There is an element of the keenest adventure in one’s first meeting with a great personality, whether that encounter be in body or through the medium of the written word. In the case of Emma Goldman I should judge the latter to be the severer test, for on the printed page she must stand and fall by the content of her message, unaided by the glamor of personal magnetism and eloquence of the lecture platform. For my own part, I should have preferred to have met her as the fiery orator than as the purveyor of academic wares. And yet in this present performance she comes forward not in the guise of the accustomed critic—on the contrary she is very often quite uncritical—but rather as the social interpreter. In other words, Emma Goldman is here what she has always been: the propagandist, with the modern drama as her latest text.
And she has a mighty text! Because “any mode of creative work, which with true perception portrays social wrongs earnestly and boldly, may be a greater menace to our social fabric and a more powerful inspiration than the wildest harangue of the soapbox orator,” she has chosen the drama as the fittest medium “to arouse the intellectuals of this country, to make them realize their relation to the people, to the social unrest permeating the atmosphere.” The great iconoclasts of our time who have spoken through the drama—Ibsen, Strindberg, Sudermann, Hauptmann, Wedekind, Brieux, Shaw, Galsworthy, Tolstoi, Tchekhof, Gorki—she has gathered together within one pair of covers to show us that their message is her message:—Change not Compromise.
As she puts it in her foreword:
They know that society has gone beyond the stage of patching up, and that man must throw off the dead weight of the past, with all its ghosts and spooks, if he is to go foot free to meet the future.
Again and again she returns to her theme. In summarizing Ibsen’s stand:
Already in Brand, Henrick Ibsen demanded all or nothing,—no weak-kneed moderation, no compromise of any sort in the struggle for the ideal.
In praise of the author of Damaged Goods:
Brieux is among the very few modern dramatists who go to the bottom of this question by insisting on a complete social and economic change, which alone can free us from the scourge of syphilis and other social plagues.
In connection with Yeats’s Where There is Nothing:
It embodies the spirit of revolt itself, of that most constructive revolt which begins with the destruction of every obstacle in the path of the new life that is to grow on the débris of the old, when the paralyzing yoke of institutionalism shall have been broken, and man left free to enjoy Life and Laughter.