It is, I think, an inestimable privilege to claim the friendship of a
man whose life and letters are a perpetual stimulus to action, an
invariable provocative of thought. I have just had a letter from my
friend, telling me that he is in despair of the stage. His play is a
thing of the past, and he vows that he has done with dramatic art for
ever.
Now being, like Goldsmith, a person who spends much time in taverns
and coffee-houses, where one can study every conceivable shade of
character, I took my friend's letter up town with me, and sat down to
muse over it and a tankard of ale. It was a cosy bar, cosier than the
Cheshire Cheese, if more modern; I sank back in a deep lounge and
watched the world go round.
To commence, I thought to myself, these people here constitute a
potential public for a play. Therefore, supposing it were _my_ play,
my attitude towards them is a factor in the dramatic problem. What is
my definition, my analysis of this potential public?
Well, they are all engaged in a terrific struggle for _safety_. They
have no social instinct apart from the instinct to combine for
_safety_. Their ideal is a tradesman, a pedlar, who has accumulated
sufficient wealth to be safe from poverty. Their ideal of religion is
one which guarantees safety from hell. They do not believe, and they
tell you bluntly they do not believe, any man who claims to be an
altruist. They do not believe any man who protests that he does not
worship wealth--_i.e._, safety.
By this time I was puzzled to know how to answer my friend's
complaints. All I knew was that, to strike one blow on the metal and
drop the hammer because it jarred his fingers, argues sloth, not the
"artistic temperament." Oh, _mon ami_, that "artistic temperament."
"Is this all? Up again!" If you are discouraged I can only suggest a
course of reading in the lives of dramatists. I recall a few
offhand--Lessing, Moliere, Scribe, Wagner, Ibsen, these will suffice.
When did _they_ stop and fold their hands in despair? As for the
Elizabethan and Restoration playwrights, their facility of invention,
their exuberance under difficulties is devastating. That, however, is
not your problem. Your drama of to-day is an old bottle with no wine
in it. You fail because words have ceased to have any definite
meaning. The words in a man's mouth bear as little relation to his
emotions as the architecture of his house bears to his ideas. Words
like Love, God, Faith, and Soul are mere coloured balloons floating
about the modern West End stage. It is easy to be horrified at such a
view, but men like me, who deal with _things_, are not to be
humbugged. You put a man in a commonplace predicament, and you make
him say tragically, "The die is cast," or "I will see him hanged
first," or "All is over between us." That is not drama; it is
nonsense. Dies are rarely cast nowadays, public hangings have been
abolished, and salaries rule too low to risk breach of promise
actions. There's your dilemma. Write me a play in which every word is
_meant_--the drama will look after itself. But, if you will allow a
young man to suggest a point, I say that you are all working in the
dark; you are groping blindly forward when you might rejoice in the
sunlight. And now, with my colleagues as texts, I shall read a homily
on the conditions of modern dramatic art.
The division of biped mammalia into merely men and women is of
comparatively recent date. In very early times, however, when wisdom
was commoner than now, the classification began with gods and
goddesses, heroes, men and women, with lower types like fauns and
satyrs. I venture to think that this nomenclature might with advantage
be revived. From time to time, in the history of the human mind since
_Anno Domini_, one sees efforts to differentiate, generally with scant
success. The Roman Catholic Church, with her elaborate canonising
machinery, stands as the most prosperous example of this, though with
the vital fault of postponing the sanctifying till after death. She,
again, is responsible for another attempt, viz., the infallibility of
her ministers, a promising enough plan, but ill regulated. The Stuart
_regime_, urging with unpleasant vigour the divinity of kingship and
the corresponding caddishness (or decadence) of much of the rest of
mankind, is a signal example of how my plan should not be carried out.
Carlyle's heroes are mostly supermen; individuals, not types.
Now, I suggest to you that we agree to classify my colleagues,
the masters of the mighty vapour, the beings who are the real
cloud-compellers of our day, as heroes. If I mistake not, I have a
prior claim to the word, too, in that Hero's engine is the type of all
our modern prime movers, the supreme type to which we are ever
striving to approximate. Masters of the vapour-driven sphere! Not men,
but heroes, having their own thoughts, their own joys and sorrows,
their own gods; more than men, in that they need less than men, less
than gods, in that they owe allegiance to them.
Well, then, here is your dramatic problem. Until you recognise the
fact that such beings as I have indicated do actually inhabit the
earth and cover the sea with their handiwork, until you consider the
tremendous fact that your world's work is done by heroes, and not
by politicians and commercial travellers, that, in short, your
intellectual Frankensteins have made a million-brained monster whom
you cannot, dare not destroy, your drama will not be a living force. I
hold out no hope that the problem is easy of solution; I only know it
exists. You will first of all become as little children, and learn, as
best you may, what makes the wheels go round. Learn, that you may
teach, by your creative art. Above all, remember, when you rise to
protest that I am forgetting Nature, that together with "the way of
an eagle in the air, and the way of a serpent upon a rock," the Hebrew
poet has joined "the way of a ship in the midst of the sea, and the
way of a man with a maid."