those particular incidents which establish a chain. of intellectual, social, or moral causation. The drama, as the most objective of all the arts-since it is at once the indissoluble union and coalescence of all the arts-exerts an influence in moral propaganda that has never been calculated, for the very reason that it is incalculable. The modern social dramatist, who is both true to the principles of his art and instinct with definite moral purpose, becomes an interpreter of life-the guardian of life's holy mysteries, the prophet of life's vaster hopes and possibilities.

The theater is beginning to influence a wider circle of human beings than the Church. The congregation, approximately speaking, is always the same from Sunday to Sunday. The audience in the theater changes from night to night. The Church as a social force is steadily losing ground; the theater as a social force is rapidly gaining ground. It is almost needless to point out, in this connection, that it is just because the Church does not live up to its possibilities and its responsibilities as an engine of social service that it is leaving indifference and apathy in its wake. To identify with, to utilize for, its own transcendant purposes, the potentialities of a science such as eugenics, of an art such as the drama, is one of the obvious ways in which the Church may hope and confidently expect to regain its hold

over the minds, the hearts, and the consciences of men.

Such a conspicuous exemplar of the contemporary drama of sociologic injunction as Brieux frankly says: "It is my nature to preach.

I have always wanted to preach. My plays all have a purpose. That is why I write them. Had I lived in the seventeenth century, I would have been a preacher. Then the Church wielded an enormous influence. But now, I write plays. The theater is what attracts people; there you can get them. And I want to bring the problems before them. I want them to think about some of the problems of life. . . . I have tried to show how wrong it is to shirk responsibility. All evil comes from lack of feeling of responsibility-of the individual for the individual, and of the classes for each other." Indeed, I think the greatest error which modern criticism has made proceeds from the vicious assumption that the social dramatist presumes to answer the questions which he raises. On the contrary, he arouses in the mind of the thoughtful spectator a most shocking sense of dubiety as to the wisdom of our conventional attitude of social indifference. The general problem, concretized by the dramatist in a highly specialized case, is brought sharply to the attention and to the conscience of the audience. The dramatist brings to his audience a sense of

conviction: we feel that we are somehow involved in the affair. The guilt of the particeps criminis weighs upon us. It is not for the dramatist, but for us, to find the solution of this social problem. Thus may be rectified some of the major evils, some of the intolerable injustices, of our modern civilization. Through the enlargement and deepening of the social conscience may come the juster and more humane social order of the future.

V

THE NEW FORMS-NATURALISM AND THE FREE THEATERS

"The individual can attain complete independence only when he liberates his soul from all external connections, from every objective relation, and, as a free subject, simply lives his own states of consciousness."-RUDOLF EUCKEN.

On a bleak evening in October of the year 1887, some cabs deposited a group of critics at the narrow passage of the Elysée des Beaux-Arts, in Paris. Stumbling down this dark passage, they entered the door of No. 37. They were there, unwittingly, to assist at the birth of a new art: the art of naturalism in the theater. With raillery unconsciously prophetic, one of the critics, Jules Lemaître, in his next week's feuilleton, after describing his strange adventures, passes from jest to earnest with the query: "We had the air of good Magi in mackintoshes seeking out some lowly but glorious manger. Can it be that in this manger the decrepit and doting Drama is destined to be born again?"

The time was ripe in France, indeed in all Europe, for the revolt embodied in the Théâtre

Libre. On the basis of the scientific investiga

tions of Cuvier, Taine had propounded his memorable theories of scientific criticism. "Beneath the shell was an animal and behind the document there was a man "-this classic phrase may well stand for the foundation stone of naturalistic criticism. Art, history, criticism, like zoölogy, had at last found its anatomy. Race, environment, epoch-these were the supreme pivots about which revolved the massive mechanism of modern scientific criticism. Man came to be regarded as the summation, the integration, of all antecedent influence, the creature of environment, the instrument of social momentum. Man came to be studied as an organism; criticism presumed to study the "laws of human vegetation."

In the early days of his literary apprenticeship, the young Émile Zola gained inspiration and instruction from his occasional chats with Taine. And in the course of a few years, Zola himself steps forth into the arena as the champion of naturalism in art, the art of both fiction and the drama. In his elaborate and monumental series of the Rougon-Macquart novels, Zola exhibits the members of a family basically affected not only by social influences and the pressure of environment, but also by physiological conditions inherited from their ancestors. It was his purpose to do away with the outworn models of his predecessors,