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Ibsen, especially in the case of the drama of explication with analytic handling, there are tremendous difficulties in the way of its successful employment. Indeed, Ibsen has had few followers in the successful employment of this form. A very fine specimen of the analytic treatment is Sudermann's Heimat, which may be regarded as a widening series of successive crises. A true disciple of Ibsen in his technical methods is the young Dane, Hjalmar Bergström, whose Karen Borneman is a signal specimen of the drama of dévoilement. Neither Zola's Renée (the dramatization of La Curée) nor Thérèse Raquin are successful treatments, from the dramaturgic standpoint, of the nemesis of heredity.. With all its fine qualities, Hauptmann's Vor Sonnenaufgang falls far short of being a masterpiece. Ibsen is his own best imitator in Rosmersholm and Hedda Gabler; and it is noteworthy that the leading figure in the former play, which after the fashion of Ghosts Ibsen intended to name White Horses, is the ancestral spirit of the house of Rosmer. In Miss Julia, Strindberg has achieved a masterpiece in the particular form employed— although here the influence of the past is insufficiently inter-related with the lively action of the present. Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, in his case marked by the employment of severe economy of means, is a true drama of explication, not lack

ing in a certain restraint in treatment; but, driven by his ineradicable sense of the ridiculous, Shaw has greatly weakened the play's effect by shattering unity of impression through the gruesome, cynical levity of Frank. Ibsen alone has exhibited in its ripened perfection the form of drama best adapted to the treatment of heredity. He alone has stamped upon us in the theatre the dread conviction, as voiced by Wilde: "Heredity is Nemesis without her mask. It is the last of the Fates and the most terrible. It is the only one of the gods whose real name we know."

There is one other weakness of the drama of explication, with purely analytic treatment, which, in all probability, best suffices to explain the lack of cosmopolitan appeal in the theater of Ibsen's supreme technical achievements. This type of drama involves the elimination of vivid action, the abandonment of the continuous succession of slight novelties in event, calculated to hold attention and win the throng. Since only the culminant situation is exhibited, a large part of the "action" must consist in explicationachieved in more or less natural ways through mutual confessions in the conversation of the characters. Persons who have not seen each other in a long time are more or less naturally brought together; and our knowledge of the past is derived through the conversations in which they en

lighten each other over the events which have transpired since their last meeting. The "exposition" of the conventional drama of former time is thus replaced by retrospective narrative, dexterously couched in the hesitant, exclamatory, broken dialogue of normal daily life. The retrospective narrative, though referring to antecedent events, is animated, accusatory-enlivened throughout with gestures, hints, implications rich in dramatic suggestiveness. Nevertheless, this continual, enforced reference to the antecedent events gives a distinctly retrospective cast to such dramas. The drama loves action more than contemplation, regnant prophecy more than mellow retrospection. Ibsen has written for an age which has passed the first flush of youth. The drama of reminiscence, though perhaps the most difficult of all forms, is a drama with its face resolutely turned toward the past. The predilection of the great public is for the drama of anticipation and prophecy, buoyantly facing the future.

IV

THE NEW FORMS-REALISM AND THE

PULPIT STAGE

"May we then secure a theater where we may be horrified over the horrible, laugh over the laughable, play with the playful; where we can see everything and not be offended, when we see what lies concealed behind theological and esthetic veils, even if the old conventional laws must be broken; may we secure a free theater, where we shall have freedom for all things save to have no talent and to be a hypocrite or a fool!"-AUGUST STRINDBERG.

FROM Out of the welter and mass of modern dramatic literature, certain general principles may be disengaged through a careful analysis of the works of the leading dramatic artists. This careful analysis suffices to exhibit a certain number of dramatic forms which may be denominated new, not in the sense of merely possessing novelty, but in the exact sense that they are forms hitherto unrealized in the history of dramatic art. It shall be our concern, then, to classify and distinguish these distinctively new types of drama.

If we abandon for the nonce the employment of the words realism and naturalism, because of their uncertainty and vagueness, I think we shall see

that the most distinctive form of drama contributed by contemporary art is what may be termed the drama of immediate actuality. There were two prime reasons why the earlier dramatists failed to create such a type. In the first place, the theater—which Shaw has aptly defined as " the last sanctuary of unreality "-was conceived as the arena for the violent, the exceptional, the adventitious, the coincidental. The more startling the external event, the greater the success. Disguises, transformations, substitutions lent an air of quaint attractiveness to the plays of the Greeks, the Romans, of the French classicists, and of the Elizabethans. The dénouement of countless plays was made to turn upon a happily discovered, but hitherto unsuspected, fact which did not untie but, Alexander-like, only cut the Gordian knot—making providential provision for every character and dismissing the audience with a delightful sense of justice poetically administered. In the second place, there was an instinctive reaction against the policy of approaching too close to real life. The psychological drama of the past, with its exhaustive searchings into the mysteries of the human heart, the profundities of the human soul, erected one last barrier between the audience and the scene. This barrier was the locale, the environmental circle within which the characters moved. The characters, even when