The new spirit in drama & art . sanction ofthe gods. The essence of modern drama is man master ofdestiny or fate ; human beings act of their own free will, andmake or mar their own lives. In order to demonstrate thisexercise of free will, modern dramatists have selected un-balanced and diseased types, apparently quite unconscious thatthe sick, mentally and morally, have not the power to exercisefree will. In fact, they are dominated by disease and areacted upon. They do not act upon. Perhaps the absence oflife-force in the characters treated accounts for the absence oflife-force in the drama i
The new spirit in drama & art . sanction ofthe gods. The essence of modern drama is man master ofdestiny or fate ; human beings act of their own free will, andmake or mar their own lives. In order to demonstrate thisexercise of free will, modern dramatists have selected un-balanced and diseased types, apparently quite unconscious thatthe sick, mentally and morally, have not the power to exercisefree will. In fact, they are dominated by disease and areacted upon. They do not act upon. Perhaps the absence oflife-force in the characters treated accounts for the absence oflife-force in the drama itself. The misunderstanding of Ibsen, then, in breeding a raceof realists, also bred a so-called realistic drama, an ugly duck-ling, in fact, to whom sentimentality was the rankest poison,who neglected the current rigid, meaningless, repertoire ofwords and phrases, and flourished on a language direct, brutal,and living. This offspring of the nineteenth-century dis-illusionists began life in the midst of tears and SUCTION OF THE STAGKAND AUDITORIUM OK THKLIVKRPOOI. RErERTORV THEATRE. THE NEW SPIRIT IN LONDON 35 Preferring shadow and gloom to the sunlit side of life, itdressed itself in sackcloth, put ashes on its head, drank deeplyof gall, and told the modern story of mankind in his self-created Hell (the agony of failure). Of mankind in Heaven(the ecstasy of success), of the aristocracy of life, it knew orsaid nothing. The equipment this skinny fowl required forexpression was correspondingly meagre. It consisted, indeed,of two trestles, a plank, and an idea. As with Paul Adam,the aim was to put an idea on the stage, each side of the ideato be represented by one or more characters, who were thusthrown together and left to fight it out. Apparently themain object of this drama was to detheatralise itself. It tookreality into the theatre only to prove how unsuitable thetheatre is to represent reality. The failure of realism to bereal on the stage may be seen in the a
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, booksubjecttheater, bookyear1912
