more, tries one to the extreme limit of esthetic emotional endurance. The age in which we live, subject to the influence of scientific research, is responsible in great measure for the intensive treatment of themes in modern dramatic practice. The vast extension of knowledge, the discovery of innumerable facts, laws, and principles governing the phenomena of human life, have compelled concentration upon the subjects of our examination. The telescope of the older epic poet has been exchanged for the microscope of the modern dramatist. It is just because modern life opens for us such panoramic vistas and widens so extensively the horizon of human possibility that we are forced to restrict ourselves to a limited field of vision. It is only through a microscopic examination of a small group of factors operating within a restricted field that we are enabled to arrive at exact knowl- edge. At the same time, there is involved in the examination an exhaustive knowledge of all ante- cedent factors in the evolutionary chain of causa- tion. It is for these reasons, primarily, that Ibsen, the greatest technician in the modern dramatic movement, has consistently employed in his social dramas the analytic treatment which is equiva- SCIENCE AND THE NEW DRAMA 73 lent, for this form, to a genuine technical dis- covery. There are, to be sure, two possibilities always open to the dramatist: the synthetic treatment, in which the action is begun, continued, and com- pleted entirely within the limits of the play itself ; and the analytic treatment, in which the action shown is the culmination of a long series of events, the outcome of external actions and internal de- velopments. Rudolph von Gottschall once said that the Greek tragedies were really only the fifth acts of tragedies. The dictum, only mediately true for Greek tragedy, is the distinctive charac- teristic of the social dramas of Ibsen. The analytic treatment is as old as drama itself; classic illustrations range all the way from the (Edipus of Sophocles and the Hamlet of Shake- speare to the Maria Stuart of Schiller and Der Zerbrochene Krug of Kleist. Yet at no time in the past has any dramatist, or any group of dramatists, subjected the dramatic art to analyt- ical treatment for the creation of a chosen dra- matic type. Of the Greek tragedies known to us, those treated analytically are notable as excep- tions, not as types; Shakespeare, free spirit sub- ject to unities neither of time nor of place, various, many-angled, discursive with all the arts of the rhetorician, the lyric and the epic poet, employed the synthetic treatment almost invariably, as the 74 THE CHANGING DRAMA technic best suited for the exhibition of his dra- matic fables. When we come to Ibsen, the scientific spirit of the age, with its demand for microscopic analysis in the interest of exact truth, immediate, particu- laristic, compels the employment of a purely analytic treatment. During the course of a dis- cussion of the complex problems raised by Ibsen's biography, which I had somewhat hesitantly un- dertaken, I once asked Dr. Sigurd Ibsen if his father ever acknowledged technical indebtedness to any dramatist who preceded him. The answer was significant. " I never heard my father ac- knowledge that he owed such a debt to any one," replied Dr. Ibsen — " with but a single exception : Friedrich Hebbel." If we study Hebbel's Julia, for example, conspicuous alike for analytic treat- ment and narrative technic, we may fully realize that Hebbel, on the technical side, was Ibsen's im- mediate forerunner and inspiration. In his social dramas, Ibsen aimed not at the presentation of situations as situations, but at a re-presentation of the intellectual and spiritual states of the souls of his characters. He achieved severely realistic transcripts of life by such vital projections. His plays are not manipulations, but creations of char- acter — the inevitable events of an attitude toward life, a point of view, a frame of mind, a tempera- mental stamp. As Brandes put it : " The most SCIENCE AND THE NEW DRAMA 75 esteemed German dramatists who preceded him, notably Friedrich Hebbel, came to be regarded merely as his forerunners. The French dram- atists, who in his youth were masters of the Eu- ropean stage, Alexandre Dumas and Emile Augier, became antiquated in the presence of his art. . . . With them there is still an intrigue of the old-fashioned type. One » is told something from which he reacts. Such intrigues are never employed by Ibsen after the period of his youthful drama, Lady Inger. The essential features of the inner life of his characters are revealed. A veil is lifted and we observe the peculiar stamp of the personality. A second veil is lifted, and we dis- tinguish its past. A third veil is drawn aside, and we discover the profoundest secrets of its nature." The supreme technical achievement of Ibsen, one may fairly say his supreme technical innovation, has been the identification of the action with the exposition. It was that profound student of dra- matic art, Friedrich Hebbel, who recognized in the separation of the action and the exposition the principal barrier between art and life. In the analytic dramas of Ibsen, there is no such thing as " preparation " in the French sense, no such thing as " exposition " in the old meaning. They are replaced by explication — the careful disentangling of the interlacing threads which constitute the dramatic fabric but stream out endlessly into the 76 THE CHANGING DRAMA past. Until Ibsen had freed himself from the influ- ence of the French school, he continued to employ the purely synthetic treatment, in which the action develops itself before the audience. This is true of The Pretenders, The Comedy of Love, Peer Gynt, Emperor and Galilean, The League of Youth. The method is employed even in one of the later dramas, An Enemy of the People, — a singular cir- cumstance which may be explained by the fact that it was a polemic piece, a play of external action, and was written in half the time Ibsen usually em- ployed in writing a drama. A blending, a har- monization, of the two methods is employed in The Pillars of Society, A Doll's House, The Lady from the Sea, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, Little Eyolf, and When We Dead Awaken; the past and the present play nearly equal parts in conditioning and controlling the outcome. But in Ghosts, Rosmersholm, The Wild Duck, and John Gabriel Borkman, all the fundamental facts have already transpired before the opening of the play ; and those episodes which appear before us are the necessary consequences of the earlier events. These dramas of explication, sometimes entitled the drama of the ripened situation, are master- pieces in the peculiar technic which Ibsen per- fected: the unveiling, during the course of the dramatic development, of the entire soul-histories of the characters through their mutual confes- SCIENCE AND THE NEW DRAMA 77 sions ; and the disclosure by this means of the entire fabric of the past as the determining and omnipotent force. This procedure I prefer to de- scribe as the technic of devoilement. If we slightly change the figure and employ an English word, we may describe it as the technic of denudation. In a well-known letter to Goethe, Schiller points out as a distinct advantage of the recessive pro- cedure that the past, since it is irrevocable, is more truly terrifying than the present, with possi- bilities of freedom of choice. It may be true, as Schiller thought, that we are more deeply moved by the dread that something may have happened in the past than by the anticipatory fear that something may occur in the future. Certainly there is a steady deepening of the horror in the convergent series of disclosures unmasked by the frenzied King CEdipus, or revealed in the confes- sions of Helen Alving. The real innovation achieved by Ibsen, Haupt- mann, and the German naturalists was the em- ployment of the technical methods of fiction in the creation of the new drama. Both the convergent treatment of the short story and the narrative discursiveness of the novel were freely utilized. It will be recalled, as a conspicuous illustration, that Hauptmann dedicated his first drama to " Bjarne P. Holmsen, most distinguished of naturalists, author of Papa Hamlet " — the pseudonym for 78 THE CHANGING DRAMA the collaborators Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf in a cycle of remarkable short stories. One notes with interest, in the contemporary drama, the presence of epic, in contradistinction to purely dramatic, qualities as a consequence of the influence of fiction. The most striking super- ficial illustration is the elaborate " stage-direc- tions " of the realistic and naturalistic dramas — let us say of Shaw and Hauptmann. In reality these are no longer " stage directions " : they are minute scenic descriptions and character delinea- tions. For the first time in the history of the drama, the stage-direction becomes an intrinsic part of the play. The information contained in these scenic descriptions and character delinea- tions in reality constitutes a wealth of epic detail. A further feature to be noted in connection with the new technic is the new type of exposition which I have described as explication. In the drama of the ripened situation, the characters are already fully developed and only await some slight event to produce the catastrophe. Since the action is culminant, it must be continuous and generally rapid. In order to reveal all the antecedent events, essential to a true comprehension of the characters and the story, the dramatist is driven to employ the convenient and familiar technic of the novel. Compelled to discard the approved French technic of an initial act of exposition, the SCIENCE AND THE NEW DRAMA 79 modern realist slowly and only by degrees, throughout the entire piece, skillfully unravels the interwoven threads of antecedent happening. Nar- rative here begins to supersede " action " in the modern drama. For narration of dramatic in- tensity and pictorial appeal is needed effectively to reveal the long chain of causation which has led to the crisis exhibited in the drama itself. Narra- tion in dialogue form, of scenes dramatic in effect, thus necessarily supersedes, in large measure, direct dramatic presentation. The method of fic- tion in sustained suspense is freely employed by the dramatist of the ripened situation. The most significant of all the revelations arising out of the antecedent events is reserved until the conclusion of the drama. The penalty of the method is revealed in the consideration that the complex web of antecedent events, which can only be con- veyed to our senses through narration, becomes vastly more important, dramatically as well as determinatively, than the events of the actual drama itself. From the standpoint of technic, we have here another type of illustration of the mutation theory of De Vries. Scientifically re- garded, the drama of recessive action arises from the projection of the explicative methods of fic- tion into the field of the drama treated as pure culmination. Great as is the technical contribution of 80 THE CHANGING DRAMA Ibsen, especially in the case of the drama of explication with analytic handling, there are tremendous difficulties in the way of its success- ful employment. Indeed, Ibsen has had few followers in the successful employment of this form. A very fine specimen of the analytic treatment is Sudermann's Heimat, which may be regarded as a widening series of successive crises. A true disciple of Ibsen in his technical methods is the young Dane, Hjalmar Bergstrom, whose Karen Borneman is a signal specimen of the drama of devoilement. -Neither Zola's Renee (the dramatization of La Curee) nor Therese Raquin are successful treatments, from the dram- aturgic standpoint, of the nemesis of heredity. With all its fine qualities, Hauptmann's Vor Son- nenaufgang falls far short of being a masterpiece. Ibsen is his own best imitator in Rosmersholm and Hedda G abler; and it io noteworthy that the lead- ing figure in the former play, which after the fash- ion of Ghosts Ibsen intended to name White Horses, is the ancestral spirit of the house of Rosmer. In Miss Julia, Strindberg has achieved a masterpiece in the particular form employed — although here the influence of the past is insuf- ficiently inter-related with the lively action of the present. Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, in his case marked by the employment of severe economy of means, is a true drama of explication, not lack- SCIENCE AND THE NEW DRAMA 81 ing in a certain restraint in treatment ; but, driven by his ineradicable sense of the ridiculous, Shaw has greatly weakened the play's effect by shatter- ing unity of impression through the gruesome, cynical levity of Frank. Ibsen alone has exhibited in its ripened perfection the form of drama best adapted to the treatment of heredity. He alone has stamped upon us in the theatre the dread con- viction, as voiced by Wilde : " Heredity is Nemesis without her mask. It is the last of the Fates and the most terrible. It is the only one of the gods whose real name we know." There is one other weakness of the drama of explication, with purely analytic treatment, which, in all probability, best suffices to explain the lack of cosmopolitan appeal in the theater of Ibsen's supreme technical achievements. This type of drama involves the elimination of vivid action, the abandonment of the continuous suc- cession of slight novelties in event, calculated to hold attention and win the throng. Since only the culminant situation is exhibited, a large part of the " action " must consist in explication — achieved in more or less natural ways through mutual confessions in the conversation of the characters. Persons who have not seen each other in a long time are more or less naturally brought together; and our knowledge of the past is de- rived through the conversations in which they en- 82 THE CHANGING DRAMA lighten each other over the events which have transpired since their last meeting. The " ex- position " of the conventional drama of former time is thus replaced by retrospective narrative, dexterously couched in the hesitant, exclamatory, broken dialogue of normal daily life. The retro- spective narrative, though referring to antecedent events, is animated, accusatory — enlivened throughout with gestures, hints, implications rich in dramatic suggestiveness. Nevertheless, this continual, enforced reference to the antecedent events gives a distinctly retrospective cast to such dramas. The drama loves action more than con- templation, regnant prophecy more than mellow retrospection. Ibsen has written for an age which has passed the first flush of youth. The drama of reminiscence, though perhaps the most difficult of all forms, is a drama with its face resolutely turned toward the past. The predilection of the great public is for the drama of anticipation and prophecy, buoyantly facing the future. IV THE NEW FORMS— REALISM AND THE PULPIT STAGE " May we then secure a theater where we may be hor- rified over the horrible, laugh over the laughable, play with the playful; where we can see everything and not be offended, when we see what lies concealed behind theo- logical and esthetic veils, even if the old conventional laws must be broken; may we secure a free theater, where we shall have freedom for all things save to have no talent and to be a hypocrite or a fool! " — August Stbindberg. From out of the welter and mass of modern dramatic literature, certain general principles may be disengaged through a careful analysis of the works of the leading dramatic artists. This careful analysis suffices to exhibit a certain num- ber of dramatic forms which may be denominated new, not in the sense of merely possessing novelty, but in the exact sense that they are forms hitherto unrealized in the history of dramatic art. It shall be our concern, then, to classify and distinguish these distinctively new types of drama. If we abandon for the nonce the employment of the words realism and naturalism, because of their uncertainty and vagueness, I think we shall see 83 84 THE CHANGING DRAMA that the most distinctive form of drama contrib- uted by contemporary art is what may be termed the drama of immediate actuality. There were two prime reasons why the earlier dramatists failed to create such a type. In the first place, the theater — which Shaw has aptly defined as " the last sanctuary of unreality " — was conceived as the arena for the violent, the exceptional, the ad- ventitious, the coincidental. The more startling the external event, the greater the success. Dis- guises, transformations, substitutions lent an air of quaint attractiveness to the plays of the Greeks, the Romans, of the French classicists, and of the Elizabethans. The denouement of countless plays was made to turn upon a happily discovered, but hitherto unsuspected, fact which did not untie but, Alexander-like, only cut the Gordian knot — making providential provision for every character and dismissing the audience with a delightful sense of justice poetically adminis- tered. In the second place, there was an instinc- tive reaction against the policy of approaching too close to real life. The psychological drama of the past, with its exhaustive searchings into the mysteries of the human heart, the profundities of the human soul, erected one last barrier between the audience and the scene. This barrier was the locale, the environmental circle within which the characters moved. The characters, even when REALISM AND THE PULPIT STAGE 85 they were modern in tendency and contemporary in conception, were placed in scenes far remote, both geographically and temporally, from the audience. In the vast majority of cases, a ro- mantic setting was chosen, because of its likelihood to lure the audience away from the oppressing sense of actuality abundantly afforded by real life. Strange and outlandish countries — the stranger and the more outlandish the better! — antique castles, grim prisons, gloomy monas- teries, desert islands — these were the ancient prop- erties with which the dramatic figures, even when animated by contemporary freshness and vital mod- ern temperament, were forcibly endowed. Whether the complications were bizarre, outre, and adven- titious; whether the setting was remote and fan- tastic; whether the actions were violent, brutal, barbaric — the result was the same: to fulfil the fundamental prerequisites of romance. These fundamental prerequisites were the employment of a continuous succession of novelties ; the constant pictorial appeal to fancy and imagination ; and the general purpose to transport the audience to a realm more strange, more beautiful, more won- derful than the garish world of tons les jours. In regard to this conventional drama, Maeter- linck has happily said : " Indeed, when I go to the theater, I feel as though I were spending a few hours with my ancestors, who conceived life as 86 THE CHANGING DRAMA something that was primitive, arid, and brutal. ... I am shown a deceived husband killing his wife, a woman poisoning her lover, a son avenging his father, a father slaughtering his children, chil- dren putting their father to death, murdered kings, ravished virgins, imprisoned citizens — in a word, all the sublimity of tradition, but alas, how superficial and material! Blood, surface-tears, and death ! " With the advent of Ibsen, we mark the tri- umphant creation of a drama of immediate actu- ality. His fundamental data were two : people of to-day ; time, the present. His drama is a com- bination of the older forms, in the sense that he avoided the unreal features of one, the unnatural features of the other. Under the ancient and classic formula?, unreal people were placed in nat- ural situations ; real people were placed in un- natural situations ; and not infrequently, unreal people were placed in unnatural situations. Ibsen set himself the severest of tasks : the placing of real people in natural situations. By real people, he understood people of to-day — of his own time, country, racial feeling, social hereditament. Nor was he content with observation alone as the artist's touchstone of reality. He insisted that the artist must be " extremely careful in discrim- inating between what one has observed and what one has experienced." Only this last, he main- REALISM AND THE PULPIT STAGE 87 tains, can be " the theme for creative work." If we attend strictly to this, he says, " no every-day, commonplace subject will be too prosaic to be sublimated into poetry." And perhaps the most significant artistic utterance he ever made — the watchword of all true " realism " — is this : " And what is it then that constitutes a poet? As for me, it was a long time before I realized that to be a poet, that is chiefly to see, but mark well, to see in such a manner that the thing seen is per- ceived by his audience just as the poet saw it. But thus is seen and thus is appreciated that which has been lived through. And as regards the thing which has been lived through, that is just the secret of the literature of modern times. All that I have written these last ten years (1864-74), I have, mentally, lived through. But no poet lives through anything isolated. What he lives through all his countrymen live through together with him. For if that were not so, what would establish the bridge of understanding between the producing and the receiving mind? " Such a supreme test necessarily requires that the dramatist deal with people of his own world, of his own time, of his own race. The drama of immediate actuality accomplishes at once this prime purpose: the identification of the audience with the play. As you witness a modern play of Ibsen, of Bjornson, of Hauptmann, you recognize 88 THE CHANGING DRAMA yourself in the characters and your life in theirs. And this, after all, is the supreme criterion for dramatic " realism." It is this quality of " recog- nition " that makes memorable one of Clyde Fitch's plays, The Truth, with its almost di- aphanous realism and keen sense for local color. In the theater, are we the spectators, separated from the dramatic characters by a barrier of the footlights? Is this a mere spectacle that is being set before us, to amuse, to cajole, to flatter, with ancient tricks of structure and modern novelties of invention? Surely not, if the realist has, in Ibsen's phrase, " established the bridge of under- standing between the producing and the viewing mind." Then, indeed, can we live, vitally, in- tensely, in the scene being enacted before us, iden- tify ourselves with the characters, and suffer, laugh, rejoice with them as with the living people of our own world. We are not enticed into lend- ing our attention : we give ourselves up utterly to the experience, forgetting that there are foot- lights, curtain, or indeed that we are in a theater at all. After A Doll's House the bold bloodshed and gaudy theatricism of the past imposed upon Ibsen never again. The violent, the exceptional moment of life has yielded place in the theater to the claims of present actuality — life itself — with its problems of predestination and freedom, will and inclination, passion and restraint. REALISM AND THE PULPIT STAGE 89 Just as the modern biologist concerns himself with the life forms of animals and the evolution of types, so the modern realist scientifically studies the life forms of human beings and the evolution of certain psychological, social, and ethical types. Especially is this procedure notable and conspicu- ous in the denotement of the modern woman. No longer are we shown women -as " fantastic sugar dolls," goddesses upon pedestals, angelic saints aureoled with cloistral sanctity, to be worshiped from afar. Nor, on the other hand, will she con- tinue to be portrayed as the domestic drudge, the plaything, and the toy of the average selfish and sensual man. Ibsen was the first dramatic realist to force upon modern consciousness the immediate realization of to-day that woman is a human being, with character as broad and deep, with rights as sweeping and sacred, as those of man. It may, with considerable justice, be urged that Ibsen has never obtained popular success in the English-speaking countries. The adequate reply is that, whether we do or do not like Ibsen is quite beside the mark. After seeing Ibsen played greatly — as I have seen him played in Christiania, in Berlin, in Chicago ; — after descend- ing to the depths of human misery with Haupt- mann, or running the gamut of tragic experience with Strindberg — it is impossible to experience the old insouciant enjoyment in the inanities of 90 THE CHANGING DRAMA the fashionable society-comedy, the lurid melo- drama, or the machine-made pieces of the theater of commerce. After the deep realities of The Wild Duck, we turn with disgust from the vapid pruriency of The Spring Chicken! What the- atric and glucose sentimentality is La Dame aux Camellias after the high seriousness and enfran- chising veracity of A DolVs House! How unen- durable a Zaza after the religious yearning, the mystic sensitivity of Beyond Human Power! " What we have learned from Ibsen," says Bern- ard Shaw, " is that our fashionable dramatic ma- terial is worn out as far as cultivated modern people are concerned. What really interests such people on the stage is not what we call action-— jneaning two well-known and rather short-sighted actors pretending to fight a duel without their glasses or a handsome leading man chasing a beauteous leading lady round the stage with threats, obviously not feasible, of immediate rapine — but stories of lives, discussion of conduct, unveiling of motives, conflict of characters in talk, laying bare of souls, discovery of pitfalls — in short, illumination of life." The second great contribution to the modern drama is what has been unfortunately denomi- nated the drama of ideas. A more accurately de- scriptive title would be the drama of intellectual content. In this sense, I assert that the mod- REALISM AND THE PULPIT STAGE 91 em drama began with Ibsen, not because he was the first great contemporary realist, but primarily because he inaugurated an epoch in art by giving an absolutely novel exemplification of the function of the drama. For centuries past, the critics have been saying what they con- tinue to say to-day : that the dramatist " cannot express more than the average of the prevailing opinions, of the ideas current in the surrounding social medium." He must address in the theater, we are baldly told, not a set of distinct individuals, but the collective spirit of the species. That is to say, his is a problem in vital mathematics: to find the greatest common denominator of the com- posite public. Under such a conception, the dram- atist's real audience is, specifically, the esprit de corps. As the psychologist, Gustave Le Bon, expresses it, again mathematically, the drama is a " function of the crowd." This astounding, yet persistent, modern idea is admirably expressed in Johnson's familiar lines: "The drama's laws the drama's patrons give, And we who live to please, must please to live." Ibsen was the first man in the history of the drama who deliberately threw over this misguided idea, grown a-weary of " telling a lie in an heroic couplet." It is not the drama's patrons, but the dramatist's practice, which gives the laws of the drama. So passionate was his love for the ancient 92 THE CHANGING DRAMA world that Swinburne once declared that he wrote his plays for antiquity. Ibsen, for his part, dedi- cated his work to posterity. Wagner magnil- oquently pronounced his music-dramas " art work of the future." In a very definite sense, Ibsen and Wagner were the first great Futurists in art. The fundamental differentia of the new dramatist is his demand for that large independ- ence of rules and systems which Turgenev posited as the indispensable condition for great art. Just as Zola, the founder of naturalism, enlarged the conception of function of the novel, sublimating it into a powerful and far-reaching instrumental- ity of moral purpose, so the new dramaturgic iconoclast demands the stage as a medium for the dissemination of the most advanced views — upon standards of morality, rules of conduct, codes of ethics, and philosophies of life. His primal dis- tinction arises from the discovery of the ever- alarming and heretical doctrine that life is greater than art. He has done away with the impotent conception of art for art's sake. He has ushered in the new era of art for life's sake. In the great majority of cases, as a study of the genesis of his dramas proves, Ibsen created his dramas from an initial starting-point of some gen- eral idea or ideas. " First of all, Ibsen jotted down memoranda by which he clarified the intel- lectual problem and set the drama, in embryo, as REALISM AND THE PULPIT STAGE 93 under a miscroscope, before his eyes. These memoranda are usually of a philosophical, psy- chological, or sociological nature, pungent obser- vations upon life, criticisms of contemporary society, epigrams, thumb-nail sketches of char- acter. These noted ideas gradually seemed to group themselves, as if with sub-conscious design, around some generality of thought — a nuclear accretion around some central point. After a time, the principal characters of his projected play, minutely observed from life but always transmuted in his poetic consciousness, begin to assume definite psychological character and highly individual attributes. Then Ibsen seems to have brought this experiential conception to bear upon the epigrammatic idea forms preserved in hap- hazard memoranda. This intrusion of his dra- matic conception into the field of his general ideas produced a remarkable effect — the general ideas at once began to group themselves into symmetrical designs of definite contours." In this analysis of mine we see that the drama developed from quite general ideas ; but at the same time we must realize that Ibsen never wove his general ideas into a play solely for their own sakes. His plays must thus be thought of, not as thesis-plays merely embodying one germ-idea, but as artistic recrea- tions of human experience in the light of some general idea or ideas. 94 THE CHANGING DRAMA The true dramatic realist does not create a drama for the mere object of expounding a given thesis. Nor does he permit his general idea to drain his characters of naturalness and verisimili- tude, leaving the mere puppets to exhibit the operation of his intellectual design. But he ac- cepts a problem, a generalization on life, a socio- logical datum, as the basis, the ground-plan for his structure. In accordance with this plan, he erects his drama ; each part must structurally conform to the general scheme, and at the same time be consistent within itself — an unit within a larger unit. It cannot be urged too strongly that the thesis- drama is a mistaken form of the drama of ideas, of intellectual content, in the true sense. The fundamental defect of the thesis-plays of Dumas fits, who may properly be said to have given the finishing touches to the " oeuvre a these," is patent after very slight inspection. In a thesis, a gen- erality about life and conduct, a certain moral pre- cept is implicit. The purpose of a thesis-drama, therefore, is to demonstrate some general idea by means of particular incidents or series of incidents shown upon the stage. The thesis dramatist does not wish to present life, to draw from it the mean- ings implicit therein. He desires to "prove some- thing " ; and in consequence he dexterously mar- shals his figures and his incidents for that purpose REALISM AND THE PULPIT STAGE 95 and that purpose only. This procedure is alien to the whole spirit of imaginative art, and places the art of drama on a plane with the science of mathematics. It is that species of " dramatic algebra " of which Lessing so contemptuously spoke: once all the factors on each side of the dramatic equation have been canceled out with each other, the demonstration is complete. Zero is equal to zero. In the last analysis, art is an esthetic process, not a scientific procedure. Art can never demonstrate anything. It is impossible to affirm accurately that the conclusions deduced from specific instances of real or imagined experi- ence do actually typify a general idea, or enforce an universal truth. "All these things (imagined experiences)," says the intuitivist, Eduard Rod, "are mere 'jeux d'esprit ' of which I should not think of denying the pleasantness, and I admit that we are indebted to them for works which have moved us. But, if they have inspired a few, I fear they have spoiled a good many and cor- rupted fine talents. Nothing warps observation more than to demand of it a priori conclusions for or against a general idea, especially when the idea itself is the subject of controversy." Ibsen, Bjornson, Hauptmann have written great dramas of ideas ; but the characters were not designed to illustrate and enforce these ideas. The fundamental generalizations upon life, conduct, 96 THE CHANGING DRAMA and morality lay implicit in the characters of these people, who were as real to the dramatists as the people of their personal acquaintance. By illum- inating the interiors of their very souls, showing them in crucial situations, depicting soul-struggles transpiring within them, the great dramatist of the contemporary school convicts and confounds his audience with a consciousness of the reality, the sternness, the infinite possibilities of human life. To awaken thought through emotion — such has often been narrowly defined to be the true and inalienable function of the drama. The contemporary realist fully recognizes the moral quality of all human experience, and avails himself of it to the utmost degree. It is not enough to make mere " slices of life " ; for life, with all its welter and confusion, is not instructive, amusing, or edifying, taken in slices. The business of the dramatist is to choose, from out this confused mass, certain characters placed in certain situations which im- plicitly carry their own meaning. Holding the kodak up to nature results in a " comedie rosse " of the grosser Theatre Libre; only supremely dis- criminative selection will result in the great drama. In the sense employed by Goethe in speaking of Moliere, we may justly say that the dramatist of the new school chastises us by painting us just as we are. The meaning, profound, disquieting, lurk- REALISM AND THE PULPIT STAGE 97 ing implicit in his dramas of contemporary life, compels us to think deeply over the problems which he has raised — but not solved! — long after the immediate emotional disturbance set up by the play itself has subsided. Often the emotional de- rangement effected by a play results in rasping our nerves, rather than in " purging us through pity and fear " ; but the calm reflection, which follows the witnessing of a drama informed by great ideas and portrayed by vital characters in natural situations, has a distinct moral value. Moral excitation means nothing more nor less than a summons toward the ordering of life upon a plane of purer thought and wider justice. "If thus the theater often causes me to think about certain problems," says the Russian critic, Igna- toff, " a habit is formed which is extremely useful in life, if these problems closely concern humanity. . . . The theater which stimulates thought not only leads us to sympathize with the weak and un- fortunate, but also to consider ways and means of helping them, and such reflection is a step toward participation in human affairs." The modern spirit in the drama, it must be clearly indicated, is not achieved by the mere vapid renovation of ancient properties. The mod- ern dramatist is not an intellectual sloven, merely following the laggard snail-pace of the crowd. He must not only keep in vital touch with his age, in 98 THE CHANGING DRAMA order that his meaning and purpose may be com- prehensible to his audience ; he must be in advance of his age. As Ibsen puts it, he must be a franc- tireur along the firing line of progress. It has been shown that the application of biological principles to the drama as an evolutionary form must be radically modified in order to take account of the individual factor of the dramatist. For from the dramatist himself proceeds that art form which may open new paths for the future ad- vance of the drama. The characters which he creates must conform to the spirit of the age; it is not enough that they be mere abstract chronometers of the time. Within them must lie the fertile, suggestive seeds of progress. They must be dynamic, evolutional, forward-moving, upward-looking, facing the future. The greatest dramas of the contemporary period may justly be regarded as heralds of a new time. They an- nounce the dawn of a new culture. The social drama, it may be surmised, is the third contribution of contemporary dramatic art. These are plays which start into life through the quickening touch of the contemporary ; and which endeavor to furnish forth an interpretation of society through the illuminative intermediary of all that is most vitally fecund, most prophetic, in the science, sociology, philosophy, and religion of to-day. They are concerned with all the crucial REALISM AND THE PULPIT STAGE 99 instances of the seething and tumultous life of to- day — with the conflicts of social classes ; the strug- gle of the individual with existent institutions, current conventions, social determinism; the con- flict of human wills with recalcitrant circum- stances. If the drama of immediate actuality is human, if the drama of intellectual content is hu- mane, the social drama is essentially humanitarian in principle. Nor is the true aim of such a drama to be concealed: the exposure of civic abuse, the redress of social wrong, and the regeneration and reform of society. These it well may achieve through classic means : artistic fidelity to fact, satiric unmasking of human folly, and veritistic embodiment of human passion. The modern dramatist, bred on the exciting ferment subsequent to the French Revolution, and fired with the passion for individualism, which was the intellectual keynote of the nineteenth century, raised the standard of revolt against the brutali- ties and tyrannies of modem civilization. The conflict of the modern social drama is the conflict of the individual with his environment, his heredity and his social hereditament : the individual against the world. A man like Ibsen, moved to philosophic doubt by Nietzsche, to scientific anarchy by Dar- win and Haeckel, to social criticism by John Stuart Mill and Henry George, clearly came to realize that for the future the artist's attitude 100 THE CHANGING DRAMA toward life must be not only revelative: it must be redemptive as well. The modern drama must be, not only a mirror to reflect surfaces veraciously, but also a Rbntgen ray to penetrate the surface and reveal, beneath the superficial integument, the fundamental framework and structure of modern life. It does not follow that the school of Ibsen sanc- tions propaganda as an artistic aim. The play which preaches is seldom art. The modern thinker, be he novelist or dramatist, can no longer ignore the social inequalities and graver social injustices which confront him at every turn. The artist may, and indeed often does, create a work full of profound social implication — without hav- ing a direct moral or social " purpose " in view. A specimen is that fine work of dramatic art, theatrical in the legitimate sense, Echegaray's El Gran Galeoto. It is not the artist's immediate desire, in this type of play, to effect any special reform or correct any specific abuse. He has studied, observed, absorbed a certain group or phase or aspect of contemporary social condi- tions, and these he has depicted with all the dex- terity and skill which he can command. Seen through the strongly colored prism of his own individual temperament, the picture will likely appear to be significant, purposeful, rich in social implication. The ideal course for the true artist REALISM AND THE PULPIT STAGE 101 to pursue, as outlined by Galsworthy, is : " To set before the public no cut-and-dried codes, but the phenomena of life and character, selected and combined, but not distorted, by the dramatist's outlook, set down without fear, favor, or prejudice, leaving the public to draw such poor moral as nature may afford. This method requires a certain detachment ; it requires a sympathy with, a love of, and a curiosity as to, things for their own sake ; it requires a far view, together with patient industry, for no immediate practical re- sult." Galsworthy's own play, The Fugitive, is a very high modern example of the exhibition of the true pity and terror evoked by the tragedy which follows a breach of current social and legal codes. Such a drama, as thus outlined, when it con- cerns itself with distinctively social questions and problems, may be denominated the drama of social implication. The most successful European prac- titioner in this type of drama, fortified by a clearly defined thesis, is Paul Hervieu. The au- thor of Le Dedale has carried the thesis-drama to a very high pitch of excellence ; his subtlety as a psychologist gives depth and carrying power to dramas which might otherwise appear merely symmetrical or schematic in construction. Severe logician, astute social thinker, Hervieu has suc- ceeded in charging his tragedies with a certain 102 THE CHANGING DRAMA dynamic intellectual quality. The practice of contemporary dramatists, however, has thrust forward into view a second type of social drama more explicit in its purpose. This may be entitled the drama of sociologic injunction. The social dramas of Ibsen and of Gals- worthy belong to the former class. In his To-morrow, Mr. Percy Mackaye has given a promising anticipation, in this type, of the greater American drama of the future. Ibsen declared that his vocation was interrogation, not affirmation. Galsworthy has disclaimed conscious purpose for the redress of immediate social evils — notably in the case of Justice. The social dramas of Shaw and of Brieux — though neither can be termed a realist in the sense in which I have employed the term — belong to the latter class. An interesting comparison is afforded by Ibsen and Shaw — the one as an exponent of the drama of social implication, and the other as an exponent of the drama of sociologic injunc- tion. The three types of serious drama find exempli- fication in the work of the Greeks, the Elizabeth- ans, and that of the contemporary school. In Greek tragedy we discern the inevitable conflict of the individual with Fate. CEdipus the King, of Sophocles, succumbs dumbly to the decree of an immitigable, foreordained destiny. The hero REALISM AND THE PULPIT STAGE 103 of the Greek drama does not, like Kipling's racy American, "Match with destiny for beers"; he matches with destiny for life, and loses — against the loaded dice of the gods. The second type of tragedy came with Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Elizabethans. Destiny became synony- mous with human character' itself. In every human being is lodged at once a heaven and a hell. Hamlet struggles vainly against forces Avithin himself which he cannot overmaster and control. When we come to the time of Ibsen and Haupt- mann, the individual has begun to take to heart the social doctrine that he is his brother's keeper. Temperamental, biological, above all social deter- minism in one form or another — is the modern equivalent of ancient fatality. In The Weavers, an oppressed class struggles pitifully, dementedly against a social condition which they can neither ameliorate nor remedy. Dr. Stockman, in An Enemy of the People, comes into sharp conflict with society and the " world." The ancient tragic terror has become softened into something which seems very like social pity and altruistic con- cern. Stockman's is not a tragedy of blood, or a tragedy of death ; indeed it is not a tragedy at all. It is a serious comedy, a tragi-comedy, of only temporary and individual failure. Some day that "damned compact liberal majority" — the social 104 THE CHANGING DRAMA conspiracy of financial self-interest — shall yield before the puissant might of social right and moral justice. As Ibsen, together with his followers, may be said to have created a new type of drama, the pure social tragi-comedy, so Bernard Shaw, to- gether with Brieux and others, may be said to have invented a new type of drama, the pure social comedy. Essentially social in his spirit and eco- nomic in his outlook, Shaw always pitches his comedies in a militant key. He frankly confesses that his object is to make people uncomfortable — and who would venture to gainsay him? In the theater of Shaw, " we are not flattered spec- tators killing an idle hour with an ingenious and amusing entertainment : we are ' guilty creatures sitting at a play.' " Shaw has not hesitated to set before the public, through the medium of comedy, those views and codes of life which he himself holds with utter tenacity. Shaw's come- dies, because of the vexatious insistence he dis- plays in exploiting his own theories of social morality, are lacking in the quality of stable equilibrium. Though deficient in the note of urbanity, though vehemently, almost hysterically directed against outworn morals and decadent civilization, they succinctly fulfil Meredith's test of comedy: they awaken our thoughtful laughter. Bergson has acutely defined laughter as a social REALISM AND THE PULPIT STAGE 105 gesture. In the light of Shaw's comedies, one might almost define laughter as a sociologic symp- tom. Shaw seeks to shatter that something rigid and mechanical, encrusted upon the living body of modern thought, morals, and society. His comedies, in the last analysis, are frantic socio- logic ebullitions upon the surface of modern dra- matic art. If social pity is the ' underlying motive of the later Russian novelists, if humanitarian concern is the moving force of the dramas of Ibsen, Bjornson, Hauptmann, and their followers, sociologic indignation is the driving force in the dramas of Shaw and Brieux. It was D'Alembert, a scientist, who said that the stage was " morals carried into action ; rules reduced to examples." This pronouncement may literally be interpreted as a prophecy of the con- temporary drama of social morality. The fun- damental weakness of the drama of sociologic in- junction is the temptation therein afforded the dramatist, not to evoke a true picture of human life, but to construct a " thesis-play " which pur- ports to enforce a general principle by means of a particular example. Dramas which wrest the facts of life from their true setting in the effort to enforce a particular thesis are indefensi- ble from the standpoint of esthetics. But the best examples of the drama of sociologic injunc- tion escape this criticism by creating the 106 THE CHANGING DRAMA dramatic conjuncture out of the individual and social obligations of the chosen theme. The writer of the modern drama of sociologic injunction often deliberately assumes the surplice of the priest of art, and employs the theater as the pulpit from which he hurls his anathemas at the churlish throng. This is not an esthetic process, but an ethical procedure. The ancient impassi- bility has given place to a passionate sense of social obligation to speak out, to pronounce judg- ment ex cathedra^ to hand down the tables of the new social commandments. In limning a word- picture of the insouciant audacity of the charac- teristic type of contemporary art and life, Mr. Gilbert Chesterton recently said : " We know we are brilliant and distinguished, but we do not know that we are right. We swagger in fantastic artis- tic costumes ; we praise ourselves ; we fling epi- grams right and left ; we have the courage to play the egotist, and the courage to play the fool, but we have not the courage to preach." Mr. Chesterton, we suspect, must have been thinking of himself and his Protean roles when he wrote this passage; he certainly could not have been thinking of a novelist like Zola or Tolstoy, of a dramatist like Brieux or Shaw. These men fully realize and eagerly assume the sacerdotal func- tions of the modern artist. Brieux looks upon the theater as an institution for social instruction REALISM AND THE PULPIT STAGE 107 and moral injunction no whit inferior to the Church. During the most active period of his career as a dramatic critic, Shaw won attention not merely through his cleverness ; he caught and held his audience because he was not content with writing only dramatic criticism. He per- sisted in writing of the theater, indeed in preach- ing about the theater, as a " factory of thought, a prompter of conscience, an elucidator of social conduct, an armory against despair and dullness, and a temple of the Ascent of Man." It is be- coming well recognized to-day that the theater has actually begun to challenge the Church as an instrumentality for inculcating in the popular throng just and adequate codes of individual and social conduct. In this day, when hundreds of thousands of people daily witness motographic representations of the vast dramas of the life of Christ, of Ben Hur, of such secular sermons as Sienkiewickz's Quo Vadis, or Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, one may readily realize the challenge of this new feature of dramatic representation, not only to the claims, but also to the achievements of the Church, as a " prompter of conscience " and " an elucidator of social conduct." When the mod- ern social dramatist re-enforces the visual appeal, and the trenchant " argument of the flesh," with the tremendously potent argument of dramatized morals and philosophy, couched in the most telling 108 THE CHANGING DRAMA phraseology and fortified with all the arts of the orator, the dialectician, and the preacher, it is easy to foresee the immense social role the theater is predestined to play in the civilization of the future. The Church — one needs but to affirm it to win acceptance of the affirmation almost without the necessity for argument — is steadily losing ground, both in directness of appeal and potency of effect. Everywhere are to be encountered not merely signs of a " growing unrest," but an active protest against the social passivity of the modern Church. The insincerity and cowardice of the great mass of those who hold the church pulpits of to-day is in nothing so clearly demonstrated as in their evasion of the monumental task of making their religious practice square with their intellectual theories. So long as creed and not conduct re- mains the test of " revealed religion," so long will the Church be threatened by the challenge of a great social institution so powerful as the theater, in which conduct and applied morality do actually constitute the fundamental test. The difference between the Church and the theater finds its analogy in the difference between critical com- mentary and narrative literature. The former is concerned with description ; the latter is concerned with representation. Nor would it even be accu- rate to complete the analogy, since the Church has REALISM AND THE PULPIT STAGE 109 shirked the prime requisite of all criticism: sin- cerity. The average church-goer distrusts the average preacher; for he knows that the deeper problems of the origin, growth, and authenticity of the Scriptures are sedulously avoided, through a craven fear that admission of doubt about any portion of the Scriptures may tend to shake and undermine the foundations of Christian belief. In consequence, the preacher impotently falls back upon the endlessly monotonous practice of Scrip- tural exegesis, and thereby only succeeds in wid- ening the chasm which has begun to yawn between the Church's " teaching " and the great central realities of practical living. Fine art, it has long been recognized, is one of the most potent instrumentalities known for the inculcation of moral principles. The force of ex- ample, the illustration of personal conduct in act- ual or imagined life, is rightly believed to be un- paralleled in its influence upon the life of man. But life, nature, is only an unconscious teacher: it may indifferently influence to good or lead to evil. The attribution of conscious intellectual or moral design to nature — the fanciful diversion of a Maeterlinck or the philosophical speculation of a Bergson — is at best a scientific hypothesis ; and at worst an artistic fancy. Fine art is selection ; the dramatist carefully chooses from out the welter and chaos of actual or imagined incidents, 110 THE CHANGING DRAMA those particular incidents which establish a chain of intellectual, social, or moral causation. The drama, as the most objective of all the arts — since it is at once the indissoluble union and coalescence of all the arts — exerts an influence in moral propaganda that has never been calculated, for the very reason that it is incalculable. The mod- ern social dramatist, who is both true to the principles of his art and instinct with definite moral purpose, becomes an interpreter of life — the guardian of life's holy mysteries, the prophet of life's vaster hopes and possibilities. The theater is beginning to influence a wider circle of human beings than the Church. The congregation, approximately speaking, is always the same — from Sunday to Sunday. The audi- ence in the theater changes from night to night. The Church as a social force is steadily losing ground; the theater as a social force is rapidly gaining ground. It is almost needless to point out, in this connection, that it is just because the Church does not live up to its possibilities and its responsibilities as an engine of social service that it is leaving indifference and apathy in its wake. To identify with, to utilize for, its own transcend- ant purposes, the potentialities of a science such as eugenics, of an art such as the drama, is one of the obvious ways in which the Church may hope and confidently expect to regain its hold REALISM AND THE PULPIT STAGE 111 over the minds, the hearts, and the consciences of men. Such a conspicuous exemplar of the contempo- rary drama of sociologic injunction as Brieux frankly says : " It is my nature to preach. . . . I have always wanted to preach. My plays all have a purpose. That is why I write them. Had I lived in the seventeenth century, I would have been a preacher. Then the Church wielded an enormous influence. But now, I write plays. The theater is what attracts people; there you can get them. And I want to bring the problems be- fore them. I want them to think about some of the problems of life. ... I have tried to show how wrong it is to shirk responsibility. All evil comes from lack of feeling of responsibility — of the individual for the individual, and of the classes for each other." Indeed, I think the greatest error which modern criticism has made proceeds from the vicious assumption that the social dram- atist presumes to answer the questions which he raises. On the contrary, he arouses in the mind of the thoughtful spectator a most shocking sense of dubiety as to the wisdom of our conventional attitude of social indifference. The general prob- lem, concretized by the dramatist in a highly specialized case, is brought sharply to the at- tention and to the conscience of the audience. The dramatist brings to his audience a sense of 112 THE CHANGING DRAMA conviction : we feel that we are somehow involved in the affair. The guilt of the particeps criminis weighs upon us. It is not for the dramatist, but for us, to find the solution of this social problem. Thus may be rectified some of the major evils, some of the intolerable injustices, of our modern civilization. Through the enlargement and deep- ening of the social conscience may come the juster and more humane social order of the future. THE NEW FORMS— NATURALISM AND THE FREE THEATERS "The individual can attain complete independence only when he liberates his soul from all external connections, from every objective relation, and, as a free subject, simply lives his own states of consciousness." — Rudolf Eucken. On a bleak evening in October of the year 1887, some cabs deposited a group of critics at the nar- row passage of the Elysee des Beaux-Arts, in Paris. Stumbling down this dark passage, they entered the door of No. 37. They were there, unwittingly, to assist at the birth of a new art: the art of naturalism in the theater. With rail- lery unconsciously prophetic, one of the critics, Jules Lemaitre, in his next week's feuilleton, after describing his strange adventures, passes from jest to earnest with the query : " We had the air of good Magi in mackintoshes seeking out some lowly but glorious manger. Can it be that in this manger the decrepit and doting Drama is destined to be born again? " The time was ripe in France, indeed in all Europe, for the revolt embodied in the Theatre 113 114 THE CHANGING DRAMA Libre. On the basis of the scientific investiga- tions of Cuvier, Taine had propounded his memorable theories of scientific criticism. " Be- neath the shell was an animal and behind the docu- ment there was a man " — this classic phrase may well stand for the foundation stone of naturalistic criticism. Art, history, criticism, like zoology, had at last found its anatomy. Race, environ- ment, epoch — these were the supreme pivots about which revolved the massive mechanism of modern scientific criticism. Man came to be regarded as the summation, the integration, of all antecedent influence, the creature of environment, the instru- ment of social momentum. Man came to be stud- ied as an organism; criticism presumed to study the " laws of human vegetation." In the early days of his literary apprenticeship, the young Emile Zola gained inspiration and in- struction from his occasional chats with Taine. And in the course of a few years, Zola himself steps forth into the arena as the champion of naturalism in art, the art of both fiction and the drama. In his elaborate and monumental series of the Rougon-Macquart novels, Zola exhibits the members of a family basically affected not only by social influences and the pressure of environ- ment, but also by physiological conditions inherited from their ancestors. It was his purpose to do away with the outworn models of his predecessors, NATURALISM AND FREE THEATERS 115 with their persistent idealization of the working- classes. " My book," he said in speaking of the unspeakable L'Assommoir, " is the first book which has the veritable odor of the people." To those of delicate sensibilities, this popular effluvia was, not unnaturally, highly distasteful. They held their noses ; but — continued to read Zola. The scien- tific basis for his theories lent them an unques- tioned strength and stability. The artist, under the naturalistic conception, discards the interest of the anecdote and the fable in favor of the in- terest which proceeds from a faithful and minute description of actuality. The new work was viewed as " simply an inquest on nature, beings, and things." Animated by this conception, Zola propounded his famous definition : " A work of art is a phase of creation seen through a tempera- ment." Realism was content to observe ; natural- ism demanded scientific experimentation. Under the most vigorous canons of naturalism, the artist disclaimed the right either to moralize or to draw conclusions. With views colored assuredly by temperamental disposition, the naturalist sought only to reproduce life as it actually is at bottom, in the light of biological and social science. The threatened invasion of the theater by the exponents of naturalism aroused the impassioned opposition of Dumas fils. " My literary stand- point is not the same as Zola's," he asserted, " on 116 THE CHANGING DRAMA some matters no agreement between us is possible. But he is a strong man ; and what I particularly like about him is his d d frankness." Three forces operated to create the drama of Augier and Dumas fils. First of all, they were the inheritors of the technical ideas of Eugene Scribe. What- ever may be urged against Scribe, on the score of poverty of ideas and weakness in psychology, certain it is that he was a master of technical craftsmanship. Although his plots were artificial and trivial, the study of character always subor- dinate to technical ingenuity, and the treatment of life which his plays embodied unworthy of being dignified by the name of criticism, he was a master in the art of preparation and intrigue, and suc- ceeded in a remarkable way, through an artfully devised chain of situations, in holding the atten- tion of his audience. So ingeniously and dexter- ously constructed were his theatrical pieces that they survived the harsh test of transplantation to other soils. La Bataille de Dames of Scribe and Legouve, light enough to be popular anywhere, has already achieved a sort of eminence as a con- temporary classic — in that genre. And so the entire civilized world was flooded with " well- made plays," adaptations from Scribe or perpetu- ally renewed illustrations of the self-same model. Dexterity in the handling of plot and careful preparation of the crucial scenes came to be re- NATURALISM AND FREE THEATERS 117 garded everywhere as fundamental features of the dramatic form. Not Augier and Dumas fits only, but Ibsen and Bjbrnson both served their apprenticeship to Scribe, and acquired a mas- tery in the technic of preparation and manipula- tion. Augier and Dumas fils, under the influence of the earlier realistic conceptions, sought to draw from life with greater accuracy of detail. The incidents were more natural, the conversation more colloquial, the scenes more familiar and more intimate. And yet, when Zola went the last step and propounded his theories of the new experi- mentation, Dumas and his followers arose in re- volt. In his reply to Zola, in the preface to the Etrangere, Dumas protests that since the theater is the art of preparation and of explanation, it can never yield to the demands of naturalism which neither prepares nor explains. Moreover, dominated by a passionate moral sense and en- dowed with the zeal of the social reformer, Dumas condemned naturalism on the score of its impas- sibility. The naturalistic drama, he averred, is a contradiction in terms. It is neither a work of art nor a moral demonstration — the two indis- pensable criteria of the authentic drama. " An artist," says Dumas most justly, " a true artist, has a higher and more difficult mission than the mere reproduction of what is : he has to discover 118 THE CHANGING DRAMA and reveal to us that which we do not see in things we look at every day — that which he alone has the faculty of perceiving in what is apparently patent to all of us." For all the protests of Dumas, technically mis- guided or artistically valid, against the new theories, naturalism marched on to an irresistible invasion of the theater. The birth of the most fecund dramatic art of our own day dates from that bleak evening in 1887 when Faguet and his fellow-critics stumbled through the dark purlieus of Montmartre. The name of Andre Antoine is inextricably linked with the evolution of contem- porary dramatic art. From him, on the side of managerial novelty, stems the fertile conception of the theater conducted purely in the interests of artistic experimentation. By forming an or- ganization of patrons who supported his theater as a club is supported, and thereby avoiding the profit-seeking evils of the theater of commerce, Antoine paved the way for the experimental or- ganizations of to-day, the theatre a cote, and the later development of the short-run and repertory theaters. In the matter of scenic arrangement and detail, he proceeded upon the theory of Ibsen, who had defined the stage as a room of which one wall has been removed. In the art of acting, he demonstrated, in the face of limitless ridicule, his naturalistic theories by the aggressive and power- NATURALISM AND FREE THEATERS 119 ful verisimilitude of his dramatic incarnations. With the zeal of the artistic revolutionary, he dis- pensed absolutely with the " indispensable prepa- ration " of Dumas ; and gave at his theater pieces which came to be denominated as " slices of life " ("tranches de la vie"). Around him collected a group of men of distinguished talent: Pierre Wolff, Leon Hennique, George Ancey, Camille Fabre, and Eugene Brieux. Under his patronage were first produced Menage d 'Artistes and Blanch- ette, early dramatic works of the remarkable figure who has recently been denominated the most im- portant dramatist produced by France since the days of Moliere. The natural consequence of the libertarianism of Antoine was the production at his Theatre Libre, not only of plays of French make, but also of remarkable dramas in the newer naturalistic manner. The very first list of pro- ductions announced by Antoine contained Tol- stoy's Power of Darkness (Puissance des Tene- bres); and here in succession were produced such pieces of revolutionary tendencies as Ibsen's Ghosts (Les Revenants), Hauptmann's Before Sunrise (Vor Sonnenaufgang), Strindberg's The Father and Miss Julia. Hospitable to all the strange, new, and disquieting forces in the drama of the time, Antoine threw open the gates to experimentation. Only a few years after the memorable night of 1887, M. Faguet is found 120 THE CHANGING DRAMA boldly proclaiming: " The only theater in Paris at this moment is the Theatre Libre." It was not in France, incredible as it may sound, that naturalism as a dramatic form came to any sort of just fruition. The Theatre Libre was a great blow struck in the cause of freedom for modern experimentation in the theater and in the drama. But in this cradle of the new art, no great naturalistic dramatist de pur sang was born. The master of Medan, a sort of presiding genius of the Theatre Libre, began as the great exemplar of naturalism in the art of fiction. Not only did he never achieve mastery of the nat- uralistic drama: he never conquered the theater in any sense. The entire course of his subsequent development shows that behind the mask of nat- uralism was concealed a colossal romanticist, in- spired by vast dreams and chimerical hopes of social and humanitarian reform. For all the stern forthrightness and acute psychology of his Les Corbeaux and La Parisienne, that remarkable talent, Henri Becque, succeeded neither in win- ning unconditional success in the French theater nor in achieving international eminence as a cos- mopolitan figure. Brieux, vastly the most prom- ising of all the fledglings of Antoine, soon burst the bonds of a confining naturalism; and eventu- ally won a seat in the Academy for his genius as a dramatic author of the newer social and human- NATURALISM AND FREE THEATERS 121 itarian type. The greatest and most consistent champion of woman the contemporary drama has produced is the author of Maternite, Les Avaries, and La Femme Seule. It was not as a natural- istic artist, but as a skilful dramatic crafts- man along the lines of a normal realism, that Brieux won his present place in the contemporary movement. And it cannot be doubted that his widening vogue outside of France, which in itself constitutes a definite forwarding of the principles of dramatic realism, is primarily due to the uni- versal emergence of social problems and the in- creasing dominance of questions concerning the status of woman in the society of to-day. The real triumph of naturalism in the theater is the contribution of Germany through the per- son of Gerhart Hauptmann. In literature, he passed under the influence of Ibsen, of Zola, and of Tolstoy. That little book of sketches, with its startlingly naturalistic treatment, the Papa Hamlet of Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf, con- fessedly written under the influence of Zola's theories and practice, impressed Hauptmann as a model of naturalistic treatment. The powerful example of Ghosts, the only drama of Ibsen's which may be termed naturalistic in its treat- ment, exerted a tremendous influence likewise upon the young Hauptmann. It was a most fortunate conjunction — the development of the naturalistic 122 THE CHANGING DRAMA talent of Hauptmann strictly contemporaneous with the rise of the free theaters in Germany. The example of Antoine in Paris awoke the am- bition of young Germany to emulate his example, to free dramatic art from the oppression of a despotic bureaucracy on the one hand, from the shackles of a rigid and adamantine convention- ality on the other. The opening of the Free Theater (Freie Biihne) in Berlin in the autumn of 1889 (Septem- ber 27) marks the birth of the new dramatic movement in Germany. The gates to the modern German drama were thrown open by the produc- tion of Ghosts, as Dr. Otto Brahm expressed it; and during the next few years this same play sounded the tocsin of the new time in England and America. It was the opening production of the Independent Theater of London in 1891; and upon its first production in New York in 1894, the performance was described by the realistic novelist, William Dean Howells, as " the very greatest theatrical event he had ever known." The production of Hauptmann's maiden dramatic work, Before Sunrise, in 1889, was a significant event in the history of the modern German drama. During the same season were produced Bjornson's A Gauntlet, Tolstoy's Power of Darkness, Die Familie Selicke of Holz and Schlaf, a sprawling chronicle in the extravagantly naturalistic manner, NATURALISM AND FREE THEATERS 123 and Hauptmann's second play, The Coming of Peace (Das Friedensfest). The storm of discus- sion aroused by Hauptmann's two plays, and the contradictory opinions thereby evoked, gave pow- erful impetus to the free theater movement. The second season, with its five performances, was note- worthy for the production of a new drama by Hauptmann, Lonely Lives (Einsame Menschen, 1881) ; and with a single performance of Strind- berg's Miss Julia, in its third season, the Freie Biihne ceased to exist. For it had fulfilled its function, accomplished the needed pioneering work, and paved the way for Gerhart Hauptmann and his successors. The new form of drama created by Gerhart Hauptmann we shall denominate the drama of pure naturalism. In such dramas, the subjects are invariably chosen from contemporary life; and, because of the sharp contrasts and new ma- terials afforded, from those phases of life which had hitherto been rigorously excluded from the domain of the drama — the life of the humble and the lowly. The subjects treated were repulsive to many theater-goers, accustomed to the uni- versal idealization of life in the conventional the- ater. The ugly, the abnormal, the asymmetric were types enthusiastically studied by the nat- uralists. Their search was not for beauty, for the ideal, or for the moral ; their search was only 124 THE CHANGING DRAMA for the truth in the light of modern social rela- tivity. A graphic and faithful projection of a section of human actuality — that, in fine, was the ideal of the naturalist. As a new form, the drama of pure naturalism affords in its origin a striking example of that " evolution by explosion " in the mutation theory of the scientist, De Vries. The naturalistic drama arose in Germany, not as the result and culmination of a series of insensible gradations in the form of the German drama. In the muta- tion theory of De Vries, a species sometimes arises which exhibits no transitional stages of preparation; the addition of a new unit to the group of units which determine the character of a species results in the creation of a new form sharply differentiated as an individual species from the one out of which it has been produced. This phenomenon is exemplified in the origin of the literary species denominated the drama of pure naturalism. Out of the scientific doctrine of evolution, and not out of the drama of the past, Hauptmann selected that unit idea which, projected into the group of units which deter- mines the character of the conventional drama, eventuated in the creation of the newer dramatic form, the drama of pure naturalism. This new unit was none other than the cardinal tenet of the doctrine of evolution: social determinism. In the NATURALISM AND FREE THEATERS 125 drama of the Greeks, tragedy was the result of an inscrutable Fate, the immutable will of the Gods. In the drama of Marlowe and Shakespeare, tragedy was the outcome of individual character. The individual was regarded as the molder of his own destiny ; he was thus held to strict moral account for his actions. This tragedy, which has been termed the drama of' psychological individ- ualization, was essentially moral in its tone; destiny became identified with human character and the human will. An eager student of the newer scientific theories in their relation to the laws of human behavior and the phenomena of human society, Hauptmann soon became a convert to the doctrine of social deter- minism. Freedom of will was seen to be a delusion in the face of the overpowering influences of environment and inherited characteristics. The simple conception of individual responsibility gave place to the vaster and more complicated concep- tion of man as a creature subject to the fixed laws of social and biological heredity. In this conception, man is derivative, not creative. The individual hero vanishes forever from the scene; and the characters of the drama are the resultants of social and biological influences for which they are not individually responsible. Unity of action, the indispensable criterion of the earlier drama, gives place to the faithful reproduction of scenes 126 THE CHANGING DRAMA which follow each other in strict chronological, rather than psychological, succession. Tragic guilt ceases to obtain: we are devoured less with a sense of individual tragedy than with a senti- ment of social pity. The egoistic appeal of the individual character tragedy is supplanted by the altruistic appeal of a social catastrophe arising from the maladjustments, imperfections, and in- justices of social organization. It cannot be denied that the naturalists have produced powerful and gripping dramas, more appalling through the squalor of the scenes and happenings than elevating through the beauty of the story. Assuredly, the remorselessness of the treatment, combined with the repulsiveness of the characters involved, have given rise to the not unnatural, but unwarranted, critical common- place that the naturalist wishes to shock and hor- rify his audience with his drab pictures of pov- erty, misery, criminality, and degeneracy. From the philosophic standpoint, the naturalist is in- tent upon exhibiting, in the most effective way, the influences of environment and heredity upon human character and action. In consequence, he chooses his subjects and scenes from those classes of society which exhibit the operation of these forces in the most striking way. Indeed, the citi- zens of the fourth estate, the petty artisans, the humbler peasantry, the submerged tenth in the NATURALISM AND FREE THEATERS 12*7 cosmopolitan centers, crooks, tramps, thugs, criminals — in these lower forms of humanity, char- acter is least volitional and creative. In such social strata are most glaringly patent the tragic consequences of hereditary ills and proclivities, the direful influences of surroundings calculated to retard and arrest all intellectual and spiritual development. When the naturalist chooses his subjects from the ordinary ranks of human life, the self-imposed restriction of moral detachment, of absolute impassibility, forces him to select for his subjects, in illustration of the working of scientific forces, individuals descending in the character scale — abnormal, aberrant, distorted types, diseased stocks, moral perverts, degen- erates, human symptoms of a decadent civiliza- tion. , Of the first class, one might mention that succession of kinematographic pictures of a social hell's kitchen, Gorky's The Lower Depths; that terribly repulsive picture of sexual degeneracy, Zola's Nana; that grim denotement of the moral degradation of the Russian peasantry, Tolstoy's The Powers of Darkness; the dramatic panorama of a peasant's strike, presided over by the grim figures of Hunger and Want, Hauptmann's Die Weber; that fevered dream of universal anarchy, Andreyev's Sairua. Of the second class, conspicu- ous examples are such presentments of the tragic consequences upon the younger generation of evil 128 THE CHANGING DRAMA living of the older, as Ibsen's Ghosts, Hauptmann's Vor Sonnenaufgang, Strindberg's Miss Julia; such illustrations of the pathetic results of human dis- parities and imperfections in environmental influ- ence as Hauptmann's Einsame Menschen, Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, Brieux's Blanchette; such exemplifications of abnormalities in char- acter and temperament, due to heredity and en- vironmental influences, as Ibsen's Hedda Gaoler, Strindberg's The Creditors, Brieux's Maternite, D'Annunzio's La Citta Morte. The day of the drama of pure naturalism, I dare say, is past. The temper of the age, with its altruistic sentiments and social sense, alone would suffice to reject the drama which posits im- passibility as one of its cardinal principles. In- deed, the further development of naturalism was effectively checked when the very founders of naturalism deserted the temple they had reared. Hauptmann, with a versatility unmatched by any contemporary dramatist, soon revealed himself in many guises wholly unfamiliar, and indeed an- tipodal, to naturalism. While Ibsen's dramas are founded upon modern theories of science and psy- chology, his characters are volitional, and they concern themselves fundamentally with problems of psychology and morality. Indeed, almost all of his later dramas, symbolic in treatment and en- veloped in certain mystical ideas, are far re- NATURALISM AND FREE THEATERS 129 moved from naturalism. Strindberg left the field of pure naturalism to soar into the blue of mys- ticism, of allegory, of romance. First, as indicated, the changed temper of the age and the defection of the naturalists themselves checked the advance of the principles of naturalism. Second, , the drama in the main deals with conflict, struggle, and the clashes arising from the development of char- acter and growth of soul. The naturalistic drama, constituted of characters purely static, shown in scenes chronologically successive, failed to furnish the indispensable appeal of human in- terest. The force of the naturalistic influence, it cannot be too strongly asserted, however, has been the greatest influence in the development and creation of the contemporary drama of the cos- mopolitan type. The effects of naturalism, under the less forbidding term of realism, its legitimate offspring, are the most conspicuous effects which the drama of to-day, wherever it may be found, has to exhibit. In all the exterior details of stage- setting, in a certain poverty of mise-en-scene, in the lack of extraneous and extrinsic embellish- ment, the contemporary drama exhibits overwhelm- ing naturalistic influence. The selection of sub- jects from modern life, the employment of the vernacular in conversation and the presentment, with the minimum of convention, of a highly nat- 130 THE CHANGING DRAMA ural picture of real life — these requirements, now accepted by the dramatic craftsman as indispensa- ble requirements of his art, are the immediate consequences of the principle and practice of nat- uralism. Even more profound has been the influ- ence of naturalism upon the treatment of human character; for the contemporary dramatist must be better and more accurately informed, than was the dramatist ever before in history, upon the modern scientific theories of hypnotism, auto-sug- gestion, psychotheraphy, psychopathy, heredity, environment, all the newer principles of biology and psychology. - Naturalism furnished the model of the drama purely static. For there is virtually no room for the dynamic display of volitional activity in a drama without psychological development and lacking in the hero and heroine of the ancient dramatic formula. This naturalistic type of drama lent itself not to long productions in five acts in the larger theaters, but to plays of a few scenes, sometimes of only a single act — pictures, tableaux, atmospheric in tone with a minimum of action — shown in a theater of very limited size. This is the " intimate theater " of to-day. The Theatre Libre first gave Zola's Therese Raquin, — a dramatized version of a novel, it is true, but in its form distinctly creative; and soon after- ward produced Strindberg's Miss Julia. At the NATURALISM AND FREE THEATERS 131 Theatre de L'CEuvre, of Lugne Poe, were pro- duced Strindberg's The Father and Creditors as conspicuous specimens in the new manner adapted to the stage of the intimate theater ; and the de- velopment proceeded rapidly in Berlin, first fos- tered by the Freie Biihne and developed gradu- ally by the genius of Reinhardt. The earlier ideas, which prevailed about the drama and the theater as its temple, were blown away by the fierce blasts of the new idea. Under the older conception, a drama must be five acts long, with no changes within the acts ; each act must be scenic in character; the end of the act must be a " curtain " — i.e. a situation designed to evoke the applause of the audience. The hero and heroine were roles especially designed for " stars." The conventions of dramaturgy in a large theater were destructive of vocal illusion: the straining of the voice, in order to be heard to the farthest confines of the theater, the oratorical and formal cast imparted to speeches given in a voice raised to a much higher pitch than that employed in real life, the absurdity of being forced to whisper low enough to be heard two hundred and fifty feet away, etc. The intimate theater must be small enough to enable the player to speak with entire naturalness but without straining the voice. This close contact with the audience, achieving the intimacy of naturalness and reality, resulted 132 THE CHANGING DRAMA in the abolition of star-parts, " curtains," so- liloquys, mere effects. When Reinhardt opened his Kammerspielhaus, the very title of the little theater expressed its function: to carry over into drama the idea of " chamber music." The drama adapted to the intimate theater can be neither sprawling, " theatrical," nor long-winded. To employ the words of Strindberg, it must be brief, significant, creative. " No definite form should control the dramatist, since the motive alone de- termines the form. Freedom in treatment is all — conditioned only by unity and the sense of style in conception." The static drama, of the new type, is thus seen to be the product of naturalism and a functional dramatic adaption to the intimate theater. Two new species of this form have come into being within the last few decades, the one in comedy, the other in tragedy. Each is a drama of quiescent action, of depressed volition. Each attains its purpose: the one through purely intel- lectual, the other through purely atmospheric means. The one may roughly be described as a dramatized debate, the other as a dramatized short-story. The first form I shall denominate the drama of discussion; the second form, the drama of suggestion. The drama of discussion, under a critical analysis, would appear to have its origin, if not NATURALISM AND FREE THEATERS 133 its precise exemplification, in the dramatic the- ories of Ibsen. In his drama of recessive action, which finds its classic model in the (Edipus Rex, of Sophocles, Ibsen foreshortened and compressed the action into a climax or catastrophe. Hebbel before him had unearthed the germ of the drama of explication in the discovery that action and exposition must be identified. Since only the con- cluding phases, the climax or catastrophe of a cumulative series of events, were to be presented, the dramatic craftsman was compelled to dram- atize the exposition. That is to say, the char- acters were obliged to reveal in discussion, in exchange of confidences, in revealing hints and ac- cusatory implications, the incidents and events which preceded and gave rise to the situations exhibited within the confines of the drama itself. A Doll's House, for example, is an excellent illus- tration of the French model of a well-made play — down to a certain point. When Nora suddenly says to Torvald : " In all these eight years — longer than that — from the very beginning of our acquaintance, we have never exchanged a word on any serious subject," and sits down to discuss in extenso the situation with him, we realize that Ibsen has broken sharply with the old form and found the germ of the new. It was this revolu- tionary change — this elaborate, revelatory discus- sion with its dramatic climax — which so startled 134 THE CHANGING DRAMA Francisque Sarcey that he threw up his hands, declaring that he understood nothing of the au- thor's purpose and intent. An Enemy of the People is a more concise example of the drama of explication ; Dr. Stockmann's most conclusive action is a speech, which consumes almost an entire act. More conspicuous still is Little Eyolf, which, save for the death of little Eyolf, the event giving the impulse to the play, is almost entirely devoted to discussion — a mordantly incisive revelation, through exchange of ideas, of two people's views of life and of the gradual re-alignment and common agreement as to the future. This play may be described as the dramatization of certain intellectual and emotional states. The social dramas of Ibsen are all dramas of awakening. And this awakening results less from overt actions of the characters than from the train of ideas set up in the minds of the characters by some par- ticular complication or conjunction. The contemporary drama has been essentially explicative in character, concerning itself less with the actions themselves than with the psychological motives which give rise to such actions or the de- velopment of character in consequence of such actions. Action has lost its predominant vitality as an end in itself: it serves rather as a point of approach or a point of departure. Such plays as The Cherry Orchard of Tchekhov, The Cred- NATURALISM AND FREE THEATERS 135 itors of Strindberg, A Gauntlet of Bjornson, Moody's The Great Divide, Schnitzler's Das Ver- machtniss, Bergstrom's Lynggard and Company may be instanced as adequate forms of the drama of explication. The extension, or rather the amplification, of the germ idea of Ibsen has 'been the technical con- tribution of Shaw and Brieux. According to Shaw's narrow but precise conception of the dramas of Ibsen, they exhibit the conflict of the older with the newer ideals. It is significant that even in his most explicative dramas, Ibsen never permits his characters to discuss ideas of life save as a means of exhibiting an indispensable phase of character or forwarding the dramatic move- ment of the piece. On the other hand, Shaw has conceived and executed a number of dramas not only singularly devoid of action, but also singu- larly replete with discussion. In witnessing Don Juan in Hell, from Man and Superman, given as an unit at the Royal Court Theater in London, I felt that the type had been pushed to the verge of its possibilities. One could not fail to recognize that the beautiful costumes designed by Charles Ricketts, the " conducting " of Shaw, the amazing glibness of Robert Loraine and Norman McKin- nel were all-powerful, almost indispensable, aux- iliaries. With Shaw, the discussion obscures the action and often becomes merely an end, not 136 THE CHANGING DRAMA a means. With Ibsen, the discussion, the conver- sational explication, is itself drama; with Shaw, the discussions are often merely displays of in- tellectual virtuosity, decorative dialectics. Shaw prides himself as much on being a moralist and a debater as on being a dramatist. And in the light of such a view, he has the hardihood to proclaim that " an interesting play cannot in the nature of things mean anything but a play in which problems of conduct and character of personal importance to the audience are raised and suggestively discussed." Shaw has written notable plays, authentic dramas according to Aristotelian standards, in which discussion dis- plays a large part — Mrs. Warren's Profession, Candida, Man and Superman, Fanny's First Play. He has written others which do not accord with Aristotelian standards — having no beginning, mid- dle, or end, in the technical sense; revealing no authentic conflict of wills ; almost totally lacking in action. Getting Married and Misalliance are perhaps the best examples. These the critics gleefully pronounce to be " not plays " — and con- demn as the witty vagaries of a skilled dialec- tician. In the Induction to Fanny's First Play, Shaw elucidates this critical attitude through the mouth of " Trotter," in whom he has lampooned Mr. Walkley, of the Times: NATURALISM AND FREE THEATERS 137 "I am aware that one author, who is, I blush to say, a personal friend of mine, resorts freely to the dastardly subterfuge of calling them conversations, discussions, and so forth, with the express object of evading criticism. But I'm not to be disarmed by such tricks. I say they are not plays. Dialogues, if you will. Exhibitions of char- acter, perhaps: especially the character of the author. Fic- tions, possibly, though a little decent reticence as to intro- ducing actual persons, and thus violating the sanctity of private life, might not be amiss. But plays, no. I say NO." Criticism, as already indicated, must radically reverse its definitions of drama and the dramatic to make room for the new drama of discussion. Remarkable examples of this form constitute per- haps the most notable work which has been done by the younger British dramatists. Galworthy's most successful drama, Strife, is a drama of dis- cussion. Barker's The Voysey Inheritance and The Madras House, with quite prosaic settings and a minimum of action, are essentially disqui- sitions, discussions in the form of a stage play. One of the most remarkable plays recently written is Schnitzler's Professor Bernardhi, a play con- sisting of a discussion, by a large number of char- acters, of a single episode, innocent enough in itself yet almost endless in its religious and social ramifications. The most effective work of the strikingly talented St. John Hankin, though he aped the conversational brilliancy of Wilde, fol- lows the lines of the drama of discussion. Wilde 138 THE CHANGING DRAMA himself, a past master in the art of writing witty dialogue, did not produce the true drama of dis- cussion — being singularly inept as a social phi- losopher and incapable, as dramaturgist, of doing more than carrying on the tradition of Congreve and Sheridan. The second variant of the type of static drama is the form created by Maeterlinck in his earlier no-plot dramas. This form, in an essay published a good many years ago, I have chosen to entitle the drama of suggestion. There are two char- acteristic features of Maeterlinck's work: the dominance of fatality and the stylicized manner. Maeterlinck harks back to the ancient idea of fatality, so familiar to the Greeks ; and conceives of a God, after the fashion of Jupiter perhaps, essentially cruel and malign in disposition. With a sense for character but slightly developed, he has drawn a group of characters which are de- ficient in individuality, volition, or even morality. They are pitiable, primitive creatures, children of the youth of the world — stumbling blindly into the snares and gins of fate, fleeing dementedlv from the wrath to come. The primitive naivete, the juvenility of the characters, is accentuated by the employment of a certain peculiar style, which creates and emanates the desired atmos- phere. The dialogue is broken, halting, stammer- ing, repetitive, recitative — suggestive at once of NATURALISM AND FREE THEATERS 139 the volitional fatuity, the mental vacuity of the characters. The real secret of the distinction of such dialogue is its suggestiveness. We are con- scious that conversation is but a superficial mani- festation, which veils depths of consciousness — language sufficing to conoeal both thought and feeling. Furthermore, Maeterlinck accomplishes the difficult feat — a feat which Thomas Hardy achieves so masterfully in his Wessex fiction — of inducing the consciousness that there is a secret connection, intercommunication — must I say rap- port — between Nature and humanity. As in the ancient Hebrew days, the later Roman time, so with Maeterlinck men look to Heaven for a sign — and when it manifests itself, they heed it with superstitious reverence. These earlier dramas of Maeterlinck, which were overloaded with symbolic paraphernalia and often too heavily freighted with mysticism, exactly express a certain definite aspect of contemporary art. This form of drama again illustrates in literary evolution the operation of the mutation theories of De Vries. A new species of drama comes into being, deriving many elements from the past but not exhibiting a gradual evolution from preceding forms through a series of suc- cessive gradations. Into the group of units con- stituting the species known as the Greek drama of fatality, Maeterlinck projected a new unit idea 140 THE CHANGING DRAMA from a new art — the art of the short-story. This unit idea was the contribution of Edgar Allan Poe — the idea of suggestion, the indirect creation of illusion. Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque — in the very title lies a clue to Poe's artistic formula. In poem as well as in short- story, in The Raven as well as in The Fall of the House of Usher, Poe successfully evokes a shiver — through his exotic, stylicized form and his sug- gestion of the immanence of mysterious, malign forces within and without us, lurking there to work upon us their devious will. Spielhagen has maintained that Poe was dominated by a single theory of criticism ; and that he attributed to the drama, the epic, and the short-story the peculiar characteristics of lyric poetry. Yet Poe was but anticipating the theory of the modern one-act play — the form which Strindberg believed to be the dramatic form of the future — when he said, in speaking of the short-story or prose tale: "if wise, he (the artist) has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents ; but having con- ceived with deliberate care a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents — he then combines such events — as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there NATURALISM AND FREE THEATERS 141 should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design." As I pointed out some years ago, Maeterlinck's plays of suggestion follow precisely the lines of the short-story, being characterized by original and ingenious artistic effects, more than often fantastic and exotic, and above all convergent, intensive, cumulative, as a means of inducing the sense of unity, of totality. " The artistic kinship of Maeterlinck with Poe and Maupassant," to quote my own words, " becomes all the more patent when we recognize Maeterlinck's no-plot plays not only as occult studies in hallucination, but as dramatic versions of the perfected art form of the masters of the short-story." Dr. C. Alphonso Smith has pointed out that the " prac- tical scientific strain " in Poe's work warrants us in describing him as " the greatest constructive force in American literature." I have often felt that America's first great conquest in the domain of the drama was destined to be, because of her contributions to world literature in the technic and form of the short-story, a mastery of the technic and form of the one-act play. The drama of suggestion, it need scarcely be pointed out, is not the work of Maeterlinck alone. The peculiar constitution of his philosophy and temperament tends to fix association of the form 142 THE CHANGING DRAMA with his name. The " dialogue of secondary inten- tion," as defined by Maeterlinck, is found in v Shakespeare and Ibsen. Hamlet and The Master- Builder are assuredly dramas of suggestion; so also are Hauptmann's Hannele, Strindberg's There are Crimes and Crimes and Easter, Bjorn- son's Beyond Human Power , Wilde's Salome, Kennedy's The Servant in the House. As far as quiescence of action in the drama is concerned, that is a part of the heritage of modern enlight- enment. " For, in truth," says Maeterlinck, " the further we penetrate into the consciousness of man, the less struggle do we discover. ... A con- sciousness that is truly enlightened will possess passions and desires infinitely less exacting, in- finitely more peaceful and patient, more salutary, abstract and general, than are those that reside in the ordinary consciousness." In an age of universal experimentation, the golden age of science and invention, we may look confidently forward in expectation of the early emergence of many new forms of the drama. We are beginning to be confronted with a profusion of novel experiments — the gigantesque photo- drama, Cabiria, of D'Annunzio ; the neo-classicist poster pantomime of Reinhardt, Sumurun; vast pageants, such as those I have witnessed at Lon- don and Oxford, or the more recent Masque of St. Louis in this country ; productions of the NATURALISM AND FREE THEATERS 143 classics and the Elizabethans in the new impres- sionist manner ; the renascence of the open-air theater; toy theaters; plays for marionettes, etc. Dramatic activity, stimulated here and there, often produces novelties in the treatment of local situation ; and from time to time " movements " are heralded with many flourishes. The strange- ness of Heijermans' The Good Hope, an impres- sionistic study of the sea, almost deceives us into thinking that he has achieved a new form ; cer- tainly there is novelty in the tendency, so notice- able in Maeterlinck, for example, for making Nature the protagonist in drama. So faithful to artistic truth is the work of John Millington Synge that we feel as if, upon the soil of Ire- land, the day of dramatic art has dawned with a fresh, rich splendor. His drama, novel in its elemental reversion to the type of dramatic art at the beginning of history, bears out, in great measure, the promise to afford that nourishment upon which live the imaginations of men. We sense profound prophecy in his memorable words : " On the stage one must have reality, and one must have joy; and that is why the intellectual modern drama has failed, and people have grown sick of the false joy of the musical comedy, that has been given them in place of the rich joy found only in what is superb and wild in reality." Dramatic forms, imparting a semblance of nov- 144 THE CHANGING DRAMA elty by reason of purely allegorical or epical quali- ties, testify to the modern tendency toward experimentation. Strindberg's colossal trilogy, To Damascus, is an amorphous dramatic auto- biography; yet it sounds the universal note. In his remarkable dramatic allegory, The Life of Man, Andreyev stands at the opposite pole from the Goethe of Faust, the Ibsen of Peer Gynt; he has here achieved the quintessence of artistic ab- straction. The EverywoTnan of Browne, with its cheap and tawdry effects, nevertheless so caught a certain tone of universality, the sense which makes the whole world kin, as to touch the heart of millions. We await from Maeterlinck the su- preme allegorical drama of our time. Symbolic romance, extensive, vast, bids fair to express best the artistic sense of the coming century. VI THE BATTLE WITH ILLUSIONS.— THE ANCIENT BONDAGE AND THE NEW FREEDOM " We wish to know the reason why we have made up our mind, and we find that we have decided without any reason, and perhaps even against every reason. But, in certain cases, that is the best of reasons. For the action which has been performed does not then express some superficial idea, almost external to ourselves, distinct and easy to account for: it agrees with the whole of our most intimate feelings, thoughts and aspirations, with that particular conception of life which is the equiva- lent of all our past experience, in a word, with our per- sonal idea of happiness and of honor. Hence it has been a mistake to look for examples in the ordinary and even indifferent circumstances of life in order to prove that man is capable of choosing without a motive. It might easily be shown that these insignificant actions are bound up with some determining reason. It is at the great and solemn crisis, decisive of our reputation with others, and yet more with ourselves, that we choose in defiance of what is conventionally called a motive, and this absence of any tangible reason is the more striking the deeper our free- dom goes." — Henbi Bebgson. The drama is a living art form. One may question, therefore, whether it will ever be possible to devise for it categories wholly valid, universally comprehensive, since the drama, as a life form, is subject to the law of evolution. It is a sig- nificant illustration of the evolution which is crea- 145 146 THE CHANGING DRAMA tive as well as progressive, continually enlarging its scope, broadening its domain, through the pressure of the human factor, in this instance the vital urge. Writing to Heinrich Laube in 1880, Ibsen said : " Do you really attach much value to categories? I, for my part, believe that the dramatic categories are elastic, and that they must accommodate themselves to the literary facts — not vice versa." And again, four years later, in a letter to Theodore Caspari, Ibsen remarked: " I gave up universal standards long ago, because I ceased believing in the justice of applying them." In these observations, Ibsen struck a blow for freedom in the domain of dramatic art. Dramatic criticism, forever seeking to formulate comprehensive categories within which to embrace the entire field of dramatic representation, exer- cises a repressive influence upon the creative genius. One of the most striking facts in the modern dramatic movement is the constructive demonstration of many contemporary dramatic craftsmen that a play may be eminently successful in stage representation, judged by both artistic and commercial standards, and yet be intrinsically " undramatic " when judged by the confining defi- nitions and traditional tenets of dramatic criti- cism. A continually recurring phenomenon now- adays is the play which attains popular success on the stage, though condemned by the dramatic THE BATTLE WITH ILLUSIONS 147 critic as not du theatre^ not a drama. The time is ripe for the exhibition of creative criticism as ap- plied to the new forms and the display of a more catholic spirit in judging the original, experi- mental art work of to-day .» One can illustrate sharply the difference be- tween ancient and modern practice by a com- parison of the ideas of Aristotle with the ideas of Hauptmann in regard to the drama. Such a comparison will serve to clarify and elucidate, in some measure, the most significant terms employed in dramatic criticism: character, action, and drama. In one of the most famous passages in all dramatic criticism, Aristotle says : " Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life. . . . Dramatic action, therefore, is not with a view to the representation of character; character comes in as subsidiary to the action. Hence the incidents and the plot are the end of a tragedy; and the end is the chief thing of all. Again, without action there cannot be a tragedy; there may be without character. . . . The plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy; character holds the second place." Viewed from any standpoint, whether from that of Aristotle alone or from that of the dramatic critic of to-day, the dictum is so gross and exaggerated a distortion of the truth as to be a virtual falsity. The object of the drama, in 148 THE CHANGING DRAMA Aristotle's view, is to exhibit character in action; and the two constituent elements of the drama are, therefore, character and action. Is it possible, then, for the dramatist to utilize either to the exclusion of the other? In other words, Aristotle is seeking the indispensable requirement, the abso- lute differentia or distinguishing characteristic, of the literary species known as the drama. Of the two, he chooses " plot " as the " first princi- ple " of the drama ; and he clearly implies the definition that action means " thdl incidents and the plot." Since Aristotle's day, action has come to mean something vastly deeper and more com- prehensive than merely " the incidents and the plot." It appears to be a perfectly true, but per- fectly trivial, dictum that a fable is indispensable to the drama. It is a deliberate perversion of the facts to maintain that this fable is synonymous with action. By the same token, a fable is equally indispensable for the novel and the short-story. Yet, in the light of modern dramaturgic practice, even the fable is not an indispensable ingredient of the drama. The drama may exist without a plot ; and the contemporary naturalist has again and again demonstrated this dictum by taking down the fourth wall of a room and exhibiting a static picture of human life. Such a play is not a play in the sense understood by Aristotle; it is not essentially narrative, but essentially pic- THE BATTLE WITH ILLUSIONS 149 torial and atmospheric, in its nature. The drama need not embody a story of human experience ; it need only be a picture of human existence, real or imagined. In the choice of the dramatist, sub- limated by his art, this picture may be so typical, so representative, as in itself to constitute a criti- cism of life, a judgment of society, or an ideal striving of the human soul. It has been pointed out that Aristotle is guilty of real confusion in thought in identifying the story with " the incidents and the plot." If Aris- totle really meant, as he says, that " without action there cannot be a tragedy," again is he refuted by the practice of contemporary dramatic art. Here we are confronted with the fundamental principle, indeed the very definition, of the drama ; and of necessity we must strive anew to arrive at some adequate comprehension of the term action. Through the intermediary of Spitta in his Die Ratten, Hauptmann denies the importance of ac- tion in the drama and asserts it to be " a worthless accident, a sop for the groundlings ! " Certainly, action in the sense of physical deeds is no longer the obligatory attribute of the drama. Speaking in his own person, Hauptmann has said : " Action upon the stage will, I think, give way to the analysis of character and to the exhaustive con- sideration of the motives which prompt men to action. Passion does not move at such headlong 150 THE CHANGING DRAMA speed as in Shakespeare's day, so that we present not the actions themselves, but the psychological states which cause them." Up to the time of our modern era, the inevitable conclusion, the artistic finale of tragedy, was death. To-day, the violent is the exceptional moment of life; and a deeper tragedy than dying may be the tragedy of living. Great dramas surely will be written, notable dramas have already been written, in which passive acceptance and not active resistance is the distinguishing characteristic. Action, says Gil- bert in Wilde's Intentions, is limited and relative. " But we who are born at the close of this wonder- ful age are at once too cultivated and too critical, too intellectually subtle and too curious of ex- quisite pleasures, to accept any speculations about life in exchange for life itself." Wilde here but expresses the conventional idea that the life of action is infinitely preferable to the life of con- templation. Certain modern critics have even gone so far as to say that Aristotle, in positing action as the indispensable criterion of the drama, was only anticipating Ferdinand Brunetiere in defin- ing the drama as the struggle of the human will against obstacles. The essential feature of the dramatic species, says Brunetiere, is the exhibition of the opposi- tion between the world without and the world within, the objective and the subjective. Struggle THE BATTLE WITH ILLUSIONS 151 is its essential element. With Aristotle, the word action has an implicit material connotation; but Brunetiere employs the word conflict, which is as applicable to the realms of the mental, the moral, the ethical, and the spiritual, as to the material and the physical. The one and indispensable criterion for the drama, according to Brunetiere, is that it shall portray a clash of contending de- sires, a stark assertion of the human will, against strenuous opposition, for the attainment of its end. " There can be no tragedy without a strug- gle," he says ; " and there can be no genuine emo- tion for the spectators unless something other and greater than life is at stake." It is not life alone, then, the material issue, but a spiritual issue — something other and greater than life — which is the stake of tragedy: character, honor, loyalty, integrity, fidelity, freedom, justice. To quote Brunetiere once more, to make his position abundantly clear, " Drama is a representation of the will of man in conflict with the mysterious powers or natural forces which limit or belittle us ; it is one of us thrown living upon the stage, there to struggle against fatality, against social law, against one of his fellow-mortals, against himself, if need be, against the ambitions, the in- terests, the prejudices, the folly, the malevolence of those who surround him." Life thrusts before us at every turn a series of 152 THE CHANGING DRAMA decisions that must be made, of alternatives that must be chosen. The problems of duty and desire eternally clamor for solution — the problems of predestination and freedom, of will and inclina- tion, of passion and self-restraint. The two fundamentals which Brunetiere posits as indis- pensable criteria for the dramatic species are will and struggle. A very brief consideration will suf- fice to demonstrate that these so-called differenti- ating characteristics of the dramatic species are striking characteristics of other forms of literary art. The short-story is an art form which has been developed to a high state of excellence during the contemporary period. Intensive, cumulative force is a distinguishing characteristic; unity of impression is a prime requisite. All the lines must converge to a predestined end or culmina- tion. Some of the most finished specimens of the form exhibit the human will in struggle, or a clash of contending desires. Even the lower forms, such as the detective story, concretize a struggle of the intensest sort. The will of a Dupin, expressed in the most cultivated forms of detective imagination, of the faculties of analysis and deduction, struggles to overcome the obstacles presented by a series of mysterious, apparently inexplicable, facts. Sherlock Holmes is less a personality than a volitional intelligence, direct- ing the searchlight of imagination and deduction THE BATTLE WITH ILLUSIONS 153 in the effort to overcome seemingly insurmounta- ble obstacles. To acknowledge that such stories are essentially dramatic is begging the question. By the logic of Brunetiere's hypothesis, we are driven to the manifestly false conclusion that they are dramas. We may assume that such stories, in competent hands, are subjects for dramatiza- tion. But such an hypothesis is clearly irrelevant to the question before us. The suggestion has recently been advanced that crisis, rather than conflict, is the essence of drama. A crisis is a turning point in the progress of a series of events, a culmination. Assuredly this is a concomitant attribute of the dramas falling under Brunetiere's definition. Such dramas, in- deed, exhibit or constitute a series of events, of physical or psychological import, marked by the display of wills in action. Crisis, to be sure, is one phase, the culminant phase, of the struggle of wills; indeed, such a struggle will generally ex- hibit a chain or succession of crises. It must also be conceded that this new criterion, though shallower in content, is more comprehensive than the criterion of Brunetiere. Consider the static dramas of Maeterlinck in his earlier period, which are indubitably short-stories cast in the dramatic form. A play such as Ulntruse, exhibiting no struggle of wills, is clearly not a " drama," ac- cording to Brunetiere. Yet under the new cri- 154 THE CHANGING DRAMA terion, it is distinctively a drama: an intensive representation of a crisis. In order to create the desired illusion, the author makes every word, every slightest stir of nature, cumulative in its effect. It is a little drama of cumulative dread. This new theory has, however, no thoroughly solid foundation. For its propounder has left un- defined the essential element, crisis ; or rather, he committed the amateurish blunder of defining it in terms of itself. The quintessential character- istic of drama, says Mr. Archer, is crisis; but he further insists that, since all crises are not dra- matic, we must admit within our category only the dramatic crises ! In other words, the essence of drama is the crucial crisis ; or to put it the other way round, crisis is the essence of the dra- matic drama. Which is absurd. It may be further urged against the criteria of both conflict and crisis that many great novels exhibit the stark assertion of the human will struggling against obstacles through a series of progressive, interlinking crises. Furthermore, one need only turn to the fertile and original dramas of our time in order to discover satisfac- tory examples of the successful stage play which fall outside the categories of both conflict and crisis ; and a backward glance will disclose not a few plays of high rank, the work of men of different times and differing nationalities, ex- THE BATTLE WITH ILLUSIONS 155 eluded from these categories. Of plays of the moderns, falling without the category of conflict, may be cited, for example, Schnitzler's Lebendige Stunden, Maeterlinck's Les Aveugles, Les Sept Princesses, L'Interieure, and Ulntruse, Gorky's Nachtasyl, Hauptmann's Hannele, Strindberg's Easter, Elizabeth Baker's Chains; an extended list might readily be made from the plays of Ms- chylus, Sophocles, Goldoni, Calderon, Goethe, Schiller, the Elizabethans, the French classicists, the dramatists of the Restoration. Of modern plays falling without the category of crisis may be mentioned Strindberg's The Dream Play, Ib- sen's When We Dead Awaken, Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird, Barker's The Madras House, Galswor- thy's The Pigeon. It must be clear, from the con- siderations set forth above, that a new definition of drama is demanded. Such a definition must accord with the facts of modern dramatic prac- tice. It must represent a thoroughly catholic point of view. At the same time it must be recog- nized, not as final, but only as tentative — subject to future modification, in order to conform to the practice of future way-breakers in dramatic art. The exhibition of will in conflict with obstacles is assuredly a spectacle perennially attractive and fascinating to the human species. The games and plays of children, the sports of the collegian, the professional contests of football, baseball, tennis, 156 THE CHANGING DRAMA cricket, lacrosse, the prize fights of America, the bull fights of Spain, the cocking mains of France, the student duels of Germany — all amply testify to man's absorbing interest in a spectacle full of conflict, with the added element of danger. The same tendency is prevailingly manifest in the drama. The plays of most direct and immediate appeal to a popular audience are those which pre- sent a naked struggle, with its attendant emo- tional excitation. Volitional activities in mortal combat are spectacles surcharged with the max- imum of emotional excitation. The appeal is to the baser emotions of the crowd, or even of the mob, rather than to the more disciplined and re- strained emotions of the enlightened individual. Such hand-to-hand, or rather, will-to-will, con- flicts are only moderately frequent in every period of the drama's history. A man like Strindberg frankly says: " I find the joy of life in its violent and cruel struggles " ; and Shaw, who has since proved recusant to his avowed principles, out- spokenly says : " Unity, however desirable in po- litical agitations, is fatal to drama, since every drama must be the artistic presentation of a con- flict. The end may be reconciliation or destruc- tion, or, as in life itself, there may be no end; but the conflict is indispensable: no conflict, no drama." Of modern plays embodying a conflict of wills, one thinks of Ibsen's A Doll's House, THE BATTLE WITH ILLUSIONS , 157 Strindberg's The Father and The Dance of Death, Shaw's Man and Superman and Candida, Gals- worthy's Strife, Moody's The Great Divide, Jones's Mrs. Dane's Defense, Wilde's Salome, Bjbrnson's A Gauntlet, Pinero's The Gay Lord Quex, Galdos's Electra, Schnitzler's Professor Bernardhi, as typical illustrations. Plays of this type, exhibiting the conflict of will with will, constitute only a fraction of the dramas successfully presented on a stage in a theater before an audience, in any given historical period. In the vast majority of plays, beyond doubt, there is exhibited an exercise of the human will; but this human will is not neces- sarily brought into direct conflict with another human will. It may operate in opposition to in- surmountable obstacles, such as the fatality of the ancients, the predestination of character, or the dead hand of heredity. Such plays — say Mac- beth, Wallenstein, Ghosts — with disastrous ending, are classed as tragedies. Again, the will may be shown in conflict with current moral laws, the rules of society, conventional codes of conduct; and in such cases — Hugo's Hernani, Hebbel's Maria Magdalena, Dumas's Fils Naturel, Brieux's Les Avaries, Ibsen's An Enemy of the People — we have the serious drama, in which the end may or may not be tragic. If the forces are more nearly equalized and the consequences clearly do 158 THE CHANGING DRAMA not promise disaster, we have comedy, with its various shadings — Moliere's Le Bourgeois Gentil- homme, Ibsen's The League of Youth, Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, Shaw's Arms and the Man. There are, also, the two lower forms of drama in which the characters exist for the sake of the plot, and the incidents are largely adven- titious — melodrama, a bastard form of tragedy, and farce, a degenerate form of comedy. In these lower forms, free play is given to surprise, sensa- tion, accident, chance, coincidence ; the incidents are often improbable, verging upon the impossible ; and the immediate appeal is to the more super- ficial, vulgar, and easily stimulated emotions. The point of departure for a new definition of drama — a definition at best suggestive, not final — is the school of contemporary dramatists, includ- ing such names as Ibsen, Bjornson, Hauptmann, Strindberg, Maeterlinck, Brieux, Shaw, Gorky, Wedekind, Barker, St. John Hankin, Schnitzler, Galsworthy. By their practice, and not through mere theorizing, they have compelled a new rating, a fresh interpretation of action in the drama. Hitherto, action has been universally accepted as an indispensable attribute of drama; and by critics so remote in times and tendency as Aris- totle and Maeterlinck. The latter, virtually dis- avowing the principle of his own static dramas, has said : " Do what one will, discover what mar- THE BATTLE WITH ILLUSIONS 159 vels one may, the sovereign law of the stage, its essential demand, will always be action — there are no words so profound, so noble and admirable, but they will weary us if they leave the situation unchanged, if they lead to no action, bring about no decisive conflict, or hasten no definite solution." The whole trend of contemporary dramatic art has been in the direction of minifying material action and magnifying emotive, psychological, in- tellectual, and spiritual action. Shaw has em- ployed a suggestive description of the function of the new drama — " illumination of life." The physical actions, the material incidents, of actual life have largely ceased to be ends in themselves : they have become the means to deeper ends, the revelation of character, the exhibition of the un- derlying motives, passions, impulses, the dis- closure of the soul — in a word, the unveiling of the inner life of man. " An event in real life — and this discovery is quite recent — ," affirms Strindberg, " springs generally from a whole series of more or less deep-lying motives. ..." One of the speakers in Dryden's Essay of Dra- matic Poesy speculatively observes : " Every al- teration or crossing of a design, every new-sprung passion, and turn of it, is a part of the action, and much the noblest, except we conceive nothing to be action till the players come to blows." I would remind you once more of Ibsen's declara- 160 THE CHANGING DRAMA tion that the ability to project experiences men- tally lived through is the secret of the literature of modern times. And it was assuredly of dra- matic literature that he was thinking when he spoke these words. He confessed that he never began the writing of a play until he had his dra- matic characters wholly in his power, and knew them down to the " last folds of their souls." Aristotle said that the drama must have a begin- ning, a middle, and an end. The tendency of the modem drama is to have no beginning, and no middle, and to begin where the earlier drama left off. It is a drama of pure culmination: the un- rolling of the scroll of ultimate human character. Nor in a certain sense can it be said to have any end; for the curtain often falls without finality. We are left with a haunting sense of the con- tinuity and endlessness of human life. The con- temporary drama, in its higher forms, is an illustration of extreme artistic foreshortening. The modern dramatist strives to penetrate ever deeper into the depths of human consciousness ; and in his progress there is the ceaseless exposure of the secret springs of human conduct. The age itself is introspective, self-analytical ; we per- petually scrutinize ourselves at arm's length. The popularization and diffusion of scientific theories, the widespread and ever-increasing interest dis- played in philosophy, psychology, pathology, THE BATTLE WITH ILLUSIONS 161 criminology, psychiatry, eugenics ; the spread of humanitarian ideas, breeding a spirit of quiescence and peace rather than of resistance and war; in- creased specialization and refinement of knowledge, imposing the obligation of dispassionate and self- less research — these and similar forces co-operate masterfully in giving tone to the era. Mere acts of violence, deeds of blood, fortuitous conjunctures and collisions are now held to be barbaric, ata- vistic, characteristic of the child-mind, of the race in the primitive stage. The contemporary feels interest in the cause, not in the details, of suicide, for example. The query is not How? but Why? The ideal of modern heroism is self-control rather than surrender to the promptings of the instincts and the passions. Yet modern life — who would venture to deny it? — for all this tone of quietude, of repression, furnishes joys more uplifting, hopes more ardent, despairs more poignant, trage- dies more hopeless, than the past ever cradled in any age. If it were possible to accept conflict as the dif- ferentia of the drama, one might define drama as the art of decisions. But it should now be clear that decision, the exercise of will for definite ends, is not an indispensable criterion for the drama. For the drama is the meeting place of all the arts. In pre-eminent degree, it possesses both plastic and pictorial attributes. The easiest, not neces- 162 THE CHANGING DRAMA sarily the highest, mode of gratifying the curi- osity and stimulating the interest of the instinc- tive spectator is to present action on the stage, action culminating in deeds. A psychologist of the crowd will ingeniously explain this as an evi- dence of the prevalence of the mob instinct in the theater. The theorizings upon the subject of the psychology of crowds have been carried to such extremes of exaggeration as to obscure in large measure the real purport of the better drama of our day. The drama is a democratic art, making its ap- peal to a motley throng assembled for a limited time within a circumscribed area. The wonderful effectiveness of the ancient theater as an instru- ment of public morality was ascribed by Bacon to the influence of the strange " secret of nature " that men's minds are more open to passions and impressions "congregate than solitary." A soli- tary spectator witnessing a performance of a great play by capable interpreters will receive certain mental impressions and undergo certain emotional experiences. Reading the text of this same play alone in his study, he will be deprived of many of the impressions and experiences received in the theater — the contributions of the acting, the mise- en-scene, and all that goes under the expressive term of stage-effect. The drama is an art of decoration as well as of representation, of appeal THE BATTLE WITH ILLUSIONS 163 to the eye as well as to the ear, touching the heart as well as affecting the brain. Hence in the theater the visual form of the pictorial, the " argument of the flesh," the appeal of the plastic, are influences superadded to those experienced by the solitary reader of the text of a play. And this no matter how well trained the reader may be in visualizing the sets of the stage, no matter how acute his powers of " stereoscopic imagination." When the solitary spectator merges into the motley crowd assembled in a theater, a certain phenomenon transpires. There is a tendency to- ward a change from heterogeneity in idea to homogeneity in sentiment. There is something electric about a crowd — the individual senses a pull of mass receptivity — toward some sort of consensus of opinion and feeling. The drama itself involves a tacit conspiracy between actors and audience — a certain remission of judgment, a certain acceptance of conventions peculiar to the theater. The spectators are seduced into taking sides ; their sympathies are engaged for certain characters ; their convictions evoked, their emotions appealed to, mayhap their nerves as- saulted. Now just as the string of a musical in- strument gives forth a certain note in response to the vibrations set up by a nearby tuning fork, so the individual undergoes certain mental and emotional experiences in vibratory response to the 164 THE CHANGING DRAMA mass-consciousness of the throng. He reacts, negatively, to the electrification of the crowd ; and, as Burton suggestively puts it, his private feeling is enforced by the overtones of the others. The spectator loses something of intellectual aloofness in favor of instinctive feeling. As Schlegel says : " The effect produced by seeing a number of others share in the same emotions is astonishingly powerful." The error of careless disciples of Tarde and Le Bon consists in confusing the passions of the mob with the mental and emotional sentiments of the audience in the theater. There are two vicious generalizations made by these whole-hearted advo- cates of crowd psychology. The one is that the individual, negatively electrified by the crowd, re- verts to the primitive, savage state, and revels in appeals to the lower emotions common to all men whether in the civilized or barbaric state. The second is that the dramatist, since it is his object, in Schlegel's words, to " produce an impression on an assembled crowd, to gain their attention, and to excite in them interest and participation," must be, as the French critic Nisard said, " only the intelligent echo of the crowd." It is quite true that the dramatist must make his appeal to the species. The man thus addressed is clearly not the primitive man, but the universal man. It is quite true that rough-and-tumble THE BATTLE WITH ILLUSIONS 165 farce, " sympathetic " parts in melodrama, and stage villains all cater to the primitive instincts in man. But these things are found in the primi- tive types of plays ; and the individuals who con- stitute the audiences do not revert to the primitive state: they are themselves already in a primitive state. The great dramatist appeals, not to com- monplace emotions, not to the uncivilized mind, but to the great elemental emotions and to the great sentiments and beliefs which make the whole world kin. Especially anachronistic at the present moment, in face of the great contemporary dramas of our time, is the theory that the' modern audience experiences only primitive, inherited emotions. If the greatest achievements of the dramatists from Ibsen down to to-day signify anything, it is that the emotions most worth appealing to in the the- ater are the higher, and not the commonplace emotions. The recognition has dawned that a drama intellectual in texture, moral in tone, spirit- ual in appeal, humanitarian in intention, is a powerful popular educative force. The function of such drama is not to pander to commonplace feeling, but to serve as a stimulant and excitant of the higher emotions. The emotions thus ap- pealed to are social, humane, Christian in their nature — the sense of brotherhood, the idea of jus- tice and equality, the sentiment of social solidar- ity, the passion for social service, the desire for 166 THE CHANGING DRAMA race improvement, the ideal of social betterment, the common intention to ameliorate conditions of poverty and disease, sympathy for the wronged and the afflicted. The commonplace emotions are not ignored; but they are in no sense paramount in legitimate drama. The great theater for their display is in the lower forms of drama, and the motographic play. The modern dramatist has successfully shat- tered the theory that he can be " only the intel- ligent echo of the crowd." The dramatists of the earlier time were content to follow the laggard snail-pace of the crowd. To find the greatest common denominator of the crowd and then ad- dress that " ideal spectator " — this is democracy in art with a vengeance! The dramatists of the newer dispensation are leaders, not mere spokes- men, of the ideas and feelings of the motley throng assembled in the playhouse. They do not exhibit the mere " reversion to type " of the primitive individuals in the audience imagined by the disci- ples of Le Bon. They have proven themselves to be leaders in thought, exemplars of the higher emotions destined to become the common heritage of the race. A chasm yawns between the present and the past. The spectator at the drama of the past might thus have voiced his appreciation to the dramatist : " How grateful I am to you for THE BATTLE WITH ILLUSIONS 167 actually expressing what I have often felt but never put in words ! " The spectator at the con- temporary drama often feels like saying to the dramatist: " How grateful I am to you for bring- ing out in me latent, unsuspected funds of thought and emotion! You have given me to think what I might, but never actually, have thought before. You have inspired in me emotions which I might have felt before, but actually never have felt until now." Ibsen wrote for a great cosmopolitan audi- ence — and not, save in a few of the dramas of the middle period, for Norway. Fru Ibsen once told me with the utmost earnestness that her hus- band regarded Germany, both intellectually and artistically, as his home land. Even the unlikely assumption that he wrote always for the " old folks at home in Norway " only serves to demon- strate how far the great radical dramatist, Ibsen, was ahead of his time. Both for Norway and for Europe, Ibsen was never " only the intelligent echo of the crowd " ; he was, in his own words, a franc- tireur along the firing line of intellectual advance. And Ibsen is the world's greatest dramatist since Moliere. Indeed, we are coming nowadays to realize that the drama is a great form of thinking, as well as vehicle of emotion. We are coming to realize that to stimulate thought through the medium of the emotions is only a very partial, a very limited 168 THE CHANGING DRAMA conception of the function of the drama. At no time in the world's history, I dare say, has thought, has philosophy in the larger sense, played so large a part in the drama. Many modern dram- atists, themselves incapable of rising to the heights of great and original thinking, have suc- ceeded in reflecting, at lower candle power, some of the great intellectual lights of the century — in this way familiarizing the popular mind with novel ideas, and so leading the way of civili- zation. Modern dramatic art effectively be- lies the assertion of Letourneau that the drama " cannot express more than the average- of the pre- vailing opinions, of the ideas current in the sur- rounding social medium." Intellectual iconoclasts, as well as esthetic revolutionaries, dramatists like Ibsen, Bjornson, Hauptmann, Brieux, Shaw have raised and continue to raise whole strata of society to the intellectual and emotional level which they, as chosen and advanced individuals, once enjoyed in more than comparative isolation. The emotions experienced by a solitary spec- tator at a play differ in degree, but not in kind, from those he would experience in the midst of a crowd in the playhouse. The crowd heightens the intensity of his emotion, but is incapable of chang- ing its nature. We live in an enlightened age; and the audiences for the better dramas of our epoch are, in the vast majority, enlightened indi- THE BATTLE WITH ILLUSIONS 169 viduals. The simple fact is that these individuals do not relapse atavistically in the theater. The playhouse is not the cradle of " Judge Lynch." The ideas, the opinions cherished by the individual spectator of to-day, are incapable of being warped by the applause or the hisses of the unintelligent. With the tremendous growth of interest in the drama, the publication of plays, the increase in the number and influence of dramatic and theatric organizations, the extension of educational facili- ties of all kinds, the average spectator at the the- ater, like the average spectator at the professional ball game, has become a critic " on his own." He is not stampeded by the noise of the theater " fan." He sits tight in his own convictions, and retains a clear mind for the formation of his own opinion. Entering the theater to be amused, he is willing to be edified. Ready for a hearty laugh and two hours of enjoyment, he or she — and the percentage of women in modern theater audiences throughout the world is very large — has a brain open enough, a heart big enough, to respond to the larger message of the thought and the con- science of our time. Hauptmann's Das Friedensfest bears upon its title page as motto the following significant pas- sage from Lessing: " They find action in no trag- edy, but that in which the lover kneels down, etc. It has never struck them that every internal con- 170 THE CHANGING DRAMA flict of passions, every sequence of antagonistic thoughts, where one annihilates the other, may also be an action; perhaps they think and feel too mechanically to be conscious of any activity. To refute them seriously were serious labor." The leading contemporary dramatists, Ibsen, Bjorn- son, Hauptmann, Schnitzler, Strindberg, Brieux, Shaw, Galsworthy, in tragedy, tragi-comedy, com- edy and even farce, have imported a new kind of action into the drama. In the earlier dramas, there was sometimes an " argument " which, in anticipa- tion, set forth in condensed form the plot of the play. In such dramas, the dialogue, the spoken words, the gestures, served but as commentaries upon the actions of the characters.. In the higher dramas of to-day, the play is itself the argument. The exposition is no longer the means of exhibit- ing the action : it is the action itself. The dialogue is the drama. We see before us individual person- alities with strong convictions and definite phi- losophies of life. The real drama issues from the struggle of these conflicting conceptions of life. When Richard Mansfield considered Shaw's Carir- dida for production, only to reject it, he suc- cinctly expressed in a letter to Mr. William Win- ter (April 10, 1895) the conventional attitude of the past : " There is no change of scene in three acts, and no action beyond moving from a chair to a sofa, and vice versa. O, ye Gods and little THE BATTLE WITH ILLUSIONS 171 fishes ! " In illustration of the more modern atti- tude, one may cite Oscar Wilde, who asserted that he wrote the first act of A Woman of No Impor- tance in answer to the complaint of the critics that Lady Windermere's Fan was lacking in ac- tion. " In the act in question," says Wilde, " there was absolutely no action at all. It was a perfect act." A well-constructed drama, says Eloesser, is like a lawsuit, in which the parties to the suit are per- mitted to speak only the essential things. In a sense, a drama of Shaw or Brieux, to employ a French law term, is a dramatic proces-verbal. The dramatist presents the characters as right from their several points of view, and resolutely refuses to take sides. The work of a dramatist like Galsworthy often fails to stir the emotions because of this extreme impassibility, this inflexi- ble sense of rectitude and fairness. The newer comedy of our time arises from the unveiling of the motives of character, the ruthless exposure of sentimental, crude, irrational, antiquated, conven- tional views of life. In this new comedy we ob- serve less a conflict of wills than a clash of ideas. Oscar Wilde once observed that the greatest dra- matic effects are produced by a conflict between our artistic sympathies and our moral judgment. Ibsen's whole series of social dramas may be re- garded as a series of conflicts between the newer 172 THE CHANGING DRAMA and the older ideas and ideals. In his Introduc- tion to The Cenci, Shelley — who possessed deep insight into the essentials of the dramatic art — shrewdly observes : " It is in the restless and anatomizing casuistry with which men seek the justification of Beatrice, yet feel that she has done what needs justification; it is in the superstitious horror with which they contemplate alike her wrongs and their revenge, that *the dramatic char- acter of what she did and suffered consists." An excellent example of the play of conflicting ideas and sentiments, falling outside the contemporary dramatic movement, is Le Gendre de M. Poirier of Augier and Sandeau. The characteristic examples of modern drama exhibit the merciless unmasking of conventional morality, of social hypocrisy, of conspiracies of silence. They are essentially dramas of disil- lusionment. The process of disillusionment is the drama. The comic dramatist forces his audience to laugh at the victim while he is being disillusion- ized; the more serious dramatist moves the spec- tator to pity and terror over the spectacle of the disastrous consequences of acting in blind obedi- ence to views of life which are patently false and illuding. Bernard Shaw has given graphic de- scription of his own comedies in the definition : the function of comedy is nothing less than the de- struction of old-established morals. " People THE BATTLE WITH ILLUSIONS 17B imagine," he observes, " that actions and feelings are dictated by moral systems, by religious sys- tems, by codes of honor and conventions of con- duct which lie outside the real human will. Now it is a part of my gift as a dramatist that I know that these conventions do not supply them with their motives. They make very plausible ex post facto excuses for their conduct ; but the real mo- tives are deep down in the will itself. And so an infinite comedy arises in every-day life from the contrast between the real motives and the alleged artificial motives." The dramatist refuses to be imposed upon, and forces his audience either to laugh consumedly at the imposture, or sympa- thetically to discern behind the imposture the aus- tere face of tragedy. That fine French actor, the late Edmond Got, in the first volume of his Diary, has tersely ex- pressed the function of the drama, according to conventional standards, in the following passage: " So long as there are opposed interests on the stage, situations that is to say, and these as strong as possible, if it all holds together and is carried out in a more or less logical crescendo, you have bagged your game, V affaire est dans le sac." Here we see represented all the classic require- ments expressed in colloquial form : the " opposed interests " to furnish the desiderated conflict; the " structural union of the parts " so dogmatically 174 THE CHANGING DRAMA insisted upon by Aristotle ; the " cumulative inter- est " of the series of events moving toward a crisis ; and action which consists of " plot and in- cidents " so arresting in their nature as to main- tain " continuity of interest." It is against the hampering restrictions of these classic require- ments that the new school of dramatists, in Eng- land and on the Continent, continue to protest, both critically and constructively. Indeed the nat- uralist, no matter of what nationality, abjures the artificial " preparation " of the French school ; displaces plot in favor of a series of graphically noted scenes which, in themselves, constitute a sug- gestive epitome of a certain phase of human life; and reduces action to its lowest terms by present- ing, as a substitute for things done, the clash of mind on mind, the pressure of character against character, or the straining of the soul on the leash of heredity, environment, institutionalism, social determinism. There are no such things as " scenes " in the conventional theatrical sense with Hauptmann in his social dramas, for example ; life is continuous and consecutive. In such plays, the interest is not cumulative from act to act : every- thing is on the same dead level of interest. The incidents are juxtaposed, as in life, rather than interwoven, as in art. A somewhat different aspect of the new dram- aturgy is afforded by the plays of Barker, of THE BATTLE WITH ILLUSIONS 175 Galsworthy, of Shaw, and the younger school of British playwrights. Impartial, many-sided dis- cussion of a specific problem or a definite situation, devoid of real action save that of powerful cere- bration — this is an accurate description of The Madras House, of Getting Married, of The Pigeon. Such a play is not a structural union of organic parts: it is a series of mental films of the same object taken from 'different angles. The speech of the characters, to employ a happy phrase of Meredith, " rambles concentrically." It is much as if some definite question of human life — marriage, poverty, an immoral inheritance, the relation of the sexes, civic responsibility — were set upon a revolving pedestal; and as it re- volves, the many facets of the subject are reflected in the minds of the characters. In the main the unities of time and place are observed; there is unity of impression only in the sense that a single subject is seen in contrariety, caught in the mir- rors of sharply delineated mentalities. Such art is not life seen through the prism of the tempera- ment of the artist: it is life, a corner of exist- ence or a phase of social thought, seen through the many temperaments of the artist's dramatic characters. This new species of drama is essenti- ally intellectual in its appeal ; it may or may not be propagandist in spirit, depending entirely on the temperament of the individual artist. Shaw and 176 THE CHANGING DRAMA Brieux represent the extreme propagandist ele- ment; Barker occupies the middle ground; whilst Galsworthy and Tchekhov represent the impas- sibility of consistent realism. Thus Shaw says that " an interesting play cannot in the nature of things, mean anything but a play in which problems of conduct and character of personal importance to the audience are raised and sug- gestively discussed " ; and accordingly " we now have plays, including some of my own, which be- gin with discussion and end with action, and others in which the discussion interpenetrates the action from beginning to end." The intellectual rather than the emotive tex- ture of contemporary drama has been accentuated by Hauptmann : " I believe the drama to be the expression of genuine mental activity, in a stage of high development. . . . From this aspect there results a series of consequences which en- large endlessly the range of the drama beyond that of the ruling dramaturgies on all sides, so that nothing that presents itself, either outwardly or inwardly, can be excluded from this form of thinking, which has become a form of art." In protest against the conception of drama as a conflict of wills and of the dramatist as a " Pro- fessor of Energy," Brieux insists that the theater " will be obliged, more and more as time goes on, to devote itself to the study of the great topics THE BATTLE WITH ILLUSIONS 177 of the day." For his part, Galsworthy denies that it is the function of the artist to work for a practical end. " It is the business of the artist," he reservedly says, " to set down just what he sees and what he feels, to be negative rather than posi- tive." At the same time, he acknowledges that " the writer's own temperamental feeling gives the hint of a solution to his readers " ; but " the solu- tion is conveyed in flux." The most conspicuous practitioner on the Con- tinent of the dramaturgy which abjures action and dispenses with the " dramatic " is Tchekhov. In such a play as The Cherry Garden, for ex- ample, absolutely nothing happens — in the ordi- nary sense of the term ; there is no conflict of wills, the leading characters are deficient in the faculty of volitional decision. Yet in this, as in his other plays, there is an infinitude of psychological ac- tion : soul struggles, bankruptcies of will, catastro- phes of indecision, tragedies of passivity. Many of Maeterlinck's plays have accustomed us to the character of passive acceptance and the play of quiescence; such plays are adventures of the soul in quest of the unknown. In speaking of Shake- speare, Wilde once said : " It is because he did nothing that he has been able to achieve every- thing." In a classic passage, Maeterlinck says: " To me, Othello does not appear to live the au- 178 THE CHANGING DRAMA gust daily life of Hamlet, who has time to live, inasmuch as he does not act." The guiding principle of the new school, the ex- perimental school, is the intention to show us real life, in its simple, normal, sincere aspects, and at the same time to reveal to us exactly what is tran- spiring in the minds of characters placed in such circumstances. Real life is not packed full of crises; real life, save at rather rare moments, is not " dramatic." So we hear a man like Barker making his plea for the " normal drama " — " nor- mal plays about and for normal people, capable of normal success under normal conditions." Such a drama must present an undistorted view of life; it must be " a comedy which shall reflect and clarify, honestly and humorously, many aspects of the confused life around us." It is not the " serious drama," or the " advanced drama," or the " intellectual drama " that these men are trying to produce. It is the " sincere drama " which Tchek- hov, Hankin, Galsworthy, Barker, Houghton, and their congeners are striving to create: the drama which shall make interesting on the stage the things which interest us in ordinary, every-day life — things trivial enough in thems-elves, yet in their setting more touching, more moving, more affect- ing than all the dramatic conjunctures, theatrical episodes, the artificial and far-fetched situations of the theater of commerce. One of the most gifted THE BATTLE WITH ILLUSIONS 179 exponents in the United States of this sincere drama is Mr. George Middleton. In his one-act plays, the art form which he has achieved with deserved success, he exhibits refreshing sincerity, earnestness, and reserve. The merely dramatic element in life is coming to be recognized as essentially occasional; its transposition to the stage imparts to it the note of the factitious. It is the human element, the pathos of "little, nameless, unremembered acts," the courage to endure the life that is, the idealism that goes forward in the face of indifference and hostility, the tragi-comedy of all that we are, of all that we fear and hope — this is the material of the new drama. " Sincerity bars out no themes," says Galsworthy in a suggestive passage: " — it only demands that the dramatist's moods and vis- ions should be intense enough to keep him ab- sorbed; that he should have something to say so engrossing to himself that he has no need to stray here and there and gather purple plums to eke out what was intended for an apple tart. Here is the heart of the matter: You cannot get sincere drama out of those who do not see and feel with sufficient fervor; and you cannot get good, sin- cere drama out of persons with a weakness for short cuts. There are no short cuts to the good in art." In the light of the contributions of the experi- 180 THE CHANGING DRAMA mental and pioneering dramatists of the contem- porary era, I shall make an effort to formulate a working definition of a play. It is important to note that our vocabulary of dramatic criticism is deficient in the requisite terms for including all the species of plays which find a place on the boards. We have no exact analogue, pithy, and concise, for the German term Schuuspiel. The bourgeois drama is only imperfectly rendered by domestic drama ; an even less desirable term is the drama of middle-class life. The very thing we are dis- cussing has itself become suspect. A drama is, from its very derivation, a branch, not of statics, but of kinetics. It really means a doing, an action of some sort, through the intermediary of human beings. Yet we are confronted to-day with a start- ling contradiction in terms ; for, as we have shown, many contemporary dramatists produce theater- pieces which are successfully produced before popular audiences, in which the tone is contempla- tive and not active. In such plays the stress is thrown upon being to the virtual exclusion of do- ing. We are driven, finally, to a definition, not of the drama, but of the play. A play is any presentation of human life by hu- man interpreters on a stage in a theater before a representative audience. The play intrinsically, and its representation by the interpreters, must be so effective, interesting, and moving as to induce THE BATTLE WITH ILLUSIONS 181 the normal individual in appreciable numbers to make a sacrifice of money and time, either one or both, for the privilege of witnessing its perform- ance. The subject of a play may be chosen from life on the normal plane of human experience or the higher plane of fantasy and imagination. Both the action and the characters of the play may be dynamic, static, or passive. By action is desig- nated every exhibition of revelative mobility in the characters themselves, whether corporeal or spirit- ual, relevant to the processes of elucidation and exposition of the play; as well as all events, ex- plicit or implicit, in the outer world of deed or the inner life of thought, present or antecedent, which directly affect the destinies of the characters, im- mediately or ultimately. The characters may be evolutional, static, or mechanical — ranging from the higher forms of tragedy, comedy, tragi- comedy through all forms of the play down to the lower species of melodrama, farce, and pantomime. A common, but not an indispensable, attribute of the play is a crisis in events, material, intellect- ual or emotional, or a culminating succession of such crises ; and such crisis generally, but by no means invariably, arises out of a conflict involving the exercise of the human will in pursuit of de- siderated ends. A play may be lacking in the ele- ments of conflict and crisis, either or both; since the pictorial and plastic, in an era of the picture- 182 THE CHANGING DRAMA frame stage in especial, are themselves legitimate and indispensable instrumentalities of stage rep- resentation. A play cannot be purely static, can- not wholly eliminate action. Physical, corporeal action may nevertheless be reduced to its lowest terms ; and in such plays the action consists in the play of the intellect and of the emotions. All dramas are plays ; all plays are not dramas. The drama may be defined as the play in which there is a distinctive plot, involving incidents actively par- ticipated in by the characters ; a plot must be of such a nature that it can be clearly disengaged and succinctly narrated as a story. A drama in- volves the functioning of the human will, whether in the individual or in the mass ; and includes within itself a crisis in the affairs of human beings. Dramatic is a term descriptive of the qualities in- herent in, indispensable to, the drama. A play may or may not be dramatic. A drama is a par- ticular kind of play. The characteristic features of the contemporary play, as the result of the revolution of technic, may now be detailed. They are, concretely, the transposition of the crucial conjuncture from the outer world to the inner life; the enlargement of the conception of the dramatic conflict in order to include the clash of differing conceptions of con- duct, standards of morality, codes of ethics, phi- losophies of life ; the participation in such conflicts THE BATTLE WITH ILLUSIONS 183 not only of individuals, but also of type embodi- ments of social classes or even segments of the social classes themselves ; the elimination of both conflict and crisis without denaturization of the literary species known as the play; the invention of the technic by which a single subject is explored from many points of view, as distinguished from the earlier technic in which