Wagner as Man & Artist

by Ernest Newman

IX

Maeterlinck and others have of late familiarised us with the idea of a "static" as distinguished from the older "dynamic" drama. It is highly probable that in the future men will go to the theatre craving the satisfaction of rather different desires from those they seek to satisfy there now. That "drama" is capable of more than one meaning is proved by the existence of dramatic forms so varied as those of the Greek drama, the Shakespearean drama, the Maeterlinckian drama, the Atalanta in Calydon of Swinburne, The Dynasts of Mr. Thomas Hardy, and the Getting Married of Mr. Bernard Shaw. It is quite reasonable to suppose, therefore, that a new generation may read another new meaning into the word. Among the finer minds of the present day there is a decided movement away from what seems to them the crudity of the old-style "well-constructed" drama of action. Maeterlinck, in one or two of his essays, has given eloquent expression to the feelings that inspire this movement of revolt. Many of the time-honoured dramatic "motives" are already sadly discredited. The dagger and the poison-bowl no longer play the part in tragedy that they used to play. Humanity has come to see that things of this kind are the mere excrescences of a dramatic action,—the mere crude outward and visible signs of desires and passions working in secret in the souls of men,—and their gaze is being turned more and more on the psychological springs of action rather than on the visible actions themselves. Drama, in the hands of thoughtful poetical writers, is becoming more and more an affair of the inner rather than the outer man; and it is probable that, as time goes on, still less reliance will be placed on the crude stage effect of violent action. It need hardly be said that as drama dispenses with piece after piece of action and explanation, and comes deeper down to the essence of tragedy as a war of impulses in a man's soul or of the fates about his path, it approaches more nearly to the mood of music. We may look in the future to a yet further purging of poetic drama of many of the tedious conventional devices on which it is still dependent so long as it has to play off a number of characters against each other like chessmen on a few square yards of board in a theatre. I think I can foresee the time when most of what now passes for "plot interest"—the pretence on the author's part of hiding something merely in order that it may in due time be triumphantly found again—will be regarded as something almost childish in the naïve quality of its appeal, and will be relegated to forms of art as much below the general intellectual level of the literature of the day as the detective story is below the intellectual level of our own better novels and dramas. The more artistic the race becomes, the less will it crave for mere facts and events in drama, and the more for an imaginative reading of the soul on which the facts and events have written their record. Again let me interpolate a word of warning against a misunderstanding of my thesis. I am not supposing that a time will ever come when the drama as we have it now will have disappeared from the stage. I fully recognise that there are certain dramatic concepts that can never be adequately expressed except by means of clashing and marching and counter-marching characters, and action more or less violent or clockworklike. But I fancy that in the not distant future the more poetic side of man will demand a form of art in which very little happens or is told, but in which the soul of the spectator is flooded by emotions of pity and sorrow and love that are all the more penetrating because they do not come to us through the relatively cold medium of words and the childish, creaking clockwork of exits and entrances and surprises and intrigue.