That this determination will throw me into a long conflict with our
theatre critics, and with the few playgoers who go to the theatre as
often as the critics, I well know; but I am too well equipped for the
strife to be deterred by it, or to bear malice towards the losing side.
In trying to produce the sensuous effects of opera, the fashionable
drama has become so flaccid in its sentimentality, and the intellect
of its frequenters so atrophied by disuse, that the reintroduction
of problem, 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