"Modernism" in Modern Drama [antikvár]

/ Foreword ALL AGES are changing ages, but during the second half of the nineteenth century many people were convinced that theirs was such in a very special sense. They both believed and hoped that they were making a very radical break with the past, and they looked forward to a future really discontinuous with it. Some of them spoke of "tradition" as almost wholly bad. Something, they thought, was at last setting men free, and they tended to think of only two epochs in man's history, the Past and that Future of which they were seeing the dawn. The term "modernism" is so vague and so general that no two people are likely to use it in the same way, and it ought not to be used at all unless this fact is taken for granted. I use it, not on the assumption that anyone will automatically know what I mean, but simply as a convenient way of making frequent reference to the special meaning which I have tried to give it. That special meaning includes.