them their own reductio ad absurdum; for obviously we build libraries, and develop the arts of typography and binding, for quite other reasons than that books are not books without them, or that the critic must consider any of the three when he is criticizing the content of a book.

Forty years of historical research, of aesthetic theory, and of wider acquaintance with the literatures of the world intervened between the Hamburgische Dramaturgie and A. W. Schlegel's Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature; and in these we find the methods inaugurated by Castelvetro applied, if not for the first time, at least with the largest amount of consistency, to the actual history of the drama. In Schlegel's first two lectures we find all the theories we have already met, as well as others of kindred intention. The drama is dialogue, but dialogue with conflict and change, and without personal explanation of this conflict or change on the part of the playwright. There is only one way in which this can be done by having men and women actually represent the characters, imitate their voices and temperaments, and carry on the discourse in surroundings that have some similarity to those imagined by the playwright. Without this help (and this is Schlegel's central idea) dramatic dialogue would demand personal explanation on the part of the playwright to make his meaning clear; that is forbidden by the very idea of drama; and so the theatre is implicit in the nature of drama itself. In the theatre, 'where the magic of many combined arts can be displayed', these all help the playwright in 'producing an impression on an assembled multitude'. Here we are once more faced with the theory of the 'psychology of the crowd'. According to Schlegel, the main object of the drama is to 'produce an impression on an assembled crowd, to gain their attention, and to excite in them interest and participation'. The impression is intensified by reason of the numbers that share it: The effect produced by seeing a

เ

number of others share in the same emotions. . . is astonish

ingly powerful.'

The theatrical and the dramatic are bound together, not only in their very nature, but, as a consequence, in their history. Acting and theatrical performances of greater or lesser complexity are to be found in various primitive ages and among various primitive peoples, and mimicry is innate in man's nature. On these assumptions Schlegel sketches the earlier history of the stage, as indeed Aristotle had done for Greek tragedy, and carries on this history throughout his discussion of the modern drama. The Elizabethan theatre's paucity of stage scenery is cited as proof of the glory of Shakespeare, inasmuch as he was able to give the air of reality, to produce complete illusion, without such adventitious aid. And so Schlegel proceeds in the case of each period of dramatic poetry; indicating the condition of the theatre almost always, but never quite arriving at the more modern conception by which the shape of the theatre or of the stage is regarded as having actually determined. the nature of the actual drama in each age.

The Austrian playwright, Grillparzer, to whose acuteness as a critic Professor Saintsbury has paid a tribute really deserved, came to regard Schlegel's lectures as 'dangerous'; but the ideas they contained, so far as the relations of drama and theatre are concerned, had a germinal influence on his own dramatic criticism. He was the most aggressive opponent of the closet-drama' that was yet appeared; and he was relentless in his contempt for all fine writing, soliloquies, and mere poetry that do not contribute to the 'action' of a play. He goes so far as to say that the distinction between theatrical and dramatic is false; whatever is truly dramatic will inevitably be theatrical. If time and space permitted, it would be interesting to discuss in detail Grillparzer's theories of the drama, especially as they have been neglected by English critics; Mr. Walkley, for instance, if he were

familiar with them, would undoubtedly find them refreshing. But the fact is that intellectual hegemony in these matters had already passed to France while Grillparzer was still writing, and we cannot remain longer in the company of German theorists, although many, from Grillparzer to Freytag and beyond, have contributed largely, if not always wisely, to the subject under discussion.

There still remains one period of dramatic theory to consider, the period of theatricalism rampant. The French have been the masters of this form of dramatic criticism, and since the middle of the nineteenth century their footsteps have been followed with little or no protest by the critics of the world. Critics like Mr. Walkley and Mr. Archer, not to mention their noisy but negligible echoes in my own country, have little enough to add to what Frenchmen had already said before them on this subject. The extremist in this movement, and indeed in some senses a pioneer, is Francisque Sarcey; and no one has gone further in the direction of making drama and theatre mutually interchangeable terms than he. Doubtless it was of him and his kind that Flaubert was thinking when he wrote to George Sand nearly forty years ago: 'One of the most comical things of our time is this newfangled theatrical mystery (l'arcane théâtral). They tell us that the art of the theatre is beyond the limits of human intelligence, and that it is a mystery reserved for men who write like cab-drivers. The question of success surpasses all others. It is the school of demoralization.' Two years after this was written Sarcey summed up his code in extenso in an Essai d'une Esthétique de Théâtre, which still remains the clearest and most extreme expression of this form of dramatic materialism.

Sarcey assumes three fundamental hypotheses: first, that the only purpose of a play is to please a definite body of men and women assembled in a theatre; secondly, that in order to do this, the playwright is limited, or if you will,

aided, by certain tricks and conventions of the theatre; and finally, some of these conventions change from age to age or from country to country, while others are inevitable and eternal. On the basis of these assumptions, he frames this pretty definition of the drama: Dramatic art is the ensemble of conventions, universal or local, eternal or temporary, by the aid of which the playwright, representing human life in a theatre, gives to the audience an illusion of truth.' Voilà donc ! Here is the greatness of Hamlet and Oedipus most simply set down. Here is a definition that makes it an easy matter to understand the greatness of all the great plays of the past!

Like nearly all his predecessors from the time of Castelvetro, of whom Sarcey had doubtless never heard, our aesthetician of the theatre places the idea of an audience first. When you think of the theatre you think of the presence of the public; when you think of a play, you think in the same instant of the public come to hear it. You can omit every other requirement, but you cannot omit the audience. It is the inevitable, the fatal sine qua non. To it dramatic art must accommodate all its organs, and from it can be drawn, without a single exception, all the laws of the theatre.

This is Sarcey's fundamental condition in 1876; and it is still fundamental with Mr. Walkley in 1911. In a facetious review of a lecture of mine on the New Criticism which he did me the honour to write for the Times in that year, Mr. Walkley asserts that the dramatic critic can only appraise a play' by an evaluation of the aesthetic pleasure received', and that in order to do this, he must take into account the peculiar conditions' under which the dramatist works. These peculiar conditions are of course the audience of Sarcey (Mr. Walkley calls it 'the peculiar psychology of the crowd he is addressing ') and Sarcey's conventions of the theatre (although Mr. Walkley limits them to the conforma

tion of the stage'). It is only fair to the critic of the Times to say that he has elaborated, perhaps more carefully than any of his predecessors, the exact influence which the 'conformation of the stage' has had on the written drama; and his account of the change from platform stage to pictureframe stage has been followed by most of his successors. I have no reason to doubt his authority in the field of stage history, but his authority ceases in the field of aesthetic speculation. A critic who has sense enough to understand that the dramatic critic must 'sit tight' against the prejudices and opinions of theatrical audiences, preserving at all hazards his own judgement (I am paraphrasing a lecture of Mr. Walkley on Dramatic Criticism) and who in the very next breath tells us that the playwright must be judged by his effect on the peculiar psychology of the crowd he is addressing', has evidently not mastered the elements of aesthetic logic. As for Francisque Sarcey, who is responsible for so much of this cheap materialism of contemporary dramatic criticism, he seems to me as shallow a dogmatist as ever wrote criticisms of plays for the press; and decent invective can hardly go farther than that.

Now, what is meant by this idea, by no means modern, but in our day more persistent than ever, that the peculiar characteristic of dramatic literature is that it is intended for an assembled crowd? Obviously not merely that men are more impressionable in crowds than when alone, and that the dramatist has an advantage over most other writers in that he may make his appeal to men when they are most impressionable. This may be Bacon's thought, but it is far from being Diderot's or Schlegel's or Mr. Walkley's. What these men assert is that the crowd is inherent in the very idea of a play, and that this crowd has a peculiar psychology different in kind from that of any individual composing it. Indeed, I believe I have read some flighty utterances of late to the effect that so far from remaining civilized beings, we