PlliillMift!l;i^^v;'.::.--,v:'^ CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE Cornell University Library PN 1861.A56 Drama ^o-^ay J 3 1924 026 100 127 The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924026100127 THE DRAMA TO-DAY THE DRAMA TO DAY BY CHARLTON ANDREWS PHILADELPHIA & LONDON J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 1913 COPTBIGHT, I9I3, BT J. B. LIPPINCOTT OOMPAKTT PUBLISHED BEFTEMBEBi 1913 PBINTED BT J. n. LIPPINCOTT COMPAKT AT THE WASHINGTON SQtTABE PBEBB FHILADEIiPBIA, V. S. A. TO GEORGE PIERCE BAKER PREFACE INTEREST in the drama as a distinct art has never been greater than at the present time, and the desire to study it seriously and intelligently has never before been so wide- spread. In spite of this fact, however, there exists no brief separate treatment, in convenient form, of the authors and the plays with which the active theatre now concerns itseK. There are collected discussions of certain groups of playwrights, volumes dealing with the drama of individual nations or movements, and in the periodicals innmnerable fugitive articles biographical and critical. But there is no brief compendium of the drama to-day, as it is practised, not only in England and America but also upon the Conti- nent. It is to supply the need of such a manual that the present treatise has been written. Little effort has been made to shed new light upon the topics discussed; the attempt has been rather to present in small compass accurate PREFACE general information as to the leaders of the modern stage and their work, and to offer, in passing, some opinions as to the prospects and tendencies of dramatic art in our day. C. A. CONTENTS PAGB I. Definitions 9 II. Realism and the " Literary" Drama 35 III. The Americans 61 IV. The British 105 V. The Continentals 169 VI. Prospective 206 DEFINITIONS THE drama is a species in the genus fiction. Bruneti^re, following Hegel, asserts that it differs from the other forms of literature in that it must always deal with some exertion of the human will. The business of the drama is to produce an intense emotional effect, and such an effect is most readily aroused by the spectacle of a struggle. In a play, there is usually a chief character who, desiring some one thing above aU else, strives for it with all his power. When Aristotle called tragedy the imita- tion of an action, by "action" he doubtless meant struggle. A play, then, is a fight, a sort of glorified prize fight, wherein the hero is pitted against ad- verse forces, human or otherwise, within or with- out, the reward of victory being the object of his dearest desires. Now, a fight — ^prize fight, bull fight, cock fight, battle of wits, debate, physical, intellectual, or moral contest of whatsoever sort — 9 THE DRAMA TO-DAY is, to repeat, the thing best adapted in human ex- perience to the excitation of intense emotion. The great battles of hfe and literature have furnished the material for the great drama: Prometheus versus Jupiter; (Edipus versus the Fates; Romeo and Juliet versus their parents; Tartuffe versus Orgon; Lady Teazle versus society; Laura Murdock versus circumstances; Cyrano de Bergerac versus his nose. At the foundation of every drama, then, is a fight. The playwright generally deals with what Stevenson calls "the great passionate crises of ex- istence, when duty and inclination come nobly to the grapple." This, however, is not the material of aU fiction. The hero of the novel may be passive; he may be merely the inactive sport of circumstances. The hero of the play must be active. He must contend against the opposition. The playwright, too, works under high pressure, in an atmosphere of rigid limitation. He must tell his story "in such skilfully devised form and order as shall, within the limits of an ordinary theatrical representation, give rise to the greatest possible amount of that peculiar kind of emotional effect, the production 10 DEFINITIONS of which is the one great function of the theatre." A true play cannot be formed of mere passive character analysis. The theatre is distinctively a place for the display of volitional activity. The more energetic a nation, therefore, the greater will be its drama. Lotus eaters furnish forth nothing but lyricism. The drama of any nation flour- ishes in the time of greatest national vitality: in Greece after Salamis; in England after the Armada; in France under Louis XIV. It is obvious that the most effective scenes in a play will be those in which the contending forces are displayed in actual grapple. Shakespeare shows us the Montagues and the Capulets brawling in the street, before he introduces us to the scenes of love-making. The real interest in a drama begins when the emotions are first aroused by the spectacle of conflict, or the strong and immediate prospect of conflict. Plays that are quick to grip our atten- tion convey their preliminary information in terms of struggle, and not merely of conversational nar- rative. Of course, we may have some curiosity as to the drawing up of the articles of agreement and in the arrival of the combatants at the ringside, 11 THE DRAMA TO-DAY but, except for the reaction of expectancy, the chief emotional interest begins only when the first blow is struck. Just as it is impossible to sustain this interest in a ring contest in which the com- batants spend their time in mere talk and "spar- ring for wind," so in the drama, when action ceases attention begins to flag. ' The drama is dependent, then, first of all upon action, either physical or spiritual. A play must present primarily a series of happenings. The original mediaeval drama, that tiny four-line trope of the Easter service, presented an occurrence: the Marys went to the tomb, and they* found that their Lord had risen. In a play of two hours' duration, it is often necessary to set forth in the beginning certain fundamental facts — ^the expo- sition. In Cymheline, two courtiers gossip and so gradually convey the information to the audi- ence. In the opening scene of Chanteckr, there is barnyard life that puts the spectator into the strange environment, but delays the action. The ideal exposition is conveyed through an emotional- ized set of conditions. Instead of the mere con- versation of Camillo and Archidamus in A Winter's 12 DEFINITIONS Tale, one prefers the combat which opens Romeo and Juliet, or the happening with which the essen- tial situation grips attention in The Case of Rebel- lious Susan. The ideal play proceeds through a rising series of happenings, based on conflict, to a climax and thence to a solution. There are four principal forms of drama, which are often combined and varied to make many other forms. They are Farce, Comedy, Melodrama, and Tragedy. Another division groups all drama under the three self-explanatory heads: the Story Play; the Character Play; and the Play of Ideas. The first emphasizes plot and aims solely to entertain. The second chiefly illustrates character in its inter- action with environment. The third presents thought in terms of action, characterization, and dialogue. Roughly speaking, farce and comedy deal with the less serious, melodrama and tragedy with the more serious phases of life. "Primarily," says Professor George Pierce Baker, "the comic depends on the point of view of the writer, for this determines his selection of material, and on his emphasis, for this is the means by which he makes it serve the ends he has in view." The 13 THE DRAMA TO-DAY same matter may be either comic or tragic, de- pending on how it is viewed or what phases of it are emphasized. The spectacle of Emerson, in premature mental decay, charitably depositing a coin in the hat of Oliver Wendell Holmes, under the impression that his old but unrecognized friend is a beggar, whereas the hat has simply been for the moment removed that the doctor may wipe his perspiring brow — such an incident is humorous or infinitely pathetic, according to how you look at it. To the pessimist, it has been said, life is a tragedy; to the optimist, a comedy. The dramatist must, of course, determine in advance whether his point of view is to be comic or tragic, and then carefully avoid any abrupt shift in empha- sis that might serve to confuse the spectator in this matter. Even so, there wiU always be play- goers incapable of determining what is really pathetic: ill-timed laughter is hkely to punctuate the most solemn tragedy. There are even persons who find downright amusement in, for an extreme example, the awful scene at the end of Ghosts! A familiar illustration of the effect of shifting emphasis upon the comic and the tragic is to be U DEFINITIONS found in the character of Shylock. To Elizabethan audiences, with their race prejudices and their love of savage amusements, the Jew in The Mer- chant of Venice was chiefly, if not wholly, a figure to be laughed at. To-day, however, actors like Irving have given Shylock a fairly tragic signifi- cance, so that the other interests of the play are in part lost sight of, while the sympathies of the audience go out to the baffled, heart-broken old man. Similarly, the distinctions between farce and comedy, and between melodrama and tragedy, are matters of emphasis. In farce, the plot is stressed at the expense of the characterization. A climactic series of comic happenings is "farced" or stuffed into the two hoiirs' traffic of the stage, for amusement purposes only. In comedy, the emotional reaction is derived chiefly from the char- acterization, and the mere plot is less obtrusive. In melodrama, again, plot takes the principal stress: a serious drama is formed of thrilling situations heaped up inordinately at the- expense of proper motivation. In tragedy, the character- ization does not suffer, and the motivation is 15 THE DRAMA TO-DAY always adequate. As variants of these principal forms, we have tragi-comedy, comedy of manners, romantic comedy, comedy of humor, comedy of dialogue, farce-comedy, and many other over- lapping classifications. It will be seen that these all too brief and hasty definitions depend largely upon the separation of the three chief ingredients of all drama: plot, characterization, and dialogue. Some explanation of these terms themselves will, accordingly, not be amiss. The plot, of course, is the story, the series of unified happenings, having a beginning, a middle, and an end, which forms the framework of the play. It is weU known that in Shakespeare's day this element was less regarded than it is at present. The Elizabethan audience was content with a familiar story in a new dress. We to-day insist on novelty of story. Gozzi and Schiller are said to have investigated all the possible combinations of human affairs and concluded that there are but thirty-six fundamental dramatic situations. From these bare three dozen have been compounded all plays, as well as all other fiction. Ibsen is often 16 DEFINITIONS vaunted as strikingly original, yet his plots are usually traceable to venerable sources. In Lady Inger of Ostraat, a mother murders her unknown son, just as in (Edipus the King, the son slaughters his unrecognized father. The same theme, for instance, is foimd also in Le Roi s'amuse, which is the basis of the opera Rigoletto; in Alfieri's Merope; in Voltaire's Semiramis; in II Trovatore; and in Eugene Walter's first play, Sergeant James, later known as Boots and Saddles. Take the dramatic situation in which a wife makes heroic sacrifice to save her husband. We find it in the Lady Godiva legend, in Monna Vanna, in Paid in Full, and in countless others. Shakespeare borrowed all his plots ready-made, with the possible exception of Love's Labour's Lost and The Tempest; and Shake- speare's stories have been retold on the stage again and again. As for single scenes, the same one often appears in scores of plays. The interrupted wedding ceremony occurs in so wide a range of authors as that comprising Sardou, Clyde Fitch, Theodore Kremer, and George Bernard Shaw. The fall of man through woman, beginning with the legend of Eve, traces itself through Carmen, 2 17 THE DRAMA TO-DAY La Dame aux Camelias, Thais, Salome, Parsifal, and hundreds of other dramas descendant from the story of Helen of Troy. The "eternal tri- angle," composed of two men and one woman, or of two women and one man, is at the bottom of mmiberless plays, including Frou-Frou, Iris, Hedda Gdbler, and Madame X. The doctrine of redemp- tion through woman's love has been preached from time immemorial in such dramas as Faust, Der FUegende Hollander, Gotterdammerung, Peer Gynt, and The Piper. Similar examples of plot resem- blance might be cited ad infinitum, but these will amply serve. If, however, the plot of a play need not — indeed, cannot — ^be precisely original, it must, if effective, possess certain other qualifications. It must not clash with the characterization, to begin with; and this being interpreted simply means that it must be logical throughout its development. The characters in the play must do what they do and say what they say from obvious rational causes implanted within their own personalities or in the surrounding conditions. Plots fail when the inci- dents they comprise occur without clear and ade- 18 DEFINITIONS quate motivation. The audience must constantly understand not only what the character does, but why he does it. Of course, the stress upon logic of plot and motivation varies according as we are dealing with comedy or farce, tragedy or melo- drama. But even in farce and melodrama, where plot license is greatest, the law of cause and effect must plainly operate throughout. The funda- mental premises may be fantastic in the extreme, but the development of the plot upon these prem- ises once laid down must, from the standpoint of logic, be as irreproachable as in comedy or tragedy. Not only must the development of the plot be logical, but it must be arranged in the emphatic order of climax. Through the skilful revelation little by little of just so much of the story as is necessary for the moment, the playwright arouses the feeling of suspense. Something new and mysterious is ever about to happen. More than that, it must happen j and having happened, it must be followed by something else that is about to, and that does, in due course, occur. And this series of happenings must take place with ever- increasing forcefulness and importance up to a 19 THE DRAMA TO-DAY supreme situation. Then comes, in technical parlance, the "falling action," the "catastrophe," the "denouement" the solution. A play must not only reach a climax, but it must appropriately end. The ending of the play, however, must not be accomplished at the cost of suspense, and so of interest. The "big moment" has come and gone, and yet the play must be concluded with expect- ancy to the last line. It is because playwrights are so often negligent of this fact that we have so many feeble last acts. The ability to maintain dramatic interest to the final curtain is even more rare than the gift of creating suspense up to the climax. It has been noted, and it deserves to be empha- sized, that action in the drama, as in Ufe, is of two kinds, physical and spiritual. We have likened the drama to the prize fight, which is its primitive prototype. In the prize fight, however, the con- flict is physical almost to the exclusion of the spiritual element; whereas, in the true drama, physical action often suffers eclipse while spiritual conflict monopolizes attention. Indeed, sheer physical action on the stage is often enough with- out dramatic significance. The mere moving about 20 DEFINITIONS of the actors, the "crossing" and recrossing, so frequently resorted to in the hope of animating a dull scene, generally fails entirely of its purpose. On the other hand, there may be an utter lack of physical movement; the stage may be held by simply two characters facing each other without so much as a spoken word, or even by but one character face to face with an obvious crisis, and yet the spiritual conflict indicated may mean action in the highest sense of the term. A good play will undoubtedly include much of both sorts of action; but in it, the physical will chiefly supplement and interpret the spiritual conflict. In the notable "big scenes" of Monsieur Bernstein's theatrical pieces, for example, there are usually but two persons on the stage, and there is almost no physi- cal action; however, when the husband learns of the wife's crime, in The Thief; or when the Anti- Semite son learns from his proud mother of his Jewish and illegitimate parentage, in Israel; or when the wife hears from her statesman spouse how he is guilty of the offense charged against him by his enemies, in L'Assaut, — ^we have the most moving mental and spiritual action. 21 THE DRAMA TO-DAY Mr. Augustus Thomas has illustrated this dis- tinction between physical and spiritual action as follows: "Let us suppose that an old man is standing by the mantelpiece, a young man sitting in a chair. They do not move. The old man is talking of heredity, of what a fine thing it is to have had good parents and grandparents. The young man begins to feel that a family line means much, that he is for that reason all the prouder of his father. Then suppose the older man, never moving, tells the boy that the man of whom he is so proud is not his father. There you get in the boy a violent action, mental yet violent. Then if the old man tells him that he himself is his father, you get another action, of a different sort, and perhaps more violent because of the variety. Yet all the time neither of the men has moved from his position." The second of the chief ingredients of drama is characterization. Characters in fiction, as is well understood, may be either types or individuals. There are far more of the former extant than of the latter. Obviously, it is far easier to present a 22 DEFINITIONS tjrpe than to create an individual. The typical hypocrite, for example, flourishes in a thousand plays; but there is only one Tartuffe. The typical swash-buckling braggart abounds in the theatre; but there is only one Falstaff . The typical villain is everjrwhere rampant upon the boards; but there is only one lago. Indeed, so persistent and so permanent are the stock theatrical types that we have been in the habit of classifying all characters unhesitatingly as "leads," "heavies," "eccen- trics," "juveniles," "characters," "emotionals," "soubrettes," "ingenues," and so forth. Heroes and heroines in the older style of drama have usually been referred to as "straight" parts, in contradistinction to "character" parts or "eccen- trics." The tendency nowadays is to make every part in the play a "character" part, and so, in some measure at least, to individuaUze the "leads" out of the old wooden Indian manner. Necessarily, the characters in a play reveal themselves and cannot rely, as do the figures in a novel, upon the author's comment for their de- tailed portraiture. Upon what the character says and does, together with what other characters say 23 THE DRAMA TO-DAY about him and his reactions upon them, we base our opinion of him. We take nobody's word for what a character is, not even the word of the character himself. If others give him a definite reputation before he first appears, he must live up to that reputation or promptly lose it. If A describes B as amusing or entertaining, and B turns out to be a bore, we have no alternative but to accept B for what he really is and to regard the original estimate as a reflection on the taste of A. If it then develops that the author really intended B as a wit, we are likely to lose all faith in the characterization as a whole. In spite of the obviousness of this proposition, the characters in many plays fail to measure up to the estimates evidently placed upon them by their creators. The reason for this is to be found often in the exceedingly delicate relationship be- tween the characters and the plot. In writing a play, an author may adopt either of two plans: he may select a group of characters and allow them naturally and logically to evolve a plot; or he may invent a plot and into it insert a set of characters. When the latter course is followed, great vigilance 24 DEFINITIONS must be exercised to prevent the exigencies of the plot from forcing the characters into inconsistent conduct. The author has intended C to be an honest and a simple-hearted man; but unfortu- nately, to carry out the preconceived action, C must be made, abruptly and in violence to his proclaimed nature, to do an underhanded deed. If the playwright, either consciously or uncon- sciously, permits this to occur, he weakens, if he does not actually destroy, the audience's faith in all his characterizations. On the other hand, even an interesting and consistent set of characters may be portrayed in a plot that is weak and unattrac- tive. Plays of this nature occasionally succeed, as in the case of Pomander Walk and The Passing of the Third Floor Back. Plays of strong plot and illogical characterization — excepting sheer melo- drama and farce — succeed more rarely. Indeed, right portraiture of human nature is the chief requisite of true drama; though, of course, the great plays are those in which irreproachable characterization is joined with interesting action. The usual recipe for playwriting is to let the story come out of the characters, rather than to 25 THE DRAMA TO-DAY fit the characters into the plot. The aspiring author is told to get hold of a set of human beings, to imagine the things possible in their lives to- gether, and to select only what is dramatic from the material thus gathered, presenting it in the order of climax. Whether this course is always followed by successful dramatists may perhaps be doubted. The characters in Hamlet impress us first of all with their amazing truth to life and their utter consistency; and yet it is more than likely that Shakespeare took the plot of his play ready made and fitted his figures into it. As much may be said for many other dramatic masterpieces. After aU, the right inter-relation of characters and story is the prime essential, and the manner of attaining it is of slight importance. The chief medium through which the dramatist unfolds both characters and action is dialogue. Dialogue, however, is not the only medium. Some- times it is entirely lacking, in pantomime, such as L'Enfant Prodigue or Sumurun, without corre- sponding loss of dramatic effectiveness. Often the big moments in the action or the character- ization of a play are indebted solely to pantomime 26 DEFINITIONS for their revelation. On the stage, as elsewhere, actions speak louder than words. Miss Kite, in The Passing of the Third Floor Back, stealthily- exchanging her half-consumed candles for the new ones in her landlady's candlesticks, tells us more about her character than some pages of conver- sation could do. At the same time, her action has graphically revealed the nature of the boarding- house and also of Mary Jane. In the same manner, the manoeuvring of the various boarders for the easy chair and the evening paper is revelatory of character to a degree beyond the power of mere words. The successful dramatist, like the actor, must know the value of gesture, facial expression, eloquent silences, piercing glances, and all the many resources of skilful and telling pantomime. This is, in fact, chief among the characteristics that distinguish the drama from literature pure and simple, and that make the stage a source of emotions not obtainable from the printed page. Charles Lamb's paradox, declaring that the actual performance of Shakespeare's plays detracts from their potency, must be ascribed to the perversity of a Shavian moment. Dumas fits is nearer the 27 THE DRAMA TO-DAY truth when he relates how a word, a look, a gesture, a silence, a purely atmospheric combination, often held him spellbound. In true drama, both pantomime and dialogue should contribute, not only to the characterization, but, also to the action. The ideal dialogue is that in which every line is both characteristic of the speaker and accelerating to the plot. To be all this, dialogue must obviously be selective and condensed. It must be of ninety-nine per cent, efficiency. There must be no excess, no waste, no dead timber. The language chosen, indeed, must be more than merely denotative; it must be con- notative, highly charged with appropriate and illuminating suggestion. Hamlet's first speech, "A little more than kin, and less than kind," characterizes the speaker, adds its mite to the exposition, and so to a certain extent advances the story. Where there is this kind of dialogue mar- ried to concrete illustrative action, there is the foundation for the highest dramatic achievement. Augustus Thomas would require of every bit of dialogue that it should either "advance the story, promote the characterization, or get a laugh." A 28 DEFINITIONS speech that does all three is at least three times better than a speech that accomplishes only one of these aims. A word in passing on this important subject of "getting a laugh" in the theatre. If the sensa- tions accompanying laughter are emotional — some psychologists still regard this as a moot point — ^then the theatre manifestly fulfils its prime function when it produces a general cachinnation. Meredith tells us that true comedy awakens "thoughtful laughter"; and we can hardly deny the activity of the intellect in that form of humor which transcends the mere spontaneous guffawing of the rustic at the antics of the slapstick clown. One of Mr. Shaw's critics, in Fanny's First Play, expresses his contempt for the "crude mediaeval psychology of hearts and brains, this Shakespeare livers and wits"; perhaps we should learnedly assume a similar attitude. At all events, the unthinking laughter at mere horseplay is the least important kind, if the most readily excited. In the difference between thoughtless and thoughtful laughter lies the distinction between low and high comedy. 29 THE DRAMA TO-DAY The French speak of a laugh-producing element in the drama as a mot, and they differentiate three principal kinds. A simple witticism, merely adorning the dialogue and amusing in itself, is termed a mot d'esprit. A mot de situation owes its amusing quality to its peculiar position in the play; it would not be funny in itself, if uttered elsewhere. The wof de caractere provokes laughter by expressing something humorous in the indi- viduality of the person that utters it. Thus, when the rude mechanicals are presenting Pyr^mus and Thisbe, we smile at the wit of Theseus as he ob- serves that "Wall," having been cursed, and ' ' being sensible, ' ' should curse back. Next moment we laugh at Bottom's naive explanation that he was merely delivering "Thisby's" cue, because the weaver thus reveals his own amusing simplic- ity. The first is mot d'esprit; the second, mot de caractere. On the other hand, when the bewitched Titania awakes and becomes instantly enamored of the grotesque Bottom in the ass's head, our merriment is provoked by neither witticism nor character revelation, but by a ludicrous situation. Obviously, the wof d'esprit is the least, the mot 30 DEFINITIONS de caractere the most essentially dramatic. Your playwright may readily be conceived of as collect- ing specimens of the former in a convenient note- book, for use wherever they will fit in. The mot de situation, however, and especially the mot de caractere, must grow out of the very stuff of drama itself. It seems more than likely that much of the pleasure accompanying laughter springs from the self-satisfaction evoked by one's readiness to grasp a point, to "see the joke." Ability along this line at least causes a pleasing sense of superi- ority that tickles the vanity. Perhaps the clever laugh-getter should always carefully take into account this element of the weakness of human nature, and build his -mot, whether of wit, situa- tion, or character, accordingly. No chapter of definitions for the drama should close without reference to the conventions of the stage. The theatre, to begin with, is a place of illusion based on many conventions. Since we could not see through it, the fourth wall of the room exhibited on the stage has been removed, but we assume that it is still there. The actors usually face one way, "down," that is, toward the 31 THE DRAMA TO-DAY footlights; though real persons in a real room would do nothing of the sort. When they speak, they raise their voices above the customary pitch, yet we aU pretend not to notice this artifice. The suc- cess of the whole enterprise, in fact, depends upon the readiness of the audience to co-operate with the players in assuming that such and such nonen- tities exist and that certain other obvious realities, like the property man in the Chinese drama, have been temporarily excluded from the category of being. Moreover, the play itself, as well as the theatre, is utterly dependent upon a set of acknowledged conventions. It is a picture of life, but not a mere photograph. The principle of selection operates throughout. The trivial is omitted, and only the vital is allowed to remain. Tautologies and irrele- vancies, which make up so much more than haK of real life, are stripped away from both action and dialogue on the stage, regardless of the futile efforts of photographers like Granville Barker to include them. The non-essential has no' place in the drama: we merely agree not to note its helpful absence. 32 DEFINITIONS All the conventions, all these relationships between players and audience, have been much I influenced by the development of the theatre itseK. As is well known, in its evolution the play- house has had three or four principal forms. In the roofless Elizabethan theatre, the stage was a bare platform projecting into the midst of the audience. The actors, spouting their scarce- interrupted poetic narratives, were almost sur- rounded by spectators. The tennis-court theatre of Mojiere, although the stage was placed at one end of the room, was small and "intimate," with free passage between platform and parquet. As for the huge Drury Lane of Sheridan's time, with its broad-arched proscenium, its lamplit apron swept far out into the auditorium. To-day the drama is set in a brilhantly illuminated picture- frame, from which, except in the case of "freak" performances like Oliver Goldsmith, Sumurun, or The Royal Box, the players never emerge. However, whether or not in our day the actors and the audience ever come into such close per- sonal contact as of yore, their relationship remains vital and established. The fundamental is, always, 3 33 THE DRAMA TO-DAY that those who live to please must please to live; and the players never please, nor are the spectators ever satisfied, except when there is fuU co-operation between the two. The drama is an essentially democratic institution; aristocratic Weimar, like all other such experiments, was a failure. Author, manager, and actor find it the chief part of their business to organize the whole mass of playgoers into a vital and functioning audience. As Pro- fessor Brander Matthews puts it, the playwright and his coadjutors "must try to find the greatest common denominator of the throng." The basis of the co-operative relationship is supplied by the many tacit conventions of the theatre upon which is built up the essential illusion of reality. 34 II REALISM AND THE "LITERARY" DRAMA PRACTICALLY all fiction, from the begin- ning, has been made up of the struggles of a brave hero, who loves a fair heroine, and who is constantly being thwarted by a deep- dyed villain. It has been so in the drama, as in the novel, the epic, and the short story. The evolution of these forms has proceeded apace, without the loss of either of these three sine qua nons. There has been, however, a distinct change in the nature of these characters, particularly of the protagonist. The hero of olden times was a miracle- worker. He balked at no obstacle; and, though delayed, of course, long enough to furnish forth five acts, he always won a final and glorious tri- umph, even if in death. His bravery, his audacity, and his resources were, as a rule, entirely super- human. Naturally enough, he spoke a language appropriately elevated above the commonplace. He was, of coiu-se, an aristocrat hving in aristo- cratic surroundings. 35 THE DRAMA TO-DAY But times change, and the mevitable effect of the rise of democracy was the depression of the hero. When it was demonstrated that in real life the average man is the true hero, the hero quickly became an average man upon the boards. Ibsen portrays ordinary people and everyday life. The tragedy written to-day we scarcely recognize with- out the purple pall. It requires an effort even to classify Ghosts with (Edipus the King, much more to admit that The Easiest Way and Macbeth are specimens of the same genre. Yet they are all tragedy, depicting the violent yet unsuccessful struggle of human beings against impossible odds. The station of the struggler and the circumstances of the contest alone have changed. As Monsieur Maeterlinck expresses it: "Consider the drama that actually stands for the reality of our time, as Greek drama stood for Greek reality, and the drama of the Renaissance for the reality of the Renaissance. Its scene is a modem house; it passes between men and women of to-day. The names of the invisible protagonists — the passions and ideas — are the same, more or less, as of old. We see love, hatred, ambition, 36 LITERARY DRAMA jealousy, envy, greed; the sense of justice and the idea of duty; pity, goodness, devotion, piety, selfishness, vanity, pride, etc. But, although the names have remained the same, how great is the difference we find in the aspect and quality, the ex- tent and influence, of these ideal actors! Of all their ancient weapons, not one is left them, not one of the marvellous moments of olden days. It is seldom that cries are heard now; bloodshed is rare, and tears are not often seen. It is in a smaU room, round a table, close to the fire, that the joys and sorrows of mankind are decided. We suffer or make others suffer; we love, we die, there in our comer; and it were the strangest chance should a door or a window suddenly, for an in- stant, fly open beneath the pressure of extraordi- nary despair or rejoicing." This is, perhaps, an exaggerated statement of modem conditions, fitting somewhat more closely into Maeterlinck's scheme of things than into the general one. And yet it emphasizes effectively the great change that has come over the drama since Richardson and Fielding, Rousseau and Diderot set forth their doctrine of the democracy 37 THE DRAMA TO-DAY of fiction and the drama. With drama down from the pedestal, the protagonist, seen at close range, proves an ordinary mortal, differing only from his fellows in that he is temporarily singled out by the spotlight. We have cited Shakespeare as illustrating the old aristocratic idea; and yet Hamlet is, broadly speaking, a modem hero. Intro- spection is essentially destructive of heroism. Be- sides, Hamlet is only heroic, like the rest of us, by most infrequent fits and starts. Literary changes are for the most part revolu- tionary and extreme. From the old romantic, miracle-working dragon-slayer and lightning-defier, we have passed abruptly to the helpless and pitiable bourgeois uncomprehendingly foiled by an un- reasonable fate. The protagonist no longer fights with dragons; he "fights with microbes." The old simplicity of life has forever passed. Men can no longer absolutely determine the logic of events. Instead, the complexity of the workings of the law of cause and effect, in modem knowledge, grows apparently more baffling day by day. Naturally, poetic justice, with all its inherent satisfactoriness, is no longer pre-eminent, even in fiction, since it is 38 LITERARY DRAMA mostly inoperative in life. It would seem that the world has turned out to be, after all, a world of triviality, and that little things make up the real comedy and tragedy of existence. The dominant artistic note in a material age like our own is inevitably the note of realism. Realism has transformed modern literature, just as science and materialistic philosophy have trans- formed modem life. The drama, once a twin sister of epic poetry, is now divorced from litera- ture in the old-time sense of that word. Scholars and critics often disagree as to the actual relation- ship between the drama and literature. It appears, from the reading of many discussions, that there is much drama that is drama, and a quantity of drama that is really only literature — ^but very little that is both. After all, the fundamental distinction of litera- ture is form. Flawless structure, charming style, and sincere, perfect, individual treatment of the subject-matter are the qualities that differentiate literature from mere writing; and, as a matter of fact, there is much literature that is seriously lacking in the element of structure. The Two 39 THE DRAMA TO-DAY Gentlemen of Verona, even, among plays, or Love's Labour's Lost, is structurally deficient, yet poetic and "literary." Style alone often distinguishes literature. If it be so in the case of the drama, in what style should one write a literary play? You must have a good plot, consistent, logical, interesting, climactic. You must have this plot and the characterization — ordinarily — expressed in dialogue. But the characterization determines the form or the style of the dialogue. Your characters, if they are worth while, must say characteristic things in characteristic language. To give this language any unnatural elevation or adornment would be to insure failure in the realistic drama of to-day. Apparently, then, there is nothing that can be done with a modern realistic play that can essentially make it anything more than good acting drama, and that can carry it on over into the realm of "literature." Of course, stage conversation is highly artificial and not actually real at all; it is a shorn and trimmed verbiage, but yet shorn and trimmed with a view to the closest possible approximation of real-life talk. There is a wide difference between the modem 40 LITERARY DRAMA play and the poetic drama, just as there so often is a wide difference between a play and the opera based on it. Opera is drama with dialogue in music. Poetic drama is drama with dialogue in poetry. The modern realistic play is drama with dialogue in what seems to be the language of real life. The drama is, indeed, an art in itself, one which generally calls to its aid several other arts, but nowadays only rarely the art of letters, or at least of poetry. Now, poetry thrives chiefly on idealism, and the real and the ideal seldom har- monize. Occasionally we find a sporadic effort to combine for the stage the poetic and the realistic, as in the case of Mr. Hagedorn's Five in the Morning; but, from the standpoint of the stage, such attempts are significant only as failures. Mr. Percy Mackaye and some of our other writers for the stage whose gifts are in the direction rather of the poetic than of the dramatic, in adorning their plays with rhetorical ornament, usually suc- ceed in producing at best only "closet drama." Such plays are often lyric, idyllic, epic, — ^but rarely dramatic. As a matter of fact, in the sense of "poetic," 41 THE DRAMA TO-DAY there has been little or no strictly "literary" English drama for nearly two hundred years. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, such drama still survived in the works of Otway, Rowe, and Dryden. Within fifty years, however, it was extinct; spectacle and opera had replaced it. Dr. Johnson, in 1747, explained the transition in the prologue he wrote for Garrick-to deUver at the opening of Drury Lane: Then, crushed by rules and weakened as refined, For years the power of Tragedy declined: From bard to bard the frigid caution crept, Till declamation roared whilst passion slept. Yet still did Virtue deign the stage to tread; Philosophy remained though Nature fled. But, forced at length her ancient reign to quit. She saw great Faustus lay the ghost of wit: Exulting folly hailed the joyful day. And pantomime and song confirmed her sway. In other words, the excesses of pseudo-classicism finally squeezed the life-blood out of the poetic drama, leaving it a dry, dead husk, which music and the spectacular quickly swept aside. Meanwhile, the writing of plays did not cease. 42 LITERARY DRAMA Instead of poetic drama, however, acting drama was produced — plays intended solely to be per- formed, not at all to be read. These plays drew upon the scene-painter and the costumer, the musician and the producer, as well as upon the actor, for their completeness. Literature was not their object, though occasionally it was their accessory. But good plays, as has been suggested, might be reduced to pantomime without losing their dramatic quality. The litterateur and the playwright have, in the past, sometimes been com- bined in one; but they are usually separate and distinct to-day. History teems with examples of literary men who failed regularly at writing drama, and dramatists wholly devoid of literary gifts. To belittle either one for lacking the abilities of the other is beside the point. Such a policy argues confusion in the mind of the critic. The modem realistic drama has been divorced absolutely from literature, at least in the former and usual sense of that term. Moreover, the two cannot be re- united without distinct loss, if not disaster. This is no reason why play reading should not be pleasurable. But modern plays should be read 43 THE DRAMA TO-DAY as plays, with the eye of the imagination fixed upon their actual performance, and not measured by old-fashioned literary standards. The seven- teenth century spectator relished the union of rhetoric with the theatrical; he felt no resentment at the mingling of the epic, the lyric, and the didactic with the dramatic. Many plays which, in our own day, are considered strictly "closet dramas," — that is, plays for reading only, — ^were, or would have been, acceptable upon the stage of two hundred years ago. At the theatre to-day we want drama; in fact, we wiU pause for little else, except it be laughable, certainly not long for mere rhetoric or even for poetry. It would seem that all this must be self-evident; and yet there is much futile controversy, based chiefly upon loose definitions of the word "litera- ture." Somebody is perennially harking back to the "pahny days," and regretting that our stage no longer re-echoes solely to blank verse. Never- theless, even Shakespeare, whenever produced to-day, is almost invariably shorn of many de- scriptive and reflective passages. Shakespeare, indeed, lives upon the modern stage because his 44 LITERARY DRAMA dramatic power is too great to be quenched by his poetry. Of course, one realizes that poetry and drama are not in conflict in Shakespeare — that they co-operate and heighten each other, indeed. However, much this same relationship is maintained in the dramatic work of countless other authors, whose plays we cannot endure on the stage to-day. There is co-operation between the dramatic and the poetic in Cato and Sophonisba, in Tennyson's Queen Mary and SheUey's T/ie Cenci, in Stafford and A Blot in the 'Scutcheon and In a Balcony; but, in each of these plays, as in scores of others almost equally valuable from the literary standpoint, the quality that makes them readable quite overshadows such actable possibilities as they may possess. While poetry flows, too often action lags. And always "literary" speech is incompatible with the effect of realism demanded upon our stage to-day. As for the oft-reiterated declaration that "the real literary value of a play depends upon the sym- metry and strength of its skeleton and the vitality of its flesh and blood," rather than upon mere "verbal felicity in dialogue, a beauty that is only 45 THE DRAMA TO-DAY skin-deep," this dictum simply quibbles with the definition of "literature." In a large measure it disregards the fact that the same achievements that make certain novels, short stories, essays, and poems "literature" rather than mere writing do not make a play necessarily the best of drama. To say that The Thunderbolt is better dramatic litera- ture than Chantecler, "because it is more pro- foundly and consistently imagined, — in other words, more real," — ^is plainly to accept the term "lit- erature" in one significance, whereas a large proportion of critics take it in another and entirely different sense. The best way out of the difficulty is to acknowledge what grows more obvious day by day, that drama, perhaps beginning in, or at least early combining with, literature, has evolved into a separate art, stiU relying on literary elements, doubtless, but by no means exclusively, or even principally. Of course, the chief factor in this evolution of the drama into a distinct and separate art has been our latter-day realism, and a word concerning it will not be out of place in this discussion. Like aU other great literary movements, the realistic is 46 LITERARY DRAMA of a reactionary nature. Undoubtedly, it has arisen, in part, as a recoil from excessive romantic unreality. Has it, in its turn, become excessive? We know, for instance, that the stage in Shake- speare's day was a bare platform, which the imagi- nation of the spectator turned into any scene at will. To-day everything possible is done to relieve the audience's imagination of this responsibility. The tendency is distinctly away from the merely presentative and nearer to the representative. In short, since Ibsen at least, the theatre's aim has been the closest approximation of life. As a result of this, infinite pains are now lavished upon settings and costumes and properties, to make them accurate and complete and real. The stage is boxed in with side-walls and ceiling. "Practical" doors and windows and stairways are more or less solidified. Costume books are care- fully followed for historical accuracy. Real meals are served to players, who actually eat and drink. Real water tinkles over realistic stones. Real horses and automobiles are pressed into service. The knocked-out front wall of the footlights is even sometimes seriously treated as if it actually 47 THE DRAMA TO-DAY existed. And the actor himself makes an earnest endeavor to say and do things on the stage as they are said and done in real life. Yet, in spite of all this conscientious striving to make the stage approximate life, the theatre remains a place of illusion based on many conventions. There is a current anecdote in point which relates how once Sir Henry Irving at rehearsal upbraided a stage hand for the poor imitation of thunder the latter had produced. "Please, sir," replied the man, "that wasn't me that made the noise. It's the real storm out-doors: it's ragin' so 'ard I couldn't 'ear you tell me when to begin." AU sides of stage imitation of reality could be similarly illustrated. The Occidental, visiting for the first time the Chinese theatre, finds there much seriousness that is to him laughably absurd. He is intensely amused that a man astride a broom- stick is accepted for a cavaher on a charger, with- out the least strain upon the risibilities of the Oriental audience. Such a convention is, indeed, to the Western mind ridiculous. Shakespeare himseK keenly realized the absurdity of the stage hobby-horses of his own day, and sensibly avoided LITERARY DRAMA them, with obvious gains in artistic effectiveness. Yet it is equally undeniable that, if some tran- scendent superman, say from Mars or Jupiter, as far advanced beyond us in stagecraft as we are advanced beyond the Chinese, were to visit for the first time the most modern of our New York or London or Paris playhouses, he would undoubtedly find in their accepted conventions much matter to make his superior lungs tickle o' the sere. Indeed, they must crow like chanticleer at scores of stage tricks, stage surroundings, and stage illusions based on a traditional platform of mutual agree- ment between actors and audience. In other words, the approximation of life upon the stage is, at the very height of our twentieth century realism, only an approximation. We stiU are, and by the very nature of things always will be, far from presenting in the theatre actual, un- modified cross-sections of life. And we are also still capable of supplying imaginatively almost all the details which modem scene-painters, stage carpenters, and property men are so assiduous in representing for us. This fact is evidenced by the success of recent revivals of the Elizabethan stage 4 49 THE DRAMA TO-DAY conditions, as well as in the refonnative efforts of Professor Max Reinhardt and of Mr. Gordon Craig. Significant also is the effect produced by the pseudo-Chinese play, The Yellow Jacket, lately presented with that Oriental lack of solicitude for the realistic which so closely parallels the custom of the Shakespearean stage. In this play a typical Chinese story is told. Meanwhile, the property man, wearing black to signify that he is invisible, in bored languor smokes his cigarette, dusts the furniture, reads a newspaper, and eats rice with the aid of chopsticks, while the actors, of course ignoring him, proceed with the unfolding of the naive narrative. Everything is "make-believe": horses, trees, chariots, mountains, rivers, and all. A few chairs piled together constitute a boat, in which hero and heroine float idyllically down a flowery stream, propelled by two boatmen, who rhs^thmically pole the air with bamboo sticks. Of course, all this was primarily meant to amuse. But sooner or later the spectators forgot how incongruous it all was and found themselves ac- cepting as reality what was so slightly suggested to their imaginations. It merely serves to demon- 50 LITERARY DRAMA strate anew that the best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if the spec- tator's imagination amend them. After all, then, what is the ultimate value of this realism which has been so painstakingly acquired? Among the changes it has wrought in modern stagecraft is the elimination of the solilo- quy and the aside. Ibsen is declared to have soimded their death-knell. They are now very rare, at all events, though they do occasionally creep up into the light again. One of the successful younger English playwrights confesses that he often writes an entire scene merely to convey a bit of information that could be given to the audience in three lines of monologue. Doubtless, most playwrights of to-day could be induced to make similar admissions. But is it really worth while? Perhaps the gist of the matter lies in the fact that the soliloquy and the aside are literary, rather than realistically dramatic, by nature. The Abb^ d'Aubignac, in his Practique du ThMtre, declares that "it is sometimes very pleasant to see a man upon the stage lay bare his heart and speak boldly 51 THE DRAMA TO-DAY of his most secret thoughts, explain his designs, and give vent to all that his passion suggests." The stage is deeply indebted to this method of self -revelation: Hamlet and Orgon, lago, and even Brand, have in this facile manner let the audience into the secret, not only of their plans but of their souls. But in the modern reahstic drama the soliloquy and the aside are discarded as over-artificial devices. However, since upon the stage all else is ancil- lary to human character in conflict, it is perhaps somewhat difficult to say why, if some yards of painted cloth may satisfactorily represent the solid wall of a house or the ethereality of blue sky, some dozens of words spoken in assumed privacy may not equally weU represent unspoken thought. People in real life do sometimes soliloquize briefly. The English playwright before alluded to adds that he never permits his characters to speak more than "the three or four words that are wrung from isolated individuals in real life under stress of strong emotion." Just exactly what the extent of such real Uf e monologues may be, it seems, is difficult to determine. As a matter of fact, sticklers 52 LITERARY DRAMA for realism have utilized, first, the confidant, that convenient being into whose ears a character may loudly pour the information he intends for the audience; and, second, that equally convenient and overworked substitute, the telephone. But these devices, like the eavesdropper concealed behind the portieres, are disappearing. On the other hand, at least one time-honored convention, the conversation entirely audible to the spectators but unheard by other characters on the stage, still flourishes. As for the pantomime dialogue indulged in "up stage" by those not supposed to hear what is going forward nearer the footlights, it bids fair to survive indefinitely. Yet both of these ancient institutions are just as unreal as the soliloquy or the aside. It all comes back eventually to the fundamental fact that the illusion of the theatre is based upon many conventions. This was again illustrated when, in a recent elaborate revival of Julius Ccesar, the conduct of the mob was criticised. It was a large mob, and "it responded to the gestures of the orators with the swift obedience of an orchestra to the beat of the conductor's baton. 53 THE DRAMA TO-DAY It gesticulated and roared or subsided into para- lyzed silence at the recognized signal. Never, by any chance, did any ill-timed ejaculation obscure a syllable of the orator's speech. That the result," continues the reviewer, "was realistic, in a sense, need not be denied, but it created no illusion. Actual crowds do not behave in that way." Of course not. As a matter of fact, in the utmost achievement of modern theatrical realism, there is always something ridiculously incongruous if you choose to regard it so. The very unraised curtain annoimces it, with its painted velvet draperies, its painted picture frame and cords and tassels. And just behind the curtain stand the flat round-painted pillars of the proscenium, built of cloth marble. Then come the flat, round- painted canvas trees, the lath-ribbed rocks, the unconvincing grass, the houses with their earth- quake totter at the slamming of a door, the painted books on the painted shelves, the painted bottles in the painted laboratory, the all too obviously painted faces of the players themselves. And then the lights: the risings and settings of sun and moon! And how time flies! The stage clock 54 1 1 « « « LITERARY DRAMA strikes two separate hours in the space of twenty- minutes by your watch. How amusing we might find the efforts of the electrician to synchronize his lowering of all the lights with the player's extinguishing the single lamp supposedly respon- sible for the total illumination! How we might titter when the housemaid so ineffectually pokes the three dead logs in front of the red light in the fireplace! How we might giggle and spoil the scene even when Cyrano, delirious and dying, staggers against the tree and it threatens to fall on him instanter! But the point is, we do not laugh at these things. We accept them, we pass them over un- questioningly, because unconsciously we recognize them as merely time-honored conventions which alone make the illusion of the theatre possible. We accept them because we realize that they are insignificant, that the human thoughts and passions and struggles that come out through and in spite of them are the realities we are looking for, that the accessories amount to little, that the play's the thing. It is probable that, in any field, undue emphasis 55 THE DRAMA TO-DAY upon the unimportant brings evil consequences. We see this in our theatre to-day when we look on unconvinced at the striving after realism and wonderingly inquire, What is it? Reality — or just a game: to see how nearly actors, carpenters, scene-painters, and all can live up to certain long- established traditions that seek in vain to substi- tute for reality? It is particularly manifest in the art of acting itself. One evil that critics like to lay at the door of the star system is the managerial custom of presenting a given player in an endless series of pieces which only slightly vary the same theme and which present the star always in prac- tically the same old part. But is this not due in large part to the craze for the approximation of life? It is weU known that nowadays when an actor is engaged for a particular role the first question asked about him is not, Can he act? or. Does he know how to make up? but. Will he look the part? Now the range of parts which a player can "look" in propria persona is manifestly limited. As a consequence, versatility is hardly at a pre- mium, and no more is the very art of acting itself. As a matter of fact, there are more than a few 56 LITERARY DRAMA players on our stage to-day who do not act at all. No matter what the play he be cast in, John Smith, star, merely walks through his part in it as John Smith, yesterday, to-day, and forever. Of coiirse, his plays are all necessarily much of a muchness. The personaUty he puts over the footlights is the identical personality with which he meets his family and his friends. If by some accident he be thrown into a play where he must portray an entirely different character, he finds himself a sudden failure, and he is pronounced miscast. "Dramatic art," says Mr. A. B. Walkeley, "should express the conflict of wills, the clash of character upon character, the movement and in- finite variety of life at large, not the idiosyncrasies of this or that gentleman or lady who chances to be playing upon the stage of the moment." When the truth of this statement comes more into its own, when play producers take away the emphasis from stage realism and the approximation of life and place it where it so much more properly belongs, doubtless we shall have better acting and better drama. The play, being the thing, will achieve its full purpose unthwarted. And we 57 THE DRAMA TO-DAY shall stop doing on the stage what we are doing so much of in all life else, and that is, sacrificing the truth for what is merely fact. "Any vital school of drama," said Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, in a lecture delivered some years ago at Yale University, "is intimately connected with the daily lives of the people, and it is useless for Englishmen or Americans to hope for much poetry in their drama tiU they have put a little more into their lives, — that is, until the reign of onmipresent, omnipotent commercialism is at an end." However, Mr. Jones believes that our drama may again become literary, even if there be no hope for the founding of a new school of blank- verse playwriting. Drama must become literature, he says, to become permanent. And what he means by drama that is literature is explained as follows: "If you have faithfully and «earchingly studied your fellow-citizens; if you have selected from amongst them those characters that are interesting in themselves, and that also possess an enduring human interest; if, in studying these interesting personalities, you have severely selected, from the 5a LITERARY DRAMA mass of their sayings and doings and impulses, those words and deeds and tendencies which mark them at once as individuals and as types j if you have then recast and reimagined all the materials; if you have cunningly shaped them into a story of progressive and accumulative action; if you have done all this, though you may not have used a single word but what is spoken in ordinary Ameri- can intercourse to-day, I will venture to say that you have written a piece of live American litera- ture, — ^that is, you have written something that wiU not only be interesting on the boards of the theatre, but that can be read with pleasure in your Hbrary; can be discussed, argued about, tasted, and digested as literature." In other words, truly literary drama is essen- tially neither poetical nor rhetorical, but simply good drama — drama raised, as it were, to the nth. power. There is no reason, then, why the realistic works of Mr. Thomas or Mr. Ade, Sir Arthur Wing Pinero or Mr, Jones himself, should not be considered "literature," except in so far as they fall below the standards of the best dra- matic composition. Just what added value the 59 THE DRAMA TO-DAY label will give them it is difficult to conceive. Surely, as plain "drama" they would aU smell as sweet. Meanwhile, poetry superimposed upon realism wiU produce not dramatic literature but incongru- ity. As for the idealistic play in blank verse, that is an entirely different matter, one that we may safely leave to Mr. Stephen Phillips — ^better to Monsieur Edmond Rostand. They will make use of realism, certainly, only to temper the extrava- gances of the ultra-romantic. Finally, whether we call it "literary" or not, the highest achievement of the realistic dramatist of to-day, instead of depending primarily upon stage carpentry, will be the best possible play, both as to characters and as to plot, the dialogue of which is couched approxi- mately in the language such people would use in real life. For in this word "approximately" are summed up all the accepted conventions of select- ing and heightening and rendering effectual for stage purposes, upon which is based the indispens- able co-operative illusion of the theatre. 60 Ill THE AMERICANS THE first play written by an American and produced in America, it is said, was the tragedy The Prince of Parthia, by Thomas Godfrey, originally performed at the Southwark Theatre, Philadelphia, in April, 1767, by a company headed by Lewis Hallam. The author was an ambitious poet who died at an early age. His play, declared above mediocrity, formed an important part of the volume of his works published in 1765. Of the great flood of dramatic writing poured forth in this country from that time down to our own day the present chapter can say but little. It wiU be sufficient for its pur- poses to treat, at no great length and in scant detail, of a haK-dozen American playwrights of the last decade or two. The period of the American Civil War has been compared, with regard to its effect upon the native drama, to the period in which England was per- 61 THE DRAM 'A TO-DAY meated with a strong sense of national pride aroused by the victories of Elizabeth's reign. It will be recalled that, shortly after the death of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the defeat of the Armada, the chronicle play, dealing with English history, flourished. As Professor Baker has pointed out, this formless, pageant-like type of stage enter- tainment depended largely upon the general sense of exalted patriotism for its emotional effect. Accordingly, when, after the accession of James I, national pride decayed, the chronicle play lost its popularity, in part on this account. Similarly, after the Civil War, American audiences began to take kindly to a sort of modern chronicle play, composed of more or less detached episodes of the battlefield and of war-time. And then, with the ultimate passing of the strong feeling which so long survived the war, this loosely built drama disappeared. As in the time of King James, audi- ences began to insist upon some degree of unity and a carefully constructed plot; they began to demand plays creating their own emotional effect, without extraneous aid. In other words, both the chronicle play and the old-style war drama had to 62 THE AMERICANS be emotionally eked out by the latent patriotism of the spectators, in the same way that certain play- wrights and, notably, certain vaudeville performers of the present emotionally eke out their productions or then- "acts" with a display of the American flag. It is likewise asserted that, just as the foreign wars of Elizabeth's reign put an end to internal strife and gave the English nation a new sense of unity, so the brief conflict of America with Spain gave the former country a new realization both of its greatness and of its dangers. With a new self-criticism there should have arisen a new crea- tive activity; and the Spanish- America!! War, as an awakener of the national consciousness, like the defeat of the Armada, should have resulted in a greatly improved national drama. Whether or not this has been the case, it is certain that there has been much productivity displayed by American playwrights and an undoubted increase of power. The competition of the Continent, and especially of England, has been strong. The feat, too, of writing for an audience sparsely scattered over an enormous territory and inhabiting many distinct sections of a great country has been a difficult one. 63 THE DRAMA TO-DAY Naturally, the playwright has been limited to a fairly general appeal. It has been almost as if he wrote not for one separate nation but for a large group of nations. To please and satisfy New England and New York, Texas and California, all at the same time, is a very different matter from writing for England alone, or for France alone, or for Germany merely. Glancing down the list of playwrights who have flourished in America since the Civil War, one singles out first of aU the name of Bronson Howard. The most significant specimen of his dramatic output is The Henrietta, perhaps the original of a long line of characteristic American dramas of business. It is, however, distinctly Victorian and mixed in its moral as weU as its artistic value. Nevertheless, as a tragedy of com- mercial speculation, it stands for the discovery of that new romance of WaU Street and of the millionaire of which we have since heard so much. In Shenandoah, Howard contributed also one of the earliest of the loosely knit and episodic Civil War plays. The chief continuator in this line has probably been William Gillette. 64 THE AMERICANS Held by the Enemy is a decided advance in the direction of the more compact Civil War play. Indeed, the symmetry of this and other of Mr. Gillette's deservedly popular melodramas has been criticised as being somewhat too marked: there is evidently artificial balance in the regular alter- nation of comic and of thrilling scenes, whereby the story is repeatedly halted for the sake of humor. The method is old-fashioned. Constructive solilo- quies and asides and immotivated exits and en- trances abound. Secret Service, while sharing in aU these defects, is yet a well built melodrama, even though at the eleventh hour a properly tragic is contorted into a conventionally "happy" ending. In the progress of dramatic technique, however, Mr. Gillette occupies a place among the forerun- ners of modern visual reaUsm, as substituted for the old-style rhetorical drama. He was one of the first to appreciate the effectiveness of pantomime, which he skilfully employed in numerous instances, such as the scene in the last act of Secret Service, where the old negro servant laboriously removes the buUets from the cartridges that are presently to be fired at the hero. Mr. Gillette's chief limita- 5 65 THE DRAMA TO-DAY tions as a playwright are largely connected with the fact that his distinctly story plays — always either melodrama or farce — ^were aU written to suit his own phlegmatic personality, and so contain each a hero who is extraordinarily calm under the most agitating circumstances. Like the author of Caste, he is a master of the theatre, rather than of life, and in this respect differs from his more significant contemporary, Bronson Howard. In a third notable American we have an inter- esting compound of something of Howard's vera- cious observation with much of Mr. Gillette's theatricism. The untimely death, a few years ago, of Clyde Fitch cut short a career marked by great theatrical versatility and photographic power. About sixty-six plays in twenty years comprise his output. He rarely failed of an interesting episode, though he never succeeded in giving to any of his work a high degree of unity of effect and significance. The variety of his scenes and characters is admirable; but always there is a lack of emotional depth and of intellectual power. As a natural result, with almost no exceptions. Fitch's 66 THE AMERICANS plays deal with themes of limited appeal, handled in a shallow, not to say superficial, manner. Vivac- ity they have, and cleverness; sharp and telling strokes of characterization abound; and occasion- ally scenes, such as in the third act of The Girl with the Green Eyes, stand out clearly as evidences of true dramatic power. Clyde Fitch began his work as a dramatist in 1890 with Beau Brummel, which achieved a much- heralded success. He was then twenty-six years of age, and he died in his forty-fifth year. Beyond question, much of his work is flimsy and ephemeral. At first, as in The Moth and the Flame and A Modern Match, he was for the most part conventional. Beginning with The Climbers, however, in 1901, his first nights ofifered a series of surprises, such as the opening of a play with a party of women returning from a funeral, the folding-bed scene in The Girl and the Judge, the Cook's tourists before the Apollo Belvedere in The Girl with the Green Eyes, the scene on the ocean liner in The Stubborn- ness of Geraldine, and the christening party in The Way of the World. True, these novelties were gen- erally unessential to the real action of the play, but 67 THE DRAMA TO-DAY they were presented with so much dash that one scarcely noted their irrelevance. Fitch was pri- marily a genial entertainer, who rarely hesitated to check the current of a play for the purpose of introducing either an amusing or an amazing scene or a scintillant epigram. His irony, being for no more serious purpose than entertainment, was never mordant. Indeed, this playwright was that almost imique phenomenon, the modern dramatist who never takes himself over-seriously. This is, perhaps, a pity, since a more profound sense of the value of his work might have led him to that painstaking revision and compression his plays so obviously lack. Before his untimely death, Clyde Fitch said that The City was his best play. It is undoubtedly striking, but it falls short of greatness because of his usual defect — a lack of unity in development as well as in theme. The underlying proposition is that life in a small town does not search out a man's soul or accentuate both his strength and his weakness as does life in the city. And yet the striking part of the play is but remotely connected with this theme, and depends upon a secondary 68 ^ THE AMERICANS plot for its effectiveness. And this secondary plot is a mere remoulding of the age-old story of un- conscious incest, handed down to us from the Attic drama. Hannock, an illegitimate son of George Rand, Sr., and a degenerate drug fiend, secretly marries Cicely, Rand's daughter. Immediately after the ceremony the bridegroom is informed by George Rand, Jr., of the unguessed consanguinity. In a scene of high-piled melodramatic horrors, Hannock kills Cicely and is barely prevented by her brother from committing suicide. With the exception of this thrilling episode, the play is one of serious dignity; but the rest of it seems dull in comparison with this "big" and non-essential moment. In The City, as in a long list of plays preceding it, the author displayed his fertility in stagecraft. In the first act, for example, the story is continued for some minutes by voices "off," while the stage itself remains empty. George Rand, Sr., has sud- denly died, and we hear the resultant confusion in his household, rather than see it. Again, in Act III, in order to get rid of a broken window, through which a pistol has been hurled at the close of Act 69 THE DRAMA TO-DAY II, the playwright turns the room about and shows another part of it. But clever stagecraft and dexterous dialogue do not compensate for divagations from the theme, consequent looseness of structure, and lack of sure- ness in characterization, at least in the case of important male figures. Women Fitch understood and could draw unusually weU, though often his greatest success is in mere vignettes of minor characters. His leading men, however, are likely to waver and to be subjected rather ruthlessly to the exigencies of the plot. George Rand, Jr., is an uncertain figure, when compared with the well drawn Hannock and the women of The City. As a photographer and a scene-builder. Fitch was extraordinarily expert. His work was lacking, however, both in high purpose and sjTnmetrical plan. If Bronson Howard inaugurated and Clyde Fitch advanced our one distinct American type of drama, the play of business and politics, it has remained for Charles^ Klein to lead in the further development of this genre. The American stage early turned reaUsm to journalistic uses. As 70 THE AMERICANS "muck-raking" became the rage in the newspaper world, so it waxed predominant behind our foot- lights. The B attle was a journalistic exploitation of the model tenement reform; The^Man of the HowF,'oi municipal corruption; The Dawn^of a Tiii^orrQifi^joi optimism as a panacea; The Easiest Way, of the social evil; The Third Degree, of modem police torture for confessions often false; The Lion and the Mouse, of the ruthlessness of "big business." Charles Klein is, in fact, our leading journalist of the stage. One of the pioneers in the "muck-raking" movement began with a searching expose of Stand- ard Oil and its methods. This work inspired The Lion and the Mouse, an extraordinarily uneven, as it has been an extraordinarily popular, play. Its plan is the usual one adopted by this author: it has a theatrical plot of cumulative intensity, to which characterization is frequently sacrificed along with both ethics and the probabilities. The manner in which the daughter of the wronged man Ijpcomes a part of the household of her father's oppressor, for example, is entirely incredible; yet it makes the opportunity for the tensely emotional 71 THE DRAMA TO-DAY "big scene." When this is rounded off with a conventional "happy ending," made possible by preposterous personal reforms, we have obviously journalistic melodrama, perhaps of admirable mechanism, but achieving no reflection of actual life. When Mr. Klein attempts to eltnbody the con- flict of labor and capital in The Daughters of Men, his highly artificial method fails of that convinc- ing characterization which alone could make the struggle interesting, as it has done in the case of Mr. Galsworthy's Strife. The Gamblers is an im- provement, in structure at least, upon The Lion and the Mouse, though less effective than The Third Degree. The exigencies of the "popular demand" seem always to hamper Mr. Klein in his treatment of themes essentially tragic. What he might be capable of, were he to carry out his stories to their inevitable conclusions, developing them by means of relentlessly consistent character- ization, is a matter for interesting speculation. Doubtless, we should then have from his pen more worthy modem successors to The Henrietta. Mr. George" H. Broadhurst is another writer 72 ' THE AMERICANS who has contributed to the drama of business and politics, at least in The Man of the Hour. The muck-rake is here plunged into that most putres- cent of American corruptions, graft-ridden munic- ipal government. The dramatic possibilities are, of course, endless. Mr. Broadhurst realizes them in part, not so touch in the moralistic attitude of Mr. Klein, but rather from the detached stand- point of the writer of comedy. At least, humor is the saving grace of this melodrama of overcrowded incident; just as it is the redeeming feature of Bought and Paid For. The author of The Lion and the Mouse usually errs through excessive theatri- cality. The writer of such amusing farces as What Happened to Jones and Why Smith Left Home is subject to the same defect, but he frequently covers it, in plays primarily intended to be serious, with a great deal of clever, though non-essential, diversion. The theme of Bought and Paid For, for instance, the rebellion of a sensitive feminine nature against the demands of a husband made brutish by alcohol, is a fundamentally tragic one, and yet the play attained its extreme popularity chiefly on the strength of its comic relief. The characters 73 THE DRAMA TO-DAY are for the most part commonplace, not to say disgusting: the husband, in his cups and after the first act at least, is a maudlin ruffian; the sister is coarse-grained and shallow; the "friend" is cowardly and abject; the plot itself is repulsive to a degree — ^yet it aU ends as happily as does, say, The Lion and the Mouse or The Third Degree. As a matter of fact, inasmuch as Robert Stafford and Virginia Blaine, for plot purposes only, are forced to sacrifice their humanity. Bought and Paid For is clearly melodrama, based upon sentimentality. But in James Gilley we have an extraordinarily amusing character study, a selfish, iU-bred bounder, who proves actually lovable for his good-humored frankness; and this figure, perhaps after aU a quite impossible one, saves the play. An equally amus- ing character, instead of the very few comedy lines contributed by the younger brother in Joseph MediU Patterson's drama of similar story. Rebel- lion, might have won for that technically superior, if over-didactic, play a popularity as signal as that of Bought and Paid For. Mr. Patterson's play, however, is intensely serious and frequently so argumentative as to give the effect rather of debate 74 THE AMERICANS merely than of drama. It is at least commend- able for its consistent narrative unity. Of the two writers, Mr, Broadhurst is thus far the more successful in the building of plots, while Mr. Patterson possibly excels in the depicting of seri- ous character. Not that Mr. Broadhurst's poli- ticians, for instance, are not excellent; still most of his main figm-es are wooden, particularly his women. Usually excelling both these playwrights on both scores is Mr. Augustus Thomas, He first became a definite figure in the world of the theatre through the writing of such racy and atmospheric melodramas as Alabama and Arizona. It was once said that he purposed going through the entire list of the forty-odd States in the Union alphabetically, writing a play for each State. Apparently this interesting project met shipwreck when it had proceeded no further than Colorado. Alabama is in the good old tradition, leisurely and familiar, though enlivened by several interest- ing Southern types. Arizona is more compact and tense. As in melodrama generally, however, the plot here sometimes depends for its success upon 75 THE DRAMA TO-DAY its speed in passing over weak places which, if dwelt upon, might bring disaster. Merely — and most naturally — ^looking for Denton's .44 bullet in the floor, at the climax of Act III, not only would save probing for the Mexican's .38 bullet in the villain Hodgman, but would bring about a much prompter denouement. The author, however, loses no time in getting us out of the room where the two shots were fired. Of late years Mr. Thomas has turned his atten- tion to the expounding of a philosophy, which appears to be a mixture of determined modem optimism and the equally modem scientific treat- ment of unplumbed mental phenomena formerly classed as occult. In The Witching Hour, for instance, we have an exploitation of thought as a dynamic force partaking of the nature of action. In The Harvest Moon the theme is, similarly, the suggestive influence of environment upon charac- ter. Because of this singleness of theme, both of these plays are technically superior to As a Man Thinks, which loses effectiveness by not concen- trating upon one idea. The power of thought is again exploited, but at least two other distinct 76 THE AMERICANS themes are present: the Jew in modern New York society and the "double standard" of morals. If this play had been confined to an exposition of the poison of hatred and its antidote, forgiveness, it would perhaps have ranked above any of its pre- decessors. In fact, Mr. Thomas, in much of his work, displays not only a high purpose but a mastery of dramatic technique so far attained by no other American, and as yet surpassed in England only by Pinero. To illustrate, one need only refer to the superb manner in which the gradual exposi- tion in As a Man Thinks is managed through scenes where characters, coming and going, engage in a general dialogue; the skiUul way in which the author connects aU the expository lines with Bur- riU's two figurines; the resourceful motivation of the entrances and exits; and the extraordinarily realistic effect of the dialogue itself, fragmentary and discursive as in real life, and yet always dramatic and always advancing the plot. The number and the quality of the successes of Mr. Thomas are matched only by the number and the quality of his failures. Within a short period after the revelation of so workmanlike a 77 THE DRAMA TO-DAY drama as As a Man Thinks, he has offered so antiquated and so puerile an effort as The Model, first presented as When It Comes Home. Here in what is apparently, though not credibly, the mature work of the leading American dramatist we have the long-lost daughter of The Music Master and untold other plays, and the old-time villain of the naiver melodrama, practising his wily seductions upon the innocent heroine, whose vocation of posing in the altogether to painters is, of course, misinterpreted greatly to her disadvan- tage. An almost equally pronoimced failure was this play's immediate successor. M ere M an, a comedy displaying all the faults Mr. Thomas has so often and so skilfully avoided. Intended as a blow at woman suffrage, the play involves itself in various other topics and, from a confused ex- position, develops an incoherent and inconclusive story. In Arizona Mr. Thomas contributed an impor- tant item to that long list of Western plays, chiefly melodramas, originating in the frontier romances of Bret Harte. The Heir to the Hoorah, Salomy Jane, and The Girl of the Golden West are easily 78 THE AMERICANS remembered titles in this group. Doubtless the most important of these cowboy and mining-camp stories is the late William Vaughn Moody's The Great Divide. Indeed, this melodrama was for a time hailed as that nebulous desideratum, the "great American drama," more than one critic declaring it the inevitable forerimner of a new native stage literature. It is, indeed, with certain important exceptions, an effective, if occasionally crude and unpoetic, treatment of a vital theme. Originally entitled A Sabine Woman, it teUs the story of the brutal domination of the heroine by the hero, who, having saved her from outrage at the hands of two other roisterers, leads her, with no choice, to the nearest magistrate. The "great divide" is the boxmdary between Ruth Jordan's Eastern refinement and Stephen Ghent's Western primitiveness. When Ruth's puritanical brother learns the facts of the marriage, he is for killing her husband. Her mother tells Ruth she should have kiUed herself. The girl, however, lives to learn that, when the "great divide" has finally been crossed, life looms larger for her than ever before. This happy ending has been denounced 79 THE DRAMA TO-DAY as illogical and deplorable. Mother Grundy has been deferred to, certain critics also insist, in the matter of the marriage that closes the first act: in real life Stephen Ghent would not have taken the trouble this formality involved; and, if he had done so, the woman, being what she was and feeling as she did, would have at once appealed to the justice of the peace for protection against the brute who was forcing her into an utterly abhor- rent union. When The Great Divide was recently produced at the Theatre des Arts in Paris, under the title of Les Deux Versants, Monsieur Robert de Flers, who is one of the most brilliant and promising of the younger French playwrights, wrote in Le Figaro of the first performance: "To encounter this struggle of nature against society, one need not go to the mountains of Ari- zona; it may be found anywhere, and it is in the strict French romantic tradition. However, this eternal conflict is sharper, more brutal, and more moving in the two localities where W. Vaughan {dc) has placed his action, and so the subject he has chosen could have much grandeur and poig- 80 THE AMERICANS nant intensity; but it has been treated without audacity and without authority, with uncertainty and awkward complications. The Westerner, who symbolizes unconquered and primitive nature, be- comes civilized too quickly and too completely. The cowboy is transformed into a Celadon. He begins by forcibly abducting a woman of much charm, but he is presently only a very gentle and inoffensive chap. Thenceforward one sees quite readily that the Eastern heroine will eventually be attracted by him and will give him her love." Nevertheless, here is a virile play, wherein life- like and well contrasted characters enact moving scenes. In spite of its improbability, the final reconciliation of Stephen and Ruth is a notable passage in our stage writing. The dialogue, too, is simple, natural, and compact; while the theme — the lifting of a man from brutality to nobility through the power of earthly love — is always material for drama. It is to be regretted that, in his second play, The Faith Healer, Moody relapsed into the non-objective. The impression produced by a dramatic struggle which is not por- trayed in action is inevitably vague and unsub- 6 81 THE DRAMA TO-DAY stantial. The Faith Healer lacks the qualities which so well adapted The Great Divide to the stage; it is "literary," a notable example of poetic prose, essentially a closet drama. Another American writer whose gift of style overshadows his dramatic power is Mr. Percy Mackaye. In Jeanne d'Arc, Fenris the Wolf, The Canterbury Pilgrims, Mater, Anti-Matrimony, The Scarecrow, and To-morrow he has produced a series of plays either frankly in verse or in highly orna- mented prose, aU of them delightful to read and aU strangely lacking in effectiveness for the stage. In fact, over-elaborate dialogue, as well as defec- tive structure, militates against this author's suc- cess. Jeanne d'Arc, for example, though it admir- ably portrays the peasant heroine of Domremy, does so, after the manner of the Elizabethan chronicle play, in a series of scenes not unified by any definite and single action. The Canterbury Pilgrims, likewise, is more pageant than comedy, better adapted to the greensward than to the foot- Hghts — ^better still, perhaps, to the closet. In Anti-Matrimony the author's skill in literary sat- ire is directed against various topics dear to the 82 THE AMERICANS writers of modern "problem plays," such as free love and exuberant individualism. The plot is extravagant and illogical, degenerating at length into a fantastic travesty upon Rosmersholm. In To-morrow, Mr. Mackaye has classed himself with the authors ridiculed in Anti-Matrimony, by at- tempting a dramatic presentment of the problem of eugenics. His idea is to apply to man the prin- ciples of scientific horticulture — to "Burbank" the human race. Obviously not new, this subject is incapable of dramatic illustration. It has been given a theatrical setting, developed in over- elaborate and didactic dialogue. The central situ- ation, wherein the hero, to save the heroine from her infatuation for the unwholesome lover she has selected, hurls him over a cliff into the sea, like the majority of such melodramatic acts of physical violence in serious plays, does not grow at all logically out of the characters. The last act of the play, too, grossly violates fundamental dramatic principles, not only in the method of reaching the solution, but also in the matter of its ill-distributed emphasis. Very different from the author of To-morrow 83 THE DRAMA TO-DAY are Messrs. Edward Sheldon and Eugene Walter, who stand among our leading continuators of the ultra-realistic tradition founded by the late James A. Heme. He, it will be recalled, blended humor and pathos, somewhat after the manner of Mr. James Whitcomb Riley, in a series of repressed and homely dramas of rural naturalism, including Hearts of Oak, Shore Acres, Sag Harbor, and Margaret Fleming. The aim of this noteworthy pioneer was, of course, the exact reproduction of the particular. Everybody well remembers how the characters in Shore Acres, for instance, actually roasted and ate a real turkey on the stage. The significance to art of this detail is doubtless a matter of question. Certainly no possible agglom- eration of similar particulars can be expected to reflect life as a whole. Inevitably, it makes for the narrow instead of the broad outlook. At aU events, both Mr. Sheldon and Mr. Walter assiduously cultivate actuality in their plays, going for their subject-matter to the com- monplace and even to the repellent, and presenting their narratives by means of action and dialogue closely observed and copied from everyday life. THE AMERICANS The same negative qualities likewise characterize the work of both authors, if in different degrees. Though each is faithful to fact in the details of incident and speech, he is also frequently incon- sistent in the development of his characters and the construction of his plots. The familiar evil genius of theatricism, in fact, and of conventional theatri- cism at that, has too often operated to mar the work of the very playwrights who aim above all things else to be inevitably real. Mr. Walter is known chiefly for his three suc- cessful plays, Paid in Full, The Easiest Way, and Fine Feathers. In Paid in Full he starts out with the very modern and very general problem of living according to latter-day standards upon an inadequate income. Much as Mr. Broadhurst does in Bought and Paid For, and as Sir Arthur Pinero does in Mid-Channel, as Clyde Fitch does in The City, and as scores of lesser lights have done in scores of other plays, however, Mr. Walter here quickly throws his initial problem overboard and launches into a conventional, if rugged and brutal narrative. It is the old story of the plot-ridden characters who, instead of doing the inevitable 85 THE DRAMA TO-DAY things that would result from all the conditions according to the logic of life, do the usual things which are merely theatrically effective according to the quite different "unlogic" of the footUghts. Before we have progressed far into Act II we have broken with our fundamental social and economic problem — one, besides, that teems with unexplored dramatic possibilities — and we are deep in the old, old melodrama of the woman tempted to sacrifice her honor to save a man from ruin. To Mr. Walter's credit, be it said immediately, however, that he does not always allow conven- tionality to force him into that most inexcus- able of theatrical makeshifts, the illogical "happy ending." Indeed, when he gets out of the tragic genre, he is likely to go to pieces. Just a Wife is a remarkably poor example of writing for the stage, a play of incredible plot, strained dialogue, and almost no action. The Easiest Way is the tragedy of Laura Murdock, an attractive young woman who, having been handicapped with a bad start in life, is inspired by an honest love to a brave struggle to lift herself out of the mire, but who eventuaEy succumbs to a conspiracy of opposition. 86 THE AMERICANS In spite of the vast difference between them as women, the warfare of Antigone's self-will with regulations human and divine is no more hopeless than that of Laura Murdock against the cumulative power of environment and the weakening forces set to work within her own nature. It is the story of the gradual decay and dissolution of a human soul, struggling, faltering, failing. And this story is told with a simplicity, a concentration, and a searching analysis that make one throb with pity for the wretched figure writhing upon the rack of circimistance. Laura Murdock's lover, however, was not the manly Westerner the author would have her — or us — ^believe him. His Alaskan venture is an almost unpardonable expedient for leaving the girl alone to fight her losing battle. Considering their ambition for decency, why they did not settle down in Denver on a reporter's twenty-five dollars a week cannot be satisfactorily demonstrated. But then there would have been a very different play. And even when John " made his pile," as Klondyjjfe's always do in fiction, he lost much invaluabl* time before conveying to Laura the 87 THE DRAMA TO-DAY financial assistance he should have feared she needed. Neither theme nor story, moreover, is exceptionally novel. Certainly The Easiest Way bears to Pinero's Iris a resemblance more striking even than does Bought and Paid For to Matemite or Smith to The Walls of Jericho. In Fine Feathers, Mr. Walter has once more utilized actuaUty to enforce a momentous moral. In a sense, this drama is The Easiest Way over again, with a man for a protagonist. Once more we have that distinctly modem sort of tragedy which springs from incessant vexation with the petty discomforts of poverty in a world where riches serve as the key to increasing luxury. A man subject to this wearing annoyance, reinforced as it is by his desire to provide ease and pleasure for his relentless young wife, is tempted to misuse the authority of an underpaid position. He lets second-grade cement go into the construction of an immense dam. By so doing he acquires forty thousand dollars, a sum which enables him to ex- change a stuffy bungalow for a Long Island villa. But his conscience prods him incessantly. Through loss he sinks to blackmail. When high water at 88 THE AMERICANS length puts the dam to the test, and it goes out, carrying with it hundreds of hves, Bob Reynolds, crazed with despair and realizing to the full that "there are some men who can't do a wrong and get away with it," since "the wrong always gets them," ends his wasted life with a pistol shot. Mr. "Walter's handling of this notable theme is, of course, photographic and not at all subtle. He has not succeeded in abolishing his tendency to the merely theatrical, and his efforts to gain sym- pathy for his hero are largely unavailing. His villain is of the old-fashioned, unadulterated type of scoundrelism, and the comic relief still shows a tendency to get in the way of the plot. Neverthe- less, the playwright has here undoubtedly por- trayed spiritual conflict forcefully and sincerely. Of hke attainments in the realm of the realistic, but of considerably more uneven performance, is Mr. Edward Sheldon. His first play. Salvation Nell, revealed his close observation and his sense of fact. Like many another realist, however, in more demesnes than that of the stage merely, Mr. Sheldon has .often mistaken superficial fact for the deeper-seated truth. Coupled with this failing 89 THE DRAMA TO-DAY is a marked tendency to present outworn theatrical situations in a grandiose style. In The Nigger, perhaps the most pretentious of this writer's works, we have the material for essential tragedy, offered first in the form of crude melodrama and later dwindling into platitudinous and anti-climactic talk. The play is founded upon an incredible major premise, devised obviously for the mere sake of a "big scene." In The Boss the tendency to utilize hackneyed situation and insufficiently moti- vated incidents becomes yet more marked. There is again much that is theatrically effective, but very little that is actually representative of life. The main elements of the plot, the heroine's mar- riage and her subsequent falling in love with her husband, are quite unbelievable. The strongest scene in the play slips at last into a melodramatic Richelieu speech of excommunication. , It is pleasant to note, in this connection, that, with his recently produced drama, A Man's Friends, Mr. Ernest Poole has achieved a treat- ment of the modern political boss that is sincere and genuine throughout. As usual the unscrupu- lous leader here is opposed by an honest district 90 THE AMERICANS attorney, but the conflict and its termination are by no means of the time-honored sort. Because the characters are vital, the plot is unhackneyed. Puppets always play the old stage tricks, but real men and women do the works of reality. As for Mr. Sheldon, in such products as Egypt and The High Road, plays intended to give scope to the abihties of two of our foremost living ac- tresses, his old failings become so pronounced as almost to neutralize his excellences. The former piece is a mere patchwork of antiquated characters, situations, and phrases from melodrama, from the long-lost daughter carried off by the gypsies and restored to her father after many years, to the ancient crone of the virulent curses and the glitter- ing eye. Opulent staging and the best of interpre- tation could not save such a fabric of fustian. As for The High Road, it is similarly conventional, if in a less degree. The plot — that of the country belle who goes to the wicked city with a gay de- ceiver, later marries a good man, and is found out by her sin at a crucial moment in his career — is one that many other playwrights have dealt with, particularly in recent years. The Woman and The 91 THE DRAMA TO-DAY Price, for example, are of this ilk, not to go back so far as to Hazel Kirke, or even to Mrs. Dane's Defense. The characters and the dialogue as well, in The High Road, are distressingly antique, while the^ heroine's about-face from a whole-hearted absorption in art to an abrupt humanitarianism is far from suiiiciently motivated. The play natu- rally disappoints, too, when we are shown a prospec- tive president of the United States, with his wife of the shady past, combining in a schoolboy plot to foil the blackmailing viUain. Mr. Sheldon displayed such vigor and promise in his earlier work that much has been expected of him since. If his future dramatic writing were to continue so far below his own earlier level as Egypt and The High Road, the American stage would thus undoubtedly suffer by one more case of arrested development. Fortunately for all con- cerned, however, this author has more recently produced, as his third offering of a single season, a much more acceptable play, bearing the signifi- cant title, Romance. Here, for once, the purely photographic is laid aside, along with much of the purely theatrical; and actual poetic feeling is at 92 THE AMERICANS times made manifest. Prologue and epilogue are of to-day, but the main action takes place in the seventies, dealing with the infatuation of an ardent young clergyman for a capricious Italian prima donna. As is the case with so many sister heroines of latter-day plays, this diva's past proves a luxury for which she must pay by renouncing her lover in his own behalf. He, meanwhile, has passed from a mad endeavor to save her soul to an even more insane desire incontinently to possess her. But he is destined to become the good bishop of the rather superfluous prologue and epilogue, and to learn of the once lovely CavaUini's death in Italy, just after he has finished recounting his life-story to a grandson who repeats history with his infatuation for an actress. As for its atmos- phere and the calling of its heroine, Romance bears a marked resemblance to Clyde Fitch's Captain Jinks. The main situation of the impetuous priest and the fair sinner, besides, the experienced theatre- goer has long since numbered among his old friends. Yet the play as a whole is stamped with its author's individuality, and it reveals him in a new and promising light. 93 THE DRAMA TO-DAY No discussion of our recent realistic drama would be complete without reference to Mr. Charles Kenyon's three-act play of life in the slums, produced with Miss Margaret lUington in the leading part, under the title of Kindling. Here is a drama of unquestioned power and sincerity, as it is of distinctly unpleasant subject-matter. How it was kept alive by the determined and generous efforts of art-loving playgoers is well known. Doubtless, if the author had expended as much talent as he has here displayed, upon characters and surroundings more inherently attractive, he would have won a more pronounced victory. As it is, he has produced a moving and a well-built play, as free from mawkish sentimentality as it is instinct with true feeling. In characterization, too, Kindling is remarkably successful. If the stevedore and his wife be glorified somewhat above actuality, such idealization is of a sort that may be gladly welcomed. Indeed, realism can never achieve the largest measure of success until it adopts those principles of selection, proportion, and emphasis which other schools of dramatic writing have so long ago tried and proved. 94 THE AMERICANS It will be seen that the achievements of the American theatre thus far noted are principally in the direction of that most facile of the dramatic categories, the reahstic melodrama. Everywhere the quest is for novelty, for striking situations, for that natural son of "yellow journahsm," the "punch," and for mere slavish photography. Perhaps, after aU, the most typical exponent of such national drama as America thus far boasts is Mr. David Belasco. This "wizard of the stage" triumphs through an actual subordination of the dramatic to the merely pictorial, and so is always laboring to establish a false standard of art. Naturally, he is the playwright of the ephemeral. He attains his "effects" through a most sedulous attention to details. He carries this policy to the extreme, — ^for instance, of accurately labelling the nursery stock shown in the setting of The Return of Peter Grimm, not for the benefit of the audience, since the labels are much too small to be read across the footlights, but "for the reaction such faithful accuracy wiU have upon the players themselves." In other words, Mr. Belasco apparently seeks to make his actors forget that they are on the stage, 95 THE DRAMA TO-DAY in order that "real life " may be the more absolutely approximated. If he were equally careful and equally capable in the matter of discerning the truth of the figures and the incidents he portrays, his value to dramatic art would be a himdredfold greater. As it is, the magic of his wand rarely evokes anything more noteworthy than inherently false incidents glozed over with an amazing air of actuality. In The Case of Becky, for example, we have a highly artificial, not to say conventional, melodrama presented with the utmost appearance of verisimilitude. Of course. The Case of Becky was not actually written by Mr. Belasco; but this producer-playwright is so Shakespearean, in the one respect, at least, that he is omnivorous as to sources, that we have come to regard whatever he sponsors as as much his own as it may be anybody else's. In almost aU the plays presented under his direction there is fundamental hollowness and only a superficial wizardry. Mr. Belasco is a past- master of the tricks of his craft, of course, — ^the Cagliostro of the modem stage. He is at his best in such moments as that curtain in The Concert, where the entirely wordless chess game between 96 THE AMERICANS the recently estranged husband and wife tells the dramatic story of reconciliation beyond the possi- bilities of any other conceivable device. As for Belasco at his worst, that means not only the drag- ging in of bizarre settings, as in the last act of The Governor's Lady, or the physician's laboratory in The Case of Becky, but also the remorseless dis- tortion of human motives and character for the sake of purely factitious situations — ^interesting entertainment, usually, but in no sense life. The Return of Peter Grimm is a typical specimen of sentimental claptrap designed to make a sure, if false, appeal to the emotions. Peter himself, in- tended to be lovable, becomes a seU-centred tyrant who deserves in "the world beyond" to imdergo experiences more like those hinted at by that far more famous revenant, the elder Hamlet. Nephew Frederick, again, is an unconscionable villain, also because the plot demands it. Notwithstanding all these sacrifices that are made to it, this plot, by the way, is loose-jointed and episodic in the ex- treme. But, even if the characters are false and the structure flabby, the firelight flickers, the rain pours, and the lightning flashes just at the proper 7 97 THE DRAMA TO-DAY moments, and there is "effect," in lieu of veracity, written large across an evening's diversion. More- over, there is a sympathetic part for a highly gifted character actor, whose talents, at least com- mercially, redeemed the original production of the play. The fact is that the subject of The Return of Peter Grimm is far too profound for its author's abilities. It has been the fashion in latter days to decry the acting of the time, contrasting it with the finer histrionism of a generation or two ago. However, when we see players like Mr. Warfield, Mrs. Fiske, and Miss Anglin furnished with no better settings for their abilities than such plays as The Return of Peter Grimm, The High Road, Mrs. Bumstead-Leigh, Egypt, and Green Stockings, this kind of condem- nation should logically be diverted into a different channel. Certain it is that the more important forms of the drama, such for instance as comedy of manners, have rarely attained distinction in the hands of American playwrights. Clyde Fitch, in the midst of much theatricism, contributed his occasional thumbnail sketches; and a few other writers, notably Messrs. Langdon Mitchell and THE AMERICANS George Ade, have added further portraiture of types to our gallery of comedy. Mr. Ade's The College Widow and The County Chairman certainly present a collection of easily-recognized small- town denizens, from the blatant sophomore to the village milliner who "meets so many travelling gent'men." Humor and the pleasure of this prompt recognition are the emotions these char- acters evoke. We Americans are "a nation of farmers." "The town population is tied by a thousand threads of sentiment to the soil. Hence the success of a very moderate play, if it only appeals to the affectionate associations which cling to the 'old homestead,' the simple village maiden with the big hat, the well and the water dipper, the small but worthy landholder, and the harvest home." Mr. Ade has recorded from boyhood and student days dozens of these familiar types. He knows how to present them with a genial emphasis upon their comic aspects; and in meeting them once again we are too much interested to note that they do not unfold for us any very novel story or enforce any very significant theme. They seem genuine, and they serve for a kindly satire. How- 99 THE DRAMA TO-DAY ever, when they have been called upon to repeat themselves in later plays, they have eventually palled. In The New York Idea, Mr. Langdon Mitchell has drawn some highly amusing and familiar types of a frivolous "society," participating in a frothy satirical comedy. The "idea" is that of "tandem polygamy." The heroine, after some bitter divorce experiences, returns to her first love, who believes that, "having kicked the stuffing out of the matri- monial buggy," she will now settle down to a steady gait. Working with a theme full of the possibiUties of high purpose, Mr. Mitchell gives it a purely fantastic treatment. Much more recently, Mr. and Mrs. Frederic Hatton, in their Years of Discretion, have produced yet another American example of the comedy of manners. Brilliant of dialogue and clear-cut of characterization, this play is a picture out of Van- ity Fair, as all such drama must be, and kindly of spirit as it is gentle of application. In view of all this, it is the more to be regretted that the theme itself — an ancient one — as employed in this in- stance is to many repellent: the idea of a middle- 100 THE AMERICANS aged widow, the mother of grown children, con- ceiving a fretful hatred for the tedium of con- ventional life and dashing into frantic excesses of worldliness, it seems, can be amusing only at the expense of ideals and sentiments we have long regarded as sacred. The rebellion of Frank R. Stockton's renowned "monk of Siberia" is highly- excusable. The heroine of Mid-Channel is not only childish but of a nature meagre and common- place. But the widow of Mr. and Mrs. Hatton's play is a mother who has lived past forty without great iateUectual or emotional excitement, and whose starvation for this stimulus at so late a date can scarcely be accoimted for on any grounds not pathological. When, having for long coquetted desperately with a necessarily disgusting group of middle-aged philanderers, she is finally manhandled by a rougher one of them, the situation, in spite of histrionic emphasis upon the trivial, becomes nearly intolerable. The indiscretions of Lady Teazle result in no such unpleasantness, and the circumstances of Lady Teazle's triflings are far more sjrmpathetic. In The Chorus Lady, The Travelling Salesman, 101 THE DRAMA TO-DAY and The Commuters, Mr. James Forbes has treated life on the stage, "on the road," and in the suburbs with much slangy vivacity and shrewd observation. Technically, however, aU three plays are sopho- moric. In The Man from Home, Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson make a notable contribu- tion to what Mr. Walter Pritchard Eaton felici- tously denominates "the American comedy of bad manners" — ^in this case a conventional melodrar matic narrative animated by one individualized provincial figure of much native wit and rustic iU-breeding. Other Americans of to-day whose work deserves mention, at least for its promise, are Rachel Crothers, George M. Cohan, Thompson Buchanan, WincheU Smith, Marion Fairfax, Richard Walton Tully, Edward Knoblauch, and Edward Locke. None of them has blazed any especially new trail, however, or even made any extraordinary contri- bution to that distinctly modem type of drama which is ultra-realistic as to details and facts and usually ultra-conventional and unreal as to funda- mental veracity. On the whole, American drama has made 102 THE AMERICANS notable progress in this direction of the semblance of reality often without the substance. Our stage to-day is, for the most part, thoroughly Belasco- ized. That means that commercial rather than artistic ideals too often animate our producers, authors, and players j that novelty is more sought after than any real criticism or reflection of life; that theatrical effectiveness — the "punch" — is often considered more desirable than the truth. On the other hand, there are distinct grounds for hopefulness. In the first place, our playgoing public is becoming rapidly more critical and dis- cerning. A tawdry imitation of the real wiU not long continue to satisfy, when the difference between the real and the imitation is clearly and generally understood. In the second place, our playwrights are not only realizing this changing attitude on the part of the public, but are also, in many cases, directing and hastening the change. The tendency toward a decreasing insistence upon plot, and a correspondingly stronger emphasis upon character portrayal, is one of the most hopeful theatrical signs of the times. Moreover, the reign of the conventional seems nearing its conclusion. 103 THE DRAMA TO-DAY Even the "happy ending" is no longer inevitable, while many of the antiquated devices of nineteenth- century theatricism are becoming rarer upon the boards. The stage and its technique are being taken seriously by men and women of marked ideals and often of rigid training. Eminent scholars are lending their thoroughgoing aid to the development of a constructive criticism and an expert craftsmanship far removed from the purely journalistic and commercial standards of a decade or two ago. Not only writers, but also producers and players, are working more and more with their eyes fixed upon life, and less and less with exclusive reference to the theatre. In fact, from many reliable indications, the drama in America seems to be coming gradually into its own as a distinct art, unsm-passed by any other in its possi- bilities ethical and aesthetic. \ 104 IV THE BRITISH BETWEEN 1830 and 1900 about twenty- four hundred new plays were put on at ' London theatres. Many of these were burlesques, vaudevilles, operas, and translations, particularly from the French of Scribe, Dumas (both father and son), Sardou, Labiche, Halevy, and Meilhac. Among the twenty-four hundred, too, were dramatizations of novels, such as the Waverley series and Dickens. To this long list of plays, Dion Boucicault, among some four hundred stage works, contributed The Shaugraun, The Colleen Bawn, Lon- don Assurance, and Rip Van Winkle; Tom Taylor, Our American Cousin, The Ticket-of-Leave Man, and nearly a score of others; Tom Robertson, Ours, Caste, Society, School. Of these last-named come- dies, indeed, three thousand performances were given within twenty years. With the possible excep- tion of Caste, they are all apparently now dead to the stage. The actual dramatic convention of the 105 THE DRAMA TO-DAY Victorian era proves, upon examination, funda- mentally factitious. That Caste lives in occa- sional revival is a tribute to its unique human qualities: they overshadow the absurd old stagey tricks so abundant in the drama of the sixties. Indeed, Robertson's work, ever kindly, genial, and carefully planned, renovated the dramatic stand- ards in his day, just as Goldsmith's Good-Natured Man had routed the sickly sentimentality per- vading the plays of his time. Present-day English playwriting of seeming importance is, for the most part, in the hands of Sir Arthur Wing Pinero, Messrs. Henry Arthur Jones, James M. Barrie, George Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, Granville Barker, and possibly of Alfred Sutro, Cosmo Hamilton, Haddon Cham- bers, Arnold Bennett, B. Macdonald Hastings, and Stephen Phillips. It is a curious and doubtless significant fact that the one blanket classification which covers the largest part of the work of most of these playwrights is that of the "problem play." /Of course, this generalization leaves out, among 'others, both Mr. Barrie and Mr. Phillips, the one Wing concerned rather with comedy of manners 106 THE BRITISH and the fantastic, the other with the poetic drama. Nevertheless, since so many of the playwrights named are devoted, in part, if not whoUy, to the problem play, it cannot be inappropriate to give that genre some preliminary consideration. In the first place, as to a definition. Very many different kinds of plays in quite as many keys may still be grouped under the "problem" heading. What binds them aU together is that distinctive strain of nineteenth century literature, the moral. Problem plays deal with problems of right and wrong in human conduct, problems which con- ventionality and civilization have not definitely solved, however much they may pretend to have done so. The writer of problem plays, indeed, approaches his task in the conviction that life is a deal more complicated than old systems of sim- phfied ethics have often realized, and in the knowl- edge that this very complexity must give rise to questions for the present frequently unanswerable. Obviously, this form of writing is bound up with a characteristic which at least one school of thinkers has regarded as a defect — conscious moral content or aim. 107 THE DRAMA TO-DAY Without turning aside to participate in the endless controversy upon this point, we may simply say in the beginning that excessive moralizing has destroyed the eflScacy of countless problem plays, just as it has defeated the purpose of so much other art. And at the same time we are bound to admit — adapting Professor Bliss Perry's simile — ^that drama divorced utterly from the moral is as lame a bird as ever tried to soar with a broken pinion. Mr. George Bernard Shaw deliberately chooses to weight down the dialogue of his plays with lengthy expressions of his own views on socialism, vivi- section, or what-not. Even so rare a technician as Ibsen freights the conversations of Ghosts with similar personal philosophizings. Mr. Shaw looks upon the dramatist, indeed, as "a critic of Hfe as well as of art." To him the artist must be a teacher, or else a waster of energy. Self-conscious moral forces must employ art for the uplifting of the race. The writer of problem plays is a pitiless critic, above all, of moral convention. The chief target of the problem dramatist, as of the social satirist, is smug respectability en- gendered by conventional morality. Often,, too, 108 THE BRITISH institutions of conventional origin are vigorously attacked. Habits of life and thought, as well as of conduct, based on mere traditionary authority, form another point of onslaught. It is obvious, of course, that much of our "morality" is merely, as Macaire puts it, "this side of the frontier." Time and place are potent factors in its determina- tion. The institution of marriage, for example, largely artificial in character, varies greatly the world over, and has varied throughout history. The changes in emphasis and attitude which mark the slow metamorphosis of conventional ethics are what the problem play-writer most frequently intends. Conservatism clings to the outworn shell of what was once expedient and is stiU respectable; radicalism thrusts it violently aside and reaches out for something better adapted to a different set of conditions. Like some ever-growing creature, society is forever bursting an old shell and secret- ing a new one. The writer of problem plays usu- ally seeks to accelerate this process. He applies to the moribund convention a pitiless test of efficiency and prescribes for it immediate euthanasia. What are some of the common problems 109 THE DRAMA TO-DAY attacked by the dramatist of this school? There is, to begin with, the problem of human happiness. What are the chief opponents of happiness? Slavery to greed, lust, ambition, selfishness, hypoc- risy. These diabolical forces are to be portrayed, in both their action and their reaction, in order that men may pause and, looking on, understand. Take social hypocrisy, for example. It is, with many, a subtle, congenital habit of thought and life. Sudermann in Die Heimat, like Ibsen in An Enemy of the People and Pillars of Society, uses the scalpel ruthlessly upon this ingrained evil. So the problem of social corruption and of heredi- tary predispositions is dealt with in Ghosts and in A Doll's House. Most of the world's great re- formers have been men who realized the outworn condition of the old and the need for the new in moral conventions. They have seen how these agreements of expediency, become stiff and rigid with age, place humanity in a strait- jacket and prevent initiative and individuality. And against these confining influences the writers of problem plays, like all other reformers, are perpetually at war. The fundamental problem becomes, then, 110 THE BRITISH the everlasting problem of the one and the many. This is the basis of nearly all of Ibsen, as it is the gist of Die Heimat and Die Versunkene Glocke. In the work of England's leading latter-day dramatist, Sir Arthur Wing Pinero, the problem usually exploited is that of sex relationship. The student of his plays wiU note that his chief char- acters are nearly all women, and that the dominant note is the tragedy of the weaker sex, — ^woman as the victim of circumstances largely beyond her control. To put it more specifically, the so-called "double standard" of morals is at the bottom of the majority of Pinero's dramas. One inevitably calls to mind that most impres- sive figure in all the Pinerian gallery, Paula Tan- queray. "A young woman of about twenty-seven, beautiful, fresh, innocent-looking," she is yet the haunted victim of that unescapable ogre, a Past. She offers her written confession to the man who is about to substitute her for his first wife, a bride of ice. But he bums the confession imread, and they enter into that matrimonial contract which is the defiance of pubUc opinion, if not of absolute ethics. There is that innate in Paula that makes 111 THE DRAMA TO-DAY for unhappiness. She is restless, vain, petulant, jealous. At moments she is capable of bursts of generous feeling; but for the most part, self- concentration makes anything like renunciation impossible. Besides, the Past has done its dead- ening work upon such sensibilities and capacities as she was originally endowed with. When she is brought up face to face with an intolerable situa- tion bred of that same relentless Past, she can but take refuge in self-destruction. Suicide is not confession with Paula, however; she has at least the courage to tell her husband the whole truth before she flies to the tragic destiny her own actions — and heaven only knows how much of heredity, environment, and smug conventional morality — ^have created for her. As for the protagonist of 7m, she is to some extent the victim of so precise an influence as a deceased and jealous husband's will. By its terms this beautiful and luxury-loving young widow may not remarry and retain its benefits. Of course, she loves a penniless young man, Laurence Trenwith, and guilelessly offers him financial aid. He is strong enough, however, to resist the temptation 112 THE BRITISH and to go off to America to fight for his career. When a defaulting trustee deprives Iris of her income, a millionaire lover, Maldonado, exposes her to temptation by leaving in her hands a book of signed cheques. Significantly, she falls to this lure through an impulse of generosity when a feUow-victim of the defaulter appeals to her for assistance. Thereafter, much as Laura Murdock, in The Easiest Way, was later to do, Iris lapses into that weakening penury Maldonado has fore- seen and desired. Her heart is true to Laurence Trenwith, but she yields to the stress of circum- stances and finally to the millionaire. When Trenwith, like Laura Murdock's lover, returns, she expects his forgiveness; but she has lost not only him but also Maldonado, who, in jealous fury, drives her back to poverty. Sir Arthur Wing Pinero is the first living English master of dramatic technique. Iris, for example, is told absorbingly, step by step, through logical development and clear-cut characteriza- tion, to a powerful climax. "The long arm of coincidence" is called into play at least once; but, after aU, because coincidence has been overworked, 8 113 THE DRAMA TO-DAY must it be banished from the stage forever? There really is a great deal of it in actual Ufe, and it is often most dramatic. Before 7m, in His House in Order, Pinero had shown himself capable as a technician. This latter comedy is the forenmner of other and even stronger plays of middle-class English life. Cer- tainly it rises admirably to a striking climax when Hilary first persuades the mistreated wife Nina to relinquish her superb revenge and then promptly takes it for her. Less convincing is Letty, a natural- istic study with an EngUsh working-girl for its heroine. Her salvation at the last moment is the result of sheer accident, rather than a logical out- come of conditions within or without. Eleventh- hour right-about-facing is rarely satisfactory on the stage, when it has no more carefully laid foundation than in the case of Letty. The Gay Lord Quex shows a marked technical advance over any of this author's plays so far mentioned. Indeed, it squeezes the full emotional content out of char- acter and situation with rare address. The antag- onists here are, curiously, a rakish nobleman and a manicure. It is a battle of wits, and Sophie 114 THE BRITISH Fulgarney wins, although it is against no mean opponent that she has been pitted. To save her foster-sister, she tries to lure Quex into a compro- mising flirtation; and her resources are no less adroit than her scheme is daring. Accordingly, she wins our sympathies with far more readiness than does Theo, in The Benefit of the Doubt, though the author puts forth a valiant effort in this latter heroine's behalf. "The dramatist," Sir Arthur is quoted as say- ing, "is only the mouthpiece of his characters, plus, of course, his knowledge of the technique of the theatre, which enables him to manoeuvre them. So he must assume an impersonal attitude toward them and permit them, so to speak, to develop out of themselves. But logic is the groundwork of every play as well as of every character — the immutable law of cause and effect. Is it not so in life?" To write a play, Pinero takes never less than a year. It is as though the logic of life could hardly be thought out for an entire drama in less time. Certainly, in the case of many a lesser light, hasty composition has been concomitant with the illogical. Following his stated policy, Pinero, 115 THE DRAMA TO-DAY since, as an obscure actor, he made his d^but with the one-act comedy. Two Hundred a Year, has produced thirty-eight original plays, in addition to several adaptations. Throughout the series there is visible an almost unbroken advance in power and skill. After The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, and per- haps The Notorious Mrs. Ebhsmith, we should men- tion Mid-Channel, at least, and The Thunderbolt. "I no longer attempt to interest any special audiences," he is reported to have said in a recent interview. "I like to write from within myseK, so to speak. Latterly, I have been rather serious, but some day I shall return to a lighter vein." It would appear that his seriousness runs to a scathing analysis of the hypocrisy and depraved selfishness of a certain type of middle-class English- man and EngUshwoman. These are the people he deals with, at all events, even more bitterly than he did in His House in Order, in Mid-Channel and The Thunderbolt. Obviously, serious plays dealing with sordid, unsympathetic characters are not fundamentally calculated to make a wide appeal, at least not among a play-going public which rarely, if ever, distinguishes between subject- 116 THE BRITISH matter and art. "Once in a long time," Pinero himself explains, "the playwright strikes the happy medium. In other words, he writes the play that can be big and powerful and at the same time restful and entertaining." The problem of The Second Mrs. Tanqueray is that of a woman's struggle with a deplorable past. The problem of The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith is the struggle of a man and a woman to live together in intellectual companionship. The problem of Mid-Channel is the problem of the marital mis- understandings of middle life. Zoe BlundeU and her husband have no children and no mutual interests. They are both selfish and neurotic. Frequent quarrels end in a separation, the effects of which are shown, first on the wife and then on the husband. Eventually they are brought together for a reconciliation. The husband con- fesses to infidelity and is forgiven; but, when the wife makes a similar admission, to her surprise she is sent back to her young lover, whom she has previously advised to marry a debutante. Finding that her counsel has been followed, she flings herself from a high balcony and so ends her wasted life. 117 THE DRAMA TO-DAY The prescription of Augustus Thomas for writing a successful play is said to begin, "Take some interesting people, and present them in interesting situations." The interest that attaches to the unpleasant Blundell household is naturally- limited. When both people and plot are uncom- fortable, no amount of excellent technique, as a rule, wiU save a play in the popular esteem. Art has perhaps saved Othello, in the face of similar handicaps; but it rarely duplicates the feat in the hands of any lesser dramatist. Mid-Channel is most praiseworthy in structure, tight of joints, and eco- nomical, as Pinero's work usually is. The figures he puts forward are searchingly dissected. They are shown, perhaps not in much objective action, but in a well-depicted and climactic internal struggle. Sir Arthur's mastery of fluent and constructive dia- logue has rarely been exhibited to better advantage than in this play. In fact, his artistry is so fine that one can scarcely help deploring that, in "writ- ing from within himself" of late, he should fall so much into an Ibsenic strain of pessimism. Moreover, in Mid-Channel there is a serious defect which doubtless has militated against the 118 THE BRITISH success of the play, as it has inevitably lessened its value. The dramatist has proposed for his problem that of the ' ' mid-channel ' ' shoals and rocks of mari- tal life, particularly where motherhood has been averted through selfishness. His business, then, was remorselessly to exhibit such perils and their dramatic significance. Instead of giving us the tragedy of the childless woman, however, he has allowed himself to be shunted off onto a conven- tional motif of adultery, taken from the French stage. There are doubtless Zoe Blundells enough in actual English and American life j but few of them are sufficiently morbid and neurotic to pursue the course this unfortunate adopts in Pinero's play. In The Thunderbolt, written before though not produced till after Mid-Channel, the problem would seem to be that of the demoralization effected in certain natures by the death of a rich relative. Manifestly, this is not new material; and Sir Arthur has, in fact, resorted to many familiar expedients in his relentless exhibition of a group of sordid provincial Britons. There is the stolen will as a peg to hang the plot on; and this plot is made up of scenes of confession and cross-examina- 119 THE DRAMA TO-DAY tion. The author, however, has never done better work in play-building. He opens with a stage full of people, all of whom he at once identifies to the audience, while at the same time he carries forward exposition and narrative without apparent delay. There is no love story in The Thunderbolt. At the close of the play, presumably as a sop to the sup- posed popular demand, a romance is hinted at between the girl Helen and the curate Trist. Meanwhile, the final curtain is delayed for some time after the close of the plot-interest. Indeed, this final curtain is made to faU upon a stage that has been left empty for about a minute, giving the effect of the incompleteness of a play which mirrors an incomplete section of life. As for that appropriately short-lived teapot tempest. Preserving Mr. Panmure, being farcical material developed in a comedy treatment, it fell between two stools and served to reconcile play- goers generally to its author's latter-day serious- ness. In its successor, The Mind-the-Paint Girl, the problem seems to be that rather prevalent one — in England, at least — of marriages between the chorus and the peerage. As a play, it is re- 120 THE BRITISH markable for its leisurely structure. It requires two acts and part of a third to lay the groundwork of exposition and atmosphere for a single "strong" situation. A fourth act is then appended to carry the much-desired " happy ending." Lily Parradell, of the Pandora Theatre, is the play's contribution to Pinero's gaUery of women. We see her first at home, and then at the theatre. Two lovers, a viscount and a captain, battle for her hand, and so supply a climax for Act III. Ultimately, "the aristocracy, with neither chins nor foreheads," has one more strong, healthy addition to its ranks to be thankful for. Technically, The Mind-the Paint Girl falls far short of its author's best work. It lacks conciseness as well as freshness of character- ization; and it is decidedly deficient in that econ- omy of materials and that unchecked forward movement which have usually marked Sir Arthur's most notable efforts. "Without excellent acting and the fascination inherent in all depictions of life on the stage, it is doubtful whether this play could long survive. It seems impossible, even for an artist of Pinero's calibre, to portray Bohemia without slipping into a great deal of sentimental slush. 121 THE DRAMA TO-DAY Second only to Sir Arthur Wing Pinero in the latter-day English drama is Mr. Henry Arthur Jones. In Judah, Mrs. Dane's Defense, The Hypo- crites, and Michael and his Lost Angel, to mention only a few, Mr. Jones, in his own way, attacks cer- tain definite problems of modern life, arising out of the inadequacy of conventional morality. As Mr. William Dean Howells has somewhere pointed out, all these plays just named and most of the others by the same writer pay unfaltering tribute to moral law and the inevitable punishment that f oUows its infraction. In The Case of Rebellious Susan, how- ever, it is noted that this supreme issue is dodged to make possible a finale for comedy. The " double standard" is here being exploited, first truthfully, in frank recognition that no such standard has a moral right to prevail; but later, falsely, in the easy acceptance of social usage in such matters, without perhaps so much of an attempt at justi- fication as we find in As a Man Thinks. In White- washing Julia, on the other hand, we have thcr same problem amusingly dealt with in such a way that the heroine's actual guilt or innocence is never definitely determined. Her lover, far from 122 THE BRITISH immaculate himself, is ultimately "generous" enough to leave her past as a closed book. Like Pinero, Mr. Jones has given his attention to light comedy as well as to serious drama. His Joseph Entangled is a good example of his best work in the former category. It satirizes the popular love of placing the worst interpretation upon innocent occurrences. Typical of Mr. Jones's serious vein is The Hypocrites, a play built up largely of familiar figures and incidents upon the theme of expediency in human conduct. The fact is that, in common with so many talented play- wrights of the day, this author is a frequent con- ciliator of that theatricism which demands "scenes" at the expense of ultimate veracity in character portrayal. For example, in The Galilean's Victory, though the problem proposed is the dramatically potent one of the bad effect of an imreligious train- ing upon a young society girl, stiU, like Pinero in the case of Mid-Channel, the playwright goes astray upon the old familiar triangle and balks his sub- ject. In Michael and his Lost Angel, to the end of Act II we have a series of situations which effectively emphasize the characters and advance 123 THE DRAMA TO-DAY a logical and inevitable story. Here, however, the playwright veers off into the melodrama which is his continual hindrance; and, as a result, he is left with nothing for a last act, except a trivial dispo- sition of the now woodenized characters to suit the ancient conventions. Meanwhile, the real tragedy of the fundamental premises is abandoned for the much less valuable, if complicated, building up to the cathedral scene. The situation of the man and the woman in this play is as hopeless as that of the husband and the wife in The Second Mrs. Tan- queray. In terms of character, there is a real inherent tragedy. Character, however, is ulti- mately sacrificed, and plot is given the right of way over verisimilitude and logic. More recently Mr. Jones has given us two plays, Lydia Gilmore and We Can't Be as Bad as All That, which betray much of the same taint as that which permeates Michael and his Lost Angel. Both are made up of familiar elements. In We Can't Be as Bad as All That may be noted the same materials that enter into Whitewashing Julia. There are the one honest man facing the aggregation of Ldars, and the woman with a past defending herself in 124 THE BRITISH the manner of Lucy Dane. There are, moreover, the stolen necklace and the substituted jewels. Out of these antiquated threads the author has woven a fairly tight melodramatic plot, with a "big scene" for a chmax and much deft and amus- ing dialogue, spiced with satire. In Lydia Gil- more, again, there is relentless cross-examination of a woman, to say nothing of numerous other such familiar incidents. The exposition, too, is labored; while the device of the sub-plot is ineffectual in reheving the tension of the main story. It is significant that both of these plays achieved prompt failure. The fact is that Mr. Jones has not weU learned he lesson enunciated by his compatriot Mr. John Galsworthy, who, admitting the necessity for story in the drama, yet insists that the story must come from the characters, and not vice versa. Situations are essential, but people must not be jammed into them regardless. Even farce, though built often on fairly insane premises, must justify its action in terms of character. The playwright who depends his characters from his plot, instead of his plot from his characters, says Mr. Gals- 125 \ THE DRAMA TO-DAY worthy, deserves to be depended himseK. A good play must have suspense and surprise and an unconventional story, but none of these must ever be permitted to interfere with absolute truth to life. In other words, the dramatist must not do what Mr. Jones has so often done, and that is, veer off into melodrama and so discredit primarily veracious human figurea^^/ I ' ^ As a matter of fact, it is far easier to lay down fhe rule than to foUow it. The amateur dramatist, at least, if not always the professional, is apt to find in high comedy a perpetual warfare between plot and. characterization, that is indeed dramatic in itselfj} The problem is to show absolutely real men and women and yet to show them in a story; for story is essential to suspense and to a large part of the desired emotional reaction. On the other hand, as everyone knows, there is compara- tively little story in real life. Most story for the stage, therefore, has to be invented; it should be fresh, and it must be made to grow out of the characters. If in this exceedingly delicate process either plot or characterization gets the upper hand, the disproportionate emphasis is sure to make the 126 THE BRITISH drama suffer. Indeed, the perfect adjustment of these two elements — in high comedy, at least — ^may be compared for difficulty to Shylock's task,the cut- ting of an exact pound of flesh, no less and no more, and aU without the shedding of a drop of blood, Mr. Galsworthy, in Justice, teUs the story of a clerk in an English law office who, needing money to save a woman, forges, is caught, and commits suicide. The purpose is to propound the curious problem wherein a man should actually be driven to his death by the very conditions of human justice. As a matter of fact, however, the man's death is caused not by justice, but by the fact of the woman and her predicament. As in the case of Paid in Full, to cite one of many similar in- stances, the original thesis is not permitted to work itself out unalloyed, but is complicated with another, so that the ultimate tragedy is com- pounded of two distinct elements. Meanwhile, the situation has been attained. Unfortunately, how- ever, it is neither strong enough nor fresh enough to compensate for a long and repetitive second act which serves little purpose other than to hold up the action. 127 THE DRAMA TO-DAY Mr, Galsworthy, who is a continuator of the Hardy and Meredith school of literature, naturally leans to pessimism. In The Silver Box the hope- less problem arises from imcontrollable environ- ment. In Strife the struggle of two obstinate wills is carried on without even the sympathy of the natural allies and in the face of the demands of practicaUty. There is illustrated merely the power of pride and domination to usurp the place of reason, where important differences demand prompt settlement. In The Pigeon we are shown the futility of charity for the submerged tenth. The play is described as a "fantastic comedy." In reaUty, it is a commentary on life, wherein splendidly drawn individuals appear in relations and episodes entirely justifiable in terms of the characters themselves. The author has thus far followed his own precept. He has not, however, gone farther and provided the unconventional plot with its suspense, surprise, and climax. The Pigeon is full of happenings, but they are not ordered in the manner of well knit dramatic nar- rative. In fact, there is little change in the cir- cumstances of the characters, from first to last. 128 THE BRITISH Nevertheless, the play is a sociological document of obvious importance. In it Vagabondia is not rehabilitated, in spite of all the earnest efforts of the reformers; instead, Guinevere Megan, woman of the streets, is allowed to go to the police court to learn the illogical, not to say cruel, attitude of society, which, wishing her dead, yet denies her the right to fulfil that wish. No solution for the problem is attempted. Solutions for problems, indeed, rarely make good material for drama. In- stead, the author regards the whole matter with judicial impartiality and a spirit of humane toleration. In his stiU later work. The Eldest Son, Mr. Galsworthy deals with an English squire whose son, having betrayed the daughter of his game- keeper, is on the point of manying her to protect her. In a similar case the father has compelled one of his laborers to marry another girl; but when the situation comes home to him the squire begins to believe that respectability must be maintained at the expense of morality. When the son refuses to obey his father, and the wife is unwilling to intercede with the girl, the squire at- 9 129 THE DRAMA TO-DAY tempts to do it himself, but finds the task beyond him. Ultimately the girl realizes that the young man no longer cares for her, and her father refuses to permit a ' ' charity marriage ' ' in his family. This not altogether novel story is told, as usual with its author, in simple, natural dialogue, and with admir- able economy and dignity. The play lacks, how- ever, both in high indignation and in fanciful charm, characteristic defects that have marked other of Mr. Galsworthy's work. Marriage as a reparation is a typical problem for latter-day drama. In this play it is at least handled with veracity and in a tone of becoming, if pessimistic, seriousness. Granting the truth of his expressed theory of dramatic composition, we are bound to note that Mr. Galsworthy has more than once failed both in his logic of structure and in his choice of char- acters. There is much that is vivid and true in Strife, for example; much that is uncloubtedly. transcribed from real life. But the play comprises actually not a plot, but simply one situation. Moreover, its conclusion faUs to satisfy, inasmuch as its lesson of compromise, appropriate enough to this one specific case, is insufficient for general 130 THE BRITISH application. With larger figures to people his stage and a more rigid logic in the unfolding of his fable, the author of Strife and Justice should be capable of tragedy worthy of high rank. Of course, Mr. Galsworthy is a realist. For- tunately, however, his self-styled "naturalism" never descends to vulgarity or triviality. In fact, he deals always with vital problems. "Matters change, and morals change," he asserts; "but men remain. " And the purpose of the dramatist should be "to set men, and the facts about them, down faithfully, so that they draw for us the moral of their natural actions." Mr. Galsworthy very properly denies that such realism as he advocates and utilizes is merely photographic. Justice, cer- tainly, is selective, compressed, orderly, emphatic, in spite of the sheer tragic horror of its grim court- room and prison scenes. The very torture of solitary confinement is set before us. Dramatic technique, however, has been neglected to an extent that proved fatal, so far as the play's stage career is concerned. It is encouraging that this writer's endeavor is toward the fusion of natural- ism with the highest skill in dramatic arrangement. 131 THE DRAMA TO-DAY "It is desperately hard," he declares, "to produce perfectly natural conversation and movements, when each natural phrase spoken and each natural movement made has not only to contribute toward the growth and perfection of a drama's soul, but also to be a revelation, phrase by phrase, move- ment by movement, of essential traits of charac- ter." Mr. Galsworthy, indeed, foresees not only a "broad and clear-cut channel" of English dramatic naturalism, but also "a poetic prose drama, emo- tionalizmg us by its diversity and purity of form and invention, and whose province will be to disclose the elemental soul of man and the forces of Nature — ^not, perhaps, as the old tragedies dis- closed them, not necessarily in the epic mood, but always with beauty and the spirit of discovery." To the former of these two predicted move- ments, apparently, belongs that most picturesque figure among the plaj^wrights of to-day, Mr. George Bernard Shaw, socialist, satirist, critic, anti-vivisectionist, vegetarian, and general poseur. In any serious consideration of this writer's plays it becomes necessary, in the first place, to inquire whether he is really a significant figure in the 132 THE BRITISH evolution of the drama or merely an amusing excrescence upon that main growth. At least, Mr. Shaw is different. His fundamental claim to our attention, indeed, rests invariably upon the element of novelty. Now, novelty may mean progress, or it may be nothing more than mere clever side-stepping. What does it mean in the case of Mr. Shaw? To answer this question with finality, one would have to have definite knowledge as to the exact trend of the modem drama. Such prescience the present writer makes no claim to possess. In order to divert the main course of dramatic writing, judging by Mr. Shaw, one has but to inject into an art generally supposed to be bound up with emotion an abrupt dose of paradoxical thought. Humanitarianism, ultras-realism, satire, and ideas are the chief ingredients of the modem thesis drama, to which he is a regular contributor. Yoxir true reformer is, of course, always iconoclas- tic; and, like Ibsen, Gorki, and Brieux, Mr. Shaw is assiduous in the shattering of idolatrous tradi- tion. He comes into the theatre of to-day, with aU its venerable inherited canons and its authori- 133 THE DRAMA TO-DAY tative restraints, like a new Jean-Jacques ill at ease in the classic atmosphere of the eighteenth century drawing-room and — ^perhaps therefore — eminently antagonistic to it. It seems nearly un- pardonable thus to compare Mr. Shaw with the father of that romanticism he so vahantly and so unremittingly assails. But Rousseau was no more impatient of the rules and restraints imposed upon him by pseudo-classicism than is the author of Man and Superman with the traditional restrictions of the twentieth century theatre. To Shaw the art of the drama, indeed, like any other art, is a preposterous institution, if it may not always be made subservient to the transportation of un- limited moral freightage. "Uart pour I' art" to him can be no better than a cabalistic incantation to evoke the odor of brimstone. He is said to have discovered "the hackneyed but ever-alarming and heretical truth, that life is greater than art." Of course, many men before him have made the same discovery and proceeded forthwith to discard art altogether. As for George Bernard Shaw, Mr. A. B. Walkeley, for one, feels confident that he provides us with "a series of dehcate and moving 13d THE BRITISH sensations, which the spectacle simply of technical address, of theatrical talent, can never inspire." However that may be, Mr. Shaw apparently reacts from the technique of the theatre with malice aforethought to a species of entertainment composed chiefly of intellectual attacks on false ideals and shams, and classified as plays often only by virtue of the definition which makes "a play" mean any performance given upon a stage. A mere dialogue, without suspense, surprise, climax, or marked emotional appeal of any sort, is sufficient, providing it enunciates the author's views with regard to latter-day manners and morals. This is, obviously, the stage usurping the function of the pulpit. If all art did the same, we should have only preaching. In a sense, George Bernard Shaw is the modem Don Quixote who has devoted himself to the destruction of the giants of false and flattering illusion. He tilts at everything that seems pre- tentious, whether it be an historic demigod or a smug conventionality of the day. As a result, it often happens that the only essential conflict that enters into his "plays" is the conflict waged by 135 THE DRAMA TO-DAY the author against his mighty, if often unsubstan- tial, opponents. Moreover, for every modem social falsehood that he actually uncovers, he merely cries "Wolf!" some scores of times. To analyze his philosophy, or to imdertake a serious criticism of it, is beyond the province of a discus- sion limited primarily to the dramatist. He chooses to replace— -or to attempt to replace — ^the Christian doctrine of seK-abnegation with the Nietzschean theory of self-exaltation. It were folly to deny that, in this respect, Mr. Shaw practises what he preaches. Romanticism he assumes to abhor, though himself exhibiting, hke most other violent antagonists of that movement, numerous highly romantic traits. Chief among these characteristics is his perpetual emphasis upon the exceptional. Indeed, the breath and finer spirit of his endeavors will be found, upon analysis, to consist primarily of the mere negation of the commonly accepted. Different as may be their views upon, say, the divorce question, Mr. Shaw resembles Mr. Gilbert K. Chesterton in more ways than one, but chiefly in respect of his fondness for the paradox. This is, of course, of romanticism 136 THE BRITISH most romantic. When we add the extraordinary- capacity of this writer for seK-pufEery and self- mockery — ^in fine, for emphasis upon the ego and for romantic irony — ^we must reaUze that in him we have distinctly a specimen of that tribe whose very name is abhorrent to Mr. Shaw. At all events, as a playwright, like his very different fellow-workers, Pinero, Jones, and Gals- worthy, Shaw is chiefly interested in problem plays. "What people call vice is eternal," he declares; "what they call virtue is mere fashion." Whether this be true or not, whether vice itself is not sometimes real virtue in disguise, just as virtue is so often only masked vice, Mr. Shaw is never so happy as when he is proposing some question of the hollowness of conventional moral- ity. Respectability has always been, and wiU always be, fair game for the social satirist; and here is one more such critic who perfectly agrees with Huxley that "the customary fate of new- truths is to begin as heresies and to end as super- stitions." Off with the old, then, and on with the new! And yet — to make haste slowly! To be not the first by whom the new is tried, at least not 137 THE DRAMA TO-DAY always; nor yet the last to relinquish the old. "The golden rule is that there are no golden rules," remarks Mr. Shaw with customary sententiousness; and so leaves us ready for anarchy — ^unless, indeed, he himseK might be induced to provide some temporary substitute for the immemorial standards of conduct. In fact, he admits, somewhat regret- fully, that "there wiU for many centuries to come be a huge demand for a ready-made code of con- duct for general use, which wiU be used more or less as a matter of overwhelming convenience by all members of communities." Meanwhile, he is utilizing the stage as a propaganda for his extreme romantic individualism. Making a point of dis- carding all possible traditions of the dramatic art, he makes it also a point to disregard aU sorts of reverence; and, for this reason, if for no other, as a playwright, faUs always into mere farcical satire. Mr. Shaw's excessive fondness for the irreverent is typical of the "shocking" pose he continually maintains. To those who take him at his word and so refuse to regard him seriously, particularly in his moments of irreligion, this is perhaps all one. To others, however, this sort of attitudinizing 138 THE BRITISH is intolerable. On one occasion, it is reported, Mr. Shaw aroused, by his irreverence, the anger of Tolstoy. In thanking the author for a copy of Man and Superman, the Russian novelist remarked, "One should not joke about such subjects as the destiny of human life and the causes of the de- pravity and vice which fiU the life of our times." When he sent Tolstoy a copy of The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet, Mr. Shaw wrote, "You said that in my other book my style was not sufficiently serious, and that I made people laugh at the most solemn moments. But why should I not do this? Why should laughter and humor be taboo? Sup- pose the world merely one of God's jokes, would you have worked less to make a bad joke into a good one?" To this Tolstoy curtly replied, "To Bernard Shaw: As regards your reflections on good and evil, I can only repeat what I have said about your Man and Superman, namely, that ques- tions of God and of good and evil are too important to be spoken of in a light tone. It is for this reason that — as I will tell you frankly — ^the final words of your letter produced a very painful impression on me." 139 THE DRAMA TO-DAY There is decided kinship between Bernard Shaw and Henry Fielding, so far as play-writing is concerned: in his earlier period the author of Tom Jones was given to writing a rather non- dramatic type of satirical farces that are the direct ancestors of Candida and You Never Can Tell and Fanny's First Play. The last-named entertain- ment, indeed, takes chiefly from Fielding — ^whom Mr. Shaw, by the way, regards as the greatest of dramatists from Shakespeare to Ibsen — ^the idea of the induction and the epilogue, wherein the critics of the day pass judgment upon the piece. This, perhaps the most successful of its author's at- tempts, at least from the box-ofl&ce standpoint, comprises, in addition to its sardonic forestalling of joumaUstic criticism, a highly amusing com- mentary on middle-class respectability and its incapacity to cope with the emergencies of the un- conventional. The drawing power of this strange intermingling of satire, paradox, fantasy, and farce lies, however, in its impudence, its wit, and chiefly its novelty, rather than in its inherent value as a revelator of false standards. Mr. Shaw has frankly described himself as a mountebank, blow- 140 THE BRITISH ing his mercenary trumpet at the cart's tail. And, as a highly amusing charlatan, in fact, he succeeds rather better, in his plays at least, than as a really profound commentator on human life. Of the plays which attempt a more serious exposition of the Shavian philosophy, perhaps Man and Superman is the most noteworthy. A dialogue, divided for convenience into acts, it presents no further dramatic struggle than the conflict of the characters' ideas, a conflict which necessarily eventuates in nothing. In Candida we have the equally exciting spectacle of the combat of "the higher, but vaguer, timider vision, and the inco- herent, mischievous, and even ridiculous unprac- ticalness" of the poet Marchbanks as "a dramatic antagonist for the clear, bold, sure, sensible, benevolent, salutarily short-sighted Christian So- cialist ideahsm" of Morell. If all this antagonism had been expressed in some form of objective action, rather than merely in a flood of discussion and words, the success of Candida as a play might have been expected. As an amusing agitator of twentieth-century thought and as a brilliant advocate of the Socialism 141 THE DRAMA TO-DAY which is at the root of all his notions, Bernard Shaw is-a force worth considering. As a contribu- tor to the actable material of the English stage, however, his importance is dubious. Whatever success he attains in this field will probably spring from his gifts in satirical dialogue, coupled with a less anarchistic attitude in the construction of farcical situations for the stage. To speak of Shaw is inevitably to recall that younger exponent of the "revolutionary drama," Mr. Granville Barker. To Mr. Barker, "a play is anything that can be made effective upon the stage of a theatre by human agency. And I am not sure," he adds, "that this definition is not too narrow." As a result of this view, at all events, in Mr. Barker's works for the stage we have a series of productions marked at the same time by their conscientious effort to illustrate the latitude of this definition and by the freshness and original- ity of dramatic talent which struggles ineffectually under the load of non-dramatic impedimenta. In his attempt to make the drama approximate Hfe, Mr. Barker finds nothing too commonplace, too dreary, nor too impertinent to be included in the 142 THE BRITISH conversation of his characters. Through long pages of perhaps characteristic, but utterly unim- portant, talk struggles a thin thread of narrative, scarcely strong enough to hold the piece even loosely together. All this is deplorable ; for nothing worth while is accomplished — the stage is brought no nearer to reality, and a vital iUuminant — if the metaphor may be so manipulated — ^is almost cunningly concealed, like Gratiano's rea- sons, in a bushel of chaff. It is not the art that is true to life, but rather the life that is in no wise true to art. The Madras House, for example, a play without hero, heroine, or plot, sets forth, in the famihar atmosphere of middle-class English life, the varying Enghsh views upon the woman question. In The Voysey Inheritance we are faced with the problem of financial responsibility handed down from father to son. In the searchingly pathetic drama, Waste, the proposition is that of the havoc wrought in hmnan life through impulsive violation of civilization's moral code. In all three, as in other of Mr. Barker's plays, however, the true dramatic significance is quite buried beneath the heap of photographically reaUstic rubbish. 143 THE DRAMA TO-DAY These excesses of the author, committed doubtless with a view to originaUty, only succeed in thwart- ing their own purpose. In Mr. Barker's and Mr. Galsworthy's train foUow a noteworthy band of devoted "naturalists," including Elizabeth Baker, Githa Sowerby, Stanley Houghton, John Masefield, and others. Several years ago Miss Baker, then an unknown typist in the ofl&ce of the London Spectator, produced her study in monotony, known as Chains. This piece, which contains excellent characterization and life- hke dialogue, is necessarily deficient in action. It is given over to an exposition of that same dull routine of a London clerk's humdrum life which Charles Lamb so keenly resented more than a century ago. There is a struggle in the play, when one fellow at least makes up his mind to break away from the grim clutches of the commonplace. His resolution vanishes, however, at the announce- ment of his wife's prospective maternity, and he settles back helplessly into his chains. The play fails of real tragic dignity largely because of the patent fact that the shackles of monotony are, after aU, rather cheerfully worn by the mass of mankind. UA THE BRITISH In Rutherford and Son, Miss Githa Sowerby, whose youth is mentioned with surprise by most critics, sets before us with notablis vitality and force the ruthlessly dominant male. Like Chains, this play is gloomy, sordid, and depressing, admir- able in characterization and dialogue, and almost devoid of action. Its popularity, in the face of its hard and repellent subject-matter, surely adds point to MoUere's reflection that the business of amusing honest folk is a strange one. Much the same thing might be said with regard to Mr. Stanley Houghton's Hindh Wakes, another character study pure and simple, wherein some imattractive English country types react with appropriate variation from an incident — the only one of the play — ^which has occurred before Act I begins. The heroine, an advanced young person, makes her declaration of independence, so far as certain ancient prejudices and conventions are concerned, and, hke the girl in The Eldest Son of Mr. Galsworthy, or that other in Mr. Ervine's The Magnanimous Lover, refuses the reluctant "reparation" of marriage. She adds decisively, "So long as I've to live my own life, I don't see 10 U5 THE DRAMA TO-DAY why I shouldn't choose what it's to be." The central figure, old Nathaniel Jeffcote, is crabbed and cantankerous, coarse and autocratic, but far more human than the implacable tyrant of Miss Sowerby's drama. As for Mr. John Masefield's Nan, it is simply one more exploitation of the cheerless and the charmless, wherein the spectre of pessimism stalks rampant and proclaims itself reality. Mr. Mase- field is a poet, but only in the last act of his play does he wax poetic, and then, be it admitted, he almost attains high tragedy, as the mercenary lover is paid in full for trifling with the heart of Nan. Thomas Hardy might have lent significance to this dismal tale. But the reaction from this kind of thing is as inevitable as the reaction from any other extreme. The realistic movement has ebbed and flowed and done its work before, and it will ebb again. Doubt- less it is proper to show one's resentment against an over-artificial theatre by discarding every dramatic device and by slicing life down to the bone. But there is such a thing, to vary the meta- phor, as throwing out too much ballast and so 146 THE BRITISH being swept away. What stage "cubism" or "futurism" may yet do to us is dreadful to reflect upon. Why not dramas that, while realistic, deal with at least ordinarily sympathetic people taking part in representative and interesting events? Why not unconventionaUty without dreary deso- lation? Why not the principle of selection, even in naturalism? Without the active operation of this principle, without a considerable reUance upon the skill of the technician, without story and com- pleteness, as well as mere continuity, the realistic drama wiU inevitably have to make way for the idealistic or the romantic, even though the latter overwhelm us with aU its own peculiar excesses. Mere samples of the fabric of life wiU never satis- factorily substitute for reproductions of its pattern. Even so brief a consideration of the modem Enghsh drama as the present hasty summary must contain at least a reference to the promising work of such writers as RudoK Besier, Louis Napoleon Parker, Charles Rann Kennedy, Alfred Sutro, Cosmo Hamilton, Arnold Bennett, Graham Moffat, and Macdonald Hastings. Mr. Besier is best known for his two delightful 147 THE DRAMA TO-DAY comedies of manners, Don and Lady Patricia. The former is a well built play, in which clearly drawn characters advance, through clever dialogue, a story calculated to make a distinct sympathetic appeal. A trace of melodrama slightly taints, though it by no means spoils, this comedy, which for the most part exhibits that favorite English middle-class respectability in conflict with the unconventional. The satire is light, but sure. Such a play shines with more than natural bril- liance in contrast with the perversities of Messrs. Shaw and Barker. Either of these writers, by simply bowing good-humoredly to the indispens- able traditions of the playwright's craft, might pro- duce plays almost as interesting and effective as Mr. Besier's Don. In Lady Patricia the satire is directed against sentimentalism, and the comedy has a tendency, perhaps, to become over-subtle. Besides, in con- structing an almost obtrusively symmetrical plot, the author has here thrust into it a number of rather colorless figures. The spirit of the comedy, however, is altogether appealing in its delicacy. Even more purely atmospheric is the quaint and 148 THE BRITISH charming comedy, Pomander Walk, by Mr. Louis Napoleon Parker. Setting and characterization, rather than plot, make this play, which is a sort of dramatized essay of Elia, delightfully blending humor and sentiment in polished dialogue. There was much of this charm in the author's earlier Rosemary, and it also marks his later Disraeli and The Paper Chase. The nature of the plot in Dis- raeli, however, requires the great Beaconsfield to be an amazingly weak and simple puppet moved only by theatrical exigency. As a master of pageantry, Mr. Parker naturally inclines to the spectacular. Designed as a patriotic stimtdus, his Drake presents a gaUery of historical figures moulded largely int6 English types. The great commander himself succeeds always by vir- tue of his ultr^-British traits. Hearty, fearless, good-natured, stern, yet democratic, he is like another Henry V. When, with Roman justice, he tries and condemns his friend of old, he yet accepts in fuU the traitor's self-purgation and parts with him in heroic tenderness. In this incident, at least, Drake rises from the merely spectacular to the truly dramatic. As for the author's stiU more recent 149 THE DRAMA TO-DAY "pageant play," Joseph and his Brethren, in spite of its obvious dependence upon the scenic, it, too, approximates real drama in several instances. Relying with similar stress upon setting, atmos- phere, and characterization for their charm are Mr. Graham Moffat's Bunty Pulls the Strings and A Scrape o' the Pen, plays that have — especially the latter — even less plot, though not more charm, than Messrs. Arnold Bennett's and Edward Kno- blauch's curious modem chronicle play. Milestones. These pieces, like most of Mr. Shaw's and Mr. Barker's, seem almost to belie the Aristotelian dictum with regard to the indispensability of action in drama. As for Milestones, it is played in the same room, pictured variously as in 1860, 1885, and 1912. Obviously, a continuous dramatic narrative is out of the question, since the long intervals have to be accounted for through the greater part of both Act II and Act III. The performance relies chiefly upon its novelty, in part upon its charac- terization, for its appeal. Somehow one feels that the story might have been much more effective had it centred around some more vital and interesting problem than that of wooden versus iron ships. 150 THE BRITISH Mr. Bennett's What the Public Wants is an amusing satire in dialogue, with very little plot. It has lately been introduced to American audi- ences by Miss Horniman's Manchester company of repertory players. Recently, too, Mr. Granville Barker has produced in London Mr. Bennett's farcical tour de force, The Great Adventure. In it an impossible artist exchanges identities with his dying valet, who is accordingly buried with fuU ceremony in Westminster Abbey. Complications ensue when an expert discovers the deception and when, after the artist's marriage, an unsuspected former wife of the dead valet appears; but the secret is carefully guarded so that Westminster may not suffer ridicule, and the painter continues, in all senses, to rest in peace. Obviously this is a hero who acts merely as the- strings are pulled. The creator of such real men and women as those that people Mr. Bermett's delightful city in the Potteries should have no dealings with common- place puppets like Ham Carve. Another notable writer of comedy of manners is Mr. Alfred Sutro, whose Walls of Jericho is yet remembered for its convincing figures, its engag- 161 THE DRAMA TO-DAY ingly natural dialogue, and its interesting story. Indeed, this play far outshines a certain latter-day echo of it by a younger British playwright. In The Fascinating Mr. Vandervelt the author amus- ingly sets forth the fact that clever wicked people are often preferable to righteous bores. Later plays from the same pen, however, have not always been marked by an equal sincerity. The Builder of Bridges, though smartly written and containing more than one clever character sketch, yet smacks of artij&ciality as to sentiment, and so is devoid of permanent significance. In The Fire Screen, again, we have the material of the theatre almost exclu- sively. The incidents are dexterously presented, but we know quite weU that they are not from real life. The characters, too, are old friends, from the stage adventuress, Angela, to the stage Don Juan, Oliver. If there were such people in actuaUty, doubtless they would become involved in just such situations as Mr. Sutro contrives. In The Perplexed Husband he has handled the woman's rights question entertainingly without becoming seriously involved in it. As in several other recent plays, the baleful influence of Ibsen on modem 152 THE BRITISH woman furnishes the complication. The matter is slight, scarcely sufficient to furnish forth more than three acts; but the writer's skill is apparent in the manner in which, in spite of this fact, he has maintained real suspense. Indeed, Mr. Sutro himself gives us his views as to the cardinal rule for playwriting in the words: "Never be duU." To return to the realm of the problem play, it is a pleasure to note, in closing, the work of Charles Rann Kennedy, of Cosmo Hamilton, and of B. Macdonald Hastings. Mr. Kennedy's The Servant in the House is a serious and significant handling of a deUcate theme — ^the introduction of the Christ figure upon the stage. Described as a "modem morality play," it has some of the deficiencies of its prototype, if not all of its good qualities. The dialogue is "literary" and diffuse; the characters are, to a large extent, the personifications of virtues or vices; and the plot, though compact and sym- metrical, is attenuated. In The Terrible Meek, Mr. Kennedy has yielded completely to his impulse to preach a sermon and offered us a strange concoction of tasteless, if well-meant, theatricism. Mr. Cosmo Hamilton, in The Blindness of Virtue, has attacked 153 THE DRAMA TO-DAY what has been quite otherwise dealt with by Wede- kind in Friihlings Erwachen, namely, the problem of the enhghtenment of the young upon the subject of sex. In spite of so solemn a theme, the writer has managed to produce an interesting picture of Enghsh country home life, peopled with several convincing Jane Austen types. The whole atmos- phere of the play, too, is one of wholesome and genial sympathy, immarred by cynicism or bitter- ness. In Mr. B. Macdonald Hastings we have a still more recent addition to the gallery of notable and promising British playwrights. His interesting drama. The New Sin, though it failed of large popularity in America, was generously acclaimed in London. Having but seven characters, all male, and no "love interest," it has made its appeal strictly by means of a powerful handling of a hitherto unexploited theme. The new "sin" is that of living when your death would benefit others. Perhaps, however, the American non- success of the drama was due in large part to the unusualness, not to say the unreality, of the central situation. At aU events, the subject was given a distinctly fresh treatment, rarely at all stagey. 154 THE BRITISH Similarly novel and engaging is the handling of another unusual theme employed by Mr. Haddon Chambers in his quaintly humorous and pathetic play, Passers-by. In the Beatrice Dainton of this piece, too, we find a r61e of actual heroic martyrdom. There are two other English playwrights of to-day who distinctly require a treatment separate from that of most of their contemporaries; these are Mr. Stephen Phillips and Mr. James M. Barrie. Mr. Phillips stands alone as the author of several successful dramas in blank verse, aU of marked poetic value. Mr. Barrie has presented us with a number of idyllic and captivating prose plays of the most delicate fancy, satire, and humor. With Paolo and Francesca, Mr. Phillips first established himself as a poet of the stage. This four-act tragedy is ordered with what so eminent a critic as Mr. William Archer terms the skill of a Sardou and the lovely poetry of a Tennyson. This is, indeed, high praise. Herod is a tragedy of much power and dignity, swift of action and broad of theatrical effect. The scene in which the frenzied king recoils a cataleptic from the embalmed body 155 THE DRAMA TO-DAY of Mariamne is in the vein of skilful horror that John Webster understood so well. Later work by Mr. Phillips lacks somewhat in both theatrical and poetic freshness, as compared with his earlier plays. Mr. Barrie, as a playwright, dawned upon us in 1892, when his farce, Walker, London, founded upon his novel, When a Man's Single, achieved marked success. Following this came The Pro- fessor's Love Story and The Little Minister. In 1903, Quality Street, The Admirable Crichton, and Little Mary made an almost simultaneous appear- ance and achieved a nearly equal prosperity. Later work by the same author has included his probable masterpiece, Peter Pan, as well as the two delightful comedies, Alice Sitrby-the-Fire and What Every Woman Knows. Mr. Barrie's is a unique and charming personahty, so far as it is revealed in his work, and that is extensively. In plajrwriting his methods are fresh; and he has the invaluable gift of pathos merging with humor, as well as of a delightfully satirical fancy. Peter Pan is in reality not a drama, but a strangely iridescent poetic pantomime, fuU of bizarre and tender 156 THE BRITISH gayety. It is sometimes difficult, indeed, to determine when Mr. Barrie's Intention is serious and when merely humorous. Perhaps as a result of this peculiarity, his plays often faU to create an impression of depth or solidity. He is particularly felicitous in the portrayal of the lighter phases of feminine character, though he has rarely achieved a fuU-length study of a truly womanly woman. Babbie, in The Ldttle Minister, is personified caprice. Phcebe Throssell, in Quality Street, is a somehow disappointing exponent of the real tragedy involved in being deprived of one's youth. Mr. Barrie rarely depicts more than the childish aspect of adult emotions, and this fact accounts for the non- success of Moira in Little Mary. The Admirable Crichton is pure farce, based on an abrupt reversal of social rank through the casting away of a noble family upon an uninhabited island. Nevertheless, it is of high-comedy grade in its blending of wit, hmnor, and satire; and its heroine is one of the most satisfactory feminine figures in this author's gallery. In Alice Sitrby-the-Fire we find a similar mingling of the facetious and the ironical, in the wistful story of a middle-aged mother's reluctant 157 THE DRAMA TO-DAY abandonment of her youth. In the delicious comedy, What Every Woman Knows, the men, utterly devoid of a sense of humor, can say or do nothing that is not highly amusing; whereas the heroine, who sees the fun of everything, speaks almost always in a strain of fairly pathetic tenderness. The satirical genius of Mr. Barrie has been given full scope in his charming burlesque, A Slice of Life. Here the stage itself, with its familiar conventions — ^which Mr. Barrie himself is so skilful in handling — supplies the target for many a well aimed shaft. The Hyphen-Browns, of course, have a parlor maid to start off with, but she is helpless over the exposition until she spies the telephone and into its receiver confides the information as to her identity. Hard pressed again, she resorts to reading aloud from a news- paper; but, realizing the unpardonable offense of the soliloquy in up-to-date drama, she refrains until she finds a china dog to which she can read the expository item. When the mistress of the house arrives, she introduces herself to the audience by saying languidly into the telephone, "Hello, is 158 THE BRITISH this you, Father? This is your daughter — ^you remember? Mrs. Hj^jhen-Brown." When her husband is later betrayed into an aside, he is promptly reproached for it. Their breakfast is over an instant after it is begun. The mysterious telegram — ^from the parlor maid — is ostentatiously dropped by the husband. The wife remains in the twentieth century theatrical fashion by stoutly resisting her temptation to read the message. So the little skit ripples along. Husband and wife delectably confess that, regardless of the stories they have told each other, all their lives they have been perfectly moral, "We cannot both go on living here like this," cries the man in agony. Naturally, they toss a coin. He loses. As he is about to go, a thought strikes him. "What is to become of the child?" "There is no child!" cries his wife. "True," he answers, "I had forgotten." Then the woman finds a solution. "Why cannot we go together?" she asks. This they do, "Out into the light!" they cry rapturously, taking up their suit-cases. The stage lights go out, and a door is very distinctly heard to slam. This trifle is, of course, comparatively insignifi- 159 THE DRAMA TO-DAY cant. And yet a treatise on the drama to-day could scarcely be complete without at least these citations from the little travesty. The author, it will be noted, hits right and left at the ultra- " realistic" contrivances of the modern stage, as well as at the problem play, emotionalism, stage conventionality, and many other fair targets for clever ridicule. In none of his later work; has Mr. Barrie achieved, or even attempted, the strength of situation and character he revealed in his first dramatic endeavors. Into all that he writes, how- ever, there is projected the exquisite, unutterable charm of the author's individuality. All gratitude is due him for the freshness of his invention, the spontaneity of his humor, the genial incisiveness of his satire, and the skUl of his stagecraft. Perhaps later work of his will add to these inestimable qualities a greater degree of spiritual dignity and hence of artistic as well as moral significance. It is impossible to conclude even the briefest discussion of the modem British drama without reference to the Irish theatre. Mr. WiUiam Butler Yeats was the first president of the Irish National 160 THE BRITISH Theatre Society, which has been largely responsible for the fruitful Dublin Abbey Theatre movement. His chief desire has been the establishment of a folk drama; and the Abbey Theatre plays, written in the Anglo-Irish idiom, are redolent of the soU. Mr. Yeats himseK is at his best in poetic allegory, clothed in an atmosphere of delicate fantasy. In Kathleen ni Houlafian, for instance, the Genius of Ireland, symbolized by an old woman, enters a farmer's cottage, in 1798, and, relating her wrongs, wins the lover from the arms of his prospective bride to take up the patriotic cause and regain the green fields of his native land. Particularly happy is this writer when embodying the superstitions of a race keenly ahve to the mysterious forces of earth, air, and water. The elves and sprites of early legend live again in his poetic plays and people a world of fearful delight. Quite otherwise is the work of the master realist who heads the list of these latter-day Irish drama- tists. It was a great day for their movement when in 1897 Mr. Yeats met John Millington Synge, a strange, taciturn, unpromising journalist, whose fancy it was to spend six months of the year in the 11 161 THE DRAMA TO-DAY Latin Quarter of Paris and the other six months among the odd peasantry living in the islands off the coast of Ireland. By Mr. Yeats's advice, Synge for the first time tried his hand at the Anglo- Irish dialect, producing that notable work. In the Shadow of the Glen. Not long afterwards came Riders to the Sea and The Well of the Saints. Then appeared The Playboy of the Western World, called by George Moore "the most original piece of stage literature that has been written since Elizabethan times." In the Shadow of the Glen is a strange little tragi-comedy, relating how a jealous husband tests his wife's fidelity by pretending to die. When she agrees to marry a suspected lover, the husband revives and both men cast her off. Luckily there is a tramp at hand, who carries her away with him. Riders to the Sea is more truly tragic, a little master- piece of pathos, filled with a sense of inevitable doom. It depicts the quiet sorrow of a mother whose six sons have one by one become the victims of the remorseless sea. She ends the drama, sajdng gently: "Michael has a clean burial in the far north, by the grace of the Almighty God. Bartley 162 THE BRITISH will have a fine coffin out of the white boards, and a deep grave surely. What more can we want than that? No man at all can be living forever, and we must be satisfied." Partly because of the opposition it has aroused among a certain class of soi-disant Irish patriots. The Playboy of the Western World is the most noted play in the Abbey Theatre's repertory. This poetic prose drama portrays with extreme felicity the humor, the susceptibility, the imaginativeness of a generous peasantry. Christy Mahon, a young fugitive, who thinks he has slain his ruffian of a father with a blow of a loy, arouses the pity, the wonder, and finally the love of Pegeen Mike. Transformed by her love into a marvel of courage, Christy achieves heroic honors only to lose them when his merely stunned parent comes after him. The boy tries again to kill his father; and then, face to face with the reality, the disenchanted Pegeen learns that "there's a great gap between a gallons story and a dirty deed." The only play- boy in the western world goes off with his father, boasting, however, that he will submit to no more paternal tyranny. Throughout, the dialogue is 163 THE DRAMA TO-DAY quaint and picturesque, and the characterization is minute and truthful. Less noted, but perhaps even more worth while than The Playboy, is The Well of the Saints, a strange story of an old blind pair, whose miracu- lously recovered sight reveals to them only un- guessed ugliness in place of their inner visions of ideal beauty. Blindness once more becomes only too welcome, for it brings oblivion to evil and restores them to comfort and understanding and sympathy. No more will old Martin Doul be touched with the holy water and so made like to "the little children that do be listening to the stories of an old woman, and do be dreaming after in the dark night that it's in grand houses of gold they are, with speckled horses to ride, and do be waking again, in a short while, and they destroyed with the cold, and the thatch dripping, maybe, and the starved ass braying in the yard." Rarely has the bitter conflict between reality and the ideal been more poignantly set forth. Among the other writers for the Abbey Theatre stage should be mentioned, at least. Lady Augusta Gregory, Lennox Robinson, William Boyle, and 164 THE BRITISH St. John G. Ervine. Lady Gregory has written many pleasant folk-tale comedies in>a charmingly simple and racy idiom. In Hyacinth Halvy, for example, we are introduced to the pompous talk and the laughable scheming of a simple and obscure people. The hero, a paragon of virtue, makes a desperate effort to live down his reputation. He begins by stealing a sheep, but the officers of the law are already after its owner for harboring tainted meat, and Hyacinth is commended generally for having saved the man he really sought to rob. Again, when Halvy bribes a boy to steal from the contribution box and himself assumes the guilt, he is credited with self-sacrificing charity. The moral is: Give a dog a good name — and he can do no wrong. In The Image, Lady Gregory offers another of the many delightful farces she has written to relieve the gloomy impression produced by the numerous tragedies of her co-laborers. There is a dispute among village folk as to the highest use of the money to be derived from the carcasses of two large whales which have been washed ashore; but, before the intricate squabble is brought to a conclusion, the sea washes its gifts 165 THE DRAMA TO-DAY away again. The dreams of the villagers are thus rudely dissipated; "the more ecstatic the vision, the more impossible its reaUzation, until that time when, after the shadows of earth, the seer shall awake and be satisfied." Of the contributions by Lennox Robinson to the new Irish theatre, the satirical Harvest deserves special mention. Old William Lordan has spent his life educating the neighborhood peasant chil- dren, only to incite a number of them to the most distressing conduct. The satire, of course, shows the harm of indiscriminate schooling, the ill effects of injudicious education upon weak characters. True progress, the moral runs, comes only from a gradual evolution. This play, like The Building Fund of William Boyle, is skilfully constructed and peopled with sharply drawn characters. It is a comedy picture of avarice contending with eager heirs. Less happy is The Mineral Workers, a play which suffers from the slightness and perhaps the non-dramatic nature of its theme. In Family Failing this author stretches a slender fable across a loose-jointed and wordy three-act comedy, into which, however, he introduces several interesting 166 THE BRITISH types. Dominic Donnelly, for example, is a sort of Irish Napoleon Jackson, whose fatalism most conveniently absolves him from over-exertion. "Whin we were down before," he observes, as he learns that the last bit of bacon is gone, "God took poor Uncle Andrew. Ye can't tell what a day may bring forth." Mixed Marriage, by St. John G. Ervine, pro- poses the difficult problem of Protestant and Catholic national and matrimonial unions. The Catholic heroine's death alone brings the drama to a solution. In The Magnanimous Lover this writer has made his contribution to the growing list of latter-day denials that marriage is a com- plete reparation to a wronged girl. Sudermann's Die Heimat is, of course, the pioneer in this field. Where Mr. Boyle's dramas are spineless and re- dundant, the work of Mr. Ervine is usually com- pact and effective in the highest degree. In aU the leading work of the Irish playwrights, simplicity and veracity lend the principal distinc- tion to plays most skiKully adapted to the theatre. These authors, like the actors that have interpreted them, have sought for their material and their 167 THE DRAMA TO-DAY effects, not on the stage, but in life. They have gone into the country, among the cottages of the peasants, into the shady glen, and along the mysterious shores of ocean; and what they have found is strong and true and full of the simple, naive charm of the elemental and the pictm-esque in nature and in human nature. The lesson of their achievements is plain to aU followers of the dramatic art. , 108 THE CONTINENTALS A MONG the dramatists of the last two or /% three decades who have written in other J m. languages than English, a few great names stand out as of first significance. Such, for example, are Ibsen and Strindberg, Haupt- mann and Sudermann, Maeterlinck and Ros- tand, Hervieu and D'Annunzio, Bernstein and Brieux. Any consideration of the playwrights whose^influence is most marked upon the acted drama of our own time must at least make men- tion of these authors, of their general character- istics, and of their leading works. Representing as they do "diverse nationaHties and racial qualities often quite different from those of the Anglo- Saxons, these dramatists have, of course, contrib- uted a wide range of matter and form to the contemporary stage. It has become a fashion among critics to relate all developments in the latter-day drama to Henrik Ibsen, either as their progenitor or at 169 THE DRAMA TO-DAY least as their sponsor. His " retrospective method," for instance, has been often lauded. We have heard much of his plays' being simply expanded fifth acts. His abandonment of the soliloquy and the aside, his use of fewer characters and less scenery, his delayed exposition have all been much exploited. However, the "retrospective method" of Ibsen is sometimes what it is in The Master Builder, for example, merely the placing forward of two chairs while one character says to another, "Sit down, and I will tell you a story." As for "delayed exposition," more than once it is so long delayed that its opportunity for an interested hearing has been quite lost. When we come to Ibsen's dialogue, on the other hand, we must admit its naturalness — except where he lapses into over-fantastic symbolism; its short speeches, broken and fragmentary as in real life; and its admirable economy in story-telling and character- ization. Moreover, Ibsen restored to the modem stage something of the inevitability of Greek tragedy. The fundamental theme which distinguishes the whole body of Ibsen's dramas is the revolt of 170 THE CONTINENTALS individualism against conventional discipline. His plays constitute a picture gallery of impressive male and female figures, each in conflict with a set of conditions strongly imposed from without. The strange mariner in The Lady from the Sea, for example, personifies the untamable element as a symbol of restless self-will and detachment from civilization. It is not surprising that, though the playwright has endeavored to give this stranger a definite human personality, he has not succeeded. In fact, all of Ibsen's plays suffer more or less from that disease of excessive symbolism which antag- onizes the fundamental illusion of reality upon which the success of the stage depends. In The Master Builder we have the most mystical flights of emblematic poetry thrust into the most prosaic surroundings — "the middle-aged architect, amid his specifications and T-squares, pursued by the forward minx and goaded into climbing a tower from which he tumbles headlong, in presence of his wife's lady visitors and the brass band of the Masons' Union." The contrast is too great to permit of conviction: we wonder at the strange- ness of such a content in such a form, and end by 171 THE DRAMA TO-DAY being bored with a strictly closet drama upon the acting stage. Similarly, the stranger in The Lady from the Sea remains an allegorical abstraction throughout a play of mingled realism and mysti- cism. In Rosmersholm the same defect militates against the play's success in action. These two plays are really complementary: the latter shows balked individuality ending in death, rather than, as in the former, gratified individuality leading to well-being. In general, the earlier plays are less effective for the stage than are the dramas of Ibsen's middle period. Pillars of Society, for instance, has some good theatrical situations, but both its dialogue and its detail are redundant. The plays of Ibsen, like those of his many imitators, are "problem plays." Unlike some of his followers, however, he always builds his drama around a central struggle. In A Doll's House the conflict is between a woman's conscience and the conventions of society. In Ghosts traditionary creeds are at war with revolutionary theories. In The Wild Duck imaginative idealism is at odds with an incapacity for action. In Rosmersholm the old culture struggles against the new. In 172 THE CONTINENTALS Liittle Eyolf the antagonism is between sensual and maternal passions. Further, in most of these plays, the smothering of truth beneath inadequate moral conventions furnishes the essential material. In Pillars of Society we are shown the smug social egotism of a small seaport. In A Doll's House a woman's individuality clashes with hypocrisy in the marriage relation. When he had so vividly pictured social degeneracy in Ghosts, only to meet with a reception even more frigid than that ac- corded to A Doll's House, Ibsen wrote An Enemy of the People to show that, as Dr. Stockmann declares in the play, "The majority is never right! That's one of the social lies a free, thinking man is bound to rebel against. Who make up the majority in any given country? Is it the wise men or the fools? . . . What sort of truths do the majority rally round? Truths that are decrepit with age. When a truth is as old as that, then it's in a fair way to become a He." In other words, as the writer of the problem play usually maintains, the principal evils in life spring from the discrepancy between actual and conventional morahty. To achieve reforms, then, the first step 173 THE DRAMA TO-DAY is to discard the outworn traditions. For the most part, this is a romantic and external sort of reform, preached generally with the emphasis upon human rights, rather than upon mutual obligations. Of course, it is the logical application of an indi- vidualistic philosophy, — ^the revolt of romanticism against restraint — of whatever sort. The excesses of individualism have often led to self-parody. Perhaps that is what Ibsen has given us in The Wild Duck, a play which portrays the merely harmful results of a morbid idealist's prob- ing into the weaknesses of his fellows. The in- evitable outcome of the stress upon the ego is pessimism. We see this most strongly marked in the plays of August Strindberg, another northern revolutionary who fiercely satirizes humanity and wages relentless warfare against all manner of restraint. This Swedish Schopenhauer, basing a terrific hatred of woman doubtless largely upon his own bitter experiences in matrimony and divorce, gives his principal attention to that sinister destructive force that is connected with unrestricted passions. The strife of the sexes has rarely been so terribly presented as in The Father, 174. THE CONTINENTALS where the contest for mastery between husband and wife results in the ultimate realization of the woman's false charge of insanity against her spouse. Throughout the entire diabolical intrigue she is moved by an irresistible craving for command. In The Link another ill-assorted pair struggle for control of the child that still holds them together. In spite of a private agreement to part in peace, these two are led by the inevitable into bitter demmciations of each other that finally lose the child to both of them. Marital incompatibility is again the theme of The Dance of Death, though in this play it is the man, rather than the woman, that is chiefly at fault. In The Countess Julia the heroine accomphshes her own destruction through her hereditary wilfulness. All these figures are manifestly but puppets in the hands of the grinning showman Fate. As an artist Strindberg ranks considerably lower than Ibsen. The Norwegian's grasp upon his ma- terial, as well as his skill in its elaboration, surpasses by a great deal the achievements of this other, the last of the distinguished Scandinavian group. On the other hand, Strindberg shows himself often a 175 THE DRAMA TO-DAY master, not only of characterization and atniosphere but also of dramatic suspense and of true tragedy. Individualism is the main element in the con- tent, realism in the form, of latter-day drama. The naturalistic movement in Germany may be traced back as far as to Faust, wherein we have depicted the swinging over of German philosophy from metaphysical speculation to materialism. In addi- tion to the promulgation of his individualistic theories, Nietzsche, in Also sprach Zarathustra, summons German poetry away from idealistic visions to a portrayal of the real. In Ibsen, as we have seen, is continued the Nietzschean emphasis upon the development of personality as man's first duty. That is the theme, indeed, of so early a work as Brand. In Peer Gynt the same notion is given a supposedly national treatment. In his later dramas Ibsen largely abandons the poetic form and seeks after ultra- realism. An Enemy of the People may be thought of as merely a prose version of Brand. And, as the inevitable effect of realism is to narrow, so. in these later plays the application, no longer uni- versal, becomes local. 176 THE CONTINENTALS When, in 1878, Ibsen produced Pillars of Society, he was widely acclaimed in Germany, whither he went to reside. And it was upon the series of realistic pieces which he then wrote that the most noteworthy latter-day German drama has been modelled. For instance, in Ger- hart Hauptmann's Lonely People and The Sunken Bell it is easy to trace the author's obligations to Rosmersholm and The Master Builder. Hauptmann is an extremist among that inter- esting group of recent playwrights who, in their revolt against every prescription of both theatrical and social usage, have endeavored to cast aside laws of dramatic writing which have been built up during twenty-five hundred years. For these laws and their effects there has been an effort to substitute chiefly witty and paradoxical dialogue, as in the case of Mr. Shaw; or dull, if amazingly veracious, photography, as in the case of Mr. Barker; or bold and brutal naturalism, as exempli- fied by Gerhart Hauptmann. In his first play, Before Sunrise, Hauptmann deliberately discarded plot, action, hero, character development, and vmity. The necessary result was confusion worse 12 177 THE DRAMA TO-DAY confounded, in this merely photographic represen- tation of alcoholic degeneracy. After he had produced several other equally obnoxious socio- logical theses in stage form, he rehashed Ros- mersJiolm — characters, problem, and solution — ^in Lonely People. The effect, however, is in no wise comparable to that of the Ibsen play with its Attic dignity. The Weavers has no definite hero, no single actor even that lasts throughout the play. It simply embodies an episode in the life of a large group of Silesian laborers: the people as a whole, represented at various times by various persons, constitutes the real protagonist. Formlessness is accordingly inevitable. Other purely naturalistic plays are credited to Hauptmann before we reach Hannele's Ascension, in which the author turns to symbolism and effectively utilizes the contrast be- tween the squalor of the girl's death and her angelic visions. The problem of The Master Builder is that of the artist who seeks to escape from an unsympa- thetic environment in the hope of realizing his ideal, but whose strength is insufficient at the last moment. The three periods in the career of 178 THE CONTINENTALS Solness have been compared to similar periods in Ibsen's own constructive work. The failure of the master builder in the end may tjrpify the ultimate, inevitable failure Ibsen foresaw for him- self. In The Sunken Bell the same fundamental idea has been attacked, with far less unity of style and purpose. At all events, here for once Hauptmann has allowed the ideal to possess him; and, as a result, he has achieved vitality. In his very next work he relapses into ultra-naturalism once more: Teamster Henschell is one of the most hideous and morbid of naturahstic dramas, a play in which even a literal as well as a figurative stench is produced upon the stage. As for its significance, there is none. In Gabriel Schilling's Flight, a neu- rotic artist is pursued to his hiding-place by a vampire mistress and a discarded wife, whose hand-to-hand fight for his possession leaves him a gibbering idiot whose suicide is a relief to all con- cerned, particularly the audience. The play is loose-jointed and "talky" in the extreme. One feels that the author either has unconsciously de- generated or is deliberately pandering to a degraded popular taste. At all events, excessive individual- 179 THE DRAMA TO-DAY ism and excessive realism are inherently antago- nistic to the universal: they restrict themselves to the special and hence the unimportant. Since The Sunken Bell, Hauptmann has produced little other than a series of horrible sociological studies, deal- ing with pruriency, disease, adultery, and crime. And it is, of course, a large question whether the mere scientist, when he thrusts himself out upon the stage, is not in the wrong galley altogether. To Hauptmann in part, as to Sudermann much more largely, belongs the credit for restoring the German stage of to-day to its former influential position. Sudermann began in Zolaesque natural- ism. Sodom's End is a morbid pathological study of the consequences of debauchery. In Die Heimat, written in 1893, however, he turned to reahsm and produced one of the best plays of the time. He had aheady won fame for his insight into dramatic technique with his earlier play. Honor. Now he presented a fairly wonderful acting drama. The problem in Die Heimat is the old one. Magda is the temperament that demands artistic expression and seK-realization. She finds herself in direct conflict with narrow-minded convention 180 THE CONTINENTALS embodied in her father. She demands the right to hve her own life. "I am I," she cries, "and I dare not lose myseK." Obviously this is Suder- mann's echo of Ibsen's echo of Nietzsche. Magda is the Ubermensch once more. Driven from her home, betrayed, grown famous as a singer, she returns one day to her stem, old-fashioned father, her subservient, feeble stepmother, her conven- tional younger sister, and aU the general atmos- phere of cut-and-dried conduct. The struggle that ensues between the woman's individualism and the old set of conditions is moving in the highest degree. It is set forth with much skill of character portraiture and contrast, in striking situations leading up to a logical and impressive climax. Throughout, the theories of individualism supported by Magda are presented not in mere talk but in illustrative action. One of the strongest passages in modern drama is that in which, instead of reproaching the pom- pous, mean-spirited coward, once her betrayer, now a respected and pious member of society, Magda astounds him by the vehemence of her gratitude for the part he has played in her life. 181 THE DRAMA TO-DAY "I was a stupid, thoughtless creature," she ex- claims, "enjoying my liberty like an escaped monkey: — ^through you I became a woman. For whatever height I have reached in my art, for what I am in myseK, I have you to thank. My soul was like a silent harp, and through you the storm swept over it; it has sounded almost to breaking the whole scale of emotions which brings us women to maturity — ^love and hate and revenge and ambition and necessity, necessity, necessity — threefold necessity — and the greatest, the strongest the highest of all — the love of a mother for a child! — aU that I owe you." The clash of two conflicting theories of life forms the basis also of Die Ehre. In this latter play it is a man that struggles against opposing conditions. Returning, successful, after an ab- sence of years, to his people in Berlin, he finds them deep in a sordid selfishness far removed from the ideals he has cherished for them. Urged to abandon them, he refuses. When he finds that his younger sister has been betrayed by the prof- ligate son of his rich employer, he plans to redeem her through love and protection. His own ideas 182 THE CONTINENTALS of honor are not shared, however, either by his sister or by the rest of his family. When he is about to give up his project in despair, he finds a recompense for his sorrows in the love of his employer's daughter. Die Ehre is a realistic problem play, deahng with unpleasant material, but containing at least two admirable figures. Class hypocrisy and the shifting code of conventional righteousness form the point of attack. The play occasionally tends .too much to the didactic, and it is too essentially German to enjoy so widespread a popularity as that of Die Heimat. In his more recent work Sudermann has given us nothing of equal signifi- cance. Das Gliick im Winkel {Happiness in a Comer) is noteworthy chiefly for its embodiment, in Von Rocknitz, of the extreme type of the IJbermensch, and for a somewhat conventional ending to a difficult story. Schmetterlinsfscha^t (The Butterflies' War) is a sordid satirical play with an incongruous comedy ending. In Morituri we have three short plays showing the effect of approaching death upon character. John the Baptist is an attempt to embody in an historical 183 THE DRAMA TO-DAY tragedy the universal love which is the ideal of Christianity. It contains several notable scenes, especially that in which the great Forerunner, about to stone the infamous Herod, is restrained by the command sent by Christ: "Love your enemies." In The Three Heron Feathers, Suder- mann has presented in symbolic guise the romantic search for the ever-fleeting ideal, St. John's Fire offers a rather theatrical presentment of the in- fluences of heredity and environment; while Es lebe das Lebenf a picture of Berlin society, portrays the struggle of another noteworthy female charac-, ter, Beata, to solve the problem of life. More recently this writer has devised, in the unimportant play, A Good Reputation, an elaborately involved plot turning on the ever-present "triangular" situ- ation, which it can scarcely be said to illuminate. Extravagant claims have been made by Suder- mann's admirers with regard to his rank in the world of the drama. Certain it is that, in more than one play, he has imited a rare technique with a keen insight into life. "The Belgian Shakespeare" is the formidable nickname with which Monsieur Maurice Maeter- 184 THE CONTINENTALS linck has had to struggle ahnost from the be- ginning. The extravagance of this well-meant but injudicious title has, doubtless, had a reac- tionary effect upon this writer's reputation among the conservative, if in another direction, perhaps, it has served him well. With Maeterlinck mysticism is the key-word. His first plays were formless and vague, as to both plot and characterization. They were offered as an effort to express the inex- pressible by means of that which does not occm- — a sufficiently difficult task to set one's seK, surely, and one that obviously implies a resort to that ser- vant of vagueness, the symbolical. We had intro- duced to us a set of helpless, unhealthy creatures in the dire grip of a relentless, often monstrous Fate, aU dealing for the most part with recurrent and antiquated symbols, though usually in a new and unwonted way. It was naturally a cause of much astonishment when the creator of this phantas- magoria of spineless figures in a shadowy dance of death abruptly produced a stage play of undeniable power. Monna Vanna is, in fact, a true drama, one in which masterful and clearly drawn char- acters contend f orcef uUy and with strong emotional 185 THE DRAMA TO-DAY effect throughout three intense and coherent, if de- layed, situations. In this one instance alone, how- ever, has the author achieved a gripping human play; and it is all the more regrettable, therefore, that in it he should tamper so deliberately with the highest standards of honor and virtue. After Monna Vanna, Maeterlinck returned to his former manner, producing, in Ariane el Barhe- Bhue, a strange combination of the fairy tale and the problem play; in Marie Madeleine, an episodical Sardouesque treatment of the New Testament; in Somr Beatrice, a miracle play of the Virgin Mary, in which the excessive pathos overburdens the slender story; and in L'Oiseau bleu, an elementary and obvious allegory, in which the fantastic and the impalpable are given a substantial embodi- ment. Upon Monna Vanna and The Blue Bird chiefly rests this author's reputation as a play- wright. The former is unfortunately tainted by the sickly morbidity which marks so much of Maeterlinck's work for the stage. As for L'Oiseau bleu, it is a "Christmas pantomime" with words, at times delicate and fanciful, but distinctly an entertainment merely and not a drama. Its 186 THE CONTINENTALS extraordinary success must be due in large measure to the matter-of-fact manner in which it presents its extremely elementary allegorical material. Its appeal is rather to children, indeed, than to adults, and its tone is accordingly optimistic. As for Marie Madeleine, it is distinctly a closet drama. Though it depicts the sharp struggle in a woman's heart between earthly and spiritual love, its chief happenings are described, rather than shown, and the action is lacking in coherence. Mysticism and symbolism are dangerous tools for dramatists to play with, especially in combina- tion with each other and with realism. Ibsen never succeeded in perfectly fusing these elements in his work, and Monsieur Maeterlinck has had an even slighter degree of su9cess. More unfortu- nate stiU is the latter's fondness for the unwhole- some. In Monna Vanna, in JoyzeUe, and in Marie Madeleine the repulsive central situation of Meas- ure for Measure is treated with apparent relish, in a determined effort to present instances of justi- fiable treachery and adultery. There is none of this tendency to the eccentric, the disingenuous, the sexual, in the dramatic work 187 THE DRAMA TO-DAY of that other modern romanticist, Monsieur Edmond Rostand. Beginning with Les Roman- esques in 1894, this brilUant dramatist and poet has produced a series of remarkable plays, including La Princesse Lointaine, La Samaritaine, Cyrano de Bergerac, L'Aiglon, and Chantecler. The first of the group — if, indeed. La Samari- taine was not written before Les Romanesques — ^is a graceful, light-hearted little comedy, exquisite and precise in verse and dialogue, gay, fleeting, and delicate. "The time of the play is immaterial," says the author, "provided the costumes be pretty." For plot, a traditional farce has been inverted, presenting two friendly fathers, who, wishing their children to marry each other, make the course of true love rough and so gratify the youngsters' dreams of romance. Although it lacks continuity of structure, there being a break of interest at least between the first and second acts, the spirit of droUery that permeates thisWatteau travesty on young love makes the slender story of Percinet and Sylvette and their adventures at the hands of the swash-buckler Straf orel an altogether delightful journey into the blue distance. 188 THE CONTINENTALS Rostand's sole experiment in mysticism is represented by La Samaritaine, a miracle play of the woman of Samaria. Distinctly pre-Raphaelite in spirit, this "gospel in three tableaus" is rather a dramatic poem than a play. It is not lacking, however, in obvious mastery of stage efifect; though occasionally the inexperience of the youth- ful dramatist is manifest. La Princesse Lointaine relates once more the antique story of Rudel and the Lady of Tripoli. With extraordinary felicity the poet maintains throughout his version of this venerable legend the atmosphere of the remote past. A pair of Pro- vencal troubadours go forth in quest of a far-away princess, the fame of whose beauty has caused them to languish at home for years. Throughout the play we find a subtle blending of the ideaUties of love with the actualities of passion, but always — spite of the lovesick hero and the exotic heroine — it is emotion without morbidity and free from all closeness of air. Universally regarded as Rostand's master- piece, Cyrano de Bergerac, an "heroic comedy" of the period of Richelieu, shows the author at the 189 THE DRAMA TO-DAY zenith of his achievement both as poet and as playwright. Instinctively avoiding all the out- lawed complications, he presents, with superb mastery of stagecraft, magnanimous and vital characters in an intricate and swiftly moving plot. The central jSgure is undoubtedly a permanent addition to the world-gaUery of romantic portraits, headed by Don Quixote and Don Juan. Doubtless these are all distinct types in the drama, destined to survive as no mere reahstic, and therefore tem- porary, character may hope to do. Cyrano is the grotesque made hero, and wonderfully sympa- thetic in his power to secure, not for himself, but for others only, the rewards of his genius and of his nobiUty of soul. Though relinquishing his own happiness, too, this subtle protagonist is con- scious of being loved in the person of another. A tender poet, he is forced by a monstrous nose to act the bully. Altogether, there has been nothing at aU so distinctive as this character since Figaro. The faults of Cyrano de Bergerac are resultant chiefly upon the playwright's exuberance. His play is presented by nearly sixty speaking charac- ters, in addition to a mob. In fact, superabundance 190 THE CONTINENTALS is not confined to the dramatis personce: the twists and turns of incident and intrigue are ever luxuri- ant, while the dialogue fairly droops under the excess of dazzhng virtuosity. In his later plays, L'Aighn and, particularly, Chantecler, the author has allowed his work to be still more seriously marred by similar extravagances. L'Aiglon has, too, the poignancy of moral tragedy, without the effectiveness of true drama. This is due, doubtless, to the fact that it is purely a play of failure, in which the actual achievements of the protagonist are nil. For such achievements the load of curious and often fascinating incident makes but a feeble substitute. Wonderfully convincing, however, is the sharp contrast of the Napoleonic epic against a background of triviality. Somewhere behind aU the pathetic helplessness of the vacillating Eaglet lurks the mighty spirit of the once all-conquering Eagle. "The best advertised play of modem times" was Chantecler, the poetic drama of the barnyard, for which its author made an eager world wait with increasing impatience, until, indeed, he achieved for himself a reputation for that sort of charlatanry which so largely distinguishes the "big 191 THE DRAMA TO-DAY names" of a press-agenting age. Certainly it is difficult to see how a man is to avoid great pub- licity with regard to his forthcoming works when, within a few years, the world has seen him spring from comparative obscurity into fame, wealth, and a seat in the French Academy, not to say the successorship to Victor Hugo. At aU events, Chanteder measured well up to the highest expec- tations its announcement had aroused, from the poetic, if not from the dramatic, standpoint. A play without human characters, in which birds and beasts of Brobdingnagian size, in an environ- ment of proportionate magnitude, Chantecler is Rostand's contribution to symbolism — a different contribution and a different symbolism from any- thing of Monsieur Maeterlinck's. For its main theme, the play takes the first problem of philoso- phy, the relation of man to the universe. That "Cyrano in feathers," Chantecler, is primarily masculine and French. But he is much more: he is humanity — ^the human race seeing in its own earth the centre of the universe. Good symbols are always generally apphcable. For all those who exaggerate seK-importance comes disiUusion- 192 THE CONTINENTALS ment. Man has had to realize in general, as men have had to realize in particular, that he is but a detail — ^rather a minor one at that — in the swinging of the spheres. Underlying the whole allegory of Chanteder is the call to faith and enthusiasm, the indomitable courage of the worker, the glory of singing and the aspiration that makes it glorious, together with the everlasting triumph of idealism over disillusion. Monsieur Rostand's growing tendency to the intricate is to be deplored. The characterization of Chanteder is most admirable; the method of presentation, however, is leisurely to a degree. In fact, the play is primarily one of atmosphere and character, rather than of incident. Of course, here is poetry instead of action, and fancy in place of cumulative situation. Best of all, it is eminently sane and wholesome — ^like a great and glorious current of fresh air ^fter the close and stufify atmosphere of Ibsen, the misty, sickly gloom of Maeterlinck, the loathsome putrescence of Haupt- mann, and the pathological miasma of D'Annunzio. This last-named writer, whose main achieve- ment has been that of restoring Italian literature 13 193 THE DRAMA TO-DAY to a deep interest in its own past, combines in his loosely built fabrics of gloom and horror and infamy the pessimism of Ibsen with the mysticism of Maeterlinck and the brutality of Hauptmann. D'Annimzio's plays are, for the most part, hastily written. Consequently, his plots are often inco- herent and his characters poorly drawn. The Daughter of Jorio, for instance, was written in thirty-three days. It has its color and its fine scenes. La Fiaccola sotto il Moggio (The Fire beneath the Ashes) is typical D'Annunzio: all possible horror and wickedness woven into a story enacted by rude and savage, as well as vaguely sketched, characters. Turning again to the French stage, we find, far more representative of its main tendencies than is Rostand, such realists as Paul Hervieu, Eugene Brieux, Maurice Donnay, and Henri Bataille. The first-named author's titles include Les Tenailks, L'Enigme, Le Dedale, Theroigne de Mericourt, and Connais-toi. In The Passing of the Torch we have a typical specimen of modem tragedy based upon the inscrutable sacrifice by Nature of generation after generation of human life. Taking for his 194 THE CONTINENTALS theme the readiness of parents to throw themselves upon the altar for the benefit of their children, Monsieur Hervieu works out his structure with^ remarkable precision and impeccable logic. Chil- dren, declares Maravon, the "raisonneur" of the play, acquit themselves of their debt to their parents by bringing other children into the world. Thus the torch is passed from hand to hand. It is, of course, a thesis play, and so involves much of the didacticism ever associated with that genre. "Filial gratitude is not spontaneous; it is an effort of civilization, a frail attempt at virtue." Mon- sieur Hervieu illustrates this thesis by portraying the sacrifice of a woman who, for her daughter's sake, steals from her own mother, only to be rewarded by desertion on the part of the daughter, who goes away with her husband. At the climax of this story of the ingratitude of the second genera- tion, the heroine's own mother dies as a result of having been carried off to the Alps by the heroine against a physician's advice. Thus the protagonist herself is left in tragic loneliness to make the grim confession: "For my daughter I have murdered my mother!" 195 THE DRAMA TO-DAY Les Tenailles is a similar analysis of marriage. In this, as in numerous other dramas, Monsieur Hervieu has shown himself in deadly earnest. Latterly, however, he has begun to exhibit a degree of philosophic serenity. In Bagatelle he presents a sort of double "triangle" of adultery, wherein the two men are bosom friends. When they rendezvous in the same place with each other's wives, there is naturally a large opportunity for displajdng love, jealousy, and friendship, both masculine and feminine, in intricate conflict. With the faithless husband, it is his friend's treachery that hurts, rather than his wife's revenge. Finally, however, all parties to the controversy, in a dis- tinctly "French" spirit, admit that time wiU trans- form these near-tragic affairs of the heart into trifles. In keenness of satire Hervieu is unsur- passed. Bagatelle itseff, in fact, is an illustration in bitter irony of the inability of the idle and per- verted rich to make their chief amusement and business in life anything more than a "mere bagatelle." Mr. George Bernard Shaw has spoken of Eugene Brieux as the greatest French playwright 196 THE CONTINENTALS since Moli^re. Others have referred to him as "a kind of maniacal demon ferreting out his characters from the mews and gutters." Mr. Shaw adds : " He is a born dramatist, differing from the other drama- tists only in that he has a large mind and a scientific habit of using it." Others, again, describe him as "the dramatist of the unmentionable." A "prob- lem playwright," Monsieur Brieux always attacks some sociological, economic, or political abuse. Matemite searches out the evils embodied in the conventional rule: No motherhood without mar- riage, and no marriage without money. La Robe rouge, perhaps its author's masterpiece, deals with defects in French court procedure. Suzette takes up the question of outraged motherhood. Like La Foi, it is dull and didactic; moreover, the general unpleasantness is not counterbalanced by any sufficient sympathy for the agonized mother. Les Hannetons depicts the diurnal tiffs of an illegally and a mismated pair. It offers no direct moral teaching, but a rather cynical satire, in its treatment of a sordid group in a repellent setting. In Les Avaries, which succeeded in shocking even the sensibilities of Paris, this writer invades the 197 THE DRAMA TO-DAY farthest limits of that sociological territory which is generally considered wholly unavailable for stage purposes. Under the title, Damaged Goods, this tremendous indictment of civilization's great- est failure, the conspiracy of silence with regard to sex, has lately been acted in New York and other American cities, producing a profound and signifi- cant impression. Once we grant that the taboo on such topics should be banished from the theatre, we must reaUze that, if Les Avaries were as artistic as a play as it is salutary as a tract, its capabiUties for enlightenment would be almost unlimited. Contrasted with Ibsen's masterly Ghosts, which deals with the same subject, the Brieux play, with its sketchy, impersonal figures and its attenuated story, seems rather cinematographic than dra- matic. Perhaps, however, its audacity and its novelty will sufficiently redeem it, so that it may serve its purpose as an antidote to the suggestive prurience that is the blight upon modern nonde- script stage amusements. La Femme seule is a tract against celibacy. The lone woman is shown ineffectually struggling for independence in the home, in business, and in the 198 THE CONTINENTALS world of labor. Everywhere the selfishness and the brutality of man prevail against her. But ulti- mately she will win. This is, indeed, the moral which the play has been ruthlessly made to fit, a moral which is expressed as follows: "In this new war of the sexes the men will be beaten, since women work for less wages. They require no surplus money to carry off to the wine- shops. And not only the laborers will be defeated in this way, Monsieur F^liat! Middle-class boys who haven't the backbone to marry girls with no money of their own will find these girls pretty soon blocking the road — these unfortunate girls who are driven to work by the men themselves. You've got to take sides! New times have come. In aU nations, in all cities, in the coimtry, among the poor and the half poor, out of every home deserted for alcohol or emptied by men who haven't the courage to marry, there is coming also a wo- man, who is going to abandon the home and take her place alongside the men, in the factory, in the workshop, in the office, behind the counter. The men don't want her to be a housekeeper; and, as she will not be a prostitute, she will become a 199 THE DRAMA TO-DAY worker and a competitor — and a victorious com- petitor!" Obviously L.a Femme seule is not much as a play. It would have been more as a tract, if it had made clear the impossibility of matrimony for its energetic heroine. The familiar French marriage of convenience furnishes most of the material for the vital but tasteless drama, The Three Daughters of Monsieur Dupont. In this, as in his other work, Monsieur Brieux presents an exaggerated portrayal of an exceptional instance as if it were the rule. Perhaps as much may be said, however, for practically all thesis plays, the justification — ^if there be any — resting in the exigencies of stage emphasis. At all events, drama of this type requires a much greater amount of theatrical interest than Monsieur Brieux usually puts into his work, if it is to be redeemed for the general public from the unpardonable tedium of non-dramatic talk. More akin to Paul Hervieu is Monsieur Henri Bataille,who possesses a somewhat similar ability to give to familiar material an unfamiliar treatment. In La Femme nue, for example, the painter's wife, 200 THE CONTINENTALS once his model, is an exponent of "the nude" metaphorically, just as she once was literally; that is, she stands for single-heartedness and simplicity in a contrasting world of hypocritical prejudices and conventions. She is set over against a rival who is the utter embodiment of self-consciousness and artificiality. In the duel between them the child of nature is vanquished. Her husband and her rival go their way together, being impelled by forces irresistible; and the author has too whole- some a regard for truth to belie inevitability for the sake of commonplace moralizing. The guilty pair are bound together indissolubly by an "artis- tic" passion; and — ^like true individualists — ^they let themselves go. Meanwhile, in the child of nature we have a most sympathetic and lovable figure. The typical French playwright of to-day uses little other material than this familiar "triangle." His task it is to ring the changes upon that hack- neyed instrument in ever new and more subtle ways. In Maurice Donnay's The Return from Jerusalem, for example, a social and intellectual is substituted for the more customary sexual interest. This, again, is a thesis play, throwing little or no 201 THE DRAMA TO-DAY new light upon an old question, though it threshes that question out in numberless discussions. It is, too, a special case and incapable of general appli- cation. The Jewish heroine leads on the Gentile Utopian to an abandonment of his wife and children. They go to Jerusalem for a honeymoon, and at length he realizes that it is Judaism, and not world peace, that his mistress and her Jewish associates are aiming at. Meanwhile we have a notable conflict of racial prejudices and ideals. Naturally there is much non-dramatic debate con- cerning the rights and wrongs of individuals, but very little reference to mutual responsibihties. One other type of French dramatist deserves at least mention before this part of the discussion is brought to a close. The tradition of theatricism founded by Scribe in France has been chiefly con- tinued, formerly by Sardou, latterly by Monsieur Henri Bernstein. A number of this author's plays, in badly adapted and mutilated versions, have been presented on the American stage with varying success. Monsieur Bernstein's method is melodramatic; he builds his plot around a single "big situation," so that often his preliminary acts 202 THE CONTINENTALS are scarcely more than expository, while the con- cluding ones are largely perfunctory. The Thief relates the story of a wife so infatuated with her husband that, to retain his favor, she sacrifices not only her own honor but also the reputation of an innocent youth — all this chiefly to create an opportunity for a "big scene." Israel works up to a climax wherein the anti-Semite hero learns from his proud Gentile mother that he is the illegitimate son of the very Jew he has been reviling. The situation, as usual, is ingeniously elaborated and "held" for all its possibilities; but the device is entirely transparent in its theatricism. There is no possible significance to the play, because the characters are unreal, and the theme of anti- Semitism is utilized solely as a basis for melodrama. In L'Assaut, again. Monsieur Bernstein has pro- duced one more "well-made play" with a valueless plot and a second act built up with admirable sus- pense to a startling cHmax. As for Le Secret, it has been called in Paris his strongest work. The chief figure is a sort of female lago, who, loving her husband, yet spends her leisure in wrecking the happiness of all about her. Eventually she ob- 203 THE DRAMA TO-DAY serves the Bernstein tradition and confesses^ — ^not only to her husband, but to her friend, Henriette, whose hfe she has so cordially tried to ruin. One inevitably regrets that this dramatist's ingenuity is not given to more permanent and vital matter. Another master of the theatre-drama is Mon- sieur Henry Kistemaeckers, the Belgian play- wright, whose melodrama, La Flambee, has of late been produced in England as The Turning Point and in America as The Spy. In this piece, with fine suspense, a skilfully devised fable presents an antipathetic hero who gradually wins the sympa- thies of the audience at the same time that he becomes persona grata with the respectable charac- ters in the play. But it all amounts to nothing better than clever craftsmanship. It is the antith- esis of Chains or Les Avaries or Rutherford and Son. Life and the theatre are harmonized only by drama that stands somewhere between these poles. It would, of course, be possible to prolong the discussion of the modem Continental stage to an indefinite length. What has already been said, however, must suffice for the present purposes. It has been seen that European plajrwrights of 204 THE CONTINENTALS to-day, with a few notable exceptions, are absorbed in realism and the discussion of "problems" upon the stage. In some cases this quest of actuahty and of didacticism has not seriously handicapped these authors' work as drama. In most cases, however, it has. The difficulty of harmonizing art and ethics is, of course, as pronounced to-day as it was in Plato's time. Few writers succeed in over- coming this difficulty. When they add symbolism rampant and even the most inscrutable mysticism, they merely increase tenfold the impossibility of the finest results. As for crass naturalism, its in- herent tendency is the destruction of all that is most essential to the highest dramatic art. Mr. John Galsworthy, as before noted, has prophesied two main courses for the English drama : a realism"f aith- ful to the seething and multiple life around us," and "a twisting and delicious stream" bearing on its breast "new barques of poetry." As for Continental Europe to-day, the channel of natural- ism is chiefly navigated; the stream of poetry, "emo- tionalizing us by its diversity and purity of form and invention," is now followed with distinguished success almost solely by Monsieur Edmond Rostand. 205 VI PROSPECTIVE NEITHER its bitter opponents nor its outspoken critics ever hesitate to say aU that they think or feel with regard to the defects and the perversions of the stage. The principal points of attack are, of course, the moral and the commercial. The drama is most usually assailed on the score either of its respon- sibilities as a disseminator of good or bad precept and example, or of its artistic standards as they are affected by the business end of theatrical enterprise. It has been a long time since the Reverend Jeremy Collier took up the cudgels in defense of decency on the stage. The drama in his day pre- sented "a world in which the ladies are like very profligate, impudent, and unfeeling men, and in which the men are too bad for any place but Pandemoniiun." Collier, however, did not de- mand the instant suppression of the theatre. Being a wholly rational man, he understood the 206 PROSPECTIVE value of the stage as an instrument of social betterment. He knew, too, that the drama springs from a fundamental human impulse and necessity that can never be eradicated by any mere legal enactment. It is certainly deplorable that all opponents of the stage have not realized this important fact. The after-effects of the complete suppression of the theatre during the Common- wealth were entirely visible to Jeremy Collier, and their significance was more than plain. So he laid about him valiantly and sensibly and brought even the doughty Dryden to his knees in honest contrition. And since that day, although the theatre has often been made a place of exhibition for indecency and vulgarity, no English or Ameri- can playwright of any notable talent has dared openly to commend vice and to condemn virtue. Collier was no compromiser, but he stood between the excesses of the Puritans on the one hand and the Restoration dramatists on the other, occupying a sane and practical middle ground. That the modem theatre is an institution of evil is a contention that may be refuted by the mere mention of the most popular plays of recent 207 THE DRAMA TO-DAY years. The work of Bronson Howard, of Augustus Thomas, of Edmond Rostand, of James M. Barrie, and of many others is, ahnost without exception, edifying. So also are a large majority of the plays by other writers which have achieved notable success on the Anglo-Saxon stage: The Servant in the House, The Passing of the Third Floor Back, The Piper, The Blue Bird, Pomander Walk, The Dawn of a To-morrow, The Melting Pot, The County Chairman, The College Widow, Don, Rose- mary, Old Heidelberg — ^the list might be extended to tedium. As for the problem play, like Greek tragedy it properly tends to become "a pulpit from which you have sermons upon conscience which go to move the inner strings of the heart as much as any sermon that was ever preached," "I have not been an habitual frequenter of the theatre," said John Stuart Blackie, in the course of his famous toast to the drama delivered in 1876, "but whenever I could spare a free evening I have gone to see the play that had the run of the season; but I never went to see a play that had anything base or degrading in it. When I was in London, five or six years ago, there were two plays which 208 PROSPECTIVE had the run of the season: the one was called Leah, and the other was called The Bells. The whole moral of Leah is the evangelical virtue of forgiveness. And if it ever was possible for a preacher using the styles of conventional theology — if it was ever possible for him to make men feel the horror of a violated conscience, he could not present a sermon more impressive than is exhibited before us in that noble melodrama, The Bells." Of course, the morals of Leah and The Bells, as of Shakespeare and of Sophocles, are implicit and not explicit. This distinction has, unfortu- nately, not always been understood by well-inten- tioned, if literal-minded, advocates of the didactic. It has seemed impossible for some of them to understand that, though a great artist rarely if ever preaches directly, there is inherent in all great art an unmistakable and emphatic ethical significance. As for the artistic deficiencies of the modem drama, there is, obviously, a very great deal to be said, pro and con. Perhaps much of the current debate regarding the relations of the stage to literature has been inspired by the extreme latter- 14 209 THE DRAMA TO-DAY day success of the playwright and consequent jealousy on the part of other authors. There is a marked modern tendency to demand entertain- ment that forces attention, rather than art that requires for its success a large measure of voluntary consideration on the part of the spectator. The twentieth century will hearken to little except what is so interesting of itseK that it is almost incapable of being ignored. The tendency in education, indeed, is to make interest the basis of everything; the old disciplinary studies, which depended upon conscious effort on the part of the pupil, have largely gone out of favor. Fiction nowadays has to be spiced with a hurry of action and plot. Novelty is in far greater demand than are many other and more substantial elements. On the stage each new idea that succeeds starts a fashion. Everybody is writing business plays, or psychic plays, or glorified melodrama, or slum plays, or whatever is most popular at the moment. A play that does not by novelty, plot, situation, or other- wise make an early and ever-increasing demand upon our interest can hardly hope to succeed, no matter how important it may be from the stand- 210 PROSPECTIVE point of character revelation, of problem propound- ing, or of the reflection of truth. The playwright makes good in proportion as he observes the law of the economy of attention. If, then, success in the drama depends chiefly on the ability to hold a wavering and unstable interest, rather than upon the power to portray the truth, it is not altogether surprising that many of our modem plays should be built for the former purpose only. The plaj^wright, in holding the mirror up to nature, aims to grip the absorbed and growing interest of his auditors. He may do both; he must do the latter. Often enough he falls between two stools. Frequently he is in- teresting at the expense of truth. Once in a while he is truthful at the expense of interest. At all events, appreciation of the drama requires less of conscious effort than does appreciation of any other art. On the other hand, it is whoUy wrong to draw the conclusion that the spread of a popular taste for the theatre is a mark of decadence. This pessimistic view is largely the result of that perennial confusion of drama with literature which has been elsewhere discussed in the present 211 THE DRAMA TO-DAY treatise. Once we begin to comprehend that the acted drama is really a distinct art, having no aim to substitute for literature, we realize that a grow- ing popular taste for the stage means simply a growing popular appreciation of a potent means of helpful comment on life. The written play is at best but the rough scaffolding upon which the actors, the scene painters, the carpenters, and the stage manager build up the finished work of art. The creative imagination of all these men and women, as well as of the author, has done its share toward the final achievement. Undoubtedly the craving for success has led many playwrights to work too often with their eyes on the box-office rather than on life. Ideals and standards of veracity are frequently thus disregarded. Originality itself is apparently held imdesirable. As for the producers, many of them seem to aim only at long New York runs, howso- ever obtained; while even the actors, in many cases, suffer from the prevalent mania for success. As a result, our plays are ever whirling forth in frenzied cycles upon usually brief careers. Accord financial success to a drama deahng with 212 PROSPECTIVE a new or a long-rested subject, and you court an endless train of more or less feeble followers. It is as though the eager playwright, on the qui vive to learn "what the public wants," were always dashing off in mad pursuit of the slightest clew to that supreme mystery. Alias Jimmy Valentine and In the Deep Purple at once engender an untold flock of underworld melodramas, some of them, like Within the Law, rather better than their ancestors; others, like Blackbirds or AliM Bill, considerably worse. Interest in the crook quickly passes over to the crook's antagonist, from Ars^ne Lupin and Raffles to Sherlock Holmes. It is for the dramatist to decide whether he wiU make his arch-criminal or his arch-policeman the hero. In the one event. The Master Mind or The Iron Door; in the other, The Conspiracy or The Argyle Case. Put in a modem, up-to-the-minute, dictograph- and-finger-print detective, backed up perhaps by his prototype in real life, and, of course, when he has cleared the heroine of the dark suspicion, he must marry her incontinent. Does the audience never wonder how he will make his conclusion, not being a Mormon, when, in the course of the day's 213 THE DRAMA TO-DAY work, he is called upon to clear another winsome young beauty of a similar stain? Of course, the stage and fiction detective, as a mere reincarnation of the knight-errant, is not to be criticised with an over-strict logic. "Why, by the way, has not Mr. Shaw given us the antidote to this noxious creature? The crook-and-detective cycle will quickly run its course and pass to a long and well-earned rest. Would that as much might be said for the over- wrought play of sex! Its vitality seems unending. The brutal husband out of MaterniU, having bobbed up in Bought and Paid For and so emphati- cally lent that piece the coveted "punch," must perforce reappear in a handful of weakling suc- cessors. As for the woman with a past, she now treads the boards in no less than a round half- dozen plays, and is even "revived" in the person of poor Paula Tanqueray. Over against all this sordidness may be set the innocent but no less imitative cycle of fantasies for children. Racketty-Packetty House and Snow White lead quickly to The Poor Little Rich Girl and A Good Little Devil. Add to these a decided interest in the "classics" — in Shakespeare and 214 PROSPECTIVE Sheridan and Goldsmith — and it is easy to predict a "romantic revival," especially when bald nat- uralism has so obviously reached its twilight. Finally and incontestably, it is established that author, producer, and player will whenever possible keep their feverish fingers upon the public pulse and follow the nearest fashion. However, this rather disheartening attitude is not universal. Happily there are still a few men and women of the theatre whose souls are above mere doUars and whose worthy ideals clamor for fulfilment. What they have been often chiefly hampered by is the current tendency to elaborate accessories. With that abuse showing signs of abatement, the horizon of hope begins to brighten. The truth of life and feeling seems likely to gain a better and better chance of portrayal, as the demand for photographic and graphophonic trivi- ality decreases. Obviously we are getting beyond that childish state of mind which marvels exces- sively at "real tubs" simply because they are shown behind the footlights. Of course, it is unjust to foist upon authors, producers, and players the entire responsibility 215 THE DRAMA TO-DAY for our slow dramatic progress. Complaint is often made that the American public does not take the theatre so seriously as it is taken in France or Germany. The Continental is said to go to the playhouse to think, expecting to carry something of importance away with him, whereas the American purposes merely to forget, and is satisfied if he has been enabled to do so from the rise to the fall of the curtain. This is, doubtless, an exaggerated criticism, applicable solely to a limited class of stage entertainments and not to the better drama, either native or imported. To infer a dramatic decadence from the popularity of vaudeville and musical comedy is a common fallacy. It takes all kinds of people to make up a world, and possibly all kinds of entertainment to divert their leisure. One man prefers ragtime; another, Beethoven. This fellow loves a chromo; that one likes Fra Angelico. That the drama grows in popularity in the face of so much competition from the mere "shows" is sufficient evidence of the drama's vitality. Certainly it is well for any people that so influential an institution as their theatre should 216 PROSPECTIVE be cultivated with intelligence and care. To amuse and entertain at the same time that you educate and civilize may not be the only possible means, but it is surely one of the most efficacious. The philanthropist who can make it possible for the eighty per cent, of young people above the age of fourteen who desert our public schools to have within their means that sort of amusement that shall be most ennobling wiU do, perhaps, as admir- able a deed as he who distributes libraries. The popularity and the inexpensiveness of motion pictures are bound to result in municipal theatres for their exhibition and their improvement. Per- chance these prospective public-owned homes of motography, together with an increased output of the right sort of drama, wiU yet result in the municipal stock company with its minimima price of admission. Surely it would be a splendid experi- ment on the part of wealth in America to endow and to foster such a movement. If the public be really responsible for much of the retardation of our modern drama, one of the best ways in which it can prepare to throw off this onerous responsibility is to cultivate the habit 217 THE DRAMA TO-DAY of reading plays. The contention of this treatise throughout has been that true plays are written to be acted, rather than merely read. Neverthe- less, by endeavoring to supply imaginatively the details of stage production, the reader of plays can undoubtedly increase his qualifications as an appreciative playgoer. Some people are repelled by the shorthand method of stage directions and the constant repetition of the names of the charac- ters before the various speeches. However, these things exist likewise in other forms of fiction, though more or less carefully disguised. Such an aversion, surely, ought easily to be overcome. Plays are quintessential in their structure. They are not padded, as are far too many novels. The longest stage play can be read in two hours and can yet supply technical and artistic dehghts that no other fiction can afford. The novel as a form is loose and vague, as compared with the drama. The art of play-making may be studied as definitely as may architecture. The trained reader loses his sense of displeasure at the subject-matter of such a play as The Thunderbolt, for instance, in his delighted observation of its skilful construction. When more playgoers find at least a part of their 218 PROSPECTIVE pleasure in such observation there will be more of that demand for capable stage workmanship which will inevitably produce the much-desired supply- And perhaps one of the best means of arousing general interest in play structure and in play read- hig is through the study classes in schools, literary clubs, and other such educational organizations. At aU events, a thoughtful survey of the theatri- cal field in the second decade of the twentieth century should result in an increased optimism concerning the prospects of the stage. Elsewhere it has been observed how Mr. John Galsworthy has predicted a twofold course of development for the drama, and how Monsieur Rostand is looking weU after the romantic side, with Monsieur Maeter- linck and Mr. Stephen PhiUips among his leading coadjutors. Even such "naturalists" as Hauptmann occasionally turn to idealism, while realism flour- ishes imder the cultivation of a score of gifted professors, including Mr. Galsworthy himself. These two things will always be, of course, in the drama as in all art, so long as men are bom with leanings either to analysis or to synthesis, to the presentation of truth in the form of detailed obser- vation or of essential types. 219 THE DRAMA TO-DAY Mr. Bernard Shaw has traced what he terms the "new drama" back to the first performances of Ibsen in London, declaring that the movement toward decreased self-satisfaction on the part of the world had begun in fiction about the middle of the nineteenth century. Of course, this "new drama " of Mr. Shaw's is a " dramaof ideas " — some- times with the drama left out, if not also occasion- ally the ideas. The modern endeavor being chiefly to find out how to five respectably without breaking social laws, the "new drama" must be wholly con- cerned with this problem. You must give "the adult, married, sensible Englishman" life presented "as an enormously interesting mass of problems of conduct which every member of the audience has or may have to solve for himself or herself." To repeat, " doubts must be discussed, even if the result be that 'drama of discussion' practised by Euripi- des, Aristophanes, MoU^re, Shakespeare, Goethe, Ibsen, Tolstoy: in short, which is the invariable symptom of the highest dramatic genius." It is observable, first, that Mr. Shaw very naturally, not to say naively, predicts the success of the kind of drama in which he excels and the failure of that other kind in which he has, so far, 220 PROSPECTIVE shown himself deficient. Second and rather more important, however, is the equally obvious fact that Mr. Shaw forgets that the drama is funda- mentally and eternally a matter of feelings and not of ideas, and that, unless his ideas are of such a nature that they wUl arouse a strong and irmne- diate emotional accompaniment, they wiU not, howsoever briQiantly phrased, amount in their sum total to actual drama. Mr. Shaw and his kind are really masquerading preachers, who wiU never succeed in convincing any considerable portion of the public that they are in fact the lions of the theatre their false skins are meant to proclaim them. The intellectualist, who, like Mr. Shaw, has the unabashed temerity to attempt a positive and absolute explanation of the mystery of life in terms of concrete thought, may find deUght in the perpetual debate of stage puppets. But the intellectualists will always be decidedly in the minority, whether or not Dr. Stockmann's minority that is always right. It is all very pleasant to be epigrammatic and to prick with unerring aim the bubbles, large and small, of hypocrisy and con- ventionality. To be thus accomphshed, however, is not necessarily to be dramatic. 221 THE DRAMA TO-DAY On the other hand, we should not lose sight of the fact that the stage in our day is chiefly occupied with dramas in which ideas are inherent. The rights of the individual as against his duties to his environment form the basis of nine-tenths of the successful plays, since Ibsen at least. But the drama does not teach its lessons directly through mere discussion. The boards of the stage will never make a bridge straight from the mind of the playwright to the mind of the playgoer. The route must lie through the latter's heart, via his imagination. The thinkers of our time — Tolstoy, Brieux, Shaw — ^may well utilize the drama; but, if they would bend it to their purpose, they must in turn yield to its fundamental laws. Meanwhile, the imthinking imitators, with cleverness enough to submit to the drama's requirements, even if without the least intellectual depth, will continue to reap the rewards of that brilliant, if transitory, success which is so exasperating to men of greater mind and less adaptability. Of course, these things are gifts. A seeing eye is one gift, and the power to build emotion-lifting drama is another. The possessor of the first may never gain the second. At all events, he cannot 222 PROSPECTIVE use it without striving. Certainly, the combined power is worth seeking. To be able to think out clearly defined conclusions from the ever-shifting conditions and emphasis that characterize our modem existence; to make application, sane and wholesome, of these conclusions to the conduct of average men and women; to illustrate this conduct and, by means of it, the truth that underlies it, in the terms of an art which draws for its unlimited assistance upon aU the other arts, and which repre- sents the climax of the human creative faculty — what more splendid achievement could a true seer and prophet in this world long for? The influence of the theatre, so long restricted by narrowness and by crudity of popular taste, is just beginning to reveal its unbounded strength. America alone employs fifty-five thousand people annually, in seven himdred companies, playing an average season of thirty weeks, in thirty-two hundred theatres, and pays out a hundred million dollars for theatrical entertainment. The rate of growth is enormous. The playhouse has become one of the three or four greatest influences in modern life. Meanwhile, theatre-goers are everywhere engag- ing in earnest efforts at organization for the pur- 223 THE DRAMA TO-DAY pose of bettering the drama by means of their tremendous, but hitherto unconcentrated, power. If the law of supply and demand governs the dramatic output, then the demand is to be reso- lutely elevated for the sake of a correspondingly uplifted supply. The business men of the theatrical world, as well as the practising dramatists, seem willing to meet the patrons of the theatre half-way. With complete demonstration of the efficiency of organized play-going there will imdoubtedly come complete surrender to the reasonable demands of the organization. There is, too, a healthful tendency toward simpUfication. Stage realism has too often been merely cluttering. We shall, doubtless, never go back to the bare Ehzabethan platform; but the time may well be expected to come when excessive elaboration in the non-essential will be confined to purely spectacular entertainment, and drama per se will be permitted to evolve without this hampering accoutrement. The activities of Mr. Gordon Craig, for instance, promise to contribute to this highly desirable consummation. His recent designs for stage settings have consisted almost exclusively of screens of various sizes, 224 PROSPECTIVE grouped, colored, and lighted with a view to sug- gesting that mood which the actor himself com- pletes and defines. Similarly, the notable efforts of Dr. Max Reinhart are in the direction of flat- toned effects, landscapes in silhouette, and even costume that suggests, rather than reproduces, the details of actuality. What both these innova- tors are aiming at, certainly, is a harmonious co-operation among the various arts that enter into the acted drama. It is unfortunate but true that, in much of our recent realistic stage produc- tion, these arts, instead of working together, have violently quarrelled. At all events, mere hollow, if gUttering, stagecraft, such as Mr. Belasco and his followers chiefly rely upon, cannot much longer be employed to conceal the utter lack of true drama, as well as the complete absence of dramatic truth. Facile photography and expert stage-carpentry cannot permanently substitute for actual criticism of life. Women are said to be considerably in the majority among modem play- goers, as they doubtless are in the patronage of all the other arts. And women everywhere are be- I coming alert to the importance of the drama; even in the remoter districts, where plays are rarely 15 225 THE DRAMA TO-DAY acted except by amateurs, women's organizations and public libraries are keeping in touch with the dramatic development in the urban centres, and preparing themselves, their neighbors, and the rising generation to appreciate and so to demand the best the stage can afford in the days to come. There have of late been certain notable failures in the direction of the endowed or experimental theatre. Fundamental lessons have been gained from experience, and these will undoubtedly pave the way for discreeter and more substantial prog- ress. Theatre societies are moving cautiously but securely toward the production of new and standard plays and toward experimentation in the unexplored possibilities of the stage. Toy Theatres, Little Theatres, unions of theatre clubs, Drama Leagues, and other such playgoers' organizations are aU rehable straws indicative of the dramatic wind. We have even at last achieved instances here in America of the civic theatre, and conducted upon that foundation of thorough democracy which is the sine qua non of aU such ventures. Withal, practical men and women are displacing the rhapsodic dreamers in the planning and the con- duct of most enterprises of this sort. The vision- 226 PROSPECTIVE aries, doubtless, are usually the pioneers; but the lesser men, who merely know how to apply the prmciples of the ideal to actual conditions, must do the concrete work. In such an organization as the Abbey Theatre Company, of Dublin, we have a significant and harmonious imion of the various elements necessary to success in dramatic reform. Beginning humbly and modestly, the Irish Players and their authors achieved masterpieces. There were enthusiasm and talent, and both were under the guidance of judgment and self-control. "It wasn't for money we worked then," declares Miss Sara AUgood, one of the most gifted players of the Abbey troupe, speaking of their start. "It was not, indeed. We got between five and fifteen shillings a week, and that only if we were lucky. Often we got nothing at all. When I was raised to fifteen shillings a week, I thought I owned the world. . . . Many's the time I've dressed myself for my parts in clothes I made from my mother's old dresses. And Kerrigan used to bor- row things from his house to use as stage properties, — once a poker, another time a blanket." After all, . . . never anything can be amiss. When simpleness and duty tender it. 227 THE DRAMA TO-DAY And when to simpleness and duty we add the high gifts of a Yeats, a Lady Gregory, a Synge, and many more, all under the governance of managerial wisdom, something of note in dramatic achieve- ment may well be expected. When all is said and done, of course, the hope for the theatre lies most largely in the hands of the highest citizenship of to-day. There was once a puritanic tendency to abandon the playhouse to the devil with all his power to assume a pleasing shape, that, as he continues very potent with such spirits, he might abuse us to damn us. But the movement at present is decidedly in the opposite direction. What its results may be it is futile to prophesy. We may say, at least, that, if we live in an age that is to prove itseK at all worthy of a first-class expression, the drama, more than any other form, promises to become the medium. And it certainly is within the power of the public to control the proportion of finished and edifying drama to the entire mass of popular amusements. 228 INDEX Abb6 d'Aubignac, 51 Abbey Theatre plays, 160-68, 227 Ade, George, 59, 99, 100 Admirable Crichton, The, 156, 157 Aiglon, L', 188, 191 Alabama, 75 Alfieri, 17 Alias Jimmy Valentine, 213 Alibi Bin, 213 Alice Sitrby-the-Fire, 156, 157 Allgood, Sara, 227 ^Also sprach Zarathustra, 176 Anglin, Margaret, 98 Anti-Matrimony, 82, 83 Archer, WiUiam, 155 Argyle Case, The, 213 Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, 186 Aristophanes, 220 Aristotle, 9, 150 Arizona, 75, 78 As a Man Thinks, 76-78, 122 Assaut, L', 21, 203 Avariis, Les {Damaged Goods), 197, 198, 204 B Bagatelle, 196 Baker, Elizabeth, 144 Baker, George Pierce, 13, 62 Barker, Granville, 32, 106, 142- 144, 148, 150, 151, 177 Barrie, James M., 106, 155, 156- 160, 208 Bataille, Henri, 194, 200 Battle, The, 71 Beau Brummel, 67 Before Sunrise, 177 Belasco, David, 95-98, 103, 225 Bells, The, 208 Benefit of the Doubt, The, 115 Bennett, Arnold, 106, 147, 150, 151 Bernstein, Henri, 21, 169, 202-204 Besier, Rudolf, 147, 148 Blackbirds, 213 Blackie, John Stuart, 208 Blindness of Virtibe, The, 153 Blot in the 'Scutcheon, A, 45 Blue Bird, The, (L'Oiseau bleu), 186, 208 Boots and Saddles, 17 Boss, The, 90 Boucicault, Dion, 105 Bought and Paid For, 73, 74, 85, 88, 214 Boyle, William, 164, 166, 167 Brand, 176 Brieux, Engine, 133, 169, 194, 196- 200, 222 Broadhurst, George H., 72-75, 85 BrunetiSre, 9 Buchanan, Thompson, 102 Builder of Bridges, The, 152 Building Fund, The, 166 Bunty Pulls the Strings, 150 Butterflies' War, The {Schmetter- linsschaft), 183 229 INDEX Candida, 140, 141 Canterbury Pilgrims, The, 82 Captain Jinks, 93 Carmen, 17 Case of Becky, The, 96, 97 Case of Rebellious Susan, The, 13, 122 Caste, 66, 105, 106 Cato, 45 Cend, The, 45 CAotns, 144, 145, 204 Chambers, Haddon, 106, 155 Chantecler, 12, 46, 188, 191-193 Chesterton, GUbert K., 136 Chorus Lady, The, 101 CUy, The, 68-70, 85 Climbers, The, 67 Cohan, George M., 102 Colleen Bavm, The, 105 College Widow, The, 99, 208 Collier, Jeremy, 206, 207 Colorado, 75 Commuters, The, 102 'Cmwert, The, 96 Connais-Uri, 194 Conspiracy, The, 213 Countess Julia, The, 175 County Chairman, The, 99, 208 Craig, Gordon, 50, 224 TCrothers, Rachel, 102 -^ Cymbeline, 12 / Cyrano de Bergerac, 10, 55, 188, 189-191 DaTice of Death, The, 175 D'Annunzio, Gabriel, 169, 193, 194 Daughter of Jorio, The, 194 Daughters of Men, The, 72 Dawn of a To-Morrow, The, 71, 208 Didale, Le, 194 Deux Versants, Les {The Great Divide), 80 Dickens, 105 Diderot, 37 Disraeli, 149 Doll's House, A, 110, 172, 173 Don, 148, 208 Donnay, Maurice, 194, 201, 202 Drake, 149 Dryden, 42, 207 Bumaafils, 27, 105 Dumas pbre, 105 E Easiest Way, The, 36, 71, 85-88, 113 Eaton, Walter Pritchard, 102 Egypt, 91, 92, 98 Ehre, Die (Honor), 180, 182, 183 Eldest Son, The, 129, 145 Enemy of the People, An, 110, 173, 176, 221 Enfant Prodigue, U, 26 Enigme, V, 194 Ervine, St. John G., 145, 165, 167 Es lebe das Leben!, 184 Euripides, 220 D Damaged Goods (Les Avarits), 197, 198 Dame aux Cam£lias, La, 18 230 Fairfax, Marion, 102 Faith Healer, The, 81, 82 Family Failing, 166 INDEX Fanny's First Play, 29, 140 FaseiruOing Mr. Vandervelt, The, 152 Father, The, 174, 175 Faust, 18, 176 Femme nue, La, 200, 201 Femme seule. La, 198-200 Fenris the Wolf, 82 Fiaccolo sotto U Moggio, La (The Fire beneath the Ashes), 194 Melding, 37, 140. Fine Feathers, 85, 88 Fire beneath the Ashes, The {La Fiaccolo sotto U Moggio), 194 Fire Screen, The, 162 Fiske, Minnie Maddem, 98 ■ Ktch, Clyde, 17, 66-70, 93, 98 Five in the Morning, 41 Flambie, La (The Turning Point; The Spy), 204 Flers, Robert de, 80 Fliegende Hollander, Der, 18 Foi, La, 197 Forbes, James, 102 FrmtrFrcm, 18 FrUhlings Erwachen, 154 Gabriel Schilling's Flight, 179 Galilean's Victory, The, 123 Galsworthy, John, 72, 106, 125- 132, 137, 144, 146, 205, 219 Gamblers, The, 72 Garrick, 42 Gay Lord Quex, The, 114 Ghosts, 14, 36, 108, 110, 172, 173, 198 Gillette, William, 64-66 Girl and the Judge, The, 67 Girl of the Golden West, The, 78 Girl with the Green Eyes, The, 67 Gliick im Winkel, Das (Happiness in a Comer), 183 Godfrey, Thomas, 61 Goethe, 220 Goldsmith, 106, 215 Good Little Demi, A, 214 Good-Natured Man, The, 106 Good Reputation, A, 184 Gorki, 133 Gdtterddmmerung, 18 Governor's Lady, The, 97 Gozzi, 16 Great Adventure, The, 151 Great Divide, The, 79-82 Green Stockings, 98 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 164, 166, 228 Hagedom, Hermann, 41 Hal^vy, 105 Hallam, Lewis, 61 Hamilton, Cosmo, 106, 147, 153 Hamlet, 26, 28, 38, 52, 97 Hannele's Ascension, 178 Hannetons, Les, 197 Happiness in a Comer (Das Gliick im Winkel), 183 Hardy, Thomas, 128, 146 Harte, Bret, 78 Harvest, 166 Harvest Moon, The, 76 Hastings, B. Macdonald, 106, 147, 153, 154 Hatton, Mr. and Mrs. Frederic, 100, 101 231 INDEX Hauptmann, Gerhart, 169, 177- 180, 193, 194, 219 Hazel Kirke, 92 Hearts of Oak, 84 Hedda Gahhr, 18 Hegel, 9 Heimat, Die, 110, 111, 167, 180, 183 Heir to the Hoorah, The, 78 Held by the Enemy, 65 Henrietta, The, 64, 72 Henry V, 149 Heme, James A., 84 Herod, 155 Hervieu, Paul, 169, 194-196, 200 High Road, The, 91, 92, 98 Hindis Wakes, 145 His House in Order, 114, 116 Homrr (DieEhre), 180, 182, 183 Houghton, Stanley, 144, 145 Howard, Bronson, 64, 66, 69, 208 Howells, William Dean, 122 Hugo, Victor, 192 Huxley, 137 Hyacinth Halvy, 165 Hypocrites, The, 122, 123 Ibsen, 47, 51, 108, 110, 111, 133, 140, 169-179, 181, 193, 194, 198, 220, 222 lUington, Margaret, 94 Image, The, 165 In a Balcony, 45 In the Deep Purple, 213 In the Shadow of the Olen, 162 7m, 18, 88, 112-114 Irish Theatre, The, 160-168 232 Iron Door, The, 213 Irving, Sir Henry, 15, 48 Israel, 21, 203 Jeanne d'Arc, 82 Johnson, Samuel, 42 John the Baptist, 183 Jones, Henry Arthur, 58, 59, 106, 122-126, 137 Joseph and his Brethren, 150 Joseph Entangled, 123 Joyzelle, 187 Judah, 122 Julius CoBsar, 53 Just a Wife, 86 Justice, 127, 131 K Kathleen ni Houlahan, 161 Kennedy, Charles Rann, 147, 153 Kenyon, Charles, 94 Kindling, 94 Kistemaeckers, Henry, 204 Klein, Charles, 70-73 Knoblauch, Edward, 102, 150 Kremer, Theodore, 17 Labiche, 105 Lady from the Sea, The, 171, 172 Lady Inger of Ostraat, 17 Lady Patricia, 148 Lamb, Charles, 27, 144 Leah, 208 Letty, 114 Liars, The, 124 INDEX Link, The, 175 Lion and the Mouse, The, 71-74 Little Eyolf, 173 LUtk Mary, 156, 157 Little Minister, The, 156, 157 Locke, Edward, 102 London Assurance, 105 Lonely People, 177, 178 Love's Labour's Lost, 17, 40 Lydia Gilmore, 124, 125 M Mackaye, Percy, 41, 82, 83 Macbeth, 36 Madame X, 18 Madras House, The, 143 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 36, 37, 169, 184^187, 192-194, 219 Magnanimous Lover, The, 145, 167 Man and Superman, 134, 139, 141 Man from Hom£, The, 102 Man of the Hour, The, 71, 73 Man's Friends, A, 90 Margaret Fleming, 84 Marie Madeleine, 186, 187 Masefield, John, 144, 146 Master Builder, The, 170, 171, 177, 178 Master Mind, The, 213 Mater, 82 MatemiU, 88, 197, 214 Matthews, Brander, 34 Measure for Measure, 187 Meilhac, 105 Melting Pot, The, 208 Merchant of Venice, The, 15 Meredith, George, 29, 128 Mere Man, 78 MeropS, 17 Michael and his Lost Angel, 122- 124 Mid-Channel, 85, 101, 116-119, 123 Midsummer Night's Dream, A, 30 Milestones, 150 Mind-the-Paint Girl, The, 120, 121 Mineral Workers, The, 166 Mitchell, Langdon, 98, 100 ^>Mixed Marriage, 167 r Model, The, 78 Modem Match, A, 67 Moffat, Graham, 147, 150 MoU6re, 33, 145, 197, 220 Monna Vanna, 17, 185-187 Moody, WilUam Vaughn, 79-82 Moore, George, 162 Moriiuri, 183 Moth and the Flame, The, 67 Mrs. Bumstead-Leigh, 98 Mrs. Dane's Defense, 92, 122, 125 Mime Master, The, 78 N Nan, 146 New Sin, The, 154 New York Idea, The, 100 Nietzsche, 136, 176, 181 Nigger, The, 90 Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, The, 116, 117 O (Edipus the King, 10, 17, 36 Oiseau bleu, V {The Blue Bird), 186 Old Heiddberg, 208 Oliver Goldsmith, 33 233 INDEX OtheUo, 52, 118 Otway, 42 Our American Cousin, 105 Ours, 105 Paid in FuU, 17, 85, 127 Paolo and Francesca, 155 Paper Chase, The, 149 Parker, Louis Napoleon, 147 Parsifal, 18 Passers-by, 155 Passing of the Third Floor Back, The, 25, 27, 208 Passing of the Torch, The, 194, 195 Patterson, Joseph Medill, 74, 75 Peer Gynt, 18, 176 Perplexed Husband, The, 152 Perry, Bliss, 108 Peter Pan, 156 Phillips, Stephen, 60, 106, 155, 156, 219 Pigem, The, 128 Pillars of Society, 110, 172, 173, 177 Pinero, Sir Arthur Wing, 59, 77, 85, 106, 111-123, 137 Piper, The, 208 Plato, 205 Playboy of the Western World, The, 162-164 Pomander Walk, 25, 149, 208 Poole, Ernest, 90 Poor Lath Rich Girl, The, 214 Practigue du Thidtre, 61 Preserving Mr. Panmure, 120 Price, The, 92 Prince of Parthia, The, 61 234 Princess lointaine, La, 188, 189 Professor's Love Story, The, 156 Pyramus and Thisbe, 30 Q Quality Street, 156, 157 Queen Mary, 45 R Rackelty-Packetty House, 214 Rebellion, 74 Reinhart, Max, 50, 225 Return from Jerusalem, The, 201, 202 Return of Peter Grimm, The, 95, 97, 98 Richardson, 37 Richelieu, 90 Riders to the Sea, 162 Rigoletto, 17 Riley, James Whitcomb, 84 Rip van Winkle, 105 Robe rouge, La, 197 Robertson, Tom, 105, 106 Robinson, Lennox, 164, 166 Roi s'amuse, Le, 17 Romance, 92, 93 Romanesques, Les, 188 Romeo and Juliet, 10, 11, 13 Rosemary, 149, 208 Rosmersholm, 83, 172, 177, 178 Rostand, Edmond, 60, 169, 188- 193, 194, 205, 208, 219 Rousseau, 37, 134 Royal Box, The, 33 Rowe, 42 Rutherford and Son, 145, 204 INDEX s Sdbine Woman, A, 79 Sag Harbor, 84 SeilomS, 18 Salomy Jane, 78 Sahaiion Nell, 89 Samaritaine, La, 188, 189 Sardou, 17, 105, 155, 202 Scarecrow, The, 82 Schiller, 16 Schmetterlinsschaft (The Butter- flies' War), 183 School, 105 Scrape o' the Pen, A, 150 Scribe, 105, 202 Second Mrs. Tangueray, The, 111, 112, 116, 117, 124, 214 Secret, Le, 203 Secrd Service, 65 Semiramis, 17 Sergeant James, 17 Servant in the House, The, 153, 208 Shakespeare, 11, 17, 26, 27, 29, 38, 44, 47, 48, 140, 208, 214, 220 Shaugrawi, The, 105 Shaw, George Bernard, 17, 27, 29, 106, 108, 132-142, 148, 150, 177, 196, 197, 214, 220-222 Sheldon, Edward, 84, 89-93 SheUey, 45 Shenandoah, 64 Sheridan, 33, 215 Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet, The, 139 Shore Acres, 84 SHxer Box, The, 128 SliceofLife,A, 158 Smith, 88 Smith, Winchell, 102 Snow White, 214 Society, 105 Sodom's End, 180 Soeur BMrice, 186 Sophocles, 208 Sophonisha, 45 Sowerby, Githa, 144, 145 Spy, The (The Turning Point; La FlambSe), 204 Stafford, 45 Stevenson, 10 St. John's Fire, 184 Stockton, Frank R., 101 Strife, 72, 128, 130, 131 Strindberg, 169, 174r-176 Stubbornness of Geraldine, The, 67 Sudermann, Hermann, 110, 167, 169, 180-184 SumurAn, 26, 33 Sunken Bell, The (Die Versunkene Glocke), 111, 177, 179, 180 Sutro, Alfred, 106, 147, 151-153 Suzette, 197 Synge, John Millington, 161-164, 228 Tarkington, Booth, 102 Tartuffe, 10, 23, 52 Taylor, Tom, 105 Teamster Henschell, 179 Tempest, The, 17 TenaUles, Les, 194, 196 Tennyson, 45, 155 Terrible Meek, The, 153 Thais, 18 Th^oigne de MMeourt, 194 Thief, The, 21, 203 Third Degree, The, 71, 72, 74 235 INDEX Thomas, Augustus, 22, 28, 59, 75- 78,118,208 Three Daughters of Monsieur Du- pont, The, 200 Three Heron Feathers, The, 184 Thunderbolt, The, 46, 116, 119, 120, 218 Ticketrof-Leave Man, The, 105 Tolstoy, 139, 220, 222 Tom Jones, 140 To-morrow, 82, 83 Traxelling Salesman, The, 101 Trovatore, II, 17 TuUy, Richard Walton, 102 Turning Point, The (The Spy; La Flambie), 204 Two Gentlemen of Verona, The, 40 Two Hundred a Year, 116 Versunkene Glocke, Die (The Sunken Bell), 111 Voltaire, 17 Voysey Inheritance, The, 143 Warfield, David, 98 Waste, 143 Way of the World, The, 67 Weavers, The, 178 Webster, John, 156 We Can't Be as Bad as All That, 124 Wedeldnd, 154 Well of the Saints, The, 162, 164 What Every Woman Knows, 156, 158 What Happened to Jones, 73 What the Public Warits, 151 When a Man's Single, 156 When It Conies Home, 78 Whitewashing Julia, 122, 124 Why Smith Left Home, 73 Wild Duck, The, 172, 174 Wilson, Harry Leon, 102 Winter's Tale, A, 12 Witching Hour, The, 76 Within the Law, 213 Woman, The, 91 W Walkeley, A. B., 57, 134 Walker, London, 156 Walls of Jericho, The, 88, 151 Walter, Eugene, 84-89 Years of Discretion, 100, 101 Yeats, William Butler, 160-162, 228 Yellow Jacket, The, 50 You Never Can Tell, 140 236