The younger men, untrammelled by memories of what they had tried to express in a previous incarnation, worked with a freedom of which they only became conscious when they paused to compare it with the restrictions under which their predecessors laboured. It has been said that, in the early nineties, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray opened a new chapter in dramatic history; when it was reproduced a dozen years later, it hardly seemed, for all its skill and power, so daring as before; and, if it were reproduced again to-day after another dozen years, the younger critics would doubtless continue to praise its technique, but they might be unable to realise its psychology. In 1920 it is felt to be surprising that any one should bother when a man marries his mistress; that she should commit suicide when another old lover comes back into her life is inconceivable: to the modern playwright that is not a dramatic theme worthy of his mettle, to the modern English world that is not a problem to cause more than passing embarrassment to any one.
Whether England has become morally more lax or merely less reticent about its laxity is a problem which no one can solve; but the greatest change that has overtaken literature and art in the last twenty years is in the new freedom to choose any theme and to treat it by any method. The plays of Shaw and the novels of Wells had embraced every subject from brothels and baldness to God and gunpowder-factories, from patent medicine and politics to love and linen-drapery. The form of the medium has changed as profoundly as the content; the play and the novel have been made an avowed platform for the dramatic or narrative discussion of any thesis that interests the author at any given moment.
This new emancipation has been accompanied by a new receptivity, welcome at first and only dangerous when criticism seeks to navigate without a compass; a new willingness to explore unfamiliar spaces and to experiment with new instruments. The twenty years which have passed since Queen Victoria's death have seen the literary birth, development or at least general recognition of a company so varied as Synge and Barker, Housman and Yeats, De Morgan and Galsworthy, Masefield and Rabindranath Tagore, to take but a few; it has seen translations of Russian novels and Chinese lyrics, of Belgian mystical essays and Scandinavian realistic plays; there is no form of literature, whatever its atmosphere and language, to which a hearing has been refused.
Nor is this merely an Athenian craving for something new. All—and perhaps more than all—that was worth rescuing of Oscar Wilde's perverse wit was restored to circulation as soon as the English had satisfied their love for a legal separation between art and morals; Samuel Butler was one of several to enjoy a posthumous vogue; and, if the other heroes were rearranged in the national pantheon, many were brought into prominence who had long languished in obscurity. This period saw an immense flood of cheap reprints issuing from a dozen different publishers; more experiments were tried on more Shakespearean plays than ever before; and theatrical societies produced Elizabethan and Restoration dramas which had been left long unplayed.
These years were enriched by two repertory seasons at the Court and Duke of York's Theatres, in which some of the maturest work of Shaw and Barker, Galsworthy and Barrie was seen; and the Abbey Theatre company came annually from Dublin to delight new audiences with some of the greatest comedies, the greatest tragedy and the finest teamwork in acting that had been seen in London for a generation. As a rule, however, the stage was more fortunate in what it revived than in what it presented for the first time; dramatic literature has lagged so far behind other forms that playwrights would compose and managers produce what no conscientious novelist or self-respecting publisher dared to expose for sale. The level of acting, too, was no higher than might be expected in a country where actors and actresses "starred" on the strength of a single part and continued in one groove, with plays written down to them, because they had not endured the discipline of a diversified early training. To suggest that the English get the drama that they deserve would be unfair to a nation which, on the whole and with startling exceptions, enjoys and supports the rare good plays offered to it; yet there rests unexplained the mystery that, although the dramatic is the most lucrative form of writing, although managers and public were clamouring for plays, although the theatres were filled with erotic comedies, brain-saving revues, emasculated French farces, clattering American melodramas and perverse, senile sentimentalities, there were not in these years more than three British playwrights who could be trusted to give a recognisable representation of life.
The mystery is deepened by the fact that, during the same period, the English, who accept with resignation if not with pride the stigma of being unmusical, crowded a lifetime of musical progress into a few years. Covent Garden has always been a battleground between those who wish to hear the greatest number of the most interesting operas in their best rendering and those who find a box and the second half of a tuneful banality the best place and time for meeting again the friends whom they have not seen since dinner. For a generation the two armies existed amicably side by side on a compromise by which the music-lovers secured that, whatever the opera, it should be competently given and the others conceded that it might be competently given so long as no experiments or innovations were made. Year after year the hackneyed Rigolettos and Lohengrins, the Traviatas and Tannhaüsers soothed the conservative hearing of any one whose musical education had been arrested in childhood; from time to time the Ring was given, but the inordinate length of each part provided a plausible excuse for those who stayed at home, and a martyr's crown or at least a victor's laurel for those who attended.
Then, without warning, the new artistic receptivity spread to music, and a trial was offered to new men and to new works. Der Rosenkavalier and Elektra were given in those years; Parsifal was played for the first time in England; and all whose knowledge of ballet was limited to the Empire and Adeline Genée found themselves led to a mountain-top and invited to regard the new world wherein Pavlova and Mordken, Karsavina and Nijinski lorded it. With the Russian ballet and under the shadow of war came the Russian opera; and, while the old repertory was played at Covent Garden, a new ecstacy was offered at Drury Lane by Prince Igor, Boris Godounov and Ivan le terrible. With the Russian opera came an artist whose admirers have not yet determined whether he is greater as a singer or as an actor, though they agree that as a combination of the two he is the greatest figure on any operatic stage in the world. The incomparable voice and superb presence of Chaliapin blew a new vigour of youth and a new conception of beauty into the stale dust of the London theatre.
Though the spirit of the emancipation breathed also on the graphic and the plastic arts, as yet its breath has produced only intoxication. For ten years one experiment has succeeded another, one school has hustled another out of the way; and the artists whom the public is enjoined to admire of a morning are devoured by their own children in the afternoon. Beyond a contempt for the academic and a revolt from the traditional—not always supported by technical proficiency in the method rejected—the impressionists and post-impressionists, the cubists, vorticists and dadaists have not made plain the goal of their exploration and as yet, though they have formulated new theories of art, they have not achieved a new beauty. As, in the reaction from Victorian stiffness, social emancipation led to a gilded hooliganism, so, in graphic art, the reaction from the strictness of the pre-Raphaelites led to chaotic lawlessness. If all England went mad for five years before the war, her madness is registered, though—it may be hoped—not immortalised, in the painting of the period.