I have tried in this book to trace the development of an attitude through a hundred years of modern drama, believing that this attitude gives unity to a number of otherwise diverse and disparate playwrights. Revolt is the energy which drives the modern theatre, just as faith drove the theatre of the past. Revolt, however, is not simply an energy but also a body of ideas, a system of values; and these have both their implicit and explicit aspects. In order to emphasize similarities rather than differences among the various playwrights, I have primarily examined the negative side of their revolt: inclined to disagree about what they are for, these playwrights are generally agreed about what they are against. My emphasis sounds like special pleading — but it is an emphasis very frequently made by the playwrights themselves. The theatre of revolt occasionally houses positive ideas and revolutionary programs — especially, as we have seen, in its messianic phase. But more often, its values are implicit. In its negative critique of existing conventions and institutions, it rarely offers any substitute ideas or ideals.
Such destructive criticism accounts, in part, for the unpopularity of this drama, for the modern world wants affirmations. The man who knocks the props out from under the shaky structure of our beliefs is expected to provide us with a new foundation: it is for this reason, perhaps, that the artist in our time has become the focus of so much expectation, and so much chagrin. Revolt is all very well, but revolt on behalf of what, in support of whom? If all our hopes are illusions, what hopes can he give us in return? Such questions the rebel dramatist is stubbornly disinclined to answer, or proceeds to answer with impossible programs and fantastic demands. To those who labor on behalf of the world, this man is an exasperating figure and a false prophet — radical when the world needs moderation, fanatic when the world needs men of goodwill, acrimonious when the world needs harmony.
But in demanding of him the positive values that they themselves possess, the men of action mistake his function. It is senseless to ask the modern dramatist to be what he is not and cannot be; it is important to recognize what he is. For this raggletail, disreputable impossiblist embodies what may be the last genuine humanist value of our crippled civilization: an abiding, indestructible respect for the truth (he holds this even when he no longer believes the truth is attainable). To be a committed political animal today is to care for something more than truth, to involve oneself in compromise for the sake of the well-being and progress of man. But if politics is the art of the possible, art is the politics of the impossible — the free artist would sooner sacrifice the world than relinquish the integrity of his vision. Thus, art encompasses politics but refuses to affirm it. The artist lives in compromised reality, but he lives in another world as well, the world of the imagination, and there his vision is pure and absolute. The conflict between reality and the imagination is the conflict between the ethical and aesthetic views of life; and it is the pivot of the modern theatre. Politics demands resolution; dramatic art is content to leave us in ambiguity. The consequences are unreconciled opposites, tension, inaction — but also the metaphysical joy which comes from a pure truth, beautifully expressed.
It is, therefore, in the art of the modern dramatist that we must look for his affirmation and find our consolation, even when that art is relentless, inconsolable, bleak. What makes Job’s torments bearable to us is the way they are set down; what reconciles us to the horror of Lear is the expressive power of Shakespeare. Terror and torment are too much with us today to make us choose to dwell upon them; but in our sometime capacity to face these feelings lies the hope for our spiritual regeneration. “Dare to be tragic men,” wrote Nietzsche, “and ye shall be redeemed.” The theatre of revolt is not a tragic theatre, but it teaches us how to be tragic men; and if comfort and happiness are not often found there, strength and courage are. The redemption of which Nietzsche speaks is the redemption of the human spirit in a time when spirit is failing; and it is towards this end that the great modern dramatists forged their revolt in enduring harmonious form.