Public and Private Problems in Modern Drama

Author(s): Ronald Peacock

Source: The Tulane Drama Review , Mar., 1959, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Mar., 1959), pp. 58-72
Published by: The MIT Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1124993

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 Public ANd Private Problems
Jr o4aderif Drawma
By RONALD PEACOCK

T has become common to view drama in the post-Ibsen period as

falling into two broad categories. On the one hand there was
a strong and persistent tradition of the A Doll's House type of play,
called for convenience "social problem plays," and on the other
a number of diverse styles of drama that represent counter-realism;
plays in verse, expressionism, formalistic styles as in Yeats' plays,
revivals of myths, fantastic drama, surrealism, plays of Freudian
psychology, Cocteau-ish podsie de thedtre, and so on, all of which,
however different from each other, have in common that they turn
away both from social problems and from the dramatic style as-
sociated with them. They do not necessarily, however, renounce
realism for "romance," or for something "poetic" in the escapist
sense. Neither are the themes they treat always without relevance
to the social situation. The point is that the social situation changed
radically in the decade of World War I, making social problem
drama of the older kind and its particular mold of realism out of
date. But the antiquated forms had no monopoly on all realism or
all social problems. The new forms, superficially judged to be
anti-realistic, often represent in fact an artistic adjustment to a
new social situation. In Georg Kaiser, in Cocteau, in Giraudoux,
in Eliot, there can be no question of evasion of reality, or of the
contemporary world, or of society. Their works depict these things
and express their feelings about them. They were strange at first
only because the realities shown had not yet been perceived by
others. The world of A Doll's House and plays like it was real to
Ibsen; it was the world he experienced. But it was no longer real
in 1918 to Kaiser, for whom the middle-class home, with a certain
set of private beliefs and social attitudes, had been pushed out of
the center of the picture to give place to the new reality of highly
technical and industrial social organization. In order to show this
he devised his expressionistic form which presents not private lives
and homes but the skeletal structure of a whole society which in
that contemporary situation was more real than the surfaces of
bourgeois life. In a similar way Eliot's plays contain a view and
a critcism of a given society. They are determined by a religious
interpretation, which means that the judgment is one of several

*Reprinted with permission from the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library.
Vol. 36, No. 1, September, 1953.
58

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 RONALD PEACOCK 59

possible ones. But the interpretation is neither fanciful nor wilful;

it does refer to a social reality. The argument applies also to the
work of Giraudoux which to a superficial glance seems to seek
refuge in "myths" in order to say something "universal" about
life, transcending the localized contemporary situation, but it is
in fact profoundly rooted in that situation.
There are some plays that deal, in the strictest sense, with "social
problems." Examples are better found in Shaw, perhaps, than any-
where else. Widowers' Houses is one. It deals with a problem
arising directly from the economic organization of society. Many
more plays, while not exactly formulating a social problem, treat
a social theme in the sense that a comment on society is implicit
in their picture. The Cherry Orchard comes under this head. The
plays of Ibsen that most influenced the social problem type may
themselves in fact be grouped more comfortably under this general
head than as examples of purely social problems. It is more ac-
curate to say of them that they focus moral problems having social
implications. For the crux of the matter nearly always is not so
much a specific "social problem" as the situation of the individual
in relation to the society he lives in. Ibsen attacks beliefs and the
people-persons, human beings-who hold them. If institutions
or social customs crack under his criticism it is because the ante-
cedent beliefs on which they rest show up as hollow. This subtlety
of moral relationships between individual beliefs and social prac-
tices is the very fibre of Ibsen's drama.
It is this relationship between an individual's world and a social
world that I want to analyze in connection with a few plays of
this century. To isolate a body of plays as social problem drama is
not enough in view of the omnipresence of the social theme in vari-
ous forms. For the larger perspective shows a continuous process
of social change and a continuing preoccupation with it in the
drama. In that process the emphasis is sometimes on the person
and sometimes on society, but always both are involved. The plays
I shall use to illustrate the argument are Ibsen's A Doll's House,
Kaiser's Gas, Giraudoux' La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu, and
Eliot's The Family Reunion.
A Doll's House and plays close to it, like Ghosts, Pillars of Soci-
ety, The Wild Duck, and others, present a cumulative picture of
society and it is one illumined by angry lights. Ibsen's imagination
is always haunted by a greatideal of what man might be if he
could realize his humanity to perfection. This ideal, dominated to a
large extent by the romantic spirit inherited from the late
eighteenth century, implied a number of qualities such as free-
dom, integrity, joyous creativeness, natural innocence and dignity,
the sense of right, that are in fact rarely or never found together

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 60 The Tulane Drama Review

but have nevertheless great power and suggestiveness as a com-

posite ideal. Ibsen knew too much about human nature to make
the mistake of trying to portray his ideal directly in idealized
characters; but he most certainly and ruthlessly measured people
against his nostalgic moral aspiration and only late in his life and
work did he soften his judgments and begin to inculcate a doctrine
of charity. His feelings about the ideal are focused in characters
who, although portrayed convincingly as real people, that is,
human beings both frail and strong, reflect his own aspiration and
undergo an illumination; such are Nora and Mrs. Alving. His feel-
ings of moral despair, on the other hand, are reflected in his picture
of a corrupt society; and indeed in these plays the insistence on
corruption is so emphatic that one feels Ibsen wanted to give
physical reality to the moral stench and assail his audience-the
society he attacked-with it. In A Doll's House Dr. Rank, em-
bittered by his disease, fulminates against the rottenness lying just
beneath the surface in nearly every family, while physical horror
is exploited to the utmost in Ghosts.
Ibsen's dramatic pattern combines incisive moral analysis with
an expressive unburdening of the feelings. To achieve the former
he uses his principal character as a pivot. Nora Helmer has been,
before the beginnings of her crisis, part of the milieu which arouses
Ibsen's indignation; she then emerges from it through a subtle
development of her selfhood and awareness of herself in relation
to others, particularly her husband; until finally Ibsen has focused
in her protestations his own analysis of what society calls "mar-
riage" and "love."
The particulars of Nora's situation may have lost most of their
power to move us, since the relations between men and women
both in and outside marriage have changed so much. To appre-
ciate the sheer dramatic effect of her decision to leave home, which
rested on the horror of the audience at the mere thought of such
a step, we have to recall the social ostracism incurred by a woman
who took it in an age when the professions were not open to
women. This effect has been lost. On the other hand we can still
hear, and possibly with keener ears, the lapidary note in the grea
discussion scene with which the play reaches its climax and in
which Nora discloses herself as the type of the protestant rebel.
Nora. . . . I can no longer content myself with what most people say, or with
what is found in books. I must think things over for myself and get t
understand them.

Helmer. Can you not understand your place in your own home? Have you not
a reliable guide in such matters as that ?--have you no religion?
Nora. I am afraid, Torvald, I do not exactly know what religion is.
Helmer. What are you saying?

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 RONALD PEACOCK 61

Nora. I know nothing

firmed. He told us tha
am away from all thi
will see if what the cle
me.

When Helmer accuses her further of having no moral se

answers in the same vein of simple honesty, admitting ig
but expressing willingness to work the problem out for he
admits Helmer's charge that she doesn't understand the conditions
of the world in which she lives:
Nora. No, I don't. But now I am going to try. I am going to see if I can mak
out who is right, the world or I.
Helmer's answer to this: "You are ill, Nora; you are delirious; I
almost think you are out of your mind," is the comment of those
who live in darkness.
The history of prophets and poets can show more exalted ex
amples of spiritual birth or rebirth. Yet however modest the p
son and circumstances of Ibsen's obscure middle-class young w
she assumes heroic stature in this scene. Step by step, with sim
plicity and logic, she strips every pretence from her life, her m
riage, and her love. But this she does in the spirit of affirmat
not of destruction; and so a great dramatic and moral exhilara
radiates from her discovery of her self and her responsibility
her age she appeared as the representative of all womanhood ab
to engage in a struggle for emancipation. But Ibsen has put him
into her actions and words. Through the local particulars of dr
and period in his play we see that Nora's case is that of man al
together, liberating himself from falsehood in order to start af
and work out his salvation with gods and men.
It is fatally easy to assimilate Ibsen to the sociological though
of the later nineteenth century. Since his plays do contai
criticism of "society" they seem to fall pat into a broad pictur
social change. But Ibsen as far as beliefs are concerned is situat
before the age of "economic and social" man. Society to Ibse
not a sociological conception but a moral one. It is the herd wit
its system of subterfuges for protecting its weaknesses and self
ness. His rebels are made to hold out against this herd and j
it. There is in his picture certainly a sense of social pressures,
cluding economic ones. Nora's crisis is precipitated partly by h
economic dependence which led her to dishonest ways of procur
money. But Ibsen's world is innocent of the play of "social,"
extra-individual, forces as that idea has since his time been
derstood. His people are not the products of such forces. They
weak, cowardly, selfish, gregarious, but they are individuals w
a potential will of their own. Ibsen's indignation is not aro

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 62 The Tulane Drama Review

by the faulty organization of society-for that we have to look to

Shaw-but by men defacing their own nature with those grimaces
of beasts that Rubek, in When We Dead Awaken, portrayed in his
sculpture. Man is here still conceived in the traditional image of
a person with a moral sense, with free will, with the knowledge
of good and evil--even though he makes mistakes-and with com-
plete responsibility. In Ibsen's world the individual, the private
person, makes the decisions that matter, social customs and insti-
tutions flowing from them. Ibsen's idea of man is that he stands
alone and makes his decision. Because of this his drama, although
it embraces criticism of "society," is primarily a critique of moral-
ity pivoted on faith in the realization of a human ideal in the free
individual.

For a drama that provides a criticism of society, in a stricter

sense of the term, we may turn to Georg Kaiser's Gas. The people
of this play, with one exception, exist only in functional relation
to an organized mass, their salient characteristic being that they
have lost their individual independence, both in character and
actions.

Gas is not a great play; it suffers from stridency and over-em-

phatic style, and the feeling about "humanity" that makes it a
violent rhetorical protest against certain tendencies in modern
society remains crude and sentimental. Yet it is a very remarkable
play because, using a bold and incisive method for the theatre, it
projected an original vision of the society that was fast developing
within the liberal bourgeois framework which was still what the
surface showed. In the general development of this century the
date of the play-1918-has significance as marking the end of
World War I and therewith of the first stage of the transition from
the liberal capitalist society of the nineteenth century to the social-
ized states and planned centralized societies of the following era.
Kaiser's theme is the dehumanizing influence of technocratic social
organization. His method is to portray such a society, bring catas-
trophe upon it from one of its own elements, and use a main char-
acter as a foil to point his moral. His picture shows a factory com-
munity, producing the most up-to-date form of energy, not only
run with maximum scientific efficiency but also completely social-
ized, since its head, the Billionaire's Son, has renounced his wealth
for the sake of the new ideal, by which the profits are shared. In
this perfectly, even idyllically, arranged life an explosion occurs
which by all the laws of science should not. Kaiser makes great
play with the symbolic "formula" that represents the limit of sci-
entific exactitude and yet still leaves something to the unexplain-
able and uncontrollable; so that there is a dangerous flaw not only
in the formula but in the nature of the society which is built on

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 RONALD PEACOCK 63

the idea behind it. The Billionaire's Son learns his lesson from the
destruction and suffering and turns away from a society and a
philosophy that are at the mercy of such a catastrophe. If the
factory with its formulae and machines is liable to such a break-
down why be enslaved to it? He recovers for himself the human
sense of values of the pre-technological life and, finding a new
ideal for his philanthropy, imagines a farming community in which
men can be natural and human again. This vapid return-to-nature
or agrarian philosophy is as weak as the picture of the futuristic
worker-technician-factory culture is incisive.
This gospel he tries to preach to his factory workers, technicians,
his chief Engineer, and industrialists; the play is a sequence of
scenes in which he implores them to see the light. But no one does.
The workers want their work back; they demand only the dis-
missal of the Engineer responsible for the breakdown to appease
their sense of oppression and loss. The Engineer is also in opposi-
tion, deriving his particular form of stubbornness from profes-
sional pride. The industrialists have only one idea, which is to get
the "gas" factory re-started so that their own concerns have power
again. All these classes of men are united in their opposition to the
Billionaire's Son because they are no longer conscious of any
meaning in themselves except as parts of a machine and in their
world all society has become a machine. Its denizens live wholly
under the technocratic compulsion that enslaves every class of its
servants. Their obtuseness and inflexibility are the signs of servi-
tude. They have lost the conception of their own nature as some-
thing they might still have; they cannot think themselves out of
their situation; they are all engaged in a constrained misdirection
of their natural feelings, ignorant of how their humanity has
already slipped beyond their reach.
Toller was to say in connection with his own technique that you
can see men as "realistic human beings" but you can also see the
same men, in a flash of vision, as puppets which move mechanically
in response to external direction. The people in Kaiser's picture
of society are puppets in this sense, with their meaning withdrawn
from their humanness and concentrated in their function, for
which one part of them may be alone of significance, their hand,
or eye, for instance. In a sullen way these people are indeed aware
that they are distortions; but great pathos (in spite of the over-
emphasis) derives from their inability to revolt and liberate them-
selves; so long as someone is "punished" for the explosion they are
satisfied to let the process start again:
Miidchen: Von meinem Bruder sage ich das!-Ich wusste
nicht, dass ich einen Bruder hatte. Ein Mensch ging mor-
gens aus dem Hause und kam abends-und schlief. Oder

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 64 The Tulane Drama Review

er ging abends weg und war

-Eine Hand war gross--die a
schlief nicht. Die stiess in einer Bewegung hin und her-
Tag und Nacht. Diese Hand war der Mensch!-Wo blieb
mein Bruder? Der friiher neben mir spielte-und Sand
mit seinen beiden HMinden baute?-In Arbeit stiirzte er.
Die brauchte nur die eine Hand von ihm ... Da frass die
Explosion auch die Hand. Da hatte mein Bruder das
Letzte gegeben!-Ist es zu wenig?-Hatte mein Bruder
gefeilscht um den Preis, als man die Hand von ihm fiir
den Hebel brauchte? Streifte er nicht willig den Bruder
ab-und verschrumpfte in die zdihlende Hand?-Zahlte er
nicht zuletzt die Hand noch? - Ist die Bezahlung zu
schlecht-um den Ingenieur zu heischen?-Mein Bruder
ist meine Stimme-: arbeitet nicht--ehe der Ingenieur
nicht vom Werk ist!-Arbeitet nicht-meines Bruders
Stimme ist es!!

One realizes at this point that Kaiser has taken several steps
beyond the simple protests at the misery of underpaid workers,
uninteresting factory jobs, and slums, consequent on the industrial
revolution. These were familiar to the later nineteenth century,
both in literature and sociological writing. In drama the humani-
tarian protest at social misery is well seen in Hauptmann's Die
Weber. Kaiser's protest is not against misery of that kind, held in
abhorrence as an affront to human beings. His socialized world has
removed those things. He protests against the loss of human status.
The shrill nostalgia of the Billionaire's Son for "den Menschen"
would not be so excessive if it were a case simply of suffering, for
that brings human qualities and virtues into play. He fights his
battle against men who have lost the knowledge of what man is.
They are morally destitute because the private world is gone. A
wholly public world engulfs the human one. Every person is chain-
ed to a function in a closely articulated mechanism; and when
human creatures exist as no more than a function within a whole,
the whole itself is not human.

The nature of Kaiser's vision of society in this play has no

to my knowledge been explicitly related to the conditions of 191
18 in Germany, when, under the stress of a war no longer offensi
but desperately defensive, the country was converted into a mili
tary machine. Here one might seek an embryonic model of what
we have since called the totalitarian society, and we remember
too that World War II made "total war" and "total mobilization"
the rule everywhere. If Gas is based on German society of 1917-
18, as I think it is, it gives, however "expressionistic" in method, a
vision of reality. Clearly a process of generalization is involved;
but the play presents an image of the skeletal structure of a certain

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 RONALD PEACOCK 65

kind of society. Altho

true. And on this tru
that provides some justification for an emotional atmosphere so
intense as to border on hysteria. The pessimism is strong; and with
reason, when the end of the individual and his moral independence
is involved.
At the side of this, Ibsen looks very nineteenth century. Great
changes have occurred. If, as we said, "society" for Ibsen was the
herd with its fears and stupidities, but still a human herd, here
in Kaiser it is the product of economic and industrial forces which
transcend the individual will. His drama is in consequence a
critique of society, or social structure, in the twentieth century
sociological meaning of the words. His picture, with its unnamed
persons representing classes or functions, its elimination of the
private man and his private life (the daughter and her officer hus-
band who runs into debt and commits suicide are the faintest
echoes of "bourgeois" life), its sharp stylizations streamlining t
features of the technocratic culture, and its clipped, pounding
bal style, shows an adjustment of dramatic form not only to so
extraneous principle of style or subjective expression but to the
new social realities.

It is a noticeable feature of Gas that the nature and quali

Menschentum remain obscure. Kaiser's feeling is all concentrated
in his protest, in the name of something referred to as humanity,
against its elimination. Hence on the one hand we have a stark,
metallic, glinting picture of the system criticized, and on the other
an explosion of rebellious sentiment. The former we see to be
analytically correct; the indignation and pity we take as a sign of
good faith. But we are not given to feel in our minds or senses
some quality of living, or thought, or sensibility, or character,
recognizable as belonging to what we mean in an ideal sense by
"humanity." In short, the play, although a strained expression of
human resentment and nostalgia, contains no person; or situation,
or words that vibrate, if only for a moment, with the ideal so con-
stantly evoked in name.
Giraudoux' dramatic work, which belongs to the years 1928 to
1945, possesses the quality absent in Kaiser. It is saturated with the
indefinable essence of humanity, understood as a delicate sense of
the situation of human beings, living under the shadow of Fate,
of gods and devils, amidst men and women of incredible com-
plexity of character and given particularly to bellicosity, but also
aspiring to happiness and goodness in a way that touches even
those who do not know very much about such things. In one sense
the dramatic pattern of a central focus-character in opposition to
others, seen in both Ibsen and Kaiser, repeats itself in Giraudoux;

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 66 The Tulane Drama Review

it is by now conventional to
But such characters in Giraudoux do not incorporate in themselves
a single idea of "the human person," as so many of Ibsen's, dif-
ferent as they are, represent the struggle for the true self. They
are drawn, it is true, with psychological art and are real enough
with their motives and emotions to fit into a story. But they are
above all the vehicles of certain qualities admired by the ethical
sensitiveness of humanity whose spokesman Giraudoux makes
himself. Judith, with her great love, Electre with her uncomprom-
ising sense of justice, Alcmene, innocent, chaste, and faithful,
Hector with his sense of brotherhood, La Folle with her unerring
instinct for simple and good people--all of them are very human,
and yet a little more than human, endowed by the abstracting im-
agination with an eloquence of person and function that derives
not from themselves but from the human faith of their creator.

The use of a myth provides the perfect opportunity for set

such quasi-real persons in motion and making them the meeting-
point for generalized ideals and the personal forms in which every-
thing human has to appear. Hector in La Guerre de Troie n'aura
pas lieu is such a person. In him and his attempt to prevent a
further outbreak of war, struggling first with the established
habits and beliefs of his family and fellow Trojans, then with
the wilful bellicosity of Demokos and the warmongers, and finally
with Destiny, there is concentrated the immense nostalgia for peace
which flooded the hearts of Europeans in the 'thirties of this cen-
tury. At that time the success of Fascism and National Socialism
represented a counter-blow to all the post-1918 endeavors to
organize an international society. The outstanding event of the
'twenties was the Treaty of Locarno; the symbolic act of hope was
the institution of the League of Nations. It was in the late 'twen-
ties that the "war books," mostly of pacifist intentions and headed
by Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, burst on to the
literary scene, focusing general feelings on the subject in a genera-
tion that had lived through the horrors of modern warfare from
1914 to 1918. The outstanding events of the 'thirties, on the other
hand, were the victory of the National Socialists in 1933, the Abys-
sinian War, the Spanish Civil War, and the various unilateral acts
of Hitler's foreign policy. It was the age of the "threat of war"
and of paralyzed attempts to evade it. But the threat of war was
simply the symptom of the problem as to how international rela-
tions should be organized, by federation of free peoples or cen-
tralization under a predominant power. The national problem of
socialization here reached its international form, and the differ-
ence, both in time and theme, between Kaiser and Giraudoux re-
flects this logical development of the modern situation. For the

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 RONALD PEACOCK 67

vital theme now concerns the relations between the different

branches of human society. What does man, within the brother-
hood and unity of the human race, owe to man and to himself?
The force of Giraudoux' play lies in the simplicity of feeling over
the central issue; its delicacy, however, in the way the public theme
is treated in connection with the complex passion of men and the
play of fatality.
It would be profitable to examine in detail Giraudoux' adroit-
ness of method in touching, through his persons and their discus-
sions, on virtually all the factors that agitated people's feelings
on this problem at the time. The brilliant satire on the procedures
of international jurists in the Busiris passage may be adduced as
an example. But we must be content to define briefly Giraudoux'
method in contrast to that of Ibsen and Kaiser. The new pattern
shows a public theme--in this play, peace and brotherhood in all
their reasonableness-joined to a generalized ethical sensitiveness
as to what constitutes "humanity." The problem is not in any
sense a private one, as Nora Helmer's was; it concerns nations and
humanity as a whole. The peculiar fictitiousness of Hector as a
mythical character emphasizes this by contrast with the contem-
porary substantiality of Nora. Yet on the other hand it is not only
a social question, as in Gas; for the distinguishing feature of Gir-
audoux' plays is a refinement of ethical feeling that only flourishes
in persons as part of their essential individual character and human
form, and can never inhere in impersonal "social" actions. And
this is expressed in the fact that Hector, like other Giraudoux
characters, in spite of being so obvious a device, assumes never-
theless the form of a person.
We perceive now that Giraudoux, using a framework taken
from classical mythology, achieved a brilliant invention of method.
His subject and emotions were absolutely contemporary, but of
a kind that could not possibly have been treated realistically-you
can only put modern politics and diplomacy into a play as carica-
ture, as Shaw did in Geneva. Giraudoux extracts the myth from
its own historico-religious context, fills the person with contem-
porary public meanings, and thus, creating a new form that is half
myth, half allegory, makes it do service again, giving an aristo-
cratic aesthetic quality to what might otherwise not have risen
above propaganda or dull moralizing. Such is the character not
only of La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu but of other plays of this
author. They avoid the particular reality of historical or contem-
porary events, substituting a quasi-real world, but only in order to
clarify issues of contemporary urgency.
The drama of Giraudoux thus appears as a critique of humanity;
that is, of the human kind. In a succession of plays he meditates,

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 68 The Tulane Drama Review

amidst all the fantasy, caprice, and wit of his theatrical style,
on general ideals such as pity, charity, justice, loyalty, faith, and
so on, which together constitute humanity understood as the char-
acteristic form of existence separating man from the rest of crea-
tion. Ibsen's characters seek self in order to be real. The people
in Gas are emasculated of both self and humanity. Giraudoux ex-
plores in his mythical fictions the nature of human quality and its
place in the modern world. He is sensitive, not labored; sceptical
and bewildered, but not without hope, and in no way a clamant
castigator of morals. At the same time as his ethical idealism is
diffused through his plays, so also is a sense of man's precarious
situation, since he lives subject to chance and fatality. From these
two things-the humanity expressed in ideals, and that witnessed
in helplessness--emanates the tragic pathos of his work.
If a play like Gas leaves one with a feeling of something lost or
abandoned, the work of Giraudoux gives the impression of em-
barrassment. Kaiser protests against a world in which humanity
is eliminated; Giraudoux, gentle and civilized, is saddened by one
in which humanity cannot make its values effective. Kaiser's per-
sons are marionettes, those of Giraudoux fictions of the moral
conscience battling against powers they cannot cope with or do not
understand, like Judith with God and the priests, Alcmene with
Jupiter, or Hector with the spirit of war. As individuals they find
themselves involved in a public situation without being able to
establish a harmonious relationship with it. The decisions their
own virtues require for themselves are contravened by incalculable
factors operating apart from individuals and their values, but not
apart from human life. Thus the world of private values is not
adjusted to the public situation, yet the latter is all-important.
Giraudoux reflects with great accuracy what is a dominant feature
of the modern situation as experienced by many people: the sense
of good and noble qualities lives on in natural and perhaps philo-
sophically ungrounded forms, while the dogmatic moral legislation
that alone secures an adjustment of public and private forms is
lacking.
One of the main impressions left by his work is of an aristocrat
of mind and sensibility commenting on life. His mythical fictions
give the semblance of drama, but they also express a withdrawal
from true drama into that kind of dialogue which springs not from
separate persons but from a divided self, or one that habitually
ruminates on moral intricacies whilst others live by cutting the
Gordian knot. The sense of the real in Giraudoux comes entirely
from the author's personal voice. It is he, not "life," that we
feel everywhere. His persons, like his fantasy and wit ceaselessly
at work, are valid not as poetic intuitions but as vehicles of his sen-

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 RONALD PEACOCK 69

sitive meditation. Giraudoux ponders real situations, contempor-

ary and public ones; he himself is real, uttering his thoughts; but
his dramatic characters are shadows whose unreality reflects the
unreality of the individual's situation in contemporary life--his
being encased in a private world of values and victimized by a
public world of events. Giraudoux' myths are in one sense a posi-
tive assertion of artistic form, in another a symptom of a malad-
justed society.
The three authors considered up to this point work without
orthodox religion. In that they differ little from most other drama-
tists of the period. The great exceptions are Hofmannsthal,
Claudel, and Eliot, whose work might be expected to throw further
light on the problem of private and social worlds. The two former
yield less in this respect than Eliot, since their plays are devoted
to more exclusively religious feelings and events. It is true that
a play like Das Grosse Welttheater has a social meaning within its
religious imagery; and one like Le Soulier de Satin has persons
with very real human passions. Yet their action moves towards a
moment when the merely human is transfigured with a divine
meaning and at such a moment what we call the "social" has little
relevance. Eliot, by contrast, observes constantly the social world,
the plays extending an analysis begun in the earlier poems. He
has himself emphasized that he wanted to portray in his plays
people in contemporary circumstances. This no doubt constituted
a problem for drama in verse but it was not an accidental or merely
ambitious aim. Eliot has the modern situation deliberately under
view, his analysis of it springing from a mind sensitive to the com-
plexity of civilized issues in any modern society and interested in
them all. The poet of The Waste Land and the Four Quartets wrote
also After Strange Gods, the commentaries of The Criterion, and
the Notes towards the Definition of Culture.
His plays have met with much hostile criticism and yet they
have shown an astonishing vigor and power to move audiences,
one reason being doubtless that they do succeed in touching modern
life at so many points, not only by presenting contemporary people
but in the manner of doing so, which shows the characteristic
modern awareness of intricacy in psychology, sociology, manners,
morals, religion, and culture. Sin, expiation, and martyrdom are
in the center of his picture, ideas disagreeable to a sceptical and
scientifically minded, or merely lighthearted, public. But they are
not there as pure religion flung in the face of life. They fascinate
and disturb because meaning falls from them on to aspects of
modern life on which one might not think religion directly imping-
ed, and in respect of which other current philosophies have notably
failed to find meaning. A passage in the Notes towards the Defini-

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 70 The Tulane Drama Review

tion of Culture provides an illuminating gloss on the characters of

The Family Reunion (and The Cocktail Party):
The reflection that what we believe is not merely what
we formulate and subscribe to, but that behavior is also
belief, and that even the most conscious and developed
of us live also at the level on which belief and behavior
cannot be distinguished, is one that may, once we allow
our imagination to play upon it, be very disconcerting. It
gives an importance to our most trivial pursuits, to the
occupation of our every minute, which we cannot contem-
plate long without the horror of nightmare. When we con-
sider the quality of the integration required for the full
cultivation of the spiritual life, we must keep in mind the
possibility of grace and the exemplars of sanctity in order
not to sink into despair. And when we consider the prob-
lem of evangelization, of the development of a Christian
society, we have reason to quail. To believe that we are
religious people and that other people are without religion
is a simplification which approaches distortion. To reflect
that from one point of view religion is culture, and from
another point of view culture is religion, can be very dis-
turbing (p. 32).
Here we see promulgated a criterion for the quality, not of
"humanity," but of the spiritual life, which may be taken to mean
human life irradiated by a transcendent power, every feature of
behavior coming finally under its influence. Against this criterion
Eliot measures modern forms of culture. All the persons in The
Family Reunion represent these forms, according to their character,
tastes, gifts, possessions, and education, from the uncles and aunts
to Amy and Mary, and then Agatha; and they are judged against
the elected person at the center, a pattern repeated with variations
in The Cocktail Party.
We may note in Eliot's work a degree of loathing of life that
quite exceeds a realistic acknowledgement of corruption or native
wickedness in man, and this no doubt gives rise to a despair that
needs redemption and also to nostalgia for sainthood and the
scarcely curbed contempt for anything lower than that. Yet such
extremes of feeling cannot really impair the main structure of
Christian belief nor the criticism of man and society deriving from
it. This faith restores decisively to the individual both meaning
and responsibility, and removes from the conception of "society"
and the "social" the materialistic and secular meanings that have
come to predominate. The terms we have used-private and public,
even individual and society--cease to be strictly relevant, except
as secondary distinctions, since a theological conception is primary.
Ibsen's rebellious individual, Giraudoux' aristocratic and sensitive

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 RONALD PEACOCK 71

humanity, Kaiser's articulated society, all of which show what can

only be a partial view of life and civilization, are here displaced
by a conception of greater comprehensiveness. Extending our clas-
sification of these plays as critiques of man and society it is easy
now to borrow from Eliot's own terms the word that describes his
drama in relation to the others we have considered. It is a critique
of culture.
It does not follow that because culture, in this context, com-
prehends more and deeper meanings Eliot's dramatic art is superior
to that of the other authors here considered, for dramatic power
does not depend on a well-ordered philosophy. But the kind of
integration of dramatic forms attempted by Eliot in his plays cor-
responds to the degree of integration envisaged in his idea of true
culture. For what he attempts to do is to portray a realistic scene
-the family in the country house, the barrister with wife, mis-
tress, and social circle-through which an underlying mythical pat-
tern diffuses its meanings to the surface; so that the "real" be-
comes, without being negated or displaced, transparent, and
through it the myth appears as the immanent meaning. In a drama
based on such a view both realistic and mythical forms are authen-
tic; the one is more than a preoccupation with limited aspects of
social reality, and the other more than a modern aesthetic device.
The symbolism of Eliot's characters is implicit because the per-
sonal form contains the meaning. Similarly, the mythical power
inheres in the real human situation, since people like Harry and
Celia, unlike figures from past myths, begin as ordinary persons
leading ordinary lives and remain human even after the assump-
tion of their distinctive functions. The incorporation of elements
from primitive or ancient ritual, though not uniformly successful,
is at least relevant, since it fortifies the endowment of the whole
situation (especially in The Family Reunion) with its complex
meaning. Eliot's considered technique of verse also makes an ap-
propriate and organic contribution, pendulating between the realis-
tic surface and the underlying myth, the verse that is very close
to the prosaic, and that which draws on all the expressive sources,
ancient and modern, of poetry.
It may be that the unifying of many strands of feeling and ex-
perience in the picture of life presented in Eliot's plays admits of
approval in theory without being unchallengeably successful in
dramatic practice. But the attempt to express this in drama by
a combination of realistic modern setting and emergent myth is
unique and, because of the range of experience and thought in-
volved, infinitely interesting.
The examination of these four plays throws a vivid light on the
relation of drama to contemporary life as expressed both in its

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 72 The Tulane Drama Review

themes and forms. For each springs from a distinct phase in the
conditions of life in the past fifty or sixty years, and the originality
of form is in each case seen to depend on an acute visionary assess-
ment of the essential reality of the situation in both its individual
and social aspects. Drama, like other literary forms, is always
created by a particular imagination, but it is never simply a per-
sonal statement. It is always about men-in-society, and a drama-
tist must be interested in that in the same way as the general run
of men, however much greater his insight or stronger his emotions.
The four cases here examined show four dramatists with their
finger on the pulse of events and social change. Ibsen's analy
realism, Kaiser's expressionistic imagery, Giraudoux' myth-f
tasies, Eliot's ritualistic realism, are distinct dramatic forms for
distinct visions of man in society and amidst historical change.
They each contain a critique of the human situation at given
moments, shaped by acuteness of feeling and perception working
together; and it is to signalize their particular contributions within
this general function that we have described them severally as
critiques of morality, society, humanity, and culture.
The comparative method is especially fruitful, indeed essential,
for this topic. The changes involved have been broadly similar in
all European societies but they have not all been expressed, or not
equally well, in any one literature; not in the Norwegian, nor the
German, nor the French, nor the English, nor any other. National
genius plays its part in these high points of expression; for the
Protestant austerity of Ibsen, the strained emotionalism of Kaiser,
the civilized intelligence of Giraudoux, the resort to verse drama
in Eliot, to mention only a few features, all appear with peculiar
appropriateness against the respective national backgrounds. The
four plays to which interest has been directed were not chosen to
make an argument; on the contrary the latter emerged from see-
ing the pattern into which they naturally fall. They are plays that
have attained an uncommon fame throughout Europe, which seems
to confirm that situations evolving everywhere were expressed best
now in one country, now in another.

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