How to See a Play Part 5

A difficulty that blocks the path of every dramatist in proportion as its removal improves his piece, is that of graduating his earlier curtains so that the climax (third act or fourth, as it may) is obviously the outstanding, over-powering effect of the whole play. The curtain of the first act will do well to possess at least some slight heightening of the interest maintained progressively from the opening of the drama; an added crispness perceptible to all who look and listen.

And the crisis of the second act must be differentiated from that of the first in that it has a tenser emotional value, while yet it is distinctly below that of the climax, if the obligatory scene is to come later. Sad indeed the result if any curtain effect in appeal and power usurp the royal place of the climactic scene! And this skillful gradation of effects upon a rising scale of interest, while always aimed at, is by no means always secured. This may happen because the dramatist, with much good material in his hands, has believed he could use it prodigally, and been led to overlook the principle of relative values in his art. A third act climax may secure a tremendous sensation by the device of keeping the earlier effects leading up to it comparatively low-keyed and quiet. The tempest may be, in the abstract, only one in a teapot; but a tempest in effect it is, all the same.

Ibsen's plays often ill.u.s.trate and justify this statement, as do the plays of the younger British school, Barker, Baker, McDonald, Houghton, Hankin. And the reverse is equally true: a really fine climax may be made pale and ineffective by too much of sensational material introduced earlier in the play.

The climax of the drama is also the best place to ill.u.s.trate the fact that the stage appeal is primarily emotional. If this central scene be not of emotional value, it is safe to say that the play is doomed; or will at the most have a languis.h.i.+ng life in special performances and be cherished by the elite. The stage story, we have seen, comes to the auditor warm and vibrant in terms of feeling. The idea which should be there, as we saw, must come by way of the heart, whence, as George Meredith declares, all great thoughts come. Herein lies another privilege and pitfall of the dramatist. Privilege, because teaching by emotion will always be most popular; yet a pitfall, because it sets up a temptation to play upon the unthinking emotions which, once aroused, sweep conviction along to a goal perhaps specious and undesirable. To say that the theater is a place for the exercise of the emotions, is not to say or mean that it is well for it to be a place for the display and influence of the unregulated emotions. Legitimate drama takes an idea of the brain, or an inspiration of the imaginative faculties, and conveys it by the ruddy road of the feelings to the stirred heart of the audience; it should be, and is in its finest examples, the happy union of the head and heart, so blended as best to conserve the purpose of entertainment and popular instruction; popular, for the reason that it is emotional, concrete, vital; and instructive, because it sinks deeper in and stays longer (being more keenly felt) than any mere exercise of the intellect in the world.

The student, whether at home with the book of the play in hand or in his seat at the theater, will scrutinize the skilled effects of climax, seeking principles and understanding more clearly his pleasure therein.

In reading Shakespeare, for example, he will see that the obligatory scene of _The Merchant of Venice_ is the trial scene and the exact moment when the height is reached and the fall away from it begins, that where Portia tells the Jew to take his pound of flesh without the letting of blood. In modern drama, he will think of the scene in Sudemann's powerful drama, _Magda_, in which Magda's past is revealed to her fine old father as the climax of the action; and in Pinero's strongest piece, _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, will put his finger on the scene of the return of Paula's lover as the crucial thing to show. And so with the scene of the cross-examination of the woman in Jones's _Mrs.

Dane's Defense_, and the scene in Lord Darlington's rooms in Wilde's _Lady Windermere's Fan_, and the final scene in Shaw's _Candida_, where the playwright throws forward the _scene a faire_ to the end, and makes his heroine choose between husband and lover. These, and many like them, will furnish ample food for reflection and prove helpful in clarifying the mind in the essentials of this most important of all the phenomena of play-building.

It is with the climax, as with everything else in art or in life: honesty of purpose is at the bottom of the success that is admirable.

Mere effectivism is to be avoided, because it is insincere. In its place must be effectiveness, which is at once sincere and dramatic.

The climax, let it be now a.s.sumed, has been successfully brought off.

The curtain falls on the familiar and pleasant buzz of conversation which is the sign infallible that the dramatist's dearest ambition has been attained. Could we but listen to the many detached bits of talk that fly about the house, or are heard in the lobby, we might hazard a shrewd guess at the success of the piece. If the talk be favorable, and the immediate reception of the obligatory scene has been hearty, it would appear as if the playwright's troubles were over. But hardly so.

Even with his climax a success, he is not quite out of the woods. A task, difficult and hedged in with the possibilities of mistake, awaits him; for the last act is just ahead, and it may diminish, even nullify the favorable impression he has just won by his manipulation of the _scene a faire_. And so, girding himself for the last battle, he enters the arena, where many a good man before him has unexpectedly fallen before the enemy.

CHAPTER X

ENDING THE PLAY

To one who is watchful in his theater seat, it must have become evident that many plays, which in the main give pleasure and seem successful, have something wrong with the last act. The play-goer may feel this, although he never has a.n.a.lyzed the cause or more than dimly been aware of the artistic problem involved. An effect of anti-climax is produced by it, interest flags or utterly disappears; the final act seems to lag superfluous on the stage, like Johnson's player.

Several reasons combine to make this no uncommon experience. One may have emerged from the discussion of the climax. It is the hard fortune of the last act to follow the great scene and to suffer by contrast; even if the last part of the play be all that such an act should be, there is in the nature of the case a likelihood that the auditor, reacting from his excitement, may find this concluding section of the drama stale, flat and unprofitable. To overcome this disadvantage, to make the last act palatable without giving it so much attraction as to detract from the _scene a faire_ and throw the latter out of its due position in the center of interest, offers the playwright a very definite labor and taxes his ingenuity to the utmost. The proof of this is that so many dramas, up to the final act complete successes and excellent examples of sound technic, go to pieces here. I am of the opinion that in no one particular of construction do plays with matter in them and some right of existence come to grief more frequently than in this successful handling of the act which closes the drama. It may even be doubted if the inexperienced dramatist has so much trouble with his climax as with this final problem. If he had no _scene a faire_ he would hardly have written a play at all. But this tricky ultimate portion of the drama, seemingly so minor, may prove that which will trip him in the full flush of his victory with the obligatory scene.

At first blush, it would seem as if, with the big scene over, little remained to be done with the play, so far as story is concerned. In a sense this is true. The important elements are resolved; the main characters are defined for good or bad; the obstacles which have combined to make the plot tangle have been removed or proved insurmountable. The play has, with an increasing sense of struggle, grown to its height; it must now fall from that height by a plausible and more gentle descent. If it be a tragedy, the fall spells catastrophe, and is more abrupt and eye-compelling. If comedy be the form, then the unknotting means a happy solution of all difficulties.

But in either case, the chief business of this final part of the play would appear to be the rounding out of the fable, the smoothing off of corners, and the production of an artistic effect of finish and finality. If any part of the story be incomplete in plot, it will be in all probability that which has to do with the subplot, if there be one, or with the fates of subsidiary characters. If the playwright, wis.h.i.+ng to make his last act of interest, and in order to justify the retention of the audience in the theater for twenty minutes to half an hour more, should leave somewhat of the main story to be cleared up in the last act, he has probably weakened his obligatory scene and made a strategic mistake. And so his instinct is generally right when he prefers to get all possible dramatic satisfaction into the _scene a faire_, even at the expense of what is to follow.

A number of things this act can, however, accomplish. It can, with the chief stress and strain over, exhibit characters in whom the audience has come to have a warm interest in some further pleasant manifestation of their personality, thus offering incidental entertainment. The interest in such stage persons must be very strong to make this a sufficient reason for prolonging a play. Or, if the drama be tragic in its nature, some lighter turn of events, or some brighter display of psychology, may be presented to mitigate pain and soften the awe and terror inspired by the main theme; as, for instance, Shakespeare alleviates the deaths of the lovers in Romeo and Juliet by the reconciliation of the estranged families over their fair young bodies. A better mood for leaving the playhouse is thus created, without any lying about life. The Greeks did this by the use of lyric song at the end of their tragedies; melodrama does it by an often violent wresting of events to smooth out the trouble, as well as by lessening our interest in character as such.

Also, and here is, I believe, its prime function, the last act can show the logical outflow of the situation already laid down and brought to its issue in the preceding acts of the drama. Another danger lurks in this for the technician, as may be shown. It would almost seem that, in view of the largely supererogatory character of this final act, inasmuch as the play seems practically over with the _scene a faire_, it might be best honestly to end the piece with its most exciting, arresting scene and cut out the final half hour altogether.

But there is an artistic reason for keeping it as a feature of good play-making to the end of the years; I have just referred to it. I mean the instinctive desire on the part of the dramatic artist and his cooperative auditors so to handle the cross-section of life which has been exhibited upon the stage as to make the transition from stage scene to real life so gradual, so plausible, as to be pleasant to one's sense of esthetic _vraisemblance_. To see how true this is, watch the effect upon yourself made by a play which rings down the last curtain upon a sensational moment, leaving you dazed and dumb as the lights go up and the orchestra renders its final ba.n.a.lity. Somehow, you feel that this sudden, violent change from life fictive and imaginative to the life actual of garish streets, clanging trolleys, tooting motor cars and theater suppers is jarring and wrong. Art, you whisper to yourself, should not be so completely at variance with life; the good artist should find some other better way to dismiss you. The Greeks, as I said, sensitive to this demand, mitigated the terrible happenings of their colossal legendary tragedies by closing with lofty lyric choruses. Turn to the last pages of Sophocles's _OEdipus Tyrannus_, perhaps the most drastic of them all, for an example. I should venture to go so far as to suggest it as possible that in an apparent exception like _Oth.e.l.lo_, where the drama closes harshly upon the murder of the ewe lamb of a wife, Shakespeare might have introduced the alleviation of a final scene, had he ever prepared this play, or his plays in general, after the modern method of revision and final form, for the Argus-eyed scrutiny they were to receive in after-time. However, that his instinct in this matter, in general, led him to seek the artistic consolation which removes the spectator from too close and unrelieved proximity to the horrible is beyond cavil. If he do furnish a tragic scene, there goes with it a pa.s.sage, a strain of music, an unforgettable phrase, which, beauty being its own excuse for being, is as balm to the soul harrowed up by the agony of a protagonist. Horatio, over the body of his dear friend, speaks words so lovely that they seem the one rubric for sorrow since. And, still further removing us from the solemn sadness of the moment, enters Fortinbras, to take over the cares of kingdom and, in so doing, to remind us that beyond the individual fate of Hamlet lies the great outer world of which, after all, he is but a small part; and that the ordered cosmos must go on, though the Ophelias and Hamlets of the world die. The mere horrible, with this alleviation of beauty, becomes a very different thing, the terrible; the terrible is the horrible, plus beauty, and the terrible lifts us to a lofty mood of searching seriousness that has its pleasure, where the horrible repels and dispirits. Thus, the sympathetic recipient gets a certain austere satisfaction, yes, why not call it pleasure, from n.o.ble tragedy. But he asks that the last act pour the oil of peace, of beauty and of philosophic vision upon the troubled waters of life.

There is then an artistic justification, if I am right, for the act following the climax, quite aside from the conventional demand for it as a time filler, and its convenience too in the way of binding up loose ends.

As the function of the great scene is to develop and bring to a head the princ.i.p.al things of the play, so that of this final act would seem to be the taking care of the lesser things, to an effect of harmonious artistry. And whenever a playwright, confronting these difficulties and dangers, triumphs over them, whenever your comment is to the effect that, since it all appears to be over, it is hard to see what a last act can offer to justify it, and yet if that act prove interesting, freshly invented, unexpectedly worth while, you will, if you care to do your part in the Triple Alliance made up of actors, playwright and audience, express a sentiment of grat.i.tude, and admiration as well, for the theater artist who has manipulated his material to such good result.

The last act of Thomas's _The Witching Hour_ can be studied with much profit with this in mind. It is a masterly example of added interest when the things vital to the story have been taken care of. Another, and very different, example is Louis Parker's charming play, _Rosemary_, where at the climax a middle-aged man parts from the young girl who loves him and whom he loves, because he does not realize she returns the feeling, and, moreover, she is engaged to another, and, from the conventions of age, the match is not desirable. The story is over, surely, and it is a sad ending; nothing can ever change that, unless the dramatist tells some awful lies about life. Had he violently twisted the drama into a "pleasant ending" in the last act he would have given us an example of an outrageous disturbance of key and ruined his piece. What does he do, indeed, what can he do? By a bold stroke of the imagination, he projects the final scene fifty years forward, and shows the man of forty an old man of ninety. He learns, by the finding of the girl's diary, that she loved him; and, as the curtain descends, he thanks G.o.d for a beautiful memory. Time has plucked out the sting and left only the flower-like fragrance. This is a fine ill.u.s.tration of an addendum that is congruous. It lifts the play to a higher category. I believe it is true to say that this unusual last act was the work of Mr. Murray Carson, Mr. Parker's collaborator in the play.

One more example may be given, for these ill.u.s.trations will bring out more clearly a phase of dramatic writing which has not received overmuch attention in criticism. The recent clever comedy, _Years of Discretion_, by the Hattons, conducts the story to a conventional end, when the middle-aged lovers, who have flirted, danced and motored themselves into an engagement and marriage, are on the eve of their wedding tour. If the story be a love story, and it is in essence, it ought to be over. The staid Boston widow has been metamorphosed by gay New York, her maneuvers have resulted in the traditional end; she has got her man. What else can be offered to hold the interest?

And just here is where the authors have been able, pa.s.sing beyond the conventional limits of story, to introduce, in a lightly touched, pleasing fas.h.i.+on, a bit of philosophy that underlies the drama and gives it an enjoyable fillip at the close. We see the newly wed pair, facing that wedding tour at fifty, and secretly longing to give it up and settle down comfortably at home. They have been playing young during the New York whirl, why not be natural now and enjoy life in the decade to which they belong? So, in the charming garden scene they confess, and agree to grow old gracefully together. It is excellent comedy and sound psychology; to some, the last act is the best of all. Yet, regarded from the act preceding, it seemed superfluous.

Still another trouble confronts the playwright as he comes at grapples with the final act. He falls under the temptation to make a conventionally desirable conclusion, the "pleasant ending" already animadverted against, which is supposed to be the constant pet.i.tion of the theater Philistine. Here, it will be observed, the pleasant ending becomes part of the constructive problem. Shall the playwright carry out the story in a way to make it harmonious with what has gone before, both psychologically and in the logic of events? Shall he make the conclusion congruous with the climax, a properly deduced result from the situation therein shown? If he do, his play will be a work of art, tonal in a totality whose respective parts are keyed to this effect. Or shall he, adopting the tag line familiar to us in fairy tales, "and so they lived happily ever after," wrest and distort his material in order to give this supposed-to-be-prayed-for condiment that the grown-up babes in front are crying for? Every dramatist meets this question face to face in his last act, unless his plan has been to throw his most dramatic moment at the play's very end. A large percentage of all dramas weaken or spoil the effect by this handling of the last part of the play. The ending either is ineffective because unbelievable; or unnecessary, because what it shows had better be left to the imagination.

An attractive and deservedly successful drama by Mr. Zangwill, _Merely Mary Ann_, may be cited to ill.u.s.trate the first mistake. Up to the last act its handling of the relation of the gentleman lodger and the quaint little slavey is pitched in the key of truth and has a d.i.c.kens-like sympathy in it which is the main element in its charm. But in the final scene, where Mary Ann has become a fas.h.i.+onable young woman, meets her whilom man friend, and a match results, the improbability is such (to say nothing about the impossibility) as to destroy the previous illusion of reality; the auditor, if intelligent, feels that he has paid too high a price for such a union. I am not arguing that the improbable may not be legitimate on the stage; but only trying to point out that, in this particular case, the key of the play, established in previous acts, is the key of probability; and hence the change is a sin against artistic probity. The key of improbability, as in some excellent farces, _Baby Mine_, _Seven Days_, _Seven Keys to Baldpate_, and their kind--where it is basal that we grant certain conditions or happenings not at all likely in life--is quite another matter and not of necessity reprehensible in the least. But _Merely Mary Ann_ is too true in its homely fas.h.i.+on to fob us off with lies at the end; we believed it at first and so are shocked at its mendacity.

One of the best melodramas of recent years is Mr. McLellan's _Leah Kleschna_. Its psychology, founded on the a.s.sumption that a woman whose higher nature is appealed to, will respond to the appeal, is as sound as it is fine and encouraging. She is a criminal who is caught opening a safe by the French statesman whose house she has entered. His conversation with her is so effective that she breaks with her fellow thieves and starts in on another and better life in a foreign country, where the statesman secures for her honest employment.

It is in the last act that the playwright gets into trouble, and ill.u.s.trates the second possibility just mentioned; unnecessary information which can readily be filled in by the spectator, without the addition of a superfluous act to show it. The woman has broken with her gang, she is saved; arrangement has been made for her to go to Austria (if my memory locates the land), there to work out her change of heart.

Really, there is nothing else to tell. The essential interest of the play lay in the reclaiming of Leah; she is reclaimed! Why not dismiss the audience? But the author, perhaps led astray by the principle of showing things on the stage, even if the things shown lie beyond the limits of the story proper, exhibits the girl in her new quarters, aided and abetted by the scene painter who places behind her a very expensive background of Nature; and then caps his unnecessary work by bringing the statesman on a visit to see how his protegee is getting along.

Meanwhile, the knowing spectator murmurs in his seat (let us hope) and kicks against the p.r.i.c.ks of convention.

These examples indicate some of the problems centering in an act which for the very reason that it is, or seems, comparatively unimportant, is all the more likely to trip up a dramatist who, buoyed up by his victory in a fine and effective scene of climactic force, comes to the final act in a state of reaction, and forgetful of the fact that pride goeth before a fall--the fall of the curtain! No wonder that, in order to dodge all such difficulties, playwrights sometimes project their climax forward into the last act and so shorten what is left to do thereafter; or, going further, place it at the play's terminal point. But the artistic objections to this have been explained. Some treatment of the falling action after the climax, longer or shorter, is advisable; and the dramatist must sharpen his wits upon this technical demand and make it part of the satisfaction of his art to meet it.

The fundamental business of the last act of a play, let it be repeated, is to show the general results of a situation presented in the crucial scene, in so far as those results are pertinent to a satisfactory grasp of story and idea on the part of the auditor. These results must be in harmony with the beginning, growth and crisis of the story and must either be demanded in advance by the audience, or gladly received as pleasant and helpful, when presented. The citation of such plays as _Rosemary_ and _Years of Discretion_ raises the interesting question whether a peculiar function of the final act may not lie in not only rounding out the story as such, but in bringing home the underlying idea of the piece to the audience. Surely a rich opportunity, as yet but little utilized, is here. Yet again danger lurks in the opportunity.

The last act might take on the nature of a philosophic tag, a preachment not organically related to the preceding parts. This, of course, would be a sad misuse of the chance to give the drama a wider application and finer bloom. But if the playwright have the skill and inventive power to merge the two elements of story and idea in a final act which adds stimulating material while it brings out clearly the underlying theme, then he will have performed a kind of double function of the drama. In the new technic of to-day and to-morrow this may come to be, more and more, the accepted aim of the resourceful, thoughtful maker of plays.

The intelligent auditor in the playhouse with this aspect of technic before him will be able to a.s.sist in his cooperation with worthy plays by noticing particularly if the closing treatment of the material in hand seem germane to the subject; if it avoid anti-climax and keep the key; and if it demonstrates skill in overcoming such obstacles as have been indicated. Such a play-goer will not slight the final act as of only technical importance, but will be alertly on the watch to see if his friend the playwright successfully grapples with the last of the successive problems which arise during the complex and very difficult business of telling a stage story with clearness, effectiveness and charm.

CHAPTER XI

THE SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PLAY

We have now surveyed the chief elements involved in the making of a play and suggested an intelligent att.i.tude on the part of the play-goer toward them. Primarily the aim has been to broaden and sharpen the appreciation of a delightful experience; for the sake of personal culture. But, as was briefly suggested in the chapter on the play as a cultural possibility, there is another reason why the student and theater attendant should realize that the drama in its possibilities is a work of art, and the theater, the place where it is exhibited, can be a temple of art. This other reason looks to the social significance of the playhouse as a great, democratic people's amus.e.m.e.nt where stories can be heard and seen more effectively, as to influence, than anywhere else or under any other imaginable conditions. It is a place where the great lessons of life can be emotionally received and so sink deep into the consciousness and conscience of folk at large. And so the question of the theater becomes more than the question of private culture, important as that is; being, indeed, a matter of social welfare. This fact is now coming to be recognized in the United States, as it has long been recognized abroad. We see more plainly than we did that when states like France and Germany or the cities of such countries grant subventions to their theaters and make theater directors high officials of the government they do so not only from the conviction that the theater stands for culture (a good thing for any country to possess) but that they feel it to have a direct and vital influence upon the life of the citizens in general, upon the civilization of the day. They a.s.sume that the playhouse, along with the school, library, newspaper and church, is one of the five mighty social forces in suggesting ideas to a nation and creating ideals.

The intelligent theater-goer to-day, as never before, will therefore note with interest the change in the notions concerning this popular amus.e.m.e.nt that is yet so much more, based upon much that has happened within our time; the coming back of plays into literary significance and acceptance, so that leaders in letters everywhere are likely to be playwrights; the publication of contemporary drama, foreign and domestic, enabling the theater-goer to study the play he is to see or has seen; and the recognition of another aim in conducting this inst.i.tution than a commercial one looking to private profit: the aim of maintaining a house of art, nourished by all concerned with the pride in and love of art which that implies, for the good of the people. The observer we have in mind and are trying to help a little will be interested in all such experiments as that of the Little Theaters in various cities, in the children's theaters in New York and Was.h.i.+ngton, in the fast-growing use of the pageant to illuminate local history, in the attempts to establish munic.i.p.al stock companies, or competent repertory companies by enlightened private munificence. And however successful or unsuccessful the particular ventures may be, he will see that their significance lies in their meaning a new, thoughtful regard for an inst.i.tution which properly conducted can conserve the general social welfare.

He will find in the growth within a very few years of an organization like the Drama League of America a sign of the times in its testimony to an interest, as wide as the country, and wider, in the development and maintenance of a sound and worthy drama. And he will be willing as lover of fellow-man as well as theater lover to do his share in the movement--it is no hyperbole to call it such--toward socializing the playhouse, so that it may gradually become an enterprise conducted by the people and in the interests of the people, born of their life and cherished by their love. Nor will he be indifferent to the thought that, thus directed and enjoyed, it may in time come to be one of the proudest of national a.s.sets, as it has been before in more than one land and period.

And with the general interests of the people in mind, our open-eyed observer will be especially quick to approve any experiment toward bringing the stimulating life of the theater to communities or sections of the city which hitherto have been deprived of amus.e.m.e.nt that while amusing ministers to the mind and emotions of the hearers in a way to give profit with the pleasure. Catholic in his view, he will just as warmly welcome a people's theater in South Boston or on the East Side in New York, or at Hull House in Chicago, as he will a New Theater in upper New York, or a Fine Arts Theater in Chicago, or a Toy Theater in Boston; believing that since the playhouse is in essence and by the nature of its appeal democratic, it must neglect no cla.s.s of society in its service. He will p.r.i.c.k up his ears and become alert in hearing of the Minnesota experiment, where a rural play, written by a member of the agricultural school, was given under university auspices fifty times in one season, throughout the state. He will rejoice at the action of Dartmouth College in accepting a $100,000 bequest for the erection and conductment of a theater in the college community and serving the interests of both academic and town life. And he will also be glad to note that the Carnegie Inst.i.tute of Technology, in Pittsburgh, has initiated a School of Drama as an organic part of the educational life.

He will see in such things a recognition among educators that the theater should be related to educational life. And, musing happily upon such matters, it will come to him again and again that it is rational to strive for a people's price for a people's entertainment, instead of a price for the best offerings prohibitive to four-fifths of all Americans. And in this fact he will see the explanation for the enormous growth of the moving picture type of amus.e.m.e.nt, realizing it to be inevitable under present conditions, because a form of entertainment popular in price as well as in nature, and hence populously frequented.

And so our theater-goer, who has now so long listened with at least hypothetic patience to exposition and argument, will be willing, indeed, will wish, as part of his watchful canniness with respect to the plays he sees and reads, to judge the playwright, among other things, according to his interpretation of life; and especially the modern social life of his own day and country.

I have already spoken of the need to have an idea in drama; a centralizing opinion about life or a personal reaction to it--something quite distinct from the thesis or propaganda which might change a work of art into a dissertation. Let it now be added that, other things being equal, a play to-day will represent its time and be vital in proportion as it deals with life in terms of social interest. To put it another way, a drama to reflect our age must be aware of the intense and practically universal tendency to study society as an organism, with the altruistic purpose of seeing justice prevail. The rich are attacked, the poor defended; combinations of business are a.s.sailed, and criminals treated as our sick brothers; labor and capital contest on a gigantic scale, and woman looms up as a central and most agitating problem. All this and more, arising from the same interest, offers a vast range of subject-matter to drama and a new spirit in treating it on the stage.

Within the last half century the two great changes that have come in human life are the growth in the democratic ideal, with all that it suggests, and the revolutionary conception of what life is under the domination of scientific knowledge. All art forms, including this of the theater, have responded to these twin factors of influence. In art it means sympathy in studying fellow-man and an attempt to tell the truth about him in all artistic depictions. Therefore, in the drama to-day likely to make the strongest claim on the attention of the intelligent play-goers, we shall get the fullest recognition of this spirit and the frankest use of it as typical of the twentieth century. This is what gives substance, meaning and bite to the plays of Shaw, Galsworthy, and Barker, of Houghton, and Francis and Sowerby, of Moody and Kennedy and Zangwill, at their best. To acknowledge this is not to deny that enjoyable farce, stirring melodrama and romantic extravaganza are not welcome; the sort of play which simply furnishes amus.e.m.e.nt in terms of good story telling, content to do this and no more. It is, however, to remind the reader that to be most representative of the day the drama must do something beyond this; must mirror the time and probe it too; yes, must, like a wise physician, feel the pulse of man to-day and diagnose his deepest needs and failings and desires; in a word, must be a social drama, since that is the keynote of the present. It will be found that even in the lighter forms of drama which we accept as typical and satisfactory this social flavor may be detected, giving it body, but not detracting from its pleasurableness. Miss Crother's _Young Wisdom_ has the light touch and the framework of farce, yet it deals with a definite aspect of feminism. Mr. k.n.o.blauch's _The Faun_ is a romantic fantasia, but is not without its keen social satire. Mr. Sheldon's _The Havoc_ seems also farcical in its type; nevertheless it is a serious satiric thrust at certain extreme conceptions of marital relations. And numerous dramas, melodramatic in form and intention, dealing with the darker economic and sociological aspects of our life--the overworked crime play of the day--indefinitely swell the list. And so with many more plays, pleasant or unpleasant, which, while clinging close to the notion of good entertainment, do not refrain from social comment or criticism. The idea that criticism of life in a stage story must of necessity be heavy, dull and polemic is an irritating one, of which the Anglo-Saxon is strangely fond. The French, to mention one other nation, have constantly shown the world that to be intellectually keen and suggestive it is not necessary to be solemn or opaque; in fact, that one is sure to be all the more stimulating because of the light touch and the sense for social adaptability. This view will in time, no doubt, percolate through the somewhat obstinate layers of the Anglo-Saxon mind.

From these considerations it may follow that our theater-goer, while generally receptive and broad-minded in his seat to the particular type of drama the playwright shall offer, will incline to prefer those plays which on the whole seem in some one of various possible ways to express the time; which drama that has survived has always done. He will care most for the home-made play as against the foreign, if equally well made, since its problem is more likely to be his own, or one he can better understand. But he will not turn a cold shoulder to some European drama by a D'Annunzio, a Sudermann, a Maeterlinck or a Tolstoy, if it be a great work of art and deal with life in such universal applications and relations as to make it quite independent of national borders. One of the socializing and civilizing functions of the theater is thus to draw the peoples together into a common bond of interest, a unit in that vast community which signifies the all-embracing experience of being a human creature. Yet the theater-goer will have but a Laodicean regard for plays which present divergent national or technically local conditions of life practically incomprehensible to Americans at large; some of the Gallic discussions of the French menage, for instance.

Terence taught us wisely that nothing human should be alien from our interest; true enough. There is however no good reason why interest should not grow as the matter in hand comes closer to us in time and s.p.a.ce. And still more vigorously will he protest against any and all of the wretched attempts to change foreign material for domestic use to be noted when the American producer (or traducer) feels he must remove from such a play the atmospheric color which is of its very life, transferring a rural setting of old England to a similar setting in New England. Short of the drama of open evil teaching, nothing is worse than these absurd and abortive makings over of drama from abroad. The result is neither fish, flesh nor good red herring. They destroy every object of theater enjoyment and culture, lying about life and losing whatever grip upon credence they may have originally possessed. Happily, their day is on the wane. Even theater-goers of the careless kind have little or no use for them.

That the stage of our day, a stage upon which it has been possible to attain success with such dramas as _The Blue Bird_, _The Servant in the House_, _The Poor Little Rich Girl_, _The Witching Hour_, _Cyrano de Bergerac_, _Candida_, _What Every Woman Knows_, _The Great Divide_ and _The Easiest Way_ (the enumeration is made to imply the greatest diversity of type) is one of catholic receptivity and some discriminating patronage, should appear to anyone who has taken the trouble to follow the discussion up to this point, and whose theater experience has been fairly large. There is no longer any reason why our drama-going should not be one of the factors which minister to rational pleasure, quicken the sense of art and invite us fruitfully to partic.i.p.ate in that free and desirable exchange of ideas which Matthew Arnold declared to be the true aim of civilization. Let us grant readily that the stage story which shows within theater restrictions the life of a land and the outlying life of the world of men has its definite demarcations; that it may not to advantage perform certain services more natural, for example to the church, or the school. It must appeal upon the basis of the bosom interests and pa.s.sions of mankind and its common denominator is that of the general emotions. Concede that it should not debate a philosophical question with the aim of the thinker, nor a legal question as if the main purpose were to settle a matter of law; nor a religious question with the purposeful finality of the theologian, or the didactic eloquence of the pulpit. But it can and should deal with any question pertinent to men, vital to the broad interests of human beings, in the spirit of the humanities and with the restraints of its particular art. It should be suggestive, arousing, not demonstrative or dogmatic. Its great outstanding advantage lies in its emotional suggestibility. To perform this service, and it is a mighty one, is to have an intelligent theater, a self-respecting theater, a theater that shall purvey rational amus.e.m.e.nt to the few and the many. And whenever theater-goers, by majority vote, elect it, it will arrive.

It was suggested on an earlier page and may now be still more evident that intelligent theater-going begins long before one goes to the theater. It depends upon preparation of various kinds; upon a sense of the theater as a social inst.i.tution, and of the renewed literary quality of the drama to-day; upon a knowledge of the specific problems of the player and playwright, and of the aids to this knowledge furnished by the best dramatic criticism; upon familiarity too with the printed drama, past and present, in a fast multiplying library that deals with the stage and dramatic writing. The last statement may be amplified here.

A few years ago, there was hardly a serious publication either in England or America devoted to the legitimate interests of the stage from the point of view of the patron of the theater, the critic-in-the-seat whom we have so steadily had in mind. Such periodicals as existed were produced rather in the interests of the stage people, actors, producers, and the like. This has now changed very much for the better. Confining the survey to this country, the monthly called _The Theater_ has some value in making the reader aware of current activities. The two monthlies, _The American Playwright_ and _The Dramatist_, edited respectively by William T. Price and Luther B. Anthony, are given to the technical consideration of contemporary drama in the light of permanent principles, and are very useful. The quarterly, _The Drama_, edited and published under the auspices of The Drama League of America, is a dignified and earnest attempt to represent the cultural work of all that has to do with the stage; and a feature of it is the regular appearance of a complete play not hitherto in print. Another quarterly, _Poet Lore_, although not given over exclusively to matters dramatic, has been honorably conspicuous for many years for its able critical treatment of the theater and play; and especially for its translations of foreign dramas, much of the best material from abroad being first given English form in its columns. At Madison, Wisconsin, _The Play Book_ is a monthly also edited by theater specialists and often containing illuminating articles and reviews. And, of course, in the better cla.s.s periodicals, monthly and weekly, papers in this field are appearing nowadays with increasing frequency, a testimonial to the general growth of interest.

Critics of the drama like W. P. Eaton, Clayton Hamilton, Arthur Ruhl, Norman Hapgood, William Winter, Montrose J. Moses, Channing Pollock, James O'Donnell Bennett, James S. Metcalf, and James Huneker are to be read in the daily press, in periodicals, or in collected book form.

Advanced movements abroad are chronicled in _The Mask_, the publication founded by Gordon Craig; and in _Poetry and Drama_. It is reasonable to believe that, with the renewed appreciation of the theater, the work of the dramatic critic as such will be felt to be more and more important and his function will a.s.sume its significance in the eyes of the community. A vigorous dramatic period implies worthy criticism to self-reveal it and to establish and maintain right standards. Signs are not wanting that we shall gradually train and make necessary in the United States a cla.s.s of critic represented in England by William Archer and A. B. Walkley. Among the publishers who have led in the movement to place good drama in permanent form in the hands of readers the firms of Macmillan, Scribner, Mitch.e.l.l Kennerley, Henry Holt, John W. Luce, Harper and Brothers, B. W. Huebsch and Doubleday, Page & Company have been and are honorably to the fore. In the way of critical books which study the many aspects of the subject, they are now being printed so constantly as plainly to testify to the new att.i.tude and interest. The student of technic can with profit turn to the manuals of William Archer, Brander Matthews, and William T. Price; the studies of Clayton Hamilton, W. P. Eaton, Norman Hapgood, Barrett Clark, and others. For the civic idea applied to the theater, and the development of the pageant, he will read Percy Mackaye. And when it comes to plays themselves, as we have seen, hardly a week goes by without the appearance of some important foreign masterpiece in English, or some important drama of English speech, often in advance of or coincident with stage production. The best work of the day is now readily accessible, where, only a little while ago, book publication of drama (save the standard things of the past) was next to unknown. It is worth knowing that The Drama League of America is publis.h.i.+ng, with the cooperation of Doubleday, Page & Company, an attractive series of Drama League Plays, in which good drama of the day, native and foreign, is offered the public at a cost which cuts in two the previous expense. And the Drama League's selective List of essays and books about the theatre, with which is incorporated a complete list of plays printed in English, can be procured for a nominal sum and will give the seeker after light a thorough survey of what is here touched upon in but a few salient particulars.

In short, there is no longer much excuse for pleading ignorance on the ground of inadequate aid, if the desire be to inform oneself upon the drama and matters pertaining to the theater.