Such being in general the theme and the aspect of the modern social drama,
we may next consider briefly how it came into being. Like a great deal else
in contemporary art, it could not possibly have been engendered before that
tumultuous upheaval of human thought which produced in history the French
Revolution and in literature the resurgence of romance. During the
eighteenth century, both in England and in France, society was considered
paramount and the individual subservient. Each man was believed to exist
for the sake of the social mechanism of which he formed a part: the chain
was the thing,--not its weakest, nor even its strongest, link. But the
French Revolution and the cognate romantic revival in the arts unsettled
this conservative belief, and made men wonder whether society, after all,
did not exist solely for the sake of the individual. Early eighteenth
century literature is a polite and polished exaltation of society, and
preaches that the majority is always right; early nineteenth century
literature is a clamorous paean of individualism, and preaches that the
majority is always wrong. Considering the modern social drama as a phase of
history, we see at once that it is based upon the struggle between these
two beliefs. It exhibits always a conflict between the individual
revolutionist and the communal conservatives, and expresses the growing
tendency of these opposing forces to adjust themselves to equilibrium.
Thus considered, the modern social drama is seen to be inherently and
necessarily the product and the expression of the nineteenth century.
Through no other type of drama could the present age reveal itself so
fully; for the relation between the one and the many, in politics, in
religion, in the daily round of life itself, has been, and still remains,
the most important topic of our times. The paramount human problem of the
last hundred years has been the great, as yet unanswered, question whether
the strongest man on earth is he who stands most alone or he who subserves
the greatest good of the greatest number. Upon the struggle implicit in
this question the modern drama necessarily is based, since the dramatist,
in any period when the theatre is really alive, is obliged to tell the
people in the audience what they have themselves been thinking. Those
critics, therefore, have no ground to stand on who belittle the importance
of the modern social drama and regard it as an arbitrary phase of art
devised, for business reasons merely, by a handful of clever playwrights.
Although the third and modern type of tragedy has grown to be almost
exclusively the property of realistic writers, it is interesting to recall
that it was first introduced into the theatre of the world by the king of
the romantics. It was Victor Hugo's _Hernani_, produced in 1830, which
first exhibited a dramatic struggle between an individual and society at
large. The hero is a bandit and an outlaw, and he is doomed to failure
because of the superior power of organised society arrayed against him. So
many minor victories were won at that famous _première_ of _Hernani_ that
even Hugo's followers were too excited to perceive that he had given the
drama a new subject and the theatre a new theme; but this epoch-making fact
may now be clearly recognised in retrospect. _Hernani_, and all of Victor
Hugo's subsequent dramas, dealt, however, with distant times and lands; and
it was left to another great romantic, Alexander Dumas _père_, to be the
first to give the modern theme a modern setting. In his best play,
_Antony_, which exhibits the struggle of a bastard to establish himself in
the so-called best society, Dumas brought the discussion home to his own
country and his own period. In the hands of that extremely gifted
dramatist, Emile Augier, the new type of serious drama passed over into
the possession of the realists, and so downward to the latter-day realistic
dramatists of France and England, Germany and Scandinavia. The supreme and
the most typical creative figure of the entire period is, of course, the
Norwegian Henrik Ibsen, who--such is the irony of progress--despised the
romantics of 1830, and frequently expressed a bitter scorn for those
predecessors who discovered and developed the type of tragedy which he
perfected.