It is important to stress this connection of the drama with life, because if we are going to have, as I believe, poetic drama in the near future, it will be because it is the best dramatic form for expressing what we feel, and as the demand must come in the first place from the intellectuals—since in them alone are the common desires sufficiently conscious—it was impossible to get a flowering of poetic drama until the intelligentsia had recovered from the epidemic of materialism, and had begun to feel the need of something more satisfying than glittering theories of reforming mankind by pure economics. The leaders of materialistic thought have always been uncomfortable about art, and have never been completely honest. In their uneasiness as to its practical value they have explained it on the ground that art develops and trains the senses—pictures train the eye, music trains the ear, drama presumably trains both.
To knock the bottom out of this ridiculous nonsense one has only to ask: What drama would you give a man in order to train him to pick up pins in the dark? Is it any wonder that the leaders of this precious substitute for thought could not appreciate Shakespeare, and is it any wonder that under their influence poetic drama has been extinct? The deadening influence of this utilitarian materialism has not only been felt in drama, it has been present in the whole life of the community; but the masses have been less subject to it than the intelligentsia, that is why the masses on the whole have stayed away from the intellectual theatre and have patronised the purely sporting, purely poetic, utterly useless Revue, Musical Comedy, and Farce. And their instinct has been sound, as sound as it is when they ignore the offer from the same quarter of a social millennium to be obtained merely by the exercise of logic. But the result has been a wider cleavage between the people and the intelligentsia than has ever existed before, and most of the dissatisfaction with the present state of the theatre is due to this fact.
It is a curious thing, but Mr. Herbert Trench, in his fine play Napoleon, which was produced last month at the Stage Society, and made a strong impression, occasionally touches on the very idea I have been setting forth. His Napoleon is a type of the materialistic intellectual who has a routine plan for the universe, and he harps continually on "order," as if "order" were something simple, something he had invented to enable the universe to run smoothly: "Your tide-work taught you poetry. I seek order," he says to Wickham—and it sounds like Mr. Shaw or some intellectual dramatist speaking. I will quote one passage from the central scene—the scene between Napoleon and Wickham—which really puts the case against the intellectuals:
Wickham: . . . . . . .
Because you have no love you have no eyes;
Your naked energy, working lovelessly,
Be it balanced like a planet is not wise.
*****
How we have suffered from you, ghosts of Cæsar,
Suffered through concentrations of our hope,
Age after age about your glittering figures,
That have polarized and crystallized and chained
Awake! Rome left our tribes one great bequest,
Her law. That's in our blood, absorbed for ever.
But is then Europe's many-fountained forest
Bubbling with ten thousand springs of life—clans, nations,
Coloured by the ruddy soils from whence they spring,
Is this multi-coloured, insuppressible world
To be controll'd from one centre? Not again!
To be twice Roman'd? Never!
The grass will lift you as it lifts the stone.
Mr. Trench's play is a beginning. If we had—what is an elementary requirement of civilisation—a National Theatre, we would certainly see Mr. Trench's play there, and I should not be in the least surprised to find it a popular success. The public will never demand Mr. Trench's play; but then the public never demanded compulsory education, much as it needed it. I have little doubt but that what the public needs in the theatre to-day is poetic drama.
*****
The Phœnix Society produced Webster's The Duchess of Malfi on November 23rd. The performance will be noticed next month. The date of the production of Dryden's Marriage à la Mode has not yet been fixed.
*****