and be vital in proportion
as it deals with life in terms of social interest. To put it another
way, a drama to reflect our age must be aware of the intense and
practically universal tendency to study society as an organism, with the
altruistic purpose of seeing justice prevail. The rich are attacked, the
poor defended; combinations of business are assailed, and criminals
treated as our sick brothers; labor and capital contest on a gigantic
scale, and woman looms up as a central and most agitating problem. All
this and more, arising from the same interest, offers a vast range of
subject-matter to drama and a new spirit in treating it on the stage.
Within the last half century the two great changes that have come in
human life are the growth in the democratic ideal, with all that it
suggests, and the revolutionary conception of what life is under the
domination of scientific knowledge. All art forms, including this of the
theater, have responded to these twin factors of influence. In art it
means sympathy in studying fellow-man and an attempt to tell the truth
about him in all artistic depictions. Therefore, in the drama to-day
likely to make the strongest claim on the attention of the intelligent
play-goers, we shall get the fullest recognition of this spirit and the
frankest use of it as typical of the twentieth century. This is what
gives substance, meaning and bite to the plays of Shaw, Galsworthy, and
Barker, of Houghton, and Francis and Sowerby, of Moody and Kennedy and
Zangwill, at their best. To acknowledge this is not to deny that
enjoyable farce, stirring melodrama and romantic extravaganza are not
welcome; the sort of play which simply furnishes amusement in terms of
good story telling, content to do this and no more. It is, however, to
remind the reader that to be most representative of the day the drama
must do something beyond this; must mirror the time and probe it too;
yes, must, like a wise physician, feel the pulse of man to-day and
diagnose his deepest needs and failings and desires; in a word, must be
a social drama, since that is the keynote of the present. It will be
found that even in the lighter forms of drama which we accept as typical
and satisfactory this social flavor may be detected, giving it body, but
not detracting from its pleasurableness. Miss Crother's _Young Wisdom_
has the light touch and the framework of farce, yet it deals with a
definite aspect of feminism. Mr. Knoblauch's _The Faun_