THE COSMOPOLITANISM OF MODERN DRAMA
Nor has the drama changed merely in these respects. Once the drama was almost wholly national. Then just because a play smacked so of its soil, it could not be intelligently heard elsewhere. In the seventies, as far as the American public was concerned, this was true of the plays of Dumas fils and Augier. Now, increased travel and all the varied means of intercommunication between nations make for such swift interchange of ideas that the dramatic success of Moscow, St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Paris, London, or Madrid is known quickly the world over. With the drawing together of the nations more common interests have developed, so that intellectual and moral movements are not merely national but worldwide. All this makes any national treatment of a world question widely interesting: it even makes the world interested in local problems. Most marked change of all, this free intercommunication of ideas tends to make even the humor of one nation comprehensible by another.
To-day, then, the drama has become cosmopolitan. Broadway sees Reinhardt’s Berlin productions: Paris and Berlin see “Kismet.” Broadway knows Gorki, Brieux, and Schnitzler; English and American plays have a hearing on the Continent. For two generations the drama has been fighting to take for its motto “Nihil mihi alienum.” It has won that right. Sensitive, responsive, eagerly welcomed everywhere, the drama, holding the mirror up to nature, by laughter and by tears reveals to mankind the world of men.