oblem, with its remorseless logic and iron framework of fact,
inevitably produces at first an overwhelming impression of coldness and
inhuman rationalism. But this will soon pass away. When the intellectual
muscle and moral nerve of the critics has been developed in the struggle
with modern problem plays, the pettish luxuriousness of the clever ones,
and the sulky sense of disadvantaged weakness in the sentimental ones,
will clear away; and it will be seen that only in the problem play is
there any real drama, because drama is no mere setting up of the camera
to nature: it is the presentation in parable of the conflict between
Man's will and his environment: in a word, of problem. The vapidness of
such drama as the pseudo-operatic plays contain lies in the fact that
in them animal passion, sentimentally diluted, is shewn in conflict, not
with real circumstances, but with a set of conventions and assumptions
half of which do not exist off the stage, whilst the other half can
either be evaded by a pretence of compliance or defied with complete
impunity by any reasonably strong-minded person. Nobody can feel that
such conventions are really compulsory; and consequently nobody can
believe in the stage pathos that accepts them as an inexorable fate, or
in the genuineness of the people who indulge in such pathos. Sitting
at such plays, we do not believe: we make-believe. And the habit of
make-believe becomes at last so rooted that criticism of the theatre
insensibly ceases to be criticism at all, and becomes more and more a
chronicle of the fashionable enterprises of the only realities left on
the stage: that is, the performers in their own persons. In this
phase the playwright who attempts to revive genuine drama produces the
disagreeable impression of the pedant who attempts to start a serious
discussion at a fashionable at-home. Later on, when he has driven the
tea services out and made the people who had come to use the theatre as
a drawing-room understand that it is they and not the dramatist who are
the intruders, he has to face the accusation that his plays ignore human
feeling, an illusion produced by that very resistance of fact and law to
human feeling which creates drama. It is the _deus ex machina_ who, by
suspending that resistance, makes the fall of the curtain an immediate
necessity, since drama ends exactly where resistance ends. Yet the
introduction of this resistance produces so strong an impression of
heartle