For twenty years now there has been a great fuss going on about
something called the new movement in the theatre. Craig, Appia,
Reinhardt; Bakst, Urban, Jones; simplicity, suggestion, synthesis;
_Drehbühne_, _pointillage_, _régisseur_; art theatre, little theatre,
circus theatre--in spite of the confusion of such catchwords, it is
hard to escape the belief that this ferment in the theatre means
something. Something for life and from life; something for art and from
art. Something immensely important to the sense of godhead in man which
is life and art together, life and art fecundating one another.
It seems peculiarly clear that the new forces in the theatre have been
working toward a spiritual change far more novel, far more interesting,
and naturally far more important than any of the technical changes
which they have brought about.
The technical changes have been confusing. First this business of
scenic designers and revolving stages and all manner of show and
mechanism; and now the “naked stage”, the permanent setting, abdication
of the artist, scrapping of the machines, the actor alone on a podium
or in a circus ring. All in the name of drama.
There is only one explanation. These changes have come as part of an
attempt to restore the theatre to its old functions. They are two very
extraordinary functions. One may be debauched into titillation, or
may rise to that fulness of vitality, that excitation, upon which the
second function of the theater is based--the function of exaltation.
Between the old theatre, in which these functions worked as potently
as they worked seldom, and the theatre in which they may work again,
lay the theatre of realism. It was the product of a tremendous force, a
force for evil as well as good--twentieth century science. Science made
the theatre realistic and realism made the drama scientific. It ceased
to be a show. It became a photograph. The drama was made “truer”, but
only in the sense that a photograph may be truer to fact than a drawing
by Picasso. It achieved resemblance to life. And then it ceased to
have excitement or exaltation, because excitement, in the vivid sense
in which I use it here, is a most uncommon thing in modern life, and
because exaltation is rare and hidden, showing seldom in outward
relations. Both are too exceptional for realism.
The restoration of excitement to the theatre may appear to degrade it
from the exact and austere report of life which realism demanded. But
the thrill of movement and event is the element in the theatre which
lifts our spirits to the point where exaltation is possible. The power
of the theatre lies in just this ability to raise us to ecstasy through
the love of vitality which is the commonest sign of divinity in life.
And when the theatre gives us ecstasy, what becomes of science? And who
cares?
The new forces in the theatre have struggled more or less blindly
toward this end. They have tried beauty, richness, novelty to win
back excitement. They have only just begun to see that the liveliest
excitation in the playhouse may come from the art of the actor and the
art of the _régisseur_ when they are stripped to the task of providing
exaltation. Present the actor as an actor and the background as an
honest material background, and you are ready for what glories the
playwright and the peculiar genius of the theatre can provide. The
drama is free again for its eternal task--the showing of the soul of
life.
Just how much this may mean is perhaps the test of your belief in the
theatre. It is the conviction of some of us that there has resided in
the theatre--and our hope that there may reside once more--something
akin to the religious spirit. A definition of this spirit is difficult.
It is certainly not religion. It goes behind religion. It is the
exaltation of which formal creeds are a product. It is the vitality
which informs life, and begets art. Out of the intensity of spiritual
feeling which rises from the eternal processes of the universe, and
in turn becomes conscious of them, the thing is born which made Greek
tragedy noble, and which called drama back to life in the Middle Ages.
Then it was the spirit of religion. To-day we might call it the spirit
of life.
Both consciously and unconsciously men of the theatre have sought to
win back this exaltation. The latest attempt is in some ways the most
daring and the most interesting. Max Reinhardt, leaving the playhouse
altogether, has tried to find it in a wedding of the drama and the
church. Before this is in print Reinhardt will have produced Calderon’s
mystic drama, “The Theatre of the World”, under the high altar of the
Collegien Kirche in Salzburg. It is impossible now to speak of how far
he has been able to effect an æsthetic union between the handsome
rococo edifice and the platform for his players; it is only possible to
speculate on the spiritual feeling which spectators may gain through
looking up at the actors from a flat floor instead of looking down
upon them. I cannot speak of the actual presence of exaltation in the
audience, but we can speculate together on the possibilities of winning
back spiritual vitality for the drama by union with the church.
First of all, there comes the disquieting thought that the theatre
presents the spectacle these days of a bird that lays eggs in other
birds’ nests. It isn’t content with the one it has used for some
centuries. It must go snooping about looking for a new haven for the
drama. It tries the circus. It tries the ballroom. It shows us the
Grosses Schauspielhaus in Berlin, and the Redoutensaal in the palace
of Marie Theresa in Vienna. It even seems to have got a notion of
laying its eggs on the fourth wall. As this wall was the only thing
not thoroughly real in the realistic theatre, the result--the motion
picture--is a bit of a scramble. And now the cuckoo theatre has its eye
on the church.
A truer charge might be that the human animal has a perverse liking
for novelty, but even that could be countered with the assertion that
out of the stimulation of novelty, as out of almost any stimulation,
man can make art--if he has it in him. As to that strange bird, the
theatre, it has never had good homekeeping habits. It laid its eggs
on Greek altars, and in mangers of Christian chapels. It nested in
inn yards in England, and in tennis courts in France. The fact that
the theatre has a habit of roaming is worth about as much in this
discussion of its chance in the modern church, as the fact that it
once found ecstasy by the Greek altar and never produced anything
approaching dramatic literature while it was in the Christian church.
In the relation of the church and the theatre there seems to be a
problem for Europe and a problem for America. The possibility of the
two uniting appears much greater in Europe. Europe--particularly
central and southern Europe, where Catholicism flourishes--holds far
more of genuine religious spirit than does America. Moreover, the
church there has the strength of tradition and of art behind it. The
æsthetic-emotional grip of the churches themselves, their architecture,
their atmosphere, the sense of continuity that lives in them, grips
men and women whose minds reject or ignore the authority of dogma.
Even an American, cut off from the traditional side of this life,
would feel a thrill in a drama in the Collegien Kirche in Salzburg or
in the Cathedral of Chartres that no performance in a theatre could
give him. The beauty of the ages would bless the drama in almost any
European building except a theatre. But come to America and try to
imagine “Everyman” in Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street, or
“The Theatre of the World” in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine,
not to bring it down to the level of a Methodist meeting house. The
theatre can always make religion more dramatic; witness the experiments
of the Reverend William Norman Guthrie and Claude Bragdon with lighting
and dance in St. Mark’s in the Bouwerie. But I do not think that any
American church short of some Spanish Indian mission in the southwest
can make the drama more religious.
For America--and, I suspect, for Europe, too--the problem is to find a
way to the spirit independent of the church. It is not a question of
producing plays in cathedrals but of producing the spirit of life in
plays. It is not: Can religion make itself theatrical? but: Can the
theatre make itself--in a new sense--religious?
If modern life, particularly the life of America, were spiritual in
any degree, all this would be simple. Church and theatre would both
minister--as neither of them does now--to the life of the spirit.
America has no art and no religion which can make drama religious.
America doesn’t believe, in any deep sense. Science has shattered
dogma, and formal religion has not been able to absorb an artistic or a
philosophic spirit great enough to recreate the religious spirit in men.
The thing is still more difficult because there is nowhere in this
country--unless, again, it is in the southwest--a sense of the age-long
processes of life which are part of the soil and which leave their mark
in men and women through the physical things that have always cradled
them. In Europe even the cities hold this ancient and natural thing;
they are shaped by man and time even as the fields and the hills are
shaped by time and man. These cities bask and lie easy. There is a
sense of long, slow growth in the very stones. In America, it is not
only that our cities are new and brash. Our countryside is the same.
Even our farmhouses stick out of the land like square boxes. As simple
a house in Europe has a width that reconciles it with the sweep of the
fields. The American farmhouse is a symbol of our separation from the
soil. We are out of touch with the earthy vitality of life which might
bring us at least a little sense of the eternal.
If the man of the theatre gives up the American church as a path to the
spirit of life, and if he finds no religion in modernity from which to
bring religion to the stage, what can he do? Is it possible that he
can create spiritual affirmation in the people by creating it in the
theatre? Can he see the vision himself, and if he sees it and embodies
it, can it make over the people?
Clive Bell, writing in “Art”, has described how such artists as
William Blake and a very few others have reached the spiritual reality
of existence--the thing we should call religion--directly, by pure
intuition: “Some artists seem to have come at it by sheer force of
imagination, unaided by anything without them; they have needed no
material ladder to help them out of matter. They have spoken with
reality as mind to mind.”
Vision of this sort is so inordinately rare that it seems as though
some other way must be found to open spiritual truth to the artist of
the theatre. The only other way is through the deepest understanding
of life itself. What can the artist find in American life to bring
the vision? Nothing, surely, on the surface. Our architects have
reached a more noteworthy expression than perhaps any of our painters,
because they have somehow managed to identify themselves with a spirit
of affirmation behind those industrial forms that our commercial
imperialism presents to view in our men of position like Morgan and
Ford, our periodicals like “The American Magazine” and “The Saturday
Evening Post”, our subways, our cigarette ads, our patent medicines,
and our Kuppenheimer clothes.
The artist of the theatre who is to create ecstasy by finding it, must
see deeper than the architects behind the sham of American life. He
must grasp the Spirit of America in a meaning so extraordinary that
the use we ordinarily make of that phrase will seem impossibly and
blasphemously cheap. We have hints of what the artist must see and
understand in Sandburg’s sense of Chicago, in Vachel Lindsay’s sense of
the middle west, in Waldo Frank’s sense of New Mexico.
When theatrical genius has grasped the truth of America, it must be his
business to make of himself and his theatre a magnifying glass for the
rest of his fellows. What he has been able to seize by sheer intuition,
he must put in such form that it can seize all America. It is the hope
of the theatre that it can make the vision of one man become the vision
of many.
There is no reason why a man of the theatre should not have the vision;
it has come to other artists. They have been able to transfer some
share of it to the sensitive, the developed, the intellectual. The
artist of the theatre can perhaps transfer it to millions, to the
uneducated and the dull as well as to the receptive. In the theatre he
has a very extraordinary instrument. It is the art nearest to life;
its material is almost life itself. This physical identity which it
has with our very existence is the thing that can enable the artist to
visualize with amazing intensity a religious spirit of which he has
sensed only the faintest indications in life. He can create a world
which shines with exaltation and which seems--as it indeed is--a world
of reality. He can give the religious spirit the pervading presence
in the theatre which it once had in the life of the Greeks and of the
people of the Middle Ages. And when men and women see eternal spirit in
such a form, who can say that they will not take it to them?
_Robert Cortes Holliday_
Not long ago Robert Cortes Holliday admitted to me that his favorite
writer was Laurence Sterne. This is important. There is much about
them that is similar. There is the same whimsical, care-free, genial
attitude toward events. I’m sure that if Laurence Sterne carried a
walking stick he balanced it as nicely and at the same angle as does
Bob. Holliday loves people, and he loves talk. So did Sterne. Holliday
tempers his sentimentality by shafts of wit and real tenderness. So did
Sterne. They are both good fellows, anyway, though two centuries apart.
Holliday is of the Indianapolis group of writers. His great fondness
for Booth Tarkington is a result of this, as well as the deep drawl of
his voice. He is large, slow-moving, solemn of visage, with eyes that
twinkle constantly behind very thick spectacles. His first advance
toward life was as an artist. He was then bookseller, librarian,
publisher’s reader and editor. As editor of +The Bookman+, and as
“Contributing Editor” he has won a wide following for his rambling
essays written under the pseudonym of “Murray Hill”. His love of books,
his wide reading, his curiosity and explorative sense, make him either,
through his books or his person, a peculiarly warm hearted, friendly
human being.