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tunity for satire and wit; while Androcles and the Lion (1912) and Pygmalion (1913) are representative of later powerful and mature work. Shaw's dramas are uneven in quality; but it is evident that his very originality makes it difficult to pass over any of his plays lightly. He is not a great technical artist like Pinero, but he is an original and clever dramatist and, more than all else, an eminent critic of life.

92. James Matthew Barrie.-To pass from George Bernard Shaw to Sir James Matthew Barrie (1860) is to go from realism to romance, from satire to delicate fancy. Barrie is distinguished as novelist as well as dramatist, and the tenderness and charm of his Sentimental Tommy and The Little Minister are also in Peter Pan and What Every Woman Knows. To his fine fantasy he has added a genuine spiritual quality, best seen in his emphasis on the child in literature; and he has also excelled in handling the mind of woman. Naturally with such emphasis he is somewhat apart from his contemporaries. For him the stage is not for problems; he has no propaganda. Accordingly, by those who are most "advanced" he has sometimes been called a reactionary. He is, however, rather an idealist searching for something more enduring than the latest whim of fashion; and in conception of character he is probably unsurpassed by any living dramatist. Withal he has been a most practical and facile worker, happily finding in America at least, in Miss Maude Adams, an artist fully capable of interpreting his productions. Probably most famous of his several very famous plays are The Little Minister (1897), The Admirable Crichton (1903), Peter Pan (1904), and What Every Woman Knows (1908). The Admirable Crichton

with humor and skill handles the situation of the family of a peer wrecked on a desert island, where the butler of the family proves himself the most resourceful person in the group. Thoroughly typical of the dramatist are the means to which he resorts in order to sustain interest. Crichton, for instance, left alone by his haughty superiors, depends on nightfall and hunger to bring them to his inviting camp-fire. After two years moreover, when Crichton has fallen in love with Lady Mary, the boom of the cannon of a passing ship indicates that they are about to be rescued, and at once all the questions of returning to the former class distinctions center in a moment of supreme tension. In What Every Woman Knows Barrie also gives beneath the surface a serious study. He will ever be most widely known and loved, however, for Peter Pan, a dramatization of the novel, The Little White Bird. Peter Pan, carefree and full of pranks, visits three little children while they are asleep and teaches them to fly away with him. He carries them to the fairy-world, to the pirate ship, and at last to his own home in the treetops. The play combines fancy, symbolism, and realism, but throughout the whole is also the tenderness that is the very essence of human life. A Kiss for Cinderella (1916) and Dear Brutus (1917) are important in the dramatist's later work.

93. John Galsworthy.-Like Barrie in that he is successful both as dramatist and novelist, but more like Shaw in his emphasis on social problems, is John Galsworthy (1867). This man is not only one of the finest intellects but also one of the most sincere of living English writers simple, straightforward, and humanitarian. Essentially earnest, he never fails to impress his audience

by the worth of what he has to say, and even in his first play, The Silver Box (1906); he revealed his characteristic qualities. Strife (1909) sets forth the contest between capital and labor, the two outstanding figures being Anthony, the honest and misguided capitalist, and Roberts, the honest but equally misguided representative of labor. Justice (1910) is a plea for prison reform. Galsworthy's very good-intention in such plays as these, however, has somehow given them the air of sociological studies rather than of artistic productions, excellent though they may be. Some counteracting fancy was to be seen in Joy (1907), The Pigeon (1912), and The Little Dream (1912). The Eldest Son (1912), The Fugitive (1913), and The Mob (1914), however, return to the dramatist's characteristic vein of seriousness and realism. Even yet he solves none of the problems that he offers; he is still detached, with the smile of experience and the yearning for something better still pondering "the riddle of the world."

94. Stephen Phillips.-Stephen Phillips (1868-1915), unlike most dramatists of recent years, chose verse as his dramatic medium. In 1898, with the publication of his poems, including "Christ in Hades" and "The Woman with the Dead Soul," he became the most discussed poet in England, and on the publication of Paolo and Francesca (1900) criticism as well as the common voice indulged in superlatives. The day of the poetic drama seemed to have come again, and the new author was compared with the greatest figures in English literary history. Herod was presented on the stage in 1900, Paolo and Francesca in 1901, Ulysses and The Sin of David in 1902, and Nero in 1906. These plays, however, did not so much

impress the public in the theatre as in book form. There could be no denying the highly musical quality of much of the poetry of Phillips, or his lyrical imagination, or even a certain command of the mechanics of the stage. All these qualities taken together, however, did not make him an effective dramatist, and his failure to justify the promise of his earlier years furnished the greatest disappointment in recent dramatic history. One critic summing up his work at the time of his death spoke ably as follows: "Though he had his moments of inspiration, he can scarcely be said to have established his right to be accounted a great dramatist. The fertile fancy, power, passion, or sheer literary beauty of his finest scenes exerted a charm that distracted attention from occasional flaws in workmanship, which in other circumstances might have been only too apparent. It would not be true to say that his plays, from Paolo and Francesca to Armageddon, are more akin to romantic melodrama, even of a high order, than to tragedy. They reach emotional heights which are tragic in the fullest and strictest meaning of that word. But, not infrequently, in construction and device, they adopt expedients which are purely melodramatic and theatrical. Of his meditated effects, the climaxes of preconceived situations, he had a secure grasp. He developed them with unfailing skill and brilliant literary and dramatic coloring. Where he failed was in the exposition of causes which should lead logically to results. He was not a great play-maker. He could not weave the pattern of a plot with the plausible ingenuity of Scribe, Sardou, Sheridan, Pinero, or Henry Arthur Jones. In great tragedy there must be the element of apparent inevitability. Even J. Rankin Towse in New York Evening Post.

in dealing with an ancient tale, with prescribed facts, this is a law from which the dramatist has no appeal. It was a law that Mr. Phillips either did not appreciate or disregarded."

95. Granville Barker.-As moral as Galsworthy but excelling him in artistry, as interested in life as Shaw but excelling him in art, is H. Granville Barker (1877—). This well-known dramatist came on the scene just at the time when England was being stirred by various independent movements for the betterment of the theatre and when there was a general clamor for more intellectual freedom. He began life as an actor and in course of time played with such artists as Ben Greet and Mrs. Campbell. From time to time also he produced plays for the Elizabethan Stage Society and in 1904 he assumed the management of the Court Theatre in London. Here he made a great reputation not only by his production of Shakespeare but also by that of the modern intellectual drama of Shaw, Barrie, Galsworthy, Hankin, and himself; and by his later work at other houses as well as at the Court he gave a new standard to the repertory theatre. Among the more interesting and typical of his own plays, which show much influence from Shaw, are The Marrying of Anna Leete (1902), The Voysey Inheritance (1905), and The Madras House (1910). The first of these three plays emphasizes the freedom that comes to woman with the newer knowledge of the world; the second is a comedy of business inviting comparison with Pinero's The Thunderbolt; and the third is a further study of woman in modern society. 96. Irish National Theatre. Lady Gregory. One of the most interesting movements of the new century and one with the greatest measure of success, is that of the Irish

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