AGE OF DOUBT AND PROSE.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 75, Issue 142, 18 June 1932, Page 1 (Supplement)

AGE OF DOUBT AND PROSE.

Poetic drama, I thought, as I watched “Electra,” will some day come into its own again, writes John O’London’s Weekly contributor. Our present mood is to ask for petty realism and psycho-pathology, and to grow impatient with any playwright who attempts to show in his characters the nobility of mankind. We are proud of our disillusion* proud of the neatness with which we cut off our noses to spite our faces, for science has seemed to show us how very small and unimportant we are in the universe. And we run about from one to the other, 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. For drama is concerned with mankind and destiny, and if man is held to be 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 in destiny. Their drama was directly religious, it lifted men off their feet and showed the possibility of sublimity in humanity. But we are in a very different boat to-day. Our drama is either an exercise in irony at our own expense, or plain amusement, or fietionised 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 this mood of defeatism cannot last, though what light will come to dispel it, and how and from what quarter, there is no prophet to tell us. . . .