en one has noticed that he could no longer create a man
of genius. The happiest writers are those that, knowing this form of
play is slight and passing, keep to the surface, never showing anything
but the arguments and the persiflage of daily observation, or now and
then, instead of the expression of passion, a stage picture, a man
holding a woman's hand or sitting with his head in his hands in dim
light by the red glow of a fire. It was certainly an understanding of
the slightness of the form, of its incapacity for the expression of the
deeper sorts of passion, that made the French invent the play with a
thesis, for where there is a thesis people can grow hot in argument,
almost the only kind of passion that displays itself in our daily life.
The novel of contemporary educated life is upon the other hand a
permanent form because having the power of psychological description it
can follow the thought of a man who is looking into the grate.

HAS THE DRAMA OF CONTEMPORARY LIFE A ROOT OF ITS OWN

In watching a play about modern educated people with its meagre language
and its action crushed into the narrow limits of possibility I have
found myself constantly saying: 'Maybe it has its power to move, slight
as that is, from being able to suggest fundamental contrasts and
passions which romantic and poetical literature have shown to be
beautiful.' A man facing his enemies alone in a quarrel over the purity
of the water in a Norwegian Spa and using no language but that of the
newspapers can call up into our minds, let us say, the passion of
Coriolanus. The lovers and fighters of old imaginative literature are
more vivid experiences in the soul than anything but one's own ruling
passion that is itself riddled by their thought as by lightning, and
even two dumb figures on the roads can call up all that glory. Put the
man who has no knowledge of literature before a play of this kind and he
will say as he has said in some form or other in every age at the first
shock of naturalism, 'What has brought me out to hear nothing but the
words we use at home when we are talking of the rates?' And he will
prefer to it any play where there is visible beauty or mirth, where life
is exciting, at high tide as it were. It is not his fault that he will
prefer in all likelihood a worse play although its kind may be greater,
for we have been following the lure of science for generations and
forgotten him and his. I come always back to this