Page:Poetry, a magazine of verse, Volume 7 (October 1915-March 1916).djvu/50

POETRY: A Magazine of Verse continuous famine. Prose playwrights have furnished us very little more that is substantial, very little that lasts beyond a season's run. Beside continental authors, the American playwright, as evidenced in recent books giving a comparative outlook, makes but a poor showing. And England is not much better off. Critics have tried to help the situation by declaring that the American playwright is learning his craft, the "well-made play," often the antithesis of all that is abundant and vital, growing steadily in amount if not in quality. The critics fail to realize that this is a purely external gain, if gain at all; the inherent weakness of American plays being a poverty of imagination. Ingenuity and "plot" can not atone for this defect. The need is deeper and more serious than one suspects.

Poverty of imagination implies a lack of sympathetic understanding of character, and there can be no fine drama without this understanding. In our plays today we have types rather than personalities, external action rather than that internal conflict of destiny or character out of which really vital drama springs. (The word conflict itself has become narrowed in meaning through its connection with plot, but it is not in that sense that it is used here.) The stage has become a platform for sociological propaganda, for reform, for all sorts of current journalistic ideas. Nowhere do we find that beauty of life intensified in moments of grief or passion which endears the older dramatists to our memory. "If Homer were alive to-day," Mr. Yeats says, "he would only resist, after a deliberate struggle the temptation