UNNATURALNESS OF THE DRAMA.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume VIII, Issue 44, 31 October 1891, Page 533

UNNATURALNESS OF THE DRAMA.

Life is very different from the play. The play must be dramatic always, because it has always been dramatic. Although conversation is very frequently on the mishaps, false steps or misbehaviour of our neighbours, how much of that intercourse which makes social life is on light or serious subjects that have nothing of sorrow or trouble in them. The people who stiffer deepest have always relieving happiness in some degree ; .they do not go about exposing their feelings. If they did most of them would betray the deepest suffering over phases of trouble that the dramatist lays no stress upon. The deserted wife may feel most keenly the bitterness of het rival’s superior charms. She may suffer far more from the knowledge that her sex will pity her because another woman took her husband away than from a broken heart. It is the injustice, the cruelty, the pain of the woman’s deserted situation that strikes the audience. The man whose wife throws him away feels some faint consolation in his bitterness that she will be punished by the world ; but his vanity is wounded more deeply than his heart. The audience feels all of the distress of the husband’s position and sympathizes more by thinking the woman a fool to wreck her own life than by direct regard for his. There are thousands of women who are not at all as unhappy as the world thinks they are ; who are, in fact, not as miserable in their domestic relations as they ought to be. There are thousands whose husbands are not dramatically vicious whose life is one unceasing torture. There are compensating considerations in most lives, whether the apparent preponderance be of pain or pleasure. People search for relief ; it is the natural impulse of pain. Some find it in recklessness, some in quiet pursuit of some aim in life. Some fill the aching heart with

another love, some fill it with friendship. Some find comfort by incurring the ban of society, some find their comfort in society. But when society pities, it is, to a sensitive woman, as terrible as the ban. Misery is always more dramatic in the imagination than in the reality. Where real misery becomes dramatic the excitement is a relief. The silent anguish, which is of no use in a play, is the most bitter thing in life. In fact the moral question is all that makes drama nowadays, and the drama always misrepresents moral values. It never shows the compensation which so often conies before the punishment. The moral value lies in the motive. It is the value ? laced by society on the situation that the stage brings out. 'he moral law and the social law do not agree. All laws leave the judge a discretion to consider the motive of crime. God even admits sinners to repentance. Society alone is inexorable, and no motive, love the highest power in the universe—weakness,starvation, nor anything else can justify the sin found out, though thousands live respected in the safety of concealment. So the drama depends to a great extent now on artificial moral values, as society does, for that matter.