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The Younger Dramatists, Etc.
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (September 21, 1912) : 21
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The younger dramatists have found a simple method of being diverting. They choose a trite dramatic theme, place it in homely surroundings, and then make all their characters react honestly to it. We are so unaccustomed to honesty that it is as exhilarating as high comedy and infinitely more thrilling than conventional stage indiscretions. The excitement of having escaped from the moralists, which long ago ceased to be any excitement at all, is exchanged for the extreme raciness of having escaped from the artificiality of stage conventions. The characters recognize no necessity whatever of being dramatic. They spoil one anothers attitudes, they prick their own bubbles and are perversely flat, they threaten the situation that permits the play to continue. they threaten the situation that permits the play to continue.
A dozen times during a performance of any of the really modern plays — of course there are very few of them — the play has the narrowest escape from ending abruptly from the sheer naturalness of the characters. They refuse to feel insulted, or shocked, or down-trodden, or persecuted, or revengeful, or any of the other garish emotions. They are bored or amused or at most argumentative. They have a horrible tendency to be gayly interested in their own emotions which disperses the emotion instantly and leaves the dramatist in a precarious position. They have a horrible tendency to be gayly interested in their own emotions which disperses the emotion instantly and leaves the dramatist in a precarious position.
The audience has all the zest of watching a contest between the author and his characters. It would be quite justified in taking bets as to whether it did not run a chance of being turned out of the theater before nine, At any moment some one may say, “Oh, well, have it your own way”; or some one else may sum up, “But, after all, it is just a common social phenomenon; it’s quite in line with evolution”; and then no one will take any more notice of the situation and each character will return to his daily routine. It seems delightful luck if the author escapes any such outbreak of reasonableness. We laugh and congratulate him and ourselves.
Long ago we longed to know how great folk looked and lived and acted, and our curiosity has been satisfied. We are inundated with kings who nonchalantly wandered in and out of neat comedies. We know thoroughly the simple satins worn by the excessively rich; we have had great and decorative people ad nauseam. Now the diverting younger dramatists are giving us the one thing we do not know, and that is ourselves. Now the diverting younger dramatists are giving us the one thing we do not know, and that is ourselves. The millions of usual people with homely ways and uncultured bluntness of sentiment are being shown themselves. When they see their own awful furniture and their own proper theories thinly covering their actual attitudes, and the attitudes breaking from cover so brazenly and simple and inconveniently, they are more amused than they have ever been before. If they do not admit it, that is because they have a theory that modern drama is not amusing; and if they cannot let it alone, that is because they have more honesty than theory.
evidently, new topic, not indicated as such in original.There is a droll quirk in human nature that makes some of us feel a certain immodesty about talking interestingly in public places. There is a droll quirk in human nature that makes some of us feel a certain immodesty about talking interestingly in public places. If any one starts a subject of real interest we look uncomfortable and feel the conversationalist to be lacking in a certain sense of delicate fitness. We do not mind being interesting in the guarded privacy of a tête-à-tête, and we do not in the least mind being inconsequent and dull in public. In fact, when we are the latter we feel perfectly respectable and experience no qualms if the people at the next table look in our direction. Britishers exhibit this trait with trying frequency. It may be part of their rabid desire for privacy. To express an opinion where there is any danger of its being overheard is to give oneself away, and to strangers whom one knows nothing about. One must, if possible, look so blank that no observer could say with any assurance whether one possessed either mind or emotions.
One’s conversation must maintain the same dead level of blankness, for to permit the man sitting next you in the car to know that you are interested in architecture or why you believe Spain to be a decadent country — why, hang it all! you might as well have the fellow to dinner. One always has a sense, when in a crowd of English people, that they are each waiting for all the rest to go before they say what they have it in them to say. Men — who, in spite of tradition, are the real upholders of decorum — have this feeling much more strongly than women, and Great Britain, being the masculine country it is, is naturally the place where the feeling flourishes.
One always has a sense, when in a crowd of English people, that they are each waiting for all the rest to go before they say what they have it in them to say. That may be the reason why, when one overhears them, they are eternally uttering perfunctory comments on the weather. They have been waiting since the beginning of time for every one else to go, and now they have given up hope and they retain only the habit of inhibition.
There are people who like to be embraced at stipulated times, and if you embrace them at any other time for no reason except that it occurred to you as a nice idea, they do not know what to do with such a derelict of a demonstration, and feel quite embarrassed at having it on their hands. They like it when they are starting on a journey; then they expect it just as they are picking up their umbrella and bag. Or in the morning just as you enter the breakfast-room. Embraces taken in this way are parts of routine and can be fitted in quite comfortably, Whereas an isolated embrace is so emotional and requires some sort of spontaneous return and even perhaps an increase in intimacy. One never knows the precise amount of affection implied — it may be disturbingly much. This points the advantage of the early morning and railway kiss. They are so impersonal that the latter might be received from the porter without any one noticing the mistake.
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