sian Anton Chekhov. There are a good many characters, and during all the earlier part of the play they seem to be talking at random and, what seems worse, at cross-purposes. Yet all the time the action is heading somewhere, in due course its direction becomes clear, and the issue is one which delights a sensitive audience. At Mrs. Beam's is not, then, a simple play. I say it is in Munro's popular style because, in contradistinction to some of his other dramatic work, it contains no “symbolism”.

"Symbolism" is a dreadful word. I shall replace it with another in a moment. The plays by Munro which contain “symbolism" can be said to be in his intellectual style, in contrast to what I have called the popular style of At Mrs. Beam's—an intellectual style solely as regards the theory inspiring it. The plays themselves are intended, exactly as are ordinary plays, to appeal directly to the feelings of an audience, and not exclusively to their intellects. The first and most widely known of them is called The Rumour. It is a specimen of the English brand of that stage expressionism which originated in Germany. Expressionism-that is the word which I now put in the place of "Symbolism". The first expressionist playwright was the German Ernst Toller. Expressionism may be said to aim at an effect of embracing the whole of the life of the day by means of a large number of more or less short scenes expressive-note the word-expressive of much that lies far beyond them. In fact, the actual scenes making up an expressionist play are slices of vaster scenes embracing stock exchanges, government offices, factories, the crowded streets, and therefore clean outside the compass of the theater. The author's object is, by means of the scenes in the play, to bring those other and vaster scenes into the consciousness and imagination of the audience. Gradually, as with plays such as At Mrs. Beam's, a general impression is built up; only it is a general impression much more comprehensive than the one built up by At Mrs. Beam's. What has at first seemed fragmentary and disconnected fits into place in some large whole.

The Rumour reflects what was the popular feeling in the years from 1919 to about 1930. It seeks to move the audience with suggestions of the evil power exerted by big business, foreign investments, armament makers, profiteers, and ambitious politicians and diplomats who, in the popular fancy, are cred

ited with a readiness to play on nationalist feeling. To tell you what The Rumour attempts in this way is to expose to you the weakness of English dramatic expressionism. It can only try to move an audience with the expression of a huge complexity by over-simplifying and hence utterly falsifying that complexity. The Rumour in this way does not rise above the imaginings of a soapbox pacifist.

English expressionism could of course be open to progress. But to begin with, it was crude-crude not so much in technique as in subject matter. I admit that, for my part, I prefer such plays as At Mrs. Beam's or as Harold Chapin's The New Morality to plays like The Rumour; and I doubt very much if expressionism will be integrated in the main tradition of the English stage. Such reservations are not meant to minimize the importance of C. K. Munro.

A LIST OF THE PLAYS NAMED IN THE
ABOVE CHAPTER

William Congreve, The Way of the World (1700); Love for Love (1695)

Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer (1773)

T. W. Robertson, Caste (1867)

William Vaughn Moody, The Great Divide (1906)

William Wycherley, The Country Wife (1675)

Sir John Vanbrugh, The Provok'd Wife (1697)

Ben Jonson, Epicoene or the Silent Woman (1609); Every Man in His Humour (1598); Volpone (1606),

George Farquhar, The Beaux' Stratagem (1706)

John Dryden, Marriage-à-la-Mode (1672); Amphitryon (1690) Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Rivals (1775); The School for Scandal (1777)

Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House (1879); Ghosts (1881); The Wild Duck (1885)

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)

Bernard Shaw, The Doctor's Dilemma (1906); The Devil's Disciple (1897); Candida (1897); Arms and the Man (1898)

W. Somerset Maugham, Home and Beauty (1919); For Services Rendered (1932); Our Betters (1923)

Eugene O'Neill, The Emperor Jones (1921); Strange Interlude (1928); Mourning Becomes Electra (1931); The Iceman Cometh (1946)

Harold Chapin, The New Morality

C. K. Munro, At Mrs. Beam's (1923); The Rumour

BOOKS

Ben Jonson, Selected Works; edited by Harry Levin (1938). ("The Nonesuch Jonson")

Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891)

7.

POETIC DRAMA

i

WE REACH HERE A KIND OF TURNING-POINT IN THIS BOOK. SIX OF my chapters have been devoted to considering literature in prose. Poetry is to be the subject of the remaining three. It is in the course of dealing with the drama that we are brought naturally to pass from dealing with prose to dealing with verse. There are plays in prose and plays in verse, and it is desirable, in seeking to ascertain how we may read for the most profit, to neglect neither the one nor the other. The former have just been considered. We turn now to the latter.

To begin with, it is reasonable to ask: Why should there be plays in verse? Is it not the aim of the theater to give us the illusion that we are watching and listening to an imitation of real life on the stage? If so, in real life people do not speak in verse. To this objection against plays being in verse the answer is that only in some plays is the aim to give the audience the illusion that they are watching and listening to an imitation of real life, and even in those plays it is never more than a minor aim. The chief aim of all drama is simply to move the audience to experience certain feelings. This aim can sometimes be attained by means of prose; at other times it is only to be attained by means of verse. The choice of medium depends on the nature of the feelings aimed at, and these are not invariably the same. How they differ we shall come to in a moment. Meanwhile, I must point out that in any event to say that the theater ever seeks to give the audience the illusion that it is watching

and listening to an imitation of real life is in itself too crude a statement.

So-called realism on the stage is but one of many stage conventions. All performance of drama, by reason of the very conditions under which it must take place, is, in reference to real life, artificial. I do not mean that it is impossible for the audience in a theater to have the illusion it is watching and hearing real people in the throes of real experience. On the contrary, from childhood onwards we all of us-or very nearly all of us -go to a play prepared to accept the necessary conventions of the stage, and thus succeed unconsciously in forgetting that it is a stage we behold. We undergo what Coleridge has called "a suspension of disbelief". So in calling "realism" a convention I do not mean to deny its power. What I do mean is that the more adult our apprehension of the happenings simulated on the stage during the performance of a play, the more we are aware of feeling instinctively that these happenings are life at a remove from real, everyday life-that they are more concentrated and more intense. The convention known as realism in no way affects our having this instinctive feeling. If anything, it strengthens it. In the years immediately before the war of 1914-18 a new realism had invaded the English stage. The vanguard among new dramatists had discarded the soliloquy and the aside. They were not only making characters talk sitting down, but also very often making them sit with their backs to the audience. These innovations were intended to be, and were accepted at the time as being, an increase in stage realism. Actually, without in the least disturbing the "suspension of disbelief", they served only to affirm the tacit awareness of the audience that in attending the performance of a play it was being present at an imitation of life more concentrated and more intense than the life which each of the individuals composing it put aside the moment the curtain went up and they settled, in rapt and serried rows, to stare out of the dark at the brilliantly illuminated make-believe framed in the proscenium arch. But the tacit awareness occurs without these aids, and complete realism in externals is not only unattainable in the theater; it is superfluous. An audience invariably gathers together in a theater only too ready to lose itself in the play, and nothing but the badness of a play can prevent it from doing so. Hence if some