We are now prepared to inquire more closely into the specific sort of
subject which the modern social drama imposes on the dramatist. The
existence of any struggle between an individual and the conventions of
society presupposes that the individual is unconventional. If the hero were
in accord with society, there would be no conflict of contending forces: he
must therefore be one of society's outlaws, or else there can be no play.
In modern times, therefore, the serious drama has been forced to select as
its leading figures men and women outcast and condemned by conventional
society. It has dealt with courtesans (_La Dame Aux Camélias_),
demi-mondaines (_Le Demi-Monde_), erring wives (_Frou-Frou_), women with a
past (_The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_), free lovers (_The Notorious Mrs.
Ebbsmith_), bastards (_Antony_; _Le Fils Naturel_), ex-convicts (_John
Gabriel Borkman_), people with ideas in advance of their time (_Ghosts_),
and a host of other characters that are usually considered dangerous to
society. In order that the dramatic struggle might be tense, the dramatists
have been forced to strengthen the cases of their characters so as to
suggest that, perhaps, in the special situations cited, the outcasts were
right and society was wrong. Of course it would be impossible to base a
play upon the thesis that, in a given conflict between the individual and
society, society was indisputably right and the individual indubitably
wrong; because the essential element of struggle would be absent. Our
modern dramatists, therefore, have been forced to deal with _exceptional_
outcasts of society,--outcasts with whom the audience might justly
sympathise in their conflict with convention. The task of finding such
justifiable outcasts has of necessity narrowed the subject-matter of the
modern drama. It would be hard, for instance, to make out a good case
against society for the robber, the murderer, the anarchist. But it is
comparatively easy to make out a good case for a man and a woman involved
in some sexual relation which brings upon them the censure of society but
which seems in itself its own excuse for being. Our modern serious
dramatists have been driven, therefore, in the great majority of cases, to
deal almost exclusively with problems of sex.
This necessity has pushed them upon dangerous ground. Man is, after all, a
social animal. The necessity of maintaining the solidarity of the family--a
necessity (as the late John Fiske luminously pointed out) due to the long
period of infancy in man--has forced mankind to adopt certain social laws
to regulate the interrelations of men and women. Any strong attempt to
subvert these laws is dangerous not only to that tissue of convention
called society but also to the development of the human race. And here we
find our dramatists forced--first by the spirit of the times, which gives
them their theme, and second by the nature of the dramatic art, which
demands a special treatment of that theme--to hold a brief for certain men
and women who have shuffled off the coil of those very social laws that man
has devised, with his best wisdom, for the preservation of his race. And
the question naturally follows: Is a drama that does this moral or immoral?
But the philosophical basis for this question is usually not understood at
all by those critics who presume to answer the question off-hand in a spasm
of polemics. It is interesting, as an evidence of the shallowness of most
contemporary dramatic criticism, to read over, in the course of Mr. Shaw's
nimble essay on _The Quintessence of Ibsenism_, the collection which the
author has made of the adverse notices of _Ghosts_ which appeared in the
London newspapers on the occasion of the first performance of the play in
England. Unanimously they commit the fallacy of condemning the piece as
immoral because of the subject that it deals with. And, on the other hand,
it must be recognised that most of the critical defenses of the same piece,
and of other modern works of similar nature, have been based upon the
identical fallacy,--that morality or immorality is a question of
subject-matter. But either to condemn or to defend the morality of any work
of art because of its material alone is merely a waste of words. There is
no such thing, _per se_, as an immoral subject for a play: in the treatment
of the subject, and only in the treatment, lies the basis for ethical
judgment of the piece. Critics who condemn _Ghosts_ because of its
subject-matter might as well condemn _Othello_ because the hero kills his
wife--what a suggestion, look you, to carry into our homes! _Macbeth_ is
not immoral, though it makes night hideous with murder. The greatest of all
Greek dramas, _Oedipus King_, is in itself sufficient proof that morality
is a thing apart from subject-matter; and Shelley's _The Cenci_ is another
case in point. The only way in which a play may be immoral is for it to
cloud, in the spectator, the consciousness of those invariable laws of life
which say to man "Thou shalt not" or "Thou shalt"; and the one thing
needful in order that a drama may be moral is that the author shall
maintain throughout the piece a sane and truthful insight into the
soundness or unsoundness of the relations between his characters. He must
know when they are right and know when they are wrong, and must make clear
to the audience the reasons for his judgments. He cannot be immoral unless
he is untrue. To make us pity his characters when they are vile or love
them when they are noxious, to invent excuses for them in situations where
they cannot be excused--in a single word, to lie about his characters--this
is for the dramatist the one unpardonable sin. Consequently, the only sane
course for a critic who wishes to maintain the thesis that _Ghosts_, or any
other modern play, is immoral, is not to hurl mud at it, but to prove by
the sound processes of logic that the play tells lies about life; and the
only sane way to defend such a piece is not to prate about the "moral
lesson" the critic supposes that it teaches, but to prove logically that it
tells the truth.
The same test of truthfulness by which we distinguish good workmanship from
bad is the only test by which we may conclusively distinguish immoral art
from moral. Yet many of the controversial critics never calm down
sufficiently to apply this test. Instead of arguing whether or not Ibsen
tells the truth about Hedda Gabler, they quarrel with him or defend him for
talking about her at all. It is as if zoölogists who had assembled to
determine the truth or falsity of some scientific theory concerning the
anatomy of a reptile should waste all their time in contending whether or
not the reptile was unclean.
And even when they do apply the test of truthfulness, many critics are
troubled by a grave misconception that leads them into error. They make the
mistake of applying _generally_ to life certain ethical judgments that the
dramatist means only to apply _particularly_ to the special people in his
play. The danger of this fallacy cannot be too strongly emphasised. It is
not the business of the dramatist to formulate general laws of conduct; he
leaves that to the social scientist, the ethical philosopher, the religious
preacher. His business is merely to tell the truth about certain special
characters involved in certain special situations. If the characters and
the situations be abnormal, the dramatist must recognise that fact in
judging them; and it is not just for the critic to apply to ordinary people
in the ordinary situations of life a judgment thus conditioned. The
question in _La Dame Aux Camélias_ is not whether the class of women which
Marguerite Gautier represents is generally estimable, but whether a
particular woman of that class, set in certain special circumstances, was
not worthy of sympathy. The question in _A Doll's House_ is not whether any
woman should forsake her husband and children when she happens to feel
like it, but whether a particular woman, Nora, living under special
conditions with a certain kind of husband, Torwald, really did deem herself
justified in leaving her doll's home, perhaps forever. The ethics of any
play should be determined, not externally, but within the limits of the
play itself. And yet our modern social dramatists are persistently
misjudged. We hear talk of the moral teaching of Ibsen,--as if, instead of
being a maker of plays, he had been a maker of golden rules. But Mr. Shaw
came nearer to the truth with his famous paradox that the only golden rule
in Ibsen's dramas is that there is no golden rule.
It must, however, be admitted that the dramatists themselves are not
entirely guiltless of this current critical misconception. Most of them
happen to be realists, and in devising their situations they aim to be
narrowly natural as well as broadly true. The result is that the
circumstances of their plays have an _ordinary_ look which makes them seem
simple transcripts of everyday life instead of special studies of life
under peculiar conditions. Consequently the audience, and even the critic,
is tempted to judge life in terms of the play instead of judging the play
in terms of life. Thus falsely judged, _The Wild Duck_ (to take an emphatic
instance) is outrageously immoral, although it must be judged moral by the
philosophic critic who questions only whether or not Ibsen told the truth
about the particular people involved in its depressing story. The deeper
question remains: Was Ibsen justified in writing a play which was true and
therefore moral, but which necessarily would have an immoral effect on nine
spectators out of every ten, because they would instinctively make a hasty
and false generalisation from the exceptional and very particular ethics
implicit in the story?
For it must be bravely recognised that any statement of truth which is so
framed as to be falsely understood conveys a lie. If the dramatist says
quite truly, "This particular leaf is sere and yellow," and if the audience
quite falsely understands him to say, "All leaves are sere and yellow," the
gigantic lie has illogically been conveyed that the world is ever windy
with autumn, that spring is but a lyric dream, and summer an illusion. The
modern social drama, even when it is most truthful within its own limits,
is by its very nature liable to just this sort of illogical conveyance of a
lie. It sets forth a struggle between a radical exception and a
conservative rule; and the audience is likely to forget that the exception
is merely an exception, and to infer that it is greater than the rule. Such
an inference, being untrue, is immoral; and in so far as a dramatist aids
and abets it, he must be judged dangerous to the theatre-going public.
Whenever, then, it becomes important to determine whether a new play of
the modern social type is moral or immoral, the critic should decide first
whether the author tells lies specifically about any of the people in his
story, and second, provided that the playwright passes the first test
successfully, whether he allures the audience to generalise falsely in
regard to life at large from the specific circumstances of his play. These
two questions are the only ones that need to be decided. This is the crux
of the whole matter. And it has been the purpose of the present chapter
merely to establish this one point by historical and philosophic criticism,
and thus to clear the ground for subsequent discussion.