3.6 Logic
The concept of logic is loved by French dramatists, but their over -emphasis lead writers such as M. Brieux and M. Hervieu to develop a stiff, formal and symmetrical style of dramatic logical argument, without the pulsing and diverse rhythms of life. Logic can easily be misapplied.
There is a place for logic in dramatic plays, and it is more conspicuous to the audience through it’s absence than its presence.
If the dramatist develops a central underlying theme, it needs to be done in a logical way, to keep him from getting entangled in side issues and to enhance the logical flow of the play.
Defective logic is evident in the French play Sardou’s “Spiritisme”, where he revealed his belief in the ability of “disembodied intelligences” to communicate with the living. He has the spirits hover around the outskirts of the action, not assigning them parts to the drama, though the hero’s belief in them brings about the conclusion. Some creepy events take place that tax the credulity of the audience to the limit, and leave them with the logical deduction that though spirit communications may exist, it is never of any practical use and the audience had been taken for a ride through illogical mysticism to no purpose. Sardou would have done better to avoid that theme, for the manifest failure of logic leaves the play neither good drama nor good argument.
Ibsen, like Hawthorne, suggests without affirming the potential action of supernatural beings. He shows us nothing that is not possible to be explained in a perfectly natural way, but he leaves us to imagine that there may be influences at work that are not yet formally recognized in physics and psychology. Ibsen is merely appealing to a mood that we all know, in which we wonder whether there may not be more things in creation than we recognize in our scientific formulas. In this there is nothing illogical.
A big mistake in logic is to hint at a problem and then illustrate it in such a way in terms of character that the problem is solved prematurely. Sometimes the matter is argued and laboriously discussed at great length, but the audience is longing, often in vain, for the one statement demanded by the logic of the situation. In both “The Liars”(Henry Arthur Jones) and “The ideal Husband” (Oscar Wilde) the authors have made the same error of logic - suggesting a broad issue, and then stating such a set of circumstances that the issue does not really arise.
Two plays satirizing “yellow journalism” were produced almost at the same time in London: “The Earth” by James B. Fagan and ”What the Public Wants” by Arnold Bennett. Because it dealt logically with the theme announced, instead of wandering away into all sorts of irrelevances, “The Earth” was considered the better play of the two. Fagan, working in broader outlines, never strayed from the logical line of development, and managed to get much nearer to the heart of his subject. All the detail Bennett went into is beside the real issue, and he missed the real point tragically, that being a Napoleon of the Press is not that he gives the public what it wants, but that he,in that influential position, have such power that he can make the public want what he wants, think what he thinks, believe what he wants them to believe, and do what he wants them to do.
In Clyde Fitch’s last play, “The City”, the author had failed to establish a logical connection between his theme and the incidents supposed to illustrate it, since the action is not really shaped by the influence of “the city.”
Even fantasy plays, which assume to be more or less exempt from the limitations of physical reality, should be logically faithful to their own assumptions. In “Pygmalion and Galatea“ the audience is forever shifting from one plane of convention to another - there is no fixed starting-point for the imagination and no logical development of a clearly-stated initial condition.