THE PRESENT STATE OF THE DRAMA

THE most pressing need of the drama to-day is a sound basis of criticism. It is the function of the critic not only to instruct and educate the playgoer, to point out excellences and assist the growth of good taste, but also, and more important still, to give help and counsel to the playwright. But in order to perform these duties with success the critic must have criteria; he must be familiar with the fundamental laws of art and be able not only to say that a certain thing is good or bad, but to give his reasons for saying so. Moreover, since these laws are stable and immutable, they will, when once arrived at, prevent all real disagreement among critics.

It would seem, therefore, from a consideration of the criticism of to-day, that these laws are not known; for while the judgments of our critics are often at variance with the verdicts of the general public, they disagree still more often and acutely among themselves. Take, for instance, the good old-fashioned melodrama, the play in which villainy is punished, beauty rescued from danger, and a series of heroic adventures is brought to a close by reconciliation and marriage. From such a play the critic turns wearily away, damning it with faint praise, or if it take him in a petulant mood, pouring drops of envenomed ink upon the acting of its leading lady. A bad play!' he yawns. But why bad? And if bad, why so popular?

Or, again, consider the play of the 'intellectual' type, full of problems and complexes. This, perhaps, our critic will praise; he will admire the subtlety of its dialogue, the intricacy of its situations. But from such a play the public, who, in the dramatic world, are the ultimate arbiters of immortality, will fly as from the plague, and no amount of explaining why they ought to like it will lure them to the box-office.

Last, there is the 'moral' play, the play whose aim is to hold up to the public eye a particular scandal, to remedy a particular abuse. This type of play both critic and public unite in condemning, though, beyond explaining that it is not the business of the theatre to preach,' they can give no satisfactory reasons for their dislike.

It may be objected that, as every individual is different from all others, it is impossible to lay down any universal principles with regard to criticism, but that this conclusion is unsound is shown by the fact that in certain cases, such as that of Shakespeare, agreement is reached, although the real reasons for this agreement are unknown.

And yet if we can approach the subject with an unprejudiced mind we may be able to arrive at a basis of criticism which will enable us to put all plays in their proper places, set out their goodness and their badness, and arrive at some idea of their degree of perfection.

The drama is an art which engages the attention of the whole range of a human being. Its appeal is first of all through the senses to the emotions. By beauty of scenery and dresses, by music, by the pain or pleasure caused by its situations, by the emotions of the characters themselves, the emotions of the audience are aroused and swayed. To some dramatists this is the only end in view, but in the truly great play it is but one, and in a certain sense the lowest, channel of appeal.

For beside the emotional nature there is what may be termed the volitional, including all that is generally called conscience or moral sense. The appeal to the will, which is made by every play without exception, and, indeed, by every other form of art, is one which is often ignored or overlooked. But that it exists and is a very strong factor in the total effect of the play is evident upon a moment's reflection. It is the appeal to the will which causes the villain to be hissed in suburban melodramas, and the same satisfaction is felt, though perhaps not expressed so crudely, by the occupants of West End stalls. Human nature being what it is, no play which is really contrary to the will or conscience of mankind can ever live. The demand for a happy ending is perfectly right and natural. It is the universal will of mankind finding expression. And a happy ending of some sort there must be to the perfect play.

The appeal to the will may be of two kinds : either positive, as by the exemplification in the play of right action, or negative, by the holding up of wrong action as an example. But to hold up wrong action as right, or to tamper with justice in a play by giving rewards to the evil-doer, will inevitably doom it, for the will of the audience cannot tolerate such perversion.

Next in order is the intellectual appeal. Every dramatic representation, from a Greek tragedy down to a modern revue, must have some intellectual content. The importance of sound thinking in a play is obvious. The audience, who are themselves capable of thought, become rightly impatient of a play the situations of which do not logically follow one from the other,

or in which the characters act unnaturally, or which, owing to the obviousness of its platitudes, is dull. All these faults and that comprehensive one which includes them all-' weak construction -cause a play to fail in its intellectual appeal.

Thus it is obvious that the critic is right in condemning the melodrama because it makes little or no appeal to the intellect, while the despised 'general public' are also right in shunning a play which is intellectually brilliant, but does not 'stir' them. Both are right in condemning the 'moral' play in so far as it is neither beautiful nor true, because the will in itself is not so much a force as that which releases the emotional and intellectual forces in any required direction.

A good play, therefore, must have these three appeals: emotional, volitional and intellectual; and inasmuch as the emotions may be controlled by the will, while the will is, or can be, controlled by the intellect, we can formulate, from the point of view of art, a hierarchical order of the three appeals, putting the emotional lowest, the volitional next, and the intellectual highest.

Such a classification will probably not commend itself to critics in general, for two reasons. In the first place, the emotional drama is the only one which has been in modern times brought to anything like perfection, and secondly, because, since all the faculties act together, it is very difficult in practice to analyse the effects of each kind of appeal, and therefore much confusion results.

The ideal play will provide a perfect balance of the three appeals. In the first place, it will have beauty: beauty of scenery, of characters, of dresses, of language, of situations, perhaps of music. This is a requirement which many dramatists have tried to do without, and in so doing have failed. If a play opens with ugliness and squalor, it must be in order to enhance by contrast the beauty of its conclusion. No human being will willingly suffer that which is ugly to be brought before his consciousness unless it is in order to bring into being a greater beauty than was before. Grand Guignol plays and the like are definitely bad, and doomed to failure, because their appeal is to the perversion of this desire for beauty. The appeal of excitement is not necessarily bad, though it is a lower form of appeal than others, but when the emotions are stirred, not by beauty, but by horror and fear, the drama is being misused and degraded.

Next, the play must be good; that is to say, it must be what we call satisfying and wholesome. There are many misguided playwrights who, with the best intentions, are seeking to reform the world by holding up to its view the enormity of its crimes. They deliberately set forth in a series of the gloomiest situations the most painful theme they can think of, and, after sternly

harrowing the feelings of their audience for a space of three hours or so, bring down the curtain on a waste of dead hopes, blasted affections and ruined lives. And they imagine that they are helping to better the world, not realising that by laying stress on these dark aspects of life they are helping to strengthen them. The surest and quickest way to combat all such evils is to ignore them as far as possible while holding up to view their antitheses. War-plays such as Tunnel Trench are not in the least likely to put an end to war; rather, they will be more apt to prolong its existence. Those who have experienced war do not need to be reminded of it, while those who have not, if they were so foolish as to witness such plays, would be worse, and not better, for the experience.

The fact is that all such plays are aimed (whether consciously or not) at the will through fear, and fear is that which it is the whole purpose of life to eradicate.

Therefore a play, to be really good in the true sense, must not deal with the evil or negative side of life except in such a way as to show that all that which is apparently evil and ugly must ultimately contribute to goodness and beauty.

Lastly, the play must be true. It must contain no flaws which the reason can detect; and not only must it be true, but the truth in it must be made plain to the audience with such force that they cannot fail to see it. It must give us something to think about, it must explain life to us, and cause us to see some truth or aspect of truth which we had hitherto overlooked. There is no greater pleasure which the human mind can have than that of recognising truth, and the thrill of the pursuit and capture of one idea after another is one before which the excitement of melodrama is sheer ennui. Therefore it is by its presentation of truth that any particular play will ultimately stand or fall. And it must be noted that it is not sufficient for the dramatist merely to state a case, to propound a problem; he must give us some hint, at least, of a solution. To say in effect, as so many dramatists do, Look at these people, all acting apparently with the best intentions. See what a mess they've got themselves into. Can you see the way out? I'm sure I can't,' is to leave the work only half done. The object of presenting a play to the public is in order to say something which they have not yet heard; therefore the dramatist is, whether he admits it or not, the teacher of his audience and has a teacher's responsibilities.

In order to solve a dramatic problem it is not, of course, necessary to put the solution into the mouth of one of the characters and fire it off towards the end of the third act. In a play that is true to life in the fullest sense, the action itself will imply, more surely than any set speech, the way out. It is because so

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many plays are not true, in that they deal with results without relating them to the thoughts or actions which are their causes, that the writers of them find so much difficulty in coming to a satisfactory conclusion.

When in any play the three qualities and the three modes of appeal which have been enumerated are perfectly balanced, there enters into it a fourth quality which is the essence of them all. It is difficult to describe, because it is not a quality which appeals to any one human faculty, but to the human being as a whole. No play whose appeal is unbalanced can have it, no mere melodrama, no purely intellectual piece. It is a quality which constitutes greatness. It cannot be described, only experienced, when in the witnessing of a play the whole being is swept away in the enthralment of the action and the consciousness is lifted up to a plane above its normal one. There are few of such plays to-day.

We have omitted from consideration what may be termed the sub-human drama, that is to say, so-called plays or dramatic representations whose appeal is merely or mainly to the senses. These are, of course, a prostitution of the dramatic art and unworthy of serious criticism.

Having thus established a criterion, it may be of interest to consider particular plays of the day and see how far they approach to our ideal. One of the most modern of recent plays, in the sense of its being a reflection of the spirit of the age, is The Vortex, by Noel Coward. This is a cleverly written and sincere attempt to find out what is wrong with us. We are shown a group of people, more or less typical of a certain class of present-day society, bored, superficial, and living an artificial life of so-called pleasure. The mother neglects her husband and philanders with a young man; the son returns from Paris and announces his engagement to an exceedingly modern young woman who, it turns out, is an old flame of the mother's lover. In the second act the characters, by now almost extinct with boredom, are shown undergoing a house party. It transpires that the son is addicted to drugtaking. The modern young woman breaks off her engagement with the son and returns to her former lover, thereby causing him to quarrel with her previous fiancé's mother (the hostess of the house party), whose lover he had been. In the last scene we are shown the effects of the Vortex,' where, after mutual recrimination and heart-searching, mother and son agree to turn over a new leaf and start again.

The value of this play is in its sincerity. It is a faithful picture of a certain aspect of life, and so far it is true and logical. There is no juggling with values. The results of a frivolous attitude towards life are clearly brought out, and the devastating