Page images
PDF
EPUB

forgives. Farewell, then, to the dreams of a last act in which a general reconciliation takes place all round, and the wandering prodigal is received not only with open arms and a sumptuous festival, but also with the idea that he can make a clean sweep of his past and begin again! In some of Mr St John Hankin's plays-which have scarcely yet received the attention they deservewill be found a good deal of this strictly scientific attitude. In the piece entitled The Return of the Prodigal' Mr Hankin displays to us a young gentleman who for a time enjoys many of the advantages of the sinner who repents, but, as the Ethiopian cannot change his skin nor the leopard his spots, the prodigal once more goes out into the wilderness.

Exceedingly wide and fruitful has been the influence of Ibsen on modern drama, because here we have a body of dramatic work-I refer, of course, to his social dramas -written under the inspiration of modern scientific ideas. Now, the condition of humanity being such as modern science has revealed it, what, if we look at the matter strictly from the individual standpoint, is a given personality or character to do? He is a prisoner within narrowing walls of circumstance and fate. His own ability to change the conditions that surround him is infinitesimally small. Hence it would appear that his only course of action is a wise and prudent selfishness. He must, according to the modern jargon, develope his own personality, and this realisation of his personality is, however refined, an obstinate and persistent egotism. Practically all the heroes and heroines of Ibsen's social dramas are confirmed egotists. The women who come in and wreck Norwegian households are selfish in a superlative degree. Witness Hedda Gabler. The whole point of The Doll's House' and of the action of Nora is her determination to live her own life, whatever may be the result to others. The men, too, are egotists, sometimes successful, sometimes unsuccessful. As a rule they are the latter, because, if you pursue egotism to its final logical conclusion, it becomes a monomania, and the victim is a suitable inmate for a madhouse.

These are unpleasant consequences, no doubt, of realistic drama, and they suggest the necessity for a more thorough examination of the basis on which it rests. Meanwhile

[ocr errors]

they are extremely significant. Just as the psychology called scientific is closely allied with and, indeed, based upon pathology, so the scientific study of man as pursued by the modern dramatist is largely occupied with morbid and eccentric types. Ibsen was once reminded by one of his associates that there were good potatoes as well as rotten ones. His answer was characteristic. Only the rotten ones have come under my observation.' To considerations of this sort we need only add one. Inasmuch as science is totally unable to explain the whence and the whither, so, too, will drama, founded on scientific realism, leave us confronted by problems that we are wholly unable to solve. That is the unfailing characteristic of most of our modern plays which mean anything to the present generation. They bring us up against an unscalable wall; they end in an impasse. If we watch the work in England of such men as Mr Stanley Houghton in 'Hindle Wakes,' Mr Galsworthy in 'Strife,' 'Justice,' 'The Eldest Son,' Mr Granville Barker in 'Waste,' and if further we correct our observations of English writers by a study of what is going on in the Austrian, Scandinavian and Russian dramas, we shall become aware of a spirit of hopelessness, of unrealised ambitions, of aspirations unfulfilled, in a word, of failure—as the total result and outcome of their views of life. Here, however, we are getting somewhat beyond our immediate subject, and must return to the effect which underlying principles of this kind have on actual dramatic technique.

Everyone will have observed that in latter days there is no desire for a dénouement, no anxiety about what are called curtains. That is because the dramatist is trying to study life, and life assuredly does not consist of passages which end with a striking situation. For the same reason, a dramatist will not mind very much if he is told that his last act is weaker than what has gone before. He does not resent the criticism, for the simple reason that many of the problems of life are not solved very satisfactorily or dramatically, but 'fizzle out'-if the expression may be pardoned-disappear in disappointing side-issues. The new drama takes it as its object to explore human souls, and it will care more to give us the psychology of these souls than to arrange incidents skilfully round them. Great attention will be paid to atmo

sphere, but not so much to the story. If we end on what is called a note of interrogation, we must not be surprised. Think of the Socratic Dialogues. They mostly ended on a note of interrogation. The problem was not solved; but it had been touched on all sides. Light had been thrown upon it from unexpected quarters, and a real advance in thought had been made. If a dramatist interests you by putting freshly before you men and women in typical circumstances which bring out the essential traits of their disposition, if he shows what nature is capable of or is incapable of in moments of stress, then you will be satisfied, even though you go away with the complaint that, after all, he has not told you a neatly constructed and finished story.

Or take another point. There used to be a clear distinction between tragedies and comedies, and tragedies ended painfully, while comedies ended happily. Many plays written by modern writers cannot be described as either tragedies or comedies. They are both or neither. In our ordinary experience tragic and comic elements of life are not distinguished. A closer observation will often reveal a tragedy, where a light superficial study will only give us a comedy. Again, the artificial distinction between the hero and the villain does not really correspond to our knowledge of human nature. There are no heroes, and there are no villains. Life would be a much easier affair if such distinctions were real; but the psychologist has to come to the conclusion that mankind is not scientifically divisible into sheep and goats. And all these points lead up to one, at which I have already hinted. The scientific attitude towards human nature, making the individual the result of the generations before him, naturally tends towards a doctrine of irresponsibility in human action. It would be a simpler affair if we could really decide that a man brings about, through malice prepense, his own wrong-doings, because then with admirable justice we could overwhelm him with our reprobation and our punishment. But the tragedy and irony of life are that a man's acts cannot always be traced to some bad will on his part, but to earlier antecedents, over which he has little or no control. This is the new doctrine of fatality, which we must not be surprised to find exhibited in our drama, if the drama is to represent

the thought of the age. Everyone is a victim, but no one is to be blamed.

I know of no better examples than the two plays of Tchekhof, which have lately been translated by Mr George Calderon-'The Seagull' and 'The Cherry Orchard.' There is assuredly no hero and no villain. We do not know whether we are dealing with a tragedy or a comedy; and, in the case of 'The Cherry Orchard,' at all events, the drama ends because the principal situation studied has come to a conclusion, not because the dramatist has formed an idea of a dénouement. In 'The Cherry Orchard' you have the contrast between a vulgar successful man and the nobility. But you must not think that the vulgar successful man is intended to be the villain of the piece. No, he is a very good-humoured creature, full of kindness, and perhaps representing some of the lineaments of Tchekhof himself. So, too, in 'The Seagull,' the successful author who does so much damage to young people, who ruins, practically, the lives both of a young girl and the young man who is her lover, is in reality a capital fellow, fond of fishing, once more possessing some of the lineaments of Tchekhof himself. If one thinks over the matter, there is no better way of trying to decide the directions in which drama is evolving than to study modern drama as it meets us in unfamiliar forms in other nations. Tchekhof is an admirable example to choose, because Tchekhof is full of a delicate artistry, and because he consciously set himself to write, not the conventional dramas which were likely to win immediate success with his public, but those more intricate studies of human life and human nature, which reveal the tragi-comedy of the world. And it is towards this illustration of the tragi-comedy of life and character in the world that all serious modern drama in England and elsewhere is slowly feeling its way. What modern drama needs is not so much a brand-new technique-that is impossible-as an adaptation or modification of the old technique to suit the prevalent conceptions of the age. W. L. COURTNEY.

Art. 6.-THE INDIVIDUAL ATOM.

1. Griechische Denker. Eine Geschichte der Antiken Philosophie. By Theodor Gomperz. Leipzig, 1896-1912. 2. Histoire de la Philosophie Atomistique. By Léopold Mabilleau. Paris: Alcan, 1895.

3. The Study of Chemical Composition: Its Method and Historical Development. By Ida Freund. Cambridge: University Press, 1904.

4. Radio-active Substances and their Radiations. By E. Rutherford. Cambridge: University Press, 1913.

5. The Conduction of Electricity through Gases. By Sir J. J. Thomson. Second edition. Cambridge: University Press, 1906.

6. An Electrical Method of Counting the Number of aParticles from Radio-active Substances. By E. Rutherford and H. Geiger. Proceedings of the Royal Society, A. 81, p. 141. June 1908.

7. On an Expansion Apparatus for making Visible the Tracks of Ionising Particles in Gases and some Results obtained by its Use. By C. T. R. Wilson. Proceedings of the Royal Society, A. 87, p. 277. June 1912.

THE theory of atoms, as an attempt to explain the ultimate structure of matter, has occupied an important place in the organised pursuit of natural knowledge; but from the days of Democritus to those of Lord Kelvin speculation on the atomic theory has rested on the assumption that vast numbers of atoms or molecules were needed to produce results appreciable by the senses; and, till recent years, the demonstration of the separate effects of a single atom was regarded as beyond human power. Thus molecular science could be treated only by statistical methods, in which the properties of the individual had to be inferred from a knowledge of the properties of immense crowds.

Philosophers and men of science are not agreed on the question whether or no the pictures of the outer world given us directly by our senses or indirectly by scientific analysis correspond to a reality in the 'things-inthemselves'-whether, indeed, we can ever apprehend the 'thing-in-itself' by means of the perceptions which alone can reach our minds through the senses. But even many

« PreviousContinue »