The Crimson Bookshelf

MR. MACLEISH'S attempt to revive poetic drama in the English tongue is eminently successful, and praiseworthy for public reasons. His genius in metrics has enabled him to hurdle the impasse of verse-form. Too realistic a poet, he is alive to the inadequacy of blank verse or the heroic couplet in the present age; in his "Note on the Verse," prefixed to this play, he says, "I have adopted for the principal scenes --scenes to be acted by bankers, radicals, lawyers--a line of five accents but unlimited syllables: the accent falling always in the position suggested by the sense." He adds, "In those sections to be spoken by voices in a street crowd. I have varied the form by using a three-beat line constructed like the five-beat line of the body of the poem. The only major difference is that the verse of the street scenes is written for the most part in couplets linked by assonance."

Owing to Mr. MacLeish's metrical skill the play moves swiftly and with dignity, in obedience to the tempo of modern life. "Spiritual anachronisms" are avoided, therefore, and the spirit is wholly contemporary, though technically, of course, Mr. MacLeish's models are the ancients: the essential structure of a Greek tragedy is the parent of this play. Even the characters suggest Sophoclean or Aeschylean prototypes, e.g., the Blind Man, with his dread prophecies, recalls Tiresias. There are few characters--only four of chief importance; Mr. MacLeish follows Euripides rather than Sophocles in giving a sympathetic portrayal of feminine character. One, the paramour of the protagonist McGafferty, is drawn with insight. The events of the play are not taken from the reservoir of tradition or mythology, but are based on recent history, the bank holiday of March 1933. Some people may find the same suggestion of an impending doom, as in the Greek tragedies, and even a kind of fatalism approximating the rule of Necessity. But for most readers the motif of the play will be a sense of bewilderment. McGafferty the banker is caught in a mesh of circumstances from which he is powerless to extricate himself. He has really no choice. Where is responsibility for the sorry state of affairs to be placed?

"No: not your fault: no one's: no one did it.

No one could have helped it. We're like sheep

Shut in a runway and one turn to take: we're

Walled in like a cornered hunted cat our Least move watched for: our last lunge of will

Checked at the gesture . . ."

In an atmosphere of such bewilderment sympathy withers. We cannot be interested in McGafferty's fate as intensely as we are in that of Orestes, or Lear, or Othello. Our contemporary drama, in attaining this height of poetic tragedy, has shown us how bleak it is, in its austere and mechanical detachment, yet how remote and inaccessible to the warm-blooded, fierce and desperate needs of the flesh.