Joseph Wood Krutch has accurately sub-titled ["Modernism" in Modern Drama] "A Definition and Estimate." According to him, modernism consists of a rejection of three beliefs fundamental in the previously-held credo of post-Renaissance man—that man is "a creature capable of dignity," that life "as led in this world" is worth living and that "the realm of human rationality is the realm in which many may most fruitfully live." Krutch takes a dim view of the modernism in modern drama, and his opinion of the achievements of modern playwrights is greatly troubled because they have made one or more of the above-mentioned rejections. He also notes with disapproval the tendency, especially marked in the work of Pirandello, to "dissolve the ego," a tendency particularly characteristic of the present century. He does discern a return to more traditional attitudes, especially in the efforts of O'Neill and Anderson to write tragedy; and he even notes a similar trend in the work of Williams and Miller. But he does not appear to be particularly impressed by this swing of the pendulum even when he entertains the possibility that it may go further; and, curiously, he makes little of the traditionalism of Eliot except in general terms. Krutch's mind is largely fixed on the theme of modern disorientation and upon the chasm between today and the "Past," or rather upon the belief he attributes to Ibsen, Shaw and others that the past and the future they contemplated or advocated were distinctly discontinuous.

As he himself recognizes, he has generalized rather freely, and his treatment of Ibsen, Strindberg, Pirandello, Chekhov, Synge, O'Neill and other modernists tends to be one-sided. The book contains less specific dramatic criticism than one might have expected of one of our most distinguished drama critics. His approach is, in the main, philosophical, and his views accord with those previously expressed in his earlier disquisitions on the state of modern man—most notably in The Modern Temper.

In the course of the present study,… Krutch sets down many valuable, if also some questionable, assertions concerning modern attitudes and their presence in modern plays. I incline to the belief that he has misplaced the blame for nihilistic tendencies somewhat, that these are more properly attributed to writers he has omitted rather than to authors he has treated—with the exception of Pirandello. Nevertheless, I find myself in the position of having to assent entirely to the nature of his inquiry…. His specific observations on plays and their authors are also often remarkably discerning. One example is his excellent treatment of the absence of the "obligatory scene" in Chekhovian drama, although his conclusion that "Chekhov denies, among other things, the significance of the drama" would need more substantiation than Krutch offers. I am uneasy only when he has to set down his judgments rather inflexibly for pedagogic reasons at the end of a lecture—as when he writes that "Chekhov gets rid of action and Pirandello gets rid of character."

As usual, Krutch writes with enviable lucidity, and the value of the facility he possesses is perhaps nowhere as evident as in his discourses on the function of "form" in the expression of "new" ideas and attitudes. Referring to the dream techniques of playwriting since Strindberg's expressionist period, the critic writes: "If you are going to say that life is meaningless, you cannot effectively say it in a play where the play itself constitutes meaning; the violence and confusion of the play must express the violence and confusion it proclaims…. It is impossible to deny that life is significant if the form which you impose upon a representation of it tends to give it meaning." I doubt that any other writer has defined the essence of the expressionist technique more ably and in so few words.

To complain that the book has many lacunae, a criticism fully anticipated by the author, is in effect a compliment. It implies that one would have liked to hear at greater length from the author. I know that I would have!… Krutch's sympathies toward an author, as in the case of Strindberg, are slight, the exceptions one is moved to register concern details which qualify rather than invalidate the argument of the book. Krutch moves to the heart of his disapprobation of modernism with a vigor that enforces his meaning upon the reader as a view of life as well as a view of art. (pp. 95-6)