conventions which discredit the efficient craftsman. Unity of action, alone of the three unities, survives as an obligatory force; and contemporary creativeness has brought to light a fourth unity, unity of impression. There is to-day no abstract or ideal justice to replace the poetic justice of a more artificial theory of art. Action and exposition proceed hand in hand, or become identical; and the modern drama concerns itself less with material action than with a minute and exhaustive consideration of the motives which prompt to action. Neither conflict nor action is indispensable to the contemporary play; passivity and immobility may constitute its ground tone and motive. The influence of the picture-frame stage, making for perfect objectivity, is offset by the continual recurrence of the personal and the temperamental. Rarer and rarer are becoming the 66 necessarily artificial poems that arise from the impossible marriage of past and present"; and in the future, reconstitution of past epochs, revitalization of historic episodes and characters, promise to be effected solely through the transmutative media of modern thought and modern philosophy. The drama to-day embodies the social fervor of the epoch. The humanizing influences of fraternal sympathy, of social pity and social justice, are everywhere beginning to replace the pressure of more personal and selfish interests. The drama is finally losing its character as pure literature; the closet-drama is a bald anachronism. The drama of the future promises to be, in the creative and constructive sense, a synthesis of all the arts. The dramatist of the future bids fair to be the Admirable Crichton in the Romance of Esthetics. THE END INDEX About, Edmond, 253 Eschylus, 155, 198 Alias Jimmy Valentine, 271 Ancey, George, 119 Anna Karenina, 13, 19 Apologie for Poetrie, 284 54, 56, 61, 62, 147, 148, Arms and the Man, 158, 208 Bacon, Francis, 162, 284 Barker, Harley Granville, Bataille de Dames, La, 116 Bennett, Arnold, 68 Bergström, Hjalmar, 80, Craig, Gordon, 64, 204, 302, Creditors, The, 70, 128, 131, Croce, Benedetto, 2, 25, 40, 239, 293, 294 Crosby, Ernest, 256 Cuvier, Georges, 114 Dacier, André, 269 157 Darwin, Charles, 43, 49, 99 Dédale, Le, 101 De l'art de la comédie, 200 Devil's Disciple, The, 241, De Vries, Hugo, 34, 43, 49, Diary of Edmond Got, The, Dickens, Charles, 16, 227, Diderot, Denis, 257, 258, 259 88, 90, 133, 156, 207, 213, Don Juan in Hell, 135 |