II

THE NEW CRITICISM AND THE NEW ETHICS

"Do you really attach much value to categories? I, for my part, believe that the dramatic categories are elastic, and that they must accommodate themselves to the literary facts-not vice versa."-HENRIK IBSEN.

"The true '-is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as the right' is the expedient in the way of our behaving."-WILLIAM JAMES.

AT a moment like this, when a new outburst of dramatic activity among English-speaking peoples is imminent if not actually present, it is a singular fact that criticism has not paved the way to popular understanding of the new drama. It is surely the function of the critic, if Croce be right, to identify himself with the artist in so complete and sensitive a way as actually to reproduce within himself those creative processes which go to the making of the work of art. Esthetic judgment strives ever to become more and more closely identified with creative art. Dramatic criticism, as a consequence, should be able to trace these new dramatic life forms as they emerge from the brain of the artist. We should then be en

abled to learn the actual evolution of the contemporary drama throughout the course of its various changes-its evolution in form, technic, and

content.

America is teeming with a vast horde of infinitely ambitious playgoers, no longer merely content with seeing and enjoying plays, but intent upon understanding them. There are many publics, each of which has a certain character, a certain distinguishing attribute; but there is one vast public which is untrained, untutored in esthetics, swinging, now this way, now that, in search of that which shall gratify their fancy and delight their senses, tickle them into laughter, stir them to sympathy, move them to tears. This untutored throng, in its sometimes unconscious aspiration for "culture," wants to be taught what the modern drama is, what benefits it may confer, what advantages it affords as a means of social enlightenment. Some new movement in literary art-fiction or drama, it matters not-was recently proposed in a great city of the Middle West, and there was a delightful naïveté, indicative of the aspiring proletarian attitude, in the assertion that "if the thing went through, we would make culture hum"! More remotely, perhaps, but no less positively, this untutored throng needs to know the significance of the drama, the reasons for its structure, its tone, its intellectual cast.

Our critics of the drama are unfortunately classic in predilection. Their academic spirit disdains to touch the drama of our own day as a distinct world movement, embracing the Scandinavian countries, Europe, England, and the United States. They prefer to remain on the safe ground of accomplished fact. The works already produced in the field of dramatic criticism have been, for the most part, marked by refined scholarship, wide learning, and indefatigable research into origins. Such work is necessary and valuable, in that it lays the foundation for a proper understanding of the historical basis of the drama. But it cannot be too earnestly urged that America still awaits the dramatic critic, liberal in spirit, catholic in taste, who will set forth deliberately, clearly, and without prejudice, the history of the contemporary drama from the period of Ibsen down to the present moment. Already many signs are present that the time is ripe, the conditions favorable, for the arrival of this criticism. Only through the medium of such interpretation will it be possible to effect a rational orientation in regard to the drama of to-day, and to achieve a proper outlook for the drama which promises in the future to flourish in our midst.

In the contemporary dramatic movement, nothing is more certain than the uncertainty of criticism in regard to the form, fundamental struc

ture, and content,-intellectual, esthetic, emotional, social, moral,—of a contemporary work of dramatic art. The iconoclasm of modern dramatic practice, the revolt of the modern craftsman and his demand for freedom to enable him to open new paths for the passage of the creative consciousness, have proved vastly unsettling through the destruction of ancient superstitions, the shattering of outworn conventions, and the inauguration of new heresies. Gustav Freytag, presumably a modern authority upon the technic of the drama, wrote his Technik des Dramas scarcely four decades ago. It is significant to observe that when this book was written, Henrik Ibsen had not yet stirred modern consciousness with his formidable array of social dramas. The whole new realm of art disclosed by Ibsen and his successors was excluded from the field of Freytag's vision. It is this very realm which, by the richness of its intellectual content, the novelty and variety of its technic, the profusion of its newly created forms, awaits an interpreter and historian.

Until near the close of the nineteenth century English dramatic criticism achieved notoriety, rather than notability, for its failure to recognize and to realize the great masters in drama for our epoch-Ibsen and Wagner. This failure indubitably ensued because Ibsen and Wagner, icono

clasts in their respective fields of art, broke violently with the traditions. The vital defect of English criticism was the inability to recognize that Ibsen and Wagner, for all their iconoclasm, succeeded in establishing standards of rigor in craftsmanship, seldom, if ever, equaled upon the ancient stage. There is always something of the iconoclast in the genius: the iconoclast and the reformer are phases of one and the same life. The genius still defies definition. That is an incomplete and partial definition which asserts that greatness consists simply in doing what other people have done but doing it better. To-day we should define this, not as genius, but as efficiency. Such a definition cripples the genius, clips his wings, bars all doors to creative imagination and constructive fancy. Since Taine, we have come to recognize that, in a certain specific sense, the work of art, no less than the human being, has its heredity, its origins, its transmitted qualities. But we also know that it is free to acquire new characteristics, to take new shapes, to compel the formulation of new laws. Genius is protean, creative, subject to a vital urge which fructifies in its advance, resulting in the throwing off of new and hitherto unsuspected varieties. Genius in the Bergsonian sense is the creative faculty of doing what no one else has ever done before, and thereby setting new standards to be formulated by poster