708 



THE DRAMA 



people than upon anything else. For years past there has been a 

 period of increasing prosperity, in which notions of ease and comfort 

 and security have forced into the background all graver questions as 

 inconvenient and irksome. How can the artist thrive when the 

 standard of living is fixed by the men who run theatres for various 

 motives: because it is not a bad form of investment, because the 

 patronage of the drama is fashionable, but mainly because they want 

 to be amused ? 



It is under such circumstances that English comedy becomes farce, 

 or else a so-called musical play; while those who might appreciate 

 tragedy, if they saw it, have to content themselves with vulgar and 

 extravagant melodrama. But when the people alter, these things will 

 too, be different, and it is possible that even before our eyes the 

 temper of the nation is transforming itself. Tragedy born of the 

 people is at its best and fullest when it is contemporaneous with a 

 great outburst of national life. Are we not living at present under a 

 wave of indignant emotion, which is sweeping away class distinctions, 

 destroying the false notion that wealth is a form of nobility, bringing 

 down the rough estimate of things to the bare human level, the 

 qualities which make a virile and efficient man ? Never in history has 

 a nation awakened to the consciousness of its real sources of great- 

 ness without finding expression for its heightened feeling in art. That 

 I take it is the hope, as eventually it will be the glory, of the 

 twentieth century. 



