The Good Hope / (In "The Drama: A Quarterly Review of Dramatic Literature")

To those content with convenient superficialities the plays of a dramatist such as Heijermans are easy of definition. He is dismissed as “a realistic writer,” “a playwright of the naturalistic school,” a follower of Ibsen, or Hauptmann, or Tolstoy, or Zola. Even then, perhaps, the definitions are not exhausted. They spring from the encyclopedia of commonplaces, and are as chaotic as the minds of their authors. There is the adjective “meticulous,” for example,—invaluable to critics. And “morbid,”—equally indispensable, in the form of “morbid psychology.” “Photographic” and “kinematographic” must not be forgotten; the latter an almost brand-new weapon of offence. For the rest, “grey,” “faithful,” “squalid” or “lifelike” will serve their turn, according to the critic’s point of view.
In phrases such as these we hear the echoes of a controversy now a generation old; a controversy dating back to the “free theatres” of the 1890 period in Paris, Berlin and London, the first performances of Ibsen’s “Ghosts,” and the early plays of Hauptmann and Strindberg. Then the issues between Realist and Philistine were sharply defined; the very terms were mutually exclusive. To be modern, to be “free,” was to be an Ibsenite, an apostle of moral indignation, an author or playgoer burning to lay bare social hypocrisies and shams; not merely pour épater le bourgeois , but in order to assert the Great Truths of Actual Life, so recently discovered by the stage. It mattered little that Ibsenites owed their existence to their misunderstanding of Ibsen. He had supplied them with an essential war cry. The old domination of insincere sentiment and false romance in the theatre was indefensible and insupportable. All the enthusiasm of dramatic reformers was perforce directed to the advance of the new realistic movement. Hence arose a battle of epithets between the two camps, with “antiquated,” “conventional,” “sentimental,” “romantic” on the one hand, and “vulgar,” “dreary,” “indecent,” “noisome” on the other.