Concerning Letters | Page 9

successful, and popular. It makes the
dramatist's position sure, and not too obviously authoritative.
The second course is: To definitely set before the public those views
and codes of life by which the dramatist himself lives, those theories in
which he himself believes, the more effectively if they are the opposite
of what the public wishes to have placed before it, presenting them so
that the audience may swallow them like powder in a spoonful of jam.
There is a third course: To set before the public no cut-and-dried codes,
but the phenomena of life and character, selected and combined, but not
distorted, by the dramatist's outlook, set down without fear, favour, or

prejudice, leaving the public to draw such poor moral as nature may
afford. This third method requires a certain detachment; it requires a
sympathy with, a love of, and a curiosity as to, things for their own
sake; it requires a far view, together with patient industry, for no
immediately practical result.
It was once said of Shakespeare that he had never done any good to any
one, and never would. This, unfortunately, could not, in the sense in
which the word "good" was then meant, be said of most modern
dramatists. In truth, the good that Shakespeare did to humanity was of a
remote, and, shall we say, eternal nature; something of the good that
men get from having the sky and the sea to look at. And this partly
because he was, in his greater plays at all events, free from the habit of
drawing a distorted moral. Now, the playwright who supplies to the
public the facts of life distorted by the moral which it expects, does so
that he may do the public what he considers an immediate good, by
fortifying its prejudices; and the dramatist who supplies to the public
facts distorted by his own advanced morality, does so because he
considers that he will at once benefit the public by substituting for its
worn-out ethics, his own. In both cases the advantage the dramatist
hopes to confer on the public is immediate and practical.
But matters change, and morals change; men remain--and to set men,
and the facts about them, down faithfully, so that they draw for us the
moral of their natural actions, may also possibly be of benefit to the
community. It is, at all events, harder than to set men and facts down,
as they ought, or ought not to be. This, however, is not to say that a
dramatist should, or indeed can, keep himself and his temperamental
philosophy out of his work. As a man lives and thinks, so will he write.
But it is certain, that to the making of good drama, as to the practice of
every other art, there must be brought an almost passionate love of
discipline, a white-heat of self- respect, a desire to make the truest,
fairest, best thing in one's power; and that to these must be added an
eye that does not flinch. Such qualities alone will bring to a drama the
selfless character which soaks it with inevitability.
The word "pessimist" is frequently applied to the few dramatists who
have been content to work in this way. It has been applied, among
others, to Euripides, to Shakespeare, to Ibsen; it will be applied to
many in the future. Nothing, however, is more dubious than the way in

which these two words "pessimist" and "optimist" are used; for the
optimist appears to be he who cannot bear the world as it is, and is
forced by his nature to picture it as it ought to be, and the pessimist one
who cannot only bear the world as it is, but loves it well enough to
draw it faithfully. The true lover of the human race is surely he who can
put up with it in all its forms, in vice as well as in virtue, in defeat no
less than in victory; the true seer he who sees not only joy but sorrow,
the true painter of human life one who blinks nothing. It may be that he
is also, incidentally, its true benefactor.
In the whole range of the social fabric there are only two impartial
persons, the scientist and the artist, and under the latter heading such
dramatists as desire to write not only for to-day, but for to- morrow,
must strive to come.
But dramatists being as they are made--past remedy it is perhaps more
profitable to examine the various points at which their qualities and
defects are shown.
The plot! A good plot is that sure edifice which slowly rises out of the
interplay of circumstance on temperament, and temperament on
circumstance, within the enclosing atmosphere of an idea. A human
being is the best plot