tine" thought of that century and especially with the influence of Montaigne, would seem worthy of the first place in order of importance. This we can only call "libertine" prose, whether we consider its philosophical implications or its rhetorical theories and form. The groundwork of this style is the Senecan pattern, which is so much more apparent in the Stoic model; but it aims at freedom, and chooses several other writers, ancient and modern, as the models by which it seeks, through the method of imitation, to escape from the method of imitation. Rabelais is the chief of these. Montaigne adds the taste for Plutarch's essays; and the form of Montaigne's own style, from 1600 onward, mingles with that of Rabelais' in almost equal proportions in the prevailing forms of libertine style in the seventeenth century.

III. Next to these in the favor of the age was the prose of "politicians" and students of "prudential wisdom": Bacon, Malvezzi, Gracian, Grotius, and a host of others, who get their rhetorical and often their political ideas chiefly from Tacitus.

To these three major forms must be added a tendency which cannot be separated from any of them, but manifests itself everywhere as the peculiar mark of the genius of the seventeenth century, a tendency observable in writers as normal as Bacon, Browne, and Balzac, but apparent in its full efflorescence in the letters of Donne, the essays of Gracian and Malvezzi and many of their fellow countrymen, the histories of Pierre Mathieu, and many similar works. For this tendency there is unfortunately no convenient name in English. "Metaphysical" is even a less happy term to describe the kinds of prose in which it appears than the related kinds of poetry; and there seems to be no possibility of making a practicable adjective or noun in English from the continental terms concettismo, etc. It may be known as the "prose of imaginative conceit" in order that we may keep in line with the terms of current criticism. But I am tempted to make the bold innovation of calling it "the baroque style" in prose; for no other term will so exactly describe its characteristic qualities.

In the three forms enumerated above (with due regard to the concettistic tendency in each of them) may be ranged all the Attic prose of the century from 1575 to 1675, and that is to say all its characteristic prose, except the writings of one or two great individualists who escape the influence of their time; and it is upon the

lines laid down in this classification that the further study of seventeenth-century prose-style must be conducted. What is now necessary is a thorough survey of Stoic prose, libertine prose, and Tacitean prose separately, each treated with reference to its philosophical theory, its preferred models in antiquity and modern times, its relation to the culture of the age, and its rhetorical forms. Only the outlines of such a survey can be suggested, of course, in the study of individual authors, even of such representative and influential leaders as Muret, Lipsius, Montaigne, and Bacon.

CENTERS OF INTEREST IN DRAMA, DRAMATIC

I

TENSION, AND TYPES OF DRAMATIC

"CONFLICT"

ALLISON GAW

Professor of English, University of Southern California

I

N his essay on La Loi du Théâtre Ferdinand de Brunetière in the year 1894 attempted to state what he considered to be "the theory, or, to speak more modestly, a theory of dramatic action." "Will any argument, however ingenious," he asked, "alter the fact that all poetry is either lyric, epic, or dramatic? Certainly not. And if the Cid, if Phèdre, if Tartuffe, if the Légataire universel, if the Barbier de Séville, if the Camaraderie, if the Demi-monde, if Célimare le bien-aimé, are dramatic, does it not follow that all those works, so different, must nevertheless have not merely a few points of contact or vague resemblance, but an essential characteristic in common? What is this characteristic ?" 1

This appears to have been the first time that the question of the one positive trait fundamental to drama throughout all of its various types was ever definitely and seriously discussed in formal literary criticism. Concerning the tragic type of drama Aristotle 2 had laid down the celebrated dicta that it was necessarily "an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; . . . in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of those emotions;" that "The plot is the first principal, and as it were, the soul of a tragedy"; that this plot should be unified, being composed of essential and nontransposable parts; and that the time of its duration should be such "that the sequence of events, according to the law of probability,

1Trans. of P. M. Hayden in B. H. Clark, European Theories of the Drama, p. 405. Poetics, trans. of S. H. Butcher, pp. 23, 27-29, 31, 33.

will admit of a change from bad fortune to good, or from good fortune to bad."

Gustav Freytag, in his Technik des Dramas (1863), had made an important advance upon this theory. "Not the presentation of a passion for itself," he says, "but of a passion which leads to action, is the business of dramatic art; not the presentation of an event for itself, but for its effect upon a human soul, is the dramatist's mission. . . . What the drama presents is always a struggle, which, with strong perturbations of soul, the hero wages against opposing forces. And as the hero must be endowed with a strong life, with a certain one-sidedness, and be in embarrassment, the opposing power must be made visible in a human representative." 1 However, although at this point employing such phraseology as apparently to apply to the entire range of drama, Freytag repeatedly in his discussions limited his statements to "serious drama," and used no illustrations drawn from the realm of comedy.

Thirty years later, Brunetière, as has been above indicated, definitely opened the broader question. What one characteristic is basic to all forms of dramatic, as distinguished from epic and lyric, art? To this, three different answers have at various times been given.

Brunetière himself broadened and deepened the theory of Freytag. He examined a number of diverse examples from French drama and came to the conclusion that "In drama or farce, what we ask of the theater is the spectacle of a will striving toward a goal, and conscious of the means which it employs." 2 Further, he distinguished the various dramatic species on the basis of the seriousness of the obstacle against which the will was struggling. An insurmountable obstacle, such as the decrees of Fate, Providence, or of natural law, or frenzied passion, produced tragedy. An obstacle surmountable only with difficulty, such as prejudice or social convention, gave romantic drama or social drama. Two equal opposing wills produced comedy. Such obstacles as the irony of fortune, the ridiculous aspect of prejudice, or the disproportion between the means and the end, gave farce.

Mr. William Archer, in his volume on Play-Making (1912), took issue with the Freytag-Brunetière theory. In Sophocles'

'Trans. of E. J. MacEwan, The Technique of the Drama, pp. 104-5. 'Op. cit., p. 407.

Agamemnon, he pointed out, there is no conflict, for Agamemnon is merely a helpless victim of Clytemnestra's prearranged plot.1 Sophocles' Edipus, too, merely writhes like a worm on a hook. Neither does Othello make any fight against Iago. In As You Like It the charm of the play does not spring from the struggle between the banished Duke and the usurper or the struggle between Orlando and Oliver, and there is not even the conflict between the eager lover and a more or less reluctant maid. In no valid sense can it be said that Ibsen's Ghosts shows us will struggling against obstacles. Thus Archer-and he concludes that "it is clearly an error to make conflict indispensable to drama, and especially to insist-as do some of Brunetière's followers-that the conflict must be between will and will."

Mr. Archer went on to develop a theory that the essential element in drama is not conflict, but crisis. "A play is a more or less rapidly developing crisis in destiny or circumstances, and a dramatic scene is a crisis within a crisis, clearly furthering the ultimate event. The drama may be called the art of crises, as fiction is the art of gradual developments." 2 This Mr. Archer declared to be "an induction from the overwhelming majority of existing dramas, and a deduction from the nature and inherent conditions of theatrical presentation." And, admitting that not all crises are dramatic, he attempted to distinguish a dramatic from an undramatic crisis "by the fact that it develops, or can be made naturally to develop, through a series of minor crises, involving more or less emotional excitement, and, if possible, the vivid manifestation of character." "

In Studies in Stagecraft (1914) Mr. Clayton Hamilton, who had previously been a follower of Brunetière, replied to Mr. Archer's contention, "I do not think it would be difficult to convince so openminded a critic as Mr. Archer that the element of 'crisis' is no

'Miss Elizabeth Woodbridge, in The Drama-Its Law and Its Technique (1898), had already shown (pp. 137-61) that in at least one type of comedy, illustrated by Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts, the case of aggressor meeting aggressor is replaced by that of the overthrow of a victim who has no opportunity to resist, but is merely deceived by the wiles of an intriguer.

2

3

Play-Making, p. 36.

Ibid., p. 38. In a paper later reprinted in his volume on The Technique of Play-Writing (see pp. 26-27), Mr. Charlton Andrews immediately and ably defended Brunetière's theory against Mr. Archer, pointing out the elements of conflict that underlay the various plays above referred to in this connection. The Theory of the Theatre, p. 29.