AGE OF DOUBT AND PROSE

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXVI, 15 June 1932, Page 10

AGE OF DOUBT AND PROSE

CHARACTER SACRIFICED Poetic drama, I thought, as I watched “Electra,” will some day come into its own again, writes u “John O’London’s Weekly’’ contributor. Our present mood is to ask for petty realism and psychopathology, and to grow impatient with any playwright who attempts lo show in Ins characters the nobility of mankind. We are proud of our disillusion, proud of (lie neatness with which we cut off our noses to spite our faces, for science lias seemed to show us how very small and unimportant we are in the universe. And we run about from one to the oilier, ignorant to ignorant, crying, “What is the purpose or use of human life?’’ convinced while we ask that the answer is nothing. Such a condition of mind is not likely to produce great art—poetic drama or anything else. Eor drama is concerned with mankind and destiny, and if man is held to he ignoble, purposeless, self-deceived, and unspiritual, and if destiny is held to be chance or chemistry, nothing noble can be said of either. The Greeks suffered Under the delusions that man might be noble in spirit and that there was justice hi destiny. Their drama was directly religious, it lifted men off their feet and showed tlie possibility of sublimity in humanity. Our drama is either an exercise in irony at our own expense, or plain amusement, or liclionised science. We have sacrificed character on the altars of psychology. . . . Faith, in anything, has vanished, and left us in the dark, and so our art is little and dark and contorted. Certain it is that tin’s mood of defeatism cannot last., though whtat light will come to dispel it, and how and from what quarter, there is no prophet to tell us. . .