The Theory of the Theatre and Other Principles of Dramatic Criticism The Modern Social Drama byHamilton, Clayton
The modern social drama—or the problem play, as it is popularly
called—did not come into existence till the fourth decade of the
nineteenth century; but in less than eighty years it has shown itself to be
the fittest expression in dramaturgic terms of the spirit of the present
age; and it is therefore being written, to the exclusion of almost every
other type, by nearly all the contemporary dramatists of international
importance. This type of drama, currently prevailing, is being continually
impugned by a certain set of critics, and by another set continually
defended. In especial, the morality of the modern social drama has been a
theme for bitter conflict; and critics have been so busy calling Ibsen a
corrupter of the mind or a great ethical teacher that they have not found
leisure to consider the more general and less contentious questions of what
the modern social drama really is, and of precisely on what ground its
morality should be determined. It may be profitable, therefore, to stand
aloof from such discussion for a moment, in order to inquire calmly what it
is all about.
I
Although the modern social drama is sometimes comic in its mood—The Gay
Lord Quex, for instance—its main development has been upon the serious
side; and it may be criticised most clearly as a modern type of tragedy. In
order, therefore, to understand its essential qualities, we must first
consider somewhat carefully the nature of tragedy in general. The theme of
all drama is, of course, a struggle of human wills; and the special theme
of tragic drama is a struggle necessarily foredoomed to failure because the
individual human will is pitted against opposing forces stronger than
itself. Tragedy presents the spectacle of a human being shattering himself
against insuperable obstacles. Thereby it awakens pity, because the hero
cannot win, and terror, because the forces arrayed against him cannot lose.
If we rapidly review the history of tragedy, we shall see that three types,
and only three, have thus far been devised; and these types are to be
distinguished according to the nature of the forces set in opposition to
the wills of the characters. In other words, the dramatic imagination of
all humanity has thus far been able to conceive only three types of
struggle which are necessarily foredoomed to failure,—only three different
varieties of forces so strong as to defeat inevitably any individual
human
being who comes into conflict with them. The first of these types was
discovered by Aeschylus and perfected by Sophocles; the second was
discovered by Christopher Marlowe and perfected by Shakespeare; and the
third was discovered by Victor Hugo and perfected by Ibsen.
The first type, which is represented by Greek tragedy, displays the
individual in conflict with Fate, an inscrutable power dominating alike the
actions of men and of gods. It is the God of the gods,—the destiny of
which they are the instruments and ministers. Through irreverence, through
vainglory, through disobedience, through weakness, the tragic hero becomes
entangled in the meshes that Fate sets for the unwary; he struggles and
struggles to get free, but his efforts are necessarily of no avail. He has
transgressed the law of laws, and he is therefore doomed to inevitable
agony. Because of this superhuman aspect of the tragic struggle, the Greek
drama was religious in tone, and stimulated in the spectator the reverent
and lofty mood of awe.
The second type of tragedy, which is represented by the great Elizabethan
drama, displays the individual foredoomed to failure, no longer because of
the preponderant power of destiny, but because of certain defects inherent
in his own nature. The Fate of the Greeks has become humanised and made
subjective. Christopher Marlowe was the first of the world's dramatists
thus to set the God of all the gods within the soul itself of the man who
suffers and contends and dies. But he imagined only one phase of the new
and epoch-making tragic theme that he discovered. The one thing that he
accomplished was to depict the ruin of an heroic nature through an
insatiable ambition for supremacy, doomed by its own vastitude to defeat
itself,—supremacy of conquest and dominion with Tamburlaine, supremacy of
knowledge with Dr. Faustus, supremacy of wealth with Barabas, the Jew of
Malta. Shakespeare, with his wider mind, presented many other phases of
this new type of tragic theme. Macbeth is destroyed by vaulting ambition
that o'erleaps itself; Hamlet is ruined by irresoluteness and contemplative
procrastination. If Othello were not overtrustful, if Lear were not
decadent in senility, they would not be doomed to die in the conflict that
confronts them. They fall self-ruined, self-destroyed. This second type of
tragedy is less lofty and religious than the first; but it is more human,
and therefore, to the spectator, more poignant. We learn more about God by
watching the annihilation of an individual by Fate; but we learn more about
Man by watching the annihilation of an individual by himself. Greek tragedy
sends our souls through the invisible; but Elizabethan tragedy answers,
"Thou thyself art Heaven and Hell."
The third type of tragedy is represented by the modern social drama. In
this the individual is displayed in conflict with his environment; and the
drama deals with the mighty war between personal character and social
conditions. The Greek hero struggles with the superhuman; the Elizabethan
hero struggles with himself; the modern hero struggles with the world. Dr.
Stockmann, in Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, is perhaps the most
definitive example of the type, although the play in which he appears is
not, strictly speaking, a tragedy. He says that he is the strongest man on
earth because he stands most alone. On the one side are the legions of
society; on the other side a man. This is such stuff as modern plays are
made of.
Thus, whereas the Greeks religiously ascribed the source of all inevitable
doom to divine foreordination, and the Elizabethans poetically ascribed it
to the weaknesses the human soul is heir to, the moderns prefer to ascribe
it scientifically to the dissidence between the individual and his social
environment. With the Greeks the catastrophe of man was decreed by Fate;
with the Elizabethans it was decreed by his own soul; with us it is decreed
by Mrs. Grundy. Heaven and Hell were once enthroned high above Olympus;
then, as with Marlowe's Mephistophilis, they were seated deep in every
individual soul; now at last they have been located in the prim parlor of
the conventional dame next door. Obviously the modern type of tragedy is
inherently less religious than the Greek, since science has as yet induced
no dwelling-place for God. It is also inherently less poetic than the
Elizabethan, since sociological discussion demands the mood of prose.
II
Such being in general the theme and the aspect of the modern social drama,
we may next consider briefly how it came into being. Like a great deal else
in contemporary art, it could not possibly have been engendered before that
tumultuous upheaval of human thought which produced in history the French
Revolution and in literature the resurgence of romance. During the
eighteenth century, both in England and in France, society was considered
paramount and the individual subservient. Each man was believed to exist
for the sake of the social mechanism of which he formed a part: the chain
was the thing,—not its weakest, nor even its strongest, link. But the
French Revolution and the cognate romantic revival in the arts unsettled
this conservative belief, and made men wonder whether society, after all,
did not exist solely for the sake of the individual. Early eighteenth
century literature is a polite and polished exaltation of society, and
preaches that the majority is always right; early nineteenth century
literature is a clamorous paean of individualism, and preaches that the
majority is always wrong. Considering the modern social drama as a phase of
history, we see at once that it is based upon the struggle between these
two beliefs. It exhibits always a conflict between the individual
revolutionist and the communal conservatives, and expresses the growing
tendency of these opposing forces to adjust themselves to equilibrium.
Thus considered, the modern social drama is seen to be inherently and
necessarily the product and the expression of the nineteenth century.
Through no other type of drama could the present age reveal itself so
fully; for the relation between the one and the many, in politics, in
religion, in the daily round of life itself, has been, and still remains,
the most important topic of our times. The paramount human problem of the
last hundred years has been the great, as yet unanswered, question whether
the strongest man on earth is he who stands most alone or he who subserves
the greatest good of the greatest number. Upon the struggle implicit in
this question the modern drama necessarily is based, since the dramatist,
in any period when the theatre is really alive, is obliged to tell the
people in the audience what they have themselves been thinking. Those
critics, therefore, have no ground to stand on who belittle the importance
of the modern social drama and regard it as an arbitrary phase of art
devised, for business reasons merely, by a handful of clever playwrights.
Although the third and modern type of tragedy has grown to be almost
exclusively the property of realistic writers, it is interesting to recall
that it was first introduced into the theatre of the world by the king of
the romantics. It was Victor Hugo's Hernani, produced in 1830, which
first exhibited a dramatic struggle between an individual and society at
large. The hero is a bandit and an outlaw, and he is doomed to failure
because of the superior power of organised society arrayed against him. So
many minor victories were won at that famous première of Hernani that
even Hugo's followers were too excited to perceive that he had given the
drama a new subject and the theatre a new theme; but this epoch-making fact
may now be clearly recognised in retrospect. Hernani, and all of Victor
Hugo's subsequent dramas, dealt, however, with distant times and lands; and
it was left to another great romantic, Alexander Dumas père, to be the
first to give the modern theme a modern setting. In his best play,
Antony, which exhibits the struggle of a bastard to establish himself in
the so-called best society, Dumas brought the discussion home to his own
country and his own period. In the hands of that extremely gifted
dramatist, Emile Augier, the new type of serious drama passed over into
the possession of the realists, and so downward to the latter-day realistic
dramatists of France and England, Germany and Scandinavia. The supreme and
the most typical creative figure of the entire period is, of course, the
Norwegian Henrik Ibsen, who—such is the irony of progress—despised the
romantics of 1830, and frequently expressed a bitter scorn for those
predecessors who discovered and developed the type of tragedy which he
perfected.
III
We are now prepared to inquire more closely into the specific sort of
subject which the modern social drama imposes on the dramatist. The
existence of any struggle between an individual and the conventions of
society presupposes that the individual is unconventional. If the hero were
in accord with society, there would be no conflict of contending forces: he
must therefore be one of society's outlaws, or else there can be no play.
In modern times, therefore, the serious drama has been forced to select as
its leading figures men and women outcast and condemned by conventional
society. It has dealt with courtesans (La Dame Aux Camélias),
demi-mondaines (Le Demi-Monde), erring wives (Frou-Frou), women with a
past (The Second Mrs. Tanqueray), free lovers (The Notorious
Mrs. Ebbsmith), bastards (Antony; Le Fils Naturel), ex-convicts (John
Gabriel Borkman), people with ideas in advance of their time (Ghosts),
and a host of other characters that are usually considered dangerous to
society. In order that the dramatic struggle might be tense, the dramatists
have been forced to strengthen the cases of their characters so as to
suggest that, perhaps, in the special situations cited, the outcasts were
right and society was wrong. Of course it would be impossible to base a
play upon the thesis that, in a given conflict between the individual and
society, society was indisputably right and the individual indubitably
wrong; because the essential element of struggle would be absent. Our
modern dramatists, therefore, have been forced to deal with exceptional
outcasts of society,—outcasts with whom the audience might justly
sympathise in their conflict with convention. The task of finding such
justifiable outcasts has of necessity narrowed the subject-matter of the
modern drama. It would be hard, for instance, to make out a good case
against society for the robber, the murderer, the anarchist. But it is
comparatively easy to make out a good case for a man and a woman involved
in some sexual relation which brings upon them the censure of society but
which seems in itself its own excuse for being. Our modern serious
dramatists have been driven, therefore, in the great majority of cases,
to
deal almost exclusively with problems of sex.
This necessity has pushed them upon dangerous ground. Man is, after all, a
social animal. The necessity of maintaining the solidarity of the family—a
necessity (as the late John Fiske luminously pointed out) due to the long
period of infancy in man—has forced mankind to adopt certain social laws
to regulate the interrelations of men and women. Any strong attempt to
subvert these laws is dangerous not only to that tissue of convention
called society but also to the development of the human race. And here we
find our dramatists forced—first by the spirit of the times, which gives
them their theme, and second by the nature of the dramatic art, which
demands a special treatment of that theme—to hold a brief for certain men
and women who have shuffled off the coil of those very social laws that man
has devised, with his best wisdom, for the preservation of his race. And
the question naturally follows: Is a drama that does this moral or immoral?
But the philosophical basis for this question is usually not understood at
all by those critics who presume to answer the question off-hand in a spasm
of polemics. It is interesting, as an evidence of the shallowness of most
contemporary dramatic criticism, to read over, in the course of Mr. Shaw's
nimble essay on The Quintessence of Ibsenism, the collection which the
author has made of the adverse notices of Ghosts which appeared in the
London newspapers on the occasion of the first performance of the play in
England. Unanimously they commit the fallacy of condemning the piece as
immoral because of the subject that it deals with. And, on the other hand,
it must be recognised that most of the critical defenses of the same piece,
and of other modern works of similar nature, have been based upon the
identical fallacy,—that morality or immorality is a question of
subject-matter. But either to condemn or to defend the morality of any work
of art because of its material alone is merely a waste of words. There is
no such thing, per se, as an immoral subject for a play: in the treatment
of the subject, and only in the treatment, lies the basis for ethical
judgment of the piece. Critics who condemn Ghosts because of its
subject-matter might as well condemn Othello because the hero kills his
wife—what a suggestion, look you, to carry into our homes! Macbeth is
not immoral, though it makes night hideous with murder. The greatest of all
Greek dramas, Oedipus King, is in itself sufficient proof that morality
is a thing apart from subject-matter; and Shelley's The Cenci is another
case in point. The only way in which a play may be immoral is for it to
cloud, in the spectator, the consciousness of those invariable laws of life
which say to man "Thou shalt not" or "Thou shalt"; and the one thing
needful in order that a drama may be moral is that the author shall
maintain throughout the piece a sane and truthful insight into the
soundness or unsoundness of the relations between his characters. He must
know when they are right and know when they are wrong, and must make clear
to the audience the reasons for his judgments. He cannot be immoral unless
he is untrue. To make us pity his characters when they are vile or love
them when they are noxious, to invent excuses for them in situations where
they cannot be excused—in a single word, to lie about his characters—this
is for the dramatist the one unpardonable sin. Consequently, the only sane
course for a critic who wishes to maintain the thesis that Ghosts, or any
other modern play, is immoral, is not to hurl mud at it, but to prove by
the sound processes of logic that the play tells lies about life; and the
only sane way to defend such a piece is not to prate about the "moral
lesson" the critic supposes that it teaches, but to prove logically that it
tells the truth.
The same test of truthfulness by which we distinguish good workmanship from
bad is the only test by which we may conclusively distinguish immoral art
from moral. Yet many of the controversial critics never calm down
sufficiently to apply this test. Instead of arguing whether or not Ibsen
tells the truth about Hedda Gabler, they quarrel with him or defend him for
talking about her at all. It is as if zoölogists who had assembled to
determine the truth or falsity of some scientific theory concerning the
anatomy of a reptile should waste all their time in contending whether or
not the reptile was unclean.
And even when they do apply the test of truthfulness, many critics are
troubled by a grave misconception that leads them into error. They make the
mistake of applying generally to life certain ethical judgments that the
dramatist means only to apply particularly to the special people in his
play. The danger of this fallacy cannot be too strongly emphasised. It is
not the business of the dramatist to formulate general laws of conduct; he
leaves that to the social scientist, the ethical philosopher, the religious
preacher. His business is merely to tell the truth about certain special
characters involved in certain special situations. If the characters and
the situations be abnormal, the dramatist must recognise that fact in
judging them; and it is not just for the critic to apply to ordinary people
in the ordinary situations of life a judgment thus conditioned. The
question in La Dame Aux Camélias is not whether the class of women which
Marguerite Gautier represents is generally estimable, but whether a
particular woman of that class, set in certain special circumstances, was
not worthy of sympathy. The question in A Doll's House is not whether any
woman should forsake her husband and children when she happens to feel
like it, but whether a particular woman, Nora, living under special
conditions with a certain kind of husband, Torwald, really did deem herself
justified in leaving her doll's home, perhaps forever. The ethics of any
play should be determined, not externally, but within the limits of the
play itself. And yet our modern social dramatists are persistently
misjudged. We hear talk of the moral teaching of Ibsen,—as if, instead of
being a maker of plays, he had been a maker of golden rules. But Mr. Shaw
came nearer to the truth with his famous paradox that the only golden rule
in Ibsen's dramas is that there is no golden rule.
It must, however, be admitted that the dramatists themselves are not
entirely guiltless of this current critical misconception. Most of them
happen to be realists, and in devising their situations they aim to be
narrowly natural as well as broadly true. The result is that the
circumstances of their plays have an ordinary look which makes them seem
simple transcripts of everyday life instead of special studies of life
under peculiar conditions. Consequently the audience, and even the critic,
is tempted to judge life in terms of the play instead of judging the play
in terms of life. Thus falsely judged, The Wild Duck (to take an emphatic
instance) is outrageously immoral, although it must be judged moral by the
philosophic critic who questions only whether or not Ibsen told the truth
about the particular people involved in its depressing story. The deeper
question remains: Was Ibsen justified in writing a play which was true and
therefore moral, but which necessarily would have an immoral effect on nine
spectators out of every ten, because they would instinctively make a hasty
and false generalisation from the exceptional and very particular ethics
implicit in the story?
For it must be bravely recognised that any statement of truth which is so
framed as to be falsely understood conveys a lie. If the dramatist says
quite truly, "This particular leaf is sere and yellow," and if the audience
quite falsely understands him to say, "All leaves are sere and yellow," the
gigantic lie has illogically been conveyed that the world is ever windy
with autumn, that spring is but a lyric dream, and summer an illusion. The
modern social drama, even when it is most truthful within its own limits,
is by its very nature liable to just this sort of illogical conveyance of a
lie. It sets forth a struggle between a radical exception and a
conservative rule; and the audience is likely to forget that the exception
is merely an exception, and to infer that it is greater than the rule. Such
an inference, being untrue, is immoral; and in so far as a dramatist aids
and abets it, he must be judged dangerous to the theatre-going public.
Whenever, then, it becomes important to determine whether a new play of
the modern social type is moral or immoral, the critic should decide first
whether the author tells lies specifically about any of the people in his
story, and second, provided that the playwright passes the first test
successfully, whether he allures the audience to generalise falsely in
regard to life at large from the specific circumstances of his play. These
two questions are the only ones that need to be decided. This is the crux
of the whole matter. And it has been the purpose of the present chapter
merely to establish this one point by historical and philosophic criticism,
and thus to clear the ground for subsequent discussion.
