The drama is the most democratic of the art forms, and perhaps the
only one that may legitimately bear the label. Painting, sculpture,
music and literature, so far as they show any genuine æsthetic or
intellectual content at all, are not for crowds, but for selected
individuals, mostly with bad kidneys and worse morals, and three of the
four are almost always enjoyed in actual solitude. Even architecture
and religious ritual, though they are publicly displayed, make their
chief appeal to man as individual, not to man as mass animal. One goes
into a church as part of a crowd, true enough, but if it be a church
that has risen above mere theological disputation to the beauty of
ceremonial, one is, even in theory, alone with the Lord God Jehovah.
And if, passing up Fifth Avenue in the 5 o’clock throng, one pauses
before St. Thomas’s to drink in the beauty of that archaic façade,
one’s drinking is almost sure to be done _a cappella;_ of the other
passers-by, not one in a thousand so much as glances at it.
But the drama, as representation, is inconceivable save as a show
for the mob, and so it has to take on protective coloration to
survive. It must make its appeal, not to individuals as such, nor
even to individuals as units in the mob, but to the mob as mob—a
quite different thing, as Gustav Le Bon long ago demonstrated in his
“Psychologie des Foules.” Thus its intellectual content, like its
æsthetic form, must be within the mental grasp of the mob, and what is
more important, within the scope of its prejudices. _Per corollary_,
anything even remotely approaching an original idea, or an unpopular
idea, is foreign to it, and if it would make any impression at all,
abhorrent to it. The best a dramatist can hope to do is to give
poignant and arresting expression to an idea so simple that the average
man will grasp it at once, and so banal that he will approve it in the
next instant. The phrase “drama of ideas” thus becomes a mere phrase.
What is actually meant by it is “drama of platitudes.”
So much for the theory. An appeal to the facts quickly substantiates
it. The more one looks into the so-called drama of ideas of the last
age—that is, into the acting drama—the more one is astounded by the
vacuity of its content. The younger Dumas’ “La Dame aux Camélias,”
the first of all the propaganda plays (it raised a stupendous pother
in 1852, the echoes of which yet roll), is based upon the sophomoric
thesis that a prostitute is a human being like you and me, and suffers
the slings and arrows of the same sorrows, and may be potentially quite
as worthy of heaven. Augier’s “Le Mariage d’Olympe” (1854), another
sensation-making pioneer, is even hollower; its four acts are devoted
to rubbing in the revolutionary discovery that it is unwise for a young
man of good family to marry an elderly cocotte. Proceed now to Ibsen.
Here one finds the same tasteless platitudes—that it is unpleasant for
a wife to be treated as a doll; that professional patriots and town
boomers are frauds; that success in business is often grounded upon
a mere willingness to do what a man of honor is incapable of; that a
woman who continues to live with a debauched husband may expect to have
unhealthy children; that a joint sorrow tends to bring husband and wife
together; that a neurotic woman is apt to prefer death to maternity;
that a man of 55 is an ass to fall in love with a flapper of 17. Do I
burlesque? If you think so, turn to Ibsen’s “Nachgelassene Schriften”
and read his own statements of the ideas in his social dramas—read
his own succinct summaries of their theses. You will imagine yourself,
on more than one page, in the latest volume of mush by Orison Swett
Marden. Such “ideas” are what one finds in newspaper editorials,
speeches before Congress, sermons by evangelical divines—in
brief, in the literature expressly addressed to those persons whose
distinguishing mark is that ideas never enter their heads.
Ibsen himself, an excellent poet and a reflective man, was under no
delusions about his “dramas of ideas.” It astounded him greatly when
the sentimental German middle-classes hailed “Ein Puppenheim” as a
revolutionary document; he protested often and bitterly against being
mistaken for a prophet of feminism. His own interest in this play
and in those that followed it was chiefly technical; he was trying
to displace the well-made play of Scribe and company with something
simpler, more elastic and more hospitable to character. He wrote
“Ghosts” to raise a laugh against the fools who had seen something
novel and horrible in the idea of “A Doll’s House”; he wanted to prove
to them that that idea was no more than a platitude. Soon afterward he
became thoroughly disgusted with the whole “drama of ideas.” In “The
Wild Duck” he cruelly burlesqued it, and made a low-comedy Ibsenist his
chief butt. In “Hedda Gabler” he played a joke on the Ibsen fanatics by
fashioning a first-rate drama out of the oldest, shoddiest materials
of Sardou, Feuillet, and even Meilhac and Halévy. And beginning with
“Little Eyolf” he threw the “drama of ideas” overboard forever, and
took to mysticism. What could be more comical than the efforts of
critical talmudists to read a thesis into “When We Dead Awaken”? I
have put in many a gay hour perusing their commentaries. Ibsen, had
he lived, would have roared over them—as he roared over the effort
to inject portentous meanings into “The Master Builder,” at bottom no
more than a sentimental epitaph to a love affair that he himself had
suffered at 60.
Gerhart Hauptmann, another dramatist of the first rank, has gone much
the same road. As a very young man he succumbed to the “drama of
ideas” gabble, and his first plays showed an effort to preach this or
that in awful tones. But he soon discovered that the only ideas that
would go down, so to speak, on the stage were ideas of such an austere
platitudinousness that it was beneath his artistic dignity to merchant
them, and so he gave over propaganda altogether. In other words, his
genius burst through the narrow bounds of mob ratiocination, and he
began appealing to the universal emotions—pity, religious sentiment,
patriotism, amorousness. Even in his first play, “Vor Sonnenaufgang,”
his instinct got the better of his mistaken purpose, and reading it
to-day one finds that the sheer horror of it is of vastly more effect
than its nebulous and unimportant ideas. It really says nothing; it
merely makes us dislike some very unpleasant people.
Turn now to Shaw. At once one finds that the only plays from his
pen which contain actual ideas have failed dismally on the stage.
These are the so-called “discussions”—e. g., “Getting Married.” The
successful plays contain no ideas; they contain only platitudes,
balderdash, buncombe that even a suffragette might think of. Of such
sort are “Man and Superman,” “Arms and the Man,” “Candida,” “Androcles
and the Lion,” and their like. Shaw has given all of these pieces
a specious air of profundity by publishing them hooked to long and
garrulous prefaces and by filling them with stage directions which
describe and discuss the characters at great length. But as stage plays
they are almost as empty as “Hedda Gabler.” One searches them vainly
for even the slightest novel contribution to the current theories of
life, joy and crime. Shaw’s prefaces, of course, have vastly more
ideational force and respectability than his plays. If he fails to get
any ideas of genuine savor into them it is not because the preface form
bars them out but because he hasn’t any to get in. By attaching them to
his plays he converts the latter into colorable imitations of novels,
and so opens the way for that superior reflectiveness which lifts the
novel above the play, and makes it, as Arnold Bennett has convincingly
shown, much harder to write. A stage play in the modern realistic
manner—that is, without soliloquies and asides—can seldom rise
above the mere representation of some infinitesimal episode, whereas
even the worst novel may be, in some sense, an interpretation as
well. Obviously, such episodes as may be exposed in 20,000 words—the
extreme limit of the average play—are seldom significant, and not
often clearly intelligible. The author has a hard enough job making
his characters recognizable as human beings; he hasn’t time to go
behind their acts to their motives, or to deduce any conclusions worth
hearing from their doings. One often leaves a “social drama,” indeed,
wondering what the deuce it is all about; the discussion of its meaning
offers endless opportunities for theorists and fanatics. The Ibsen
symbolists come to mind again. They read meanings into such plays as
“Rosmersholm” and “The Wild Duck” that aroused Ibsen, a peaceful man,
to positive fury. In the same way the suffragettes collared, “A Doll’s
House.” Even “Peer Gynt” did not escape. There is actually an edition
of it edited by a theosophist, in the preface to which it is hymned as
a theosophical document. Luckily for Ibsen, he died before this edition
was printed. But one may well imagine how it would have made him swear.
The notion that there are ideas in the “drama of ideas,” in truth,
is confined to a special class of illuminati, whose chief visible
character is their capacity for ingesting nonsense—Maeterlinckians,
uplifters, women’s clubbers, believers in all the sure cures for
all the sorrows of the world. To-day the Drama League carries on
the tradition. It is composed of the eternally young—unsuccessful
dramatists who yet live in hope, young college professors, psychopathic
old maids, middle-aged ladies of an incurable jejuneness, the
innumerable caravan of the ingenuous and sentimental. Out of the
same intellectual _Landsturm_ comes the following of Bergson, the
parlor metaphysician; and of the third-rate novelists praised by the
newspapers; and of such composers as Wolf-Ferrari and Massenet. These
are the fair ones, male and female, who were ecstatically shocked by
the platitudes of “Damaged Goods,” and who regard Augustus Thomas as
a great dramatist, and what is more, as a great thinker. Their hero,
during a season or two, was the Swedish John the Baptist, August
Strindberg—a lunatic with a gift for turning the preposterous into the
shocking. A glance at Strindberg’s innumerable volumes of autobiography
reveals the true horse-power of his so-called ideas. He believed in
everything that was idiotic, from transcendentalism to witchcraft.
He believed that his enemies were seeking to destroy him by magic;
he spent a whole winter trying to find the philosopher’s stone. Even
among the clergy, it would be difficult to find a more astounding ass
than Strindberg. But he had, for all his folly, a considerable native
skill at devising effective stage-plays—a talent that some men seem
to be born with—and under cover of it he acquired his reputation
as a thinker. Here he was met half way by the defective powers of
observation and reflection of his followers, the half-wits aforesaid;
they mistook their enjoyment of his adept technical trickery for an
appreciation of ideas. Turn to the best of his plays, “The Father.”
Here the idea—that domestic nagging can cause insanity—is an almost
perfect platitude, for on the one hand it is universally admitted
and on the other hand it is not true. But as a stage play pure and
simple, the piece is superb—a simple and yet enormously effective
mechanism. So with “Countess Julie.” The idea here is so vague and
incomprehensible that no two commentators agree in stating it, and yet
the play is so cleverly written, and appeals with such a sure touch to
the universal human weakness for the obscene, that it never fails to
enchant an audience. The case of “Hedda Gabler” is parallel. If the
actresses playing Hedda in this country made up for the part in the
scandalous way their sisters do in Germany (that is, by wearing bustles
in front), it would be as great a success here as it is over there.
Its general failure among us is due to the fact that it is not made
indelicate enough. This also explains the comparative failure of the
rest of the Ibsen plays. The crowd has been subtly made to believe that
they are magnificently indecent—and is always dashed and displeased
when it finds nothing to lift the diaphragm. I well remember the
first production of “Ghosts” in America—a business in which I had a
hand. So eager was the audience for the promised indecencies that it
actually read them into the play, and there were protests against it
on the ground that Mrs. Alving was represented as trying to seduce
her own son! Here comstockery often helps the “drama of ideas.” If no
other idea is visible, it can always conjure up, out of its native
swinishness, some idea that is offensively sexual, and hence pleasing
to the mob.
That mob rules in the theater, and so the theater remains infantile
and trivial—a scene, not of the exposure of ideas, nor even of
the exhibition of beauty, but one merely of the parading of mental
and physical prettiness and vulgarity. It is at its worst when
its dramatists seek to corrupt this function by adding a moral or
intellectual purpose. It is at its best when it confines itself to
the unrealities that are its essence, and swings amiably from the
romance that never was on land or sea to the buffoonery that is at
the bottom of all we actually know of human life. Shakespeare was
its greatest craftsman: he wasted no tortured ratiocination upon his
plays. Instead, he filled them with the gaudy heroes that all of us
see ourselves becoming on some bright to-morrow, and the lowly frauds
and clowns we are to-day. No psychopathic problems engaged him; he
took love and ambition and revenge and braggadocio as he found them.
He held no clinics in dingy Norwegian apartment-houses: his field was
Bohemia, glorious Rome, the Egypt of the scene-painter, Arcady.... But
even Shakespeare, for all the vast potency of his incomparable, his
stupefying poetry, could not long hold the talmudists out in front from
their search for invisible significances. Think of all the tomes that
have been written upon the profound and revolutionary “ideas” in the
moony musings of the diabetic sophomore, Hamlet von Danemark!