PRAGUE LETTER
LIVING here, right at the centre of Europe, is to feel as though one were lying on the ground, ear pressed to the earth, listening to the slow rumbling which announces the crash of the social structure, and feeling the heavy waves of disintegration which threaten European culture, a disintegration which began in the nineteenth century with Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Strindberg, reaching its highest point during the World War.
But while such writers as Oswald Spengler have made a scientific analysis of this decadence, others have firmly believed that the European soul-sickness is only a transitional phase, an inevitable phase between war and peace. They refuse to read the writing on the wall; unwilling to believe in a passing of our slowly-gathered culture. They resolutely affirm their belief in the spiritual goodness in man, attempting, where possible, to salvage what remains of that traditional culture.
On the other hand there are writers who seem to follow no traditional path; writers who do not wish to conserve the past. They step out into the future with nothing more to guide them than a simple faith in life. This faith, clear-running as a brook, is the secret of the success of the dramas by the two brothers, Karel and Joseph Capek.
Karel Capek is the author of The Robber, R. U. R., The Macropolus Affair; Joseph Capek collaborated with his brother in The World We Live In, and is also the author of The Land of Many Names, a new play produced this month.
The “Expressionist” drama is a product of post-war conditions in Germany. It grew out of the common mood that accompanied the various revolutions and revolts that took place in the Teutonic countries, bringing the masses and the barricades on to the stage. It deals almost exclusively with man as a social and a political animal, although at times the individual soul stalks nakedly through the general disorder. But in the main it concerns itself with the social organism, while the “Collective-Expressionist”
