ABSTRACT
If the human being is the centre of drama, the artist still has the choice of placing at that centre the human soul, or the human character. The playwrights of the previous generation-whose influence still makes itself felt in the present generation and in all the arts-chose the second way, and found their satisfaction in wandering through the winding mazes of a character, and imprisoning humanity, victim of its labyrinthine complexities, in the simplicity of an aphorism. The human being became a mechanism whose reactions in given circumstances it was diverting to observe and examine. Audiences were quite satisfied, because they found themselves confirmed in their notions about themselves, and about human beings-seeing them as a sum of aptitudes and capacities, dominated and directed by a psychological causality similar to material causality, whose laws, once explored, allowed the essence of man to be lost. Those conforming to the spirit of the times became all too willingly the victims of this error, because on the one hand it spared them a deep knowledge of themselves, while on the other it flattered their penchant for self-analysis; because it tried to raise their daily existence, their life, their ‘psyche’, into the sphere of art, and so persuaded them that their daily living represented true life, their psyche the human spirit, their little embarrassments great problems. Confronting this error, which robs man of his spirit, one is tempted to speak of a criminal art. For man is not a mechanism, conscious subjectivism is a bad sign, and psychological causality is of as little importance as material causality….
