THE CORNERSTONES OP MODERN DEAMA 711 



ranges of drama for us to wonder at. France, in the seventeenth 

 century, was the scene of the last of these great creative outbursts, 

 and the incomparable Moliere was the head and front of its glory. 



This brings me to the purpose of my lecture, which is, indeed, to 

 ask this practical question : " By what means can a worthy art of the 

 Drama be fostered and developed in America and England to-day ? " 

 I think we may best get an answer to this question by comparing the 

 history and status of tne Drama in France and in England from the 

 time of Moliere down to the twentieth century down to the modern 

 Drama of the day before yesterday. 



Here 1 must beg time and space for a rather long but quite rele- 

 vant parenthesis. No glance at any corner of the Modern Drama 

 can leave out of sight the ominous figure of Ibsen. A great de- 

 stroyer, a great creator, a great poet, a great liberator, in his later 

 prose plays he has freed the Euopean drama, not only from the minor 

 conventions of the stage, such as the aside and the perfunctory solilo- 

 quy, but from the deadlier bondage of sentimentality, of one-eyed 

 optimism, and sham morality. As there is no modern playwright 

 who understands his craft that does not pay homage to Ibsen's tech- 

 nique, so there i? no serious modern dramatist who has not been 

 directly or indirectly influenced by him, and whose path has not 

 been made clearer, and straighter, and easier by Ibsen's matchless 

 veracity, courage and sincerity. Throughout these later plays, again 

 and again he shows us how far more poignant and startling are in- 

 ward spiritual situations and the secret surprises and suspenses of 

 the soul that outward physical situations and the traps and surprises 

 of mechanical ingenuity. 



Like all the greatest artists, he is greatest, not where he is most 

 realistic, but where he is most imaginative. It is true he does not 

 reach through the middle zones of cloud and tempest; he does not 

 attain those sunny heights of wisdom and serenity where Sophocles 

 and Shakespeare and Goethe sit radiantly enthroned, watching all 

 the turbid stream of human life as it flows a thousand leagues be- 

 neath their feet. Ibsen for the most part looms darkly through a 

 blizzard, in a wilderness made still more bleak and desolate by the 

 great lava streams of corrosive irony that have poured from his 

 crater. Yet by this very fact he becomes all the more representative 

 of his age, and of the present cast and drift of European thought and 

 philosophy. His generation has heard and received his insistent new 

 gospel, " Live your own life." But human hearts will always long 

 for that strain of higher mood which we seem to remember, " Who- 

 eoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; whosoever shall lose his 

 life shall preserve it." 



Ibsen is a citizen of a small country; this gives him many signal 

 advantages and some monstrous disadvantages. If his eyes avert 



