The Theatre and the Social Confusion

THE THEATRE .AND THE SOCIAL CONFUSION MALCOLM M-AcKENZIE Ross I N the contem·porar.y theatre there is apparent ·a vigo~~us effort .to ·break away 'f~o1n ~he social-realist~c trad1t1on. _ The prose ·play wtth 1-ts photographic stage has become too limited .and·often too intellectual in its ·appeal, and playwrights and critics ·alike are searching for a new medium and a new vision, a medium which will take fire in the theatre, aJ;ld a vision which has the fi·re to bestow. The traditional poetic method ·is _ still mentioned as a possible solution for the problem. More radical thinkers in the theatre, however, .are convinced th.at . modern life offers new mediums for expression much more suitable to the dramatic purpose than spoken verse. For thetn the problem is to find the .equivalent ·of the Elizabethan 1netho9, and they go to jazz and athletics and the motion-picture for idioms to which the modern is most susceptible. But vve should not .leap to ·the conclusion that, if by some magic formula of expression the plays of Eugene O'Neill could be 1nade intelligible to Maggie and Jiggs and Mrs. Grundy, our pr~blem would be solved. We should still have to account for the dramatic ideas of Eugene O'Neill. In the theatre, at least, we cannot overlook content for form. The ·escape from the pervasive social consciousness and sick individualism of n1odern drama, if there is to be an escape, cannot be a purely aesthetic one. The history ·Of the modern theatre is a symptomatic part ~f the history ·Of modern culture, and· the problems of ·the theatre are, ·in part at least, the problems of that culture. For instance, we can see reflected in drama the loss of an imaginative faith in kingship with the rise of the m·iddle .c] ass and the con197 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY s·equent shift fro1n an in9.ividual to a social point of view· . And to-day, with the class-question at the bursting point, the dramatist cannot stand aside from his world and work out his single destiny with 1nasks and lights and muted trumpets. In this article I propose to stu<;iy the relation of the social and cuitural question to the problem confran ting the .contemporary dramatist. Class b~a~e actively self-conscious· in the English theatre with the ~mergence of bourgeois prose-drama in the eighteenth century. I say actively self-conscious because here you have a clearly defined protest against the standards and accomplishments of a rival class. Class-distinctions, of course, are implicit, even obvious, in Greek and Elizabethan drama. One recalls the Hsweaty night-caps" of the mob in 'julius Caesar and indeed the whole tradition of kingly heroes. But the tradition was accepted. The unpleasant_condition of the night-caps belonged to the eternal order of the universe, in company with rocks and stones and trees, and also, I suppo,se, with "the convention of the calumniator believed." The bourgeois drama was revolutionary. It attacked a way of life, an entire social perspective. The middle class began to feel itself more powerful and 1nore in1portant than the court, and it was thoroughly tired of being the butt of the courtly jest.· It was also industriously sanctimonious, and had no sympathy at all with ,the devilishly attractive amusetnents of its betters. The cynical i1nmorality of Restoration comedy seemed dangerously irresponsible to the good roast-beef of England, and it is not surprising that the first battle-cry of the new drama was "Virtue,", the astonishing virtue ·of the bourgeoisie. There was soon a profound change in the nature of the 198 TI-IE THEATRE AND THE SOCIAL ·coNFUSION tragic conception. vVith a blameless hero the tragic 'emphasis is bound to be on circumstance. The plays of Lillo, Charles Johnson, an.d the others, are populated with innocent souls who fall victim to evil companions, though never to evil desires. "I-Iave a goo.d cry over the fate of thjs blameless, unlucky man," is the typical invitation of the. sentimental drama. There is no sternness left because there is no balance between character and destiny, between internal motivation and external compulsion. Fate is largely replaced by chance, and character is replaced by personified virtue. The middle class was carrying a chip on its shoulder. It denied, for practical purposes at least, any participation in original sin, _and if the miseries of the world were to be explained they must be explained in terms of the external. Perhaps the peculiar.. state of religion had a negative effect on the drama. The age had really no centre of gravity other than the soc.ial and economic aspirations of the middle class. The religious theme had gone the way of the "imperial theme''-in to the dust-bin. This was not all done by the senti1nental dra1natists of the eighteenth century. Their vvork was merely transitional , and in them the specific criticism of society never actually comes out. For instance, Charles Johnson allows his heroine, Caelia, to be jmprisoned in a brothel, but only ·that we may weep for her.1 There is no attack on the social evil. But such an attack was i11:evitably the next step. After the middle-class mind had tired of preening itself on its own virtue, there was nothing else to do but to e~amine the conditi.ons which made its conception of virtue unreal. Culture had burnt its bridges, and there was nothing left but the assault. 1Charles Johnson, Caelia, London, 1733. 199 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY Professor Allardyce ·Nicoll has laboriously compiled a list of unplayable -plays that appeared in the first half of the nineteenth century.2 Despite the uncertainty .and ineptitude of the writing, these plays show a progressive advance of the social.point of view. The problem of the individual in relation to society is the dominant theme and the cosmologica-l aspect is slighted. As one 'vould expect, comedy and tragedy move closer together until they are almost indistinguishable. With man considered as a cog in a social machine, the cathartic value of laughter became more obvious. Perhaps the recognition of the fact that society was in astate of change, and that "society outlasted the individual," made dramatic conclusi ~eness impossible, and the dramatist was increasingly less able to put the stamp of :finality on his play. The "slice-of-life" attitude, so popular to-day, was at least in embryo in nine_ teen.th-century drama. The inclination towards prose rather than verse was strengthened down through the century, as was the dramatic interest in the bourgeois character. .Professor Arthur Du Bois has aptly summarized and analysed the popular ty-pes of plays.8 - The burlesque heads the list, and in many ways it is typical of the great changes t_hat had taken place. H._J. Byrori, Ta_lfourd, and the others sought to "domesticate th~: heroes of old tragedy." Tragic seriousness was punned off the stage in works like Talfourd's Shylock, or the Merchant of Venice Preserved. The point of the jest was always in bringing the grand emotion do~n to the ordinary commonplace level. For inst~nce, Jessica swears passionately that Lorenzo's "withered heart" comes from "eating goose2A . Nicoll, Early Nineteenth Century Drama, Cambridge, 1930. 3A. E. Du Bois, "Shakespeare and Nineteenth Century Drama" (Journal of English Liierary Hislory, Sept., 1934); to whose analysis of the whole period I am rn uch indebted. 200 THE T,HEATRE AND THE SOCIAL CONFUSION berries when green;" The burlesque genre also abounds in topical references and satire, and reaches ·its .height in the work of W. S. .Gilbert. Next come the .melodra.mas, which tend in .the g.irection of the soci~l thesis-play. . The Long Strike .of Boucicault is typical with its attack on Manchester strike conditions. In the historical plays of Shelley, ·Tennyson, and Browning; the same social spirit is.at work aithough it filtered through .a decadent medium. Mr. Ludwig Lewisohn ·finds the spi6t of modern tragedy in the cry of Beatrice Cenci on her way to death: What a tyrant thou art, And what slaves these, and what a world we make The oppressor and the opprest. . . .4 Tennyson dedicated his trilogy to the ''growth ofliberty," and Browning depicted Strafford as the victim of a rising spirit of democracy. Other groups of : plays which Professor Du Bois divides into domestic, naturalistic, and local-colour plays, all advance the tradition ·begun in the eighteenth century towards conversational dialogue, ~harper observation of com1nonplace detail, and the social rather than the heroic perspective. As one might expect, the development of the physical stage through the century paralleled the dramatic spirit in its groping towards naturalism. Obviously the nineteenth century did not stand still. It moved slowly but -surely to the "overwhelming question " that we rnust face to-day. Robertson with hisplays ahout "Cast·e" .and "Society" and his use of real stage-doors, was not th~ great innovator that he is commonly supposed to be. Bu-t he did much to consolidate a trq.dition and make it stand out as clear as d_ aylight. That his own work was relativ~ly feeble4Ludwig Lewisa·hn, Modern Drama, New York, 1931. 201 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY minded is not the point. He brought into relationship something of the modern social point of view and some-' thing of the modern naturalistic method. Sir Arthur Wing Pinero at ·times managed to achieve a fusion of medium and idea that demonstrates quite well the possibilities and the limitations of the naturalistic movement. There is a scene in Act III of his masterpiece The Thunderbolt, which I must quote. A group of grasping and mutually suspicious relatives are quarrelling over the distribution of an estate. Panting, seated at a table and sc1·ibbling away at his calculations: A hundred and seventy thousand pounds. Stephen: Six into seventeen, two and carry five. Panting: Six into fifty, eight and carry two. Stephen: Six into twenty . Panting: ThreeStephen : And carry two. Panting: Six into twenty again, three and carry two. Stephen: Again, six into twenty, three and carry two. Panting: Six into forty, six and carry four. Stephen: Six into forty, eightPanting : EightStephen , rising, witlz an ail· offinality: Twenty-eight thousand; three hundred and thirty-three pounds, six shillings and eight pence. Panting: No! Twenty-eight thousand apiece. Agitated chorus: No, no, no! The means used by Pinero are obvious. Here is dialogue whittled down to the bare essentials. There is no comment, no explanation, but there is here, and throughout the play, a supreme contempt for the meanness and littleness of these creatures. The technique of expression is exactly suited to the idea. Indeed, in the passage I have quoted it anticipates the expressionistic method of a play like Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine202 THE THEATRE AND THE SOCIAL CONFUSION communication in the very terms of the thing to be communicateq.. Rice, to suggest the cog-like insignificance of his characters, gives them numbers instead of names, and makes them behave with the precision and will-lessness· of machines. Pinero's characters, groping emptily about in a universe of pounds, shillings, and pence, name their own brief souls with the brief terms of the mint. T here is no help asked or needed from poetry. The vision and the medium become one and the same thing- a co!lsummatiot?- much to be desired, Ot:J.e would suppose. When we ask ourselves why we are not satisfied after all, it is so easy to reply, "Because it is not poetic;" but that is a silly reply. What we really miss is the positive note. Our drama may have come to a clear and distinct perception of our social and individual predicament, but we are demanding more than this in drama because we are beginning to demand more in life. Because our_demanq has gone through and beyond the poised, critical, and intellectual thought of Bernard Shaw to the cynical desperation ofthe moment, we are seeking earnestly for a sustaining vision. It is not enough now to jab at the sore tooth. The tooth must come out. Perhaps we shall have to take the head with it. Ibsen was the last of the dramatists with anything approaching a positive faith. It is true that no one was a severer critic of society than he. But he, at any rate, had a gospel, a cure for the ill. Professor Stoll speaks of the hollow note that comes at the end of the tragedies of Ibsen and Eugene O'Neill.• Again and again the plays of these two men have been bracketed together as typifying the modern tragic effect. And surely this is a mistake. For Ibsen has a profound and aggressive faith in the 5E. E. Stoll, "Reconciliation in Tragedy" (UNIVERSITY or ToRONTO QUAR TERLY , Oct., 1934). 203 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY possibilities of ·the -individual. He stated his creed in these words : "The ·principal thing is that one remain veracious and faithful in one's relation to oneself. The great thing is not to will one thing :rather than another, but to will that which one is absolutely impelled to will because one is oneself and cannot do otherwise. Anything else will drag us into deception;" This is the underlying theme .of.all his important plays. Sometitnes he presents it positively in characters like Stockman or Nora. Sometimes it is implied negati:vely, as in Ghosts ·where we are made to feel that tragedy would have _ been averted if only Mrs. Alving had been true to herself. There is never a real hollowness in these tragedies. There is often pro- · . found despair, to be sure, but one always feels that the dramatis personae should have and could have done differently. . The effect, dark as it is within the play, is embedded in a .challenge, a call for courage and selfassertion and hope. The dramatic action does centre on the relationship of the individual to society and social standards, but we are worlds away from the outlook of the typical social dramatist. True, .the religious then1e and the imperial theme are as dead for Ibsen as they were for Lillo. But the one last possible faith is realized herethe faith in the individual. As far as the theatre was cpncerned man pulled himself up by the boot-straps for the last time in the plays of Ibsen and the dramatic cogitations of Bernard Shaw. When we turri to the work of Eugep.e O'Neill we cannot help but wonder what has become of the faith of Ibsen. For here ~t last we are "really in the dark." The tragic spirit of O'Neill is symbolized in the character of Charlie Marsden,6 .dear old Charlie, who "sits b.eside the ~Eugene O'Neill, Strange Interlude, Act -I (Nine Plays. New York. 1932, p. 496). 204 THE THEATRE AND THE SOCIAL CONFUSION fierce river, im1naculately timid, cool and clothed, watching the burning, naked, frozen swimmers drown at last." Queer, shrinking, neurotic Charlie Marsden outlasts them all, and wins-in the end his heart's desire, after it has turned into dust and. ashes. There is. no "should" about this or about any of O'Neill's plays. The people in them have "loved, lusted, won and lost, sung- and wept,and that is alL The curtain when it falls is black and final. It is not enough to say, as does· Mr. Joseph Wood l(rutch, that the great plays of O'Neill "mean the same thing that Oedipus and Hamlet and Macbeth mea-nnamely , that human beings ·are great and terrible creatures when they are in the grip of great passions,_and that the spectacle of them is not only absorbing- but also and at once horrible and cleansing."7 Certai11ly O'Neill aimed bravely at the metaphysical and universal concern of great tragedy. He attempted to thrust aside the critical social movement in dramatic thought and put back on the stage man in his relation to the universe. And how vividly and terribly he has revealed the bankruptcy of that relationship! The Wasteland itsel-f is scarcely more terrifying in its realization of the flight of values and significance. Perhaps it was the insistent complaint of critics that set O'Neill in search of something positive and solid~ _Perhaps it was an inner need. At any rate in Lazarus Laughed he attempted to whip hi1nself into a lyrical cry· of acceptance. And now in Days Without End he would seal the relation of 1nan to God in the bonds of orthodox religion. At least part of the play's failure can be attributed to the self-consciousness of the attempt. The religious the1ne seems now to be something- of a last resort. In the drama, which must be an emotional thiJ?.g, it has 7Joseph Wood Krutch in Introduction to Nine Plays by Eugene o·Neill, p. XX. 205 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY not the conviction of the intellectual trend in Christianity of which we have.lately heard so much. The social question, the relation of man to man, cannot be set aside as co1npletely as it is in the work of O'Neill, partly because it vvas to return to the modern consciousness with tripled force after the umad twenties" were over, and partly because the bottom seems to have dropped out of the more ambitious theme of man's relation to God. We will pick up the thread of the social drama in a moment. But at this point we c~nnot leave O'Neill without considering his medium, his mariner of expression. Aga1n I must quote Mr. Krutch. He is wtiting of Mourning Becomes Electra: "To find in the play any .lack at all one n1ust compare it with the very greatest works of dramatic literature..... But no modern is capable of language really worthy of O'Neill's play, and the lack of'. that one thing is the penalty we must pay for living in an age which is equal to no more than prose." 8 "The lack of that one thing"-give us great -vvords and we have great poetic drama! Surely this is a superficial . view. "The most soaring eloquence and the most profound poetry," even if they were possible, could notsolve the real dilem1na of our 9-rama. The poetry would reach the very few who are left with the ear for it, and to them the dra1natic thought would be only the more passionate·in its unsatisfying despair. But to copsider 1nedium by itself for a mo1nent, O,Neill's inability to com1nunicate fully in ·words is not entirely a--personal inability. His expressionistic use of mask and chorus and soliloquy· is not ·solely to cover up literary limitations. It is an atte1npt to communicate in terms of the theatre to a public as far from the old glory of words as the dramatist himself. · BJbid., p. xxi. 206 THE THEATRE AND THE SOCIAL CONFUSION And we must not assu1ne too .easily · that we belong to an age which is "equal to no more than prose." , The theatrical art of Robert Edmond Jones, Lee Simonson, and Jo Mielziner (to mention only a few na1nes) is much more than prose. The Duke of Saxe-Meneingen, Appia, and Stanislavski have exerted a far-reaching influence on methods of imaginative and appropriate production, until to-day harmony of action, threedimensional design, and "painting with light" are accepted as fundamental by even the commercial theatre. But this art-theatre 1novement is not enough. Lee Simonson has made abundan-tly clear the dependence of his art, stagedesign , on the actual work of the playwright. 11 The play is still the thing. Technical1niracles can be illuminating and suggestive, but are necessarily subordinate. The designer interprets and does not create. In our day it is possible that the art of the theatre has advanced further than the art of the drama, and that "the stage is set" waiting for the playwright to make significant use of it.· In an article of this .length it is impossible to do n1uch more than generalize, and sketch with the thumb-nail. New plays, set to new and interesting designs, are being produced rapidly and should be considered in detail if we are to make any pretension to :finality in our judg1nents. Typical plays like Merrily We Roll Along, The Petrified Forest, and Awake and Sing, have in them the awareness of the cultural and social sick-bed, the dilemma of the individual. Awake and Sing differs strikingly from the others named in being a play of revolt, and it profoundly humanizes the radical attitude to the social confusion. MaxweJL Anderson's current w·ork Winterset is notable 9Lee Simonson, The Stage is Set, New York, 1932. This is an invaluable study. The chapter on Gordon Craig is an excellent corrective to the common overvaluing of his work. · 207 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY both for its social sympathy and for its language, which aims at being a poetic version of common speech. Mr. Anderson has · experimented with verse before, in his historical plays, and. now courageously uses the medium of verse in a play on contemporary slum-life. Whether or not he has indicated a "new path" for dramatic writing to take, remains to be seen. His effort is successful enough, at least, to have revived interest in the possihilities of formal verse. Yet in many quarters there is a persistent notion that the theatre should not seek a ''verse revival," but rather should develop a medium equivalent in popularity and in communicability to the blank-verse medium of the Elizabethans. Perhaps the theatre should forget ma1_1y of its sanctified conventions and reach outside to the popular interests of the day, if it would discover the ele1nents of a new and more vital means of expression. Recent experimenters have been particularly attracted to the expressive values inherent in the motion-picture, in athletics, and in jazz. They hope that if dramatic ideas could be expressed in terms of idioms imbedded in the popular mind they would have, at last, the world and. his wife for audience. A brief consideration of these "idioms" will, I think, clatify the central argument of the article. The motion-picture is an industry. Yet it is a medium with distinct artistic possibilities. Furthermore, by virtue of its direct impact on the senses, it can con1municate immediately and vividly effects which would strain the · intelligibility of a modern poet. Whereas Maxwell Anderson 1nust reform 1nodern poetry if he is to reform the stage with it, the motion-picture ·director can go ahead without self-consciousness, in the knowledge that his medium ugets across'' to the ordinary n1an. A scene 208 THE THEATRE AND THE SOCIAL CONFUSION from the silent picture Tempest illustrates my point. The camera is stationed at one side of a door leading into an officers' quarters. Directly across from the camera a line of convicted prisoners of war is standing before a firing squad. Two officers stroll up, pass the camera, and open the door, cutting off the view of the condemned 1nen for an instant. The door closes behind them, and the camera looks out ~uddenly at a heap of corpses. In the casual opening and shutting of a door we are made to realize the fact of death. This only hints at what the screen might do. Max Reindhart in his recent production of A Midsummer Nights Dream has achieved fantastic miracles with the camera. It is to be hoped that his success will induce cautious capital to welcome the creative artist, and encourage him actually to create in terms of the medium. · As Rene Clair, eminent French director, has pointed out, the screen will never become an art until men create directly for it as they would for the stage or the novel. It cannot advance into its own kingdom as long as it remains the mere translator of plays and books. An emancipated motion-picture would not replace the theatre. But it would become a legitimate and significant arm of the theatre, with its proper and different ambitions clearly realized. There would be a division of labour, an extension and enrichment of the means of dramatic expression . If we progress but slowly to this end, it is because we are stumbling over profits. And because of, the profit-seeking motive the motion-picture has neither made full use of its own expressive quality, nor reflected with any depth the intellectual and social climate of the time. Sport and jazz alone rival the ('movie" in popular appeal, and it is possible that the dramatist has something 209 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY fundamental to learn from Paul Whiteman and Babe·Ruth. Perhaps the most significant use of the athletic method that we have seen was in the Douglas Fairbanks filn1. .A.ided by camera-trickery and a swash-buckling swagger of his own, Fairbanks cancelled the law of gravity in a most exhilarating fashion, and had no difficulty in communicating his fantasies to an audience which could delight in the grace and imagination of the human body. If nowadays we are all born little golfers and little tennisplayers rather than little liberals and little conservatives, perhaps words and lights are not enough for us in the theatre. . And that the athletic 1nethod may be used to express more ambitious matter than Fairbanks was concerned with, we can be sure fro1n the example of the Russians, who have made astounding use of the athletic idiom. By breaking the stage into levels and en1phasizing the n1oVement of bodies in a 1nanner that falls somewhere between the ballet and the art of acrobatics, they have given a sheer physical power of expression to the theatre.10 Jazz, like the motion-picture, is not a thing in its~lf, but rather a technique, a way of getting an effect. Musically , it depends quite as much on t.one-colour and · co1nbination of instruments as it does on the underlying rhythm. For this reason it is very difficult to extricate the full effect ofjazz and carry it over to.another forn1 of expression like the dran1a. An interesting and quite successful attempt to do this was made in the: motion- . picture version of Street Scene, where the curious pattern of the action was underlined with an appropriate accompaniment of jazz. It is unfortunate but possibly inevitable that dramatists are using the j azz_lyric for their purposes rather than the n1ore essential and more vital elements of the style. This seems much weaker and much lOR. Fiilop-Miller and Joseph Gregor, Tlte Russian Theatre, London, 1930. 210 THE THEATRE AND THE SOCIAL CONFUSION less useful than the muted tru1npet and ·the strange conflicting tempo of the music. However, the significant thing is that the artist is seizing deliberately on the more banal aspects of popular idiom and using them to express his contempt for, ai_-Id despair of, life as he sees it. T. S. Eliot, in Sweeney Agonistes, expresses the sense of futility quite powerfully by the use of this method: That's nothing to me and nothing to you \Ve gotta do what we gotta do We're gonna sit here and drink this booze We're gonna sit here and have a tune We're gonna stay and we're gonna go And somebody's gotta pay the rent. The refrain- · Under the bamboo Bamboo Bamboo Under the bamboo treealmost succeeds in echoing the tom-to1n mus1c of Cab Calloway. W. H. Auden, in the Dance of Death, emphasizes his thesis that we "belong to a world which has had its day," by borrowing tricks from jazz, athletics, the circus, the musical revue, and almost every other form of popular amusement. These are brought together in producing a powerfully negative effect. The opening scene is on a beach. Very handsofl?.e speCimens of both sexes are sunbathing and exercising with a medicine-ball. They sing a long chorus in praise of the sun, from w:hich I will quote a typical passage: Lie down on the sand Feel the sun on your :flesh It's so grand Oh boy you'll soon want to get fresh! 211 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY Living. with nature is the life of the future The new life The true Jife The life for you Europe's in a hole l\1illions on the dole But come out into the sun. vVhile the chorus is expressing its empty optimism in empty language, someone has made off with all the clothes leaving military uniforms instead. The sun-god departs and the bathers are left stiff ahd mechanical from cold. This is Auden's tone throughout. He seizes on something which seems vital in itself and throws it into relation with the large futility of things. His characters are not individuals but A, B, C, and alpha, beta, and gamma, all helpless and insigni:ficant in relation both to society and the universe. There is superb 1nockery of its kind in his circusparody of an attempt to know the final metaphysical truth. A dancer advances to the front of the stage, preparing for the great moment. The announ_cer speaks: "Rullo, everybody! As you all know, the greatest feat, the most stupendous risk in human history is being undertaken this evening by a gentleman who prefers to remain known sitnply as the Pilot. His ambition is no less than to reach the very heart C?f reality." The crowd cheers wildly and begins laying lavish bets on the outcome. · The announcer continues: "The Pilot desires me to thank all those who have been kind enough to send him messages of good luck, knitted sca.rves, crystalized fruits, killingbottles , copies of the Outline of Modern Knowledge for Boys and Girls, pamphlets relating to the pyramids, birthcontrol , a universallariguage, etc. He regrets that owing to pressure he is unable to answer each correspondent 212 THE THEATRE AND THE SOCIAL CONFUSION individually, but' trusts that they will accept this public acknowledgement." The search for reality proceeds in the form of a frenzied acrobatic dance, which ends in the collapse of the dancer. Here is Auden's contempt for a lost world, a world which would have Christ walk the waves for a newsreel camera should he come again. And here we are face to face with the real disease ofour theatre. I have traced briefly. the development of the social concern in drama. .This growing social consciousness has run parallel to a decline in faith-faith in the individual, faith in the security of the individual's relation to the universe. To-day we have all about us idioms for profound dramatic use. The fault is not in the 1nedium that we have no theatrical expression at once popular and great. We have not to resort to a lost verse-style in order to communicate our vision. The fault is in the v1ston. It hurts too much. Our tragedy has become truly a "comedy of the grotesque," full of painful, bitter laughter. And it has no more finality than a questionmark . Sean O'Casey ends his Witlzin the Gates by letting a prostitute crazed with the fear of death snatch at a religious consolation, while off stage can be heard the dull hopeless "chant of the down-and-outs." There is terror and pity here, but no relief. We do not desire a gush of optimism in our drama. No great drama has had that. Tragedy .will always look steadfastly into the pit-but the pit must have a bottom. We cannot go on forever showing to the world that the world has ceased to exist. The crowd does not take the theatre seriously now, because of the very quality of the seriousness. It prefers the crooning of Rudy Vallee to work in the direction of Mr. Auden's, and who can doubt that this is a sensible preference? I have said that Auden, in his use of the 213 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY popular idiom, seizes on something that seen1s vital in itself and throws it into relation with the large futility of things. In doing this he casts the shado·w not only on the shape of life, but on the very detail of it. He despises the symbolism which he drags from the popular world to express his sense of life's futility as a whole. Both the means and the end of his tragic expression are of the one colour. If all the swords andjewels and roses of Shakespeare 's dramatic poetry were tarnished and rotten, how 1nuch of the effect would be lost! But Shakespeare could feel the positive value of these things. There was a unity of regard between artist and audience for the popular aspirations of the day. This is the unity we have lost. We are divided into those who guess gloomily at the destiny of the wood, and those who prefer to regard the living quality of the individual trees. That there is life in these, in jazz, in athletics, even in the symbol of the machine (that bogey of Western expressionistic drama) we know from the positive use that has been made of them in Russia. There the dramatist and his audience have a community of sympathy for the significant details of their life. The machine, for instance, becomes a symbol of power and triumph.- It is not safe to be too enthusiastic about the Russian theatre. Propaganda is still the dominant theme~ . and p'rofounder dramatic ideas are yet to come. But it has made the .great beginning. The social question-mark is erased, and there is the right positive relation between the popular life and the idioms of its expression. Surely it is obvious that our dramatists cannot set out deliberately to imitate this condition. The theatre, whatever else it may be, is always a symptom. The cure for it now cannot be a self-cure. Its sick individualism, its religious emptiness, and its mounting social despair 214 THE THEATRE AND THE SOCIAL CONFUSION come from outside, and from outside, too, must come the physic. I-Iow, it is not our function to speculate. For although the theatre takes its nourishment from life, it can never predict the substance of its very next 1neal. 215 ...