Abstract

Drama

For a theater or any house of art the author knows no better motto than that sentence of playwright, John Dryden which does not grow stale with repeated quotation: "The Spirit of Mali Cannot Be Satisfied But With Truth, or at Least Verisimility." Verisimility, that is, likeness to the outer and visible aspects of truth, is a great virtue since the phenomenon betrays its cause and the body its soul, but inner truth is the transcendent one which is tied to the form and mood of no single school or kind of art but may inhere in a work whatever its method and technique. Inner truth, the correspondence to some profound human experience, here, if anywhere, is a test by which we may discover whether, a play, a story, a poem rises to that plane on which a self-respecting criticism begins its activity.