"SOLOMON EAGLE" ON ABRAHAM LINCOLN.*
• Books in General. Byr Solomon Eagle. London: Hodder and Stoughton. IS. 64. " SoLoniox EAGLE" has just reprinted a third series of his Books in General from the New Statesman. Some of the essays
have kept, some, like insufficiently boiled jam, have gone " worky." Among those still delightful are a little essay on
Literary Publicity in the Future, that on Maeterlinck, and that on Mr. Wells's History of the World, but the article to which the reader of the present moment will probably turn at once is that on Mr. Drinkwater's Abraham Lincoln, for this play has just teen revived at the Lyceum. "Solomon Eagle" is far
from being a professional dramatic critic, for he confesses that he rare* goes inside a theatre. Therefore it is perhaps because he is unjaded by sitting through two or three dozen mediocre plays a year that in his article we miss something of the tone of relief which has pervaded other writers' criticisms. This omission of the usual preparation by degrees of mortifica- tion, however, may perhaps be considered to make his criticism more, not less, valuable. When he comes to particulars, we find that he likes Mr. Drinkwater's notion of presenting a sort of film of Lincoln's life in independent scenes, also his plan of linking up the scenes with eloeuted choruses. The choruses themselves, however, give "Solomon Eagle" " goose-flesh " —a most effective phrase. He says he saw
"all sorts of defects in characterizatios, interpretation, machinery ; from the absence of that humein• which always clung about the hero to the fact that the whole seven scenes took place indoors ; from the melodrama of Mr. Hook to the unconvincing and overdone pathos of the condemned sentry, who was so handsome, so brave, spoke such perfect English, and had committed his offence under such extremely palliating circumstances that it was unbelievable that anyone can have meant to execute him. But the fact remained that my eyes and ears were glued to the actors throughout ; that in places I was profoundly moved ; that I was as sorry when Lincoln was shot as I should have been had I been present at the event ; and that I went away saying that not even the ban on smoking would keep me away from the theatre if there were many plays about which appealed as this one had done to both my intelli- gence and my emotion. There is no poetry about Mr. Drinkwater's verse choruses, but there is a good deal in his prose-play."
Here he continues with a plea for the poetic drama. The witty comedy of manners needs no poetry ; in that sphere our age (he instances Arms and the Man and The Importance of Being Earnest) has produced work equal to the best Restoration writers. But we cannot have a Lear or an As You Like It without poetry (not necessarily verse). Our modern tragedies, he complains, give one the feeling of pain, not as of a great grief or of a religious experience, but of a toothache or "a month in a slum." We are sure that "Solomon Eagle" is right ; what we are not sure about is that Mr. Drinkwater has as yet hit upon the best technique for the poetic drama, as apart from the historic drama. In the historic drama we need a, certain amount of technical realism. In Mr. Chesterton's memorable couplet :— " Geography is about maps, Biography is about chaps."
The historical drama is also about "chaps." Abraham Lincoln, is a play that is interesting mainly because a man called Abraham Lincoln lived and behaved much as Mr. Drinkwater has shown him behaving. That is to say, the historical drama is about a "chap"; poetical drama is about types of men and the working out of emotions. It does not matter to us in the least whether
there was a king of Denmark called Hamlet, who was succeeded by his brother, and whose son was killed before he came to the
throne, or whether the Venetian Republic) once employed a Moorish general who was "perplexed in the extreme." The cinema-like series of scenes, so effective when we want to learn of the actual events which happened to an actual "chap," cease to be useful when we are interested, not intrinsically in facts, but in general principles which certain events have been chosen to illustrate.
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