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school he complains of "absence of style," "low ideals of form," "too
little imaginative creation." He seems to assume that, while prose
dramati~ts
are on the whole mediocre, verse dramatists are on the whole
imaginative. Yet, outside Yeats, Hofmannsthal, and "the three important
English tragedies" he does not name any good modern plays in verse.
As for the enemy, Schnitzler, Wedekind, Hauptmann, Gorky, and Becque
are ignored. Strindberg is brushed off as a mere pathologist. Ibsen and
Shaw are discussed so briefly that the effect is of dismissal rather than
argument. Even Synge, who opposed the naturalists as eagerly as Mr.
Peacock himself, is found "singularly unhelpful."
As far as its thesis goes,
The Poet in the Theatre
is but another
wistful plea for poetic drama, which, like its predecessors, vastly under–
rates the achievements of naturalism and makes too much of the dis–
tinction between verse and prose. Luckily Mr. Peacock is bigger than
his thesis. Sometimes he seems even to rebel against it; at least he inserts
modifiers which practically cancel the main proposition-as when he
admits that it is unfair to discuss only the unfortunate after-effects of
Ibsenism without doing justice to the real genius of Ibsen. And Mr.
Peacock has more sympathy for Shaw than Mr. Eliot's theory allows.
He almost manages to make a loophole for Shaw by claiming that
though naturalism ruins tragedy it can be adapted to the purposes of
comedy. But the thesis intervenes and we are told that Shaw's "plays do
not live as plays beyond the fall of the curtain." Which is simply not
true. Perhaps it is not surprising that the champion of poetic drama
should find much to say for Chekhov. The chapter on him is very good.
But, ridden by his thesis, Mr. Peacock cannot allow himself to find
Chekhov's plays satisfying. For all their fineness of fiber, he thinks them
eccentric and structureless. Which is simply not so.
Mr. Peacock has too big a mind to stay always in the theater. He
is at his best discussing the dominance of fiction in modern times and
telling how modern poets and novelists have used dramatic patterns in
their nondramatic forms. One is bound to agree with him that the novel–
ists have done much more with modern psychological knowledge and
awareness than the playwrights have; it may also be true that our sense
of history is, as he maintains, unfavorable to dramatic art. What one
regrets is that all Mr. Peacock's discussions are so brief. Since his book
was written precisely to elaborate the cryptic hints and
aperfuS
of Mr.
Eliot he should have done so much more fully. All too often he has only
added his own cryptic hints and
aperfUS.
Overlooking such a desperately sketchy chapter as that on tragedy
and comedy, which is as full of acute critical observations as it is empty
of historical imagination, let us take up the general problem, which is
