OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES.*
Me. Cossets-Ks apologizes in his Preface to this book of essays for their lack of connexion and unity, and for the antiquity of many of his themes. But his study of Euripides, " who may be Said to have founded the school of dramatic realism," is closely linked up with a detailed examination of Brieux as a moralist ; in another paper he compares and contrasts the dramas of Aeschylus with The Dynasts of Mr. Hardy, finding in the latter such qualities of the former as a certain ruggedness, austerity, elevation, a definite philosophical scheme, and a gift of high-sounding rhetoric and occasional poetry. The Dynasts is " a grandiose exploit which is destined to live." Similarly Demosthenes is renovated as a theme by bracketing him with M. Venizelos. Both had to struggle with very refractory material. " To be a Greek citizen in the modern era is to be conscious of great humiliations. . . . There has been no one quite like Venizelos in the Near East, in his grasp of actual and possible conditions. . . . If only there had been another Venizelos at Belgrade or Sofia!"
Mr. Courtney devotes a substantial part of this volume to a discussion of the Idea of Comedy and of the Realistic Drama. He adopts George Meredith's definition of a comedy as a play which produces " thoughtful laughter," a sort of internal chuckle, a symptom of intellectual enjoyment. Comedy is " the flower which grows on the edge of the precipice, which we gather with a fearful joy" ; most comedies end with marriage, " because the sequel would be too depressing." The evolution of Shakespeare as a writer of comedies is followed out in an interesting way, and also the process by which MoliOre completed his self-education as a dramatist. Of the modern realistic drama Mr. Courtney finds the beginning in Mr. Pinero's The Profligate, produced in 1889, and realism " made good " with The Second Mra. Tanqueray, just four years later. The essayist, tracing the Realistic Drama through Ibsen and Mr. Shaw, and the younger school represented by Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Arnold Bennett, and the late Stanley Houghton and St. John Hankin, finds the true apology for realism in " the passionate desire for truth—truth at all costs, passionate hatred of all hypocrisy and sham, zeal to anchor on solid facts, and refusal to care whether pain or discomfort is brought to men and women who would rather live in a fool's paradise." The test of a great realistic play is that •it lifts one out of the audience into the play, as romance and melodrama and farce do not. Mr. Courtney found this test satisfied, in his own case, by The Second Mrs. Tangueray; and also by Hindle Wakes. Modern realism in drama tends to cynicism and pessimism. " Never was so cruel a play written as Justice, cruel, relentless, soul-shaking. Such themes should be treated in a pamphlet unless we are all to become sterile and ineffective pessimists." Many readers will welcome these essays because of, and not in spite of, 'their discursiveness ; and they have a grace of diction Which does not always accompany erudition. One can turn to Mr. Courtney for the assured pleasure of encountering temperate opinions lucidly expressed.
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