I
When I speak of the modern drama, I naturally refer only to those
regions of dramatic literature that, sparsely inhabited as they may be,
are yet essentially new. Down below, in the ordinary theatre, ordinary
and traditional drama is doubtless yielding slowly to the influence of
the vanguard; but it were idle to wait for the laggards when we have the
pioneers at our call.
The first thing that strikes us in the drama of the day is the decay,
one might almost say the creeping paralysis, of external action. Next we
note a very pronounced desire to penetrate deeper and deeper into human
consciousness, and place moral problems upon a high pedestal; and
finally the search, still very timid and halting, for a kind of new
beauty, that shall be less abstract than was the old.
It is certain that, on the actual stage, we have far fewer extraordinary
and violent adventures. Bloodshed has grown less frequent, passions less
turbulent; heroism has become less unbending, courage less material and
less ferocious. People still die on the stage, it is true, as in reality
they still must die, but death has ceased--or will cease, let us hope,
very soon--to be regarded as the indispensable setting, the _ultima
ratio_, the inevitable end, of every dramatic poem. In the most
formidable crises of our life--which, cruel though it may be, is cruel
in silent and hidden ways--we rarely look to death for a solution; and
for all that the theatre is slower than the other arts to follow the
evolution of human consciousness, it will still be at last compelled,
in some measure, to take this into account.
When we consider the ancient and tragical anecdotes that constitute the
entire basis of the classical drama; the Italian, Scandinavian, Spanish
or mythical stories that provided the plots, not only for all the plays
of the Shakespearian period, but also--not altogether to pass over an
art that was infinitely less spontaneous--for those of French and German
romanticism, we discover at once that these anecdotes are no longer able
to offer us the direct interest they presented at a time when they
appeared highly natural and possible, at a time, when, at any rate, the
circumstances, manners and sentiments they recalled were not yet extinct
in the minds of those who witnessed their reproduction.