I
Few competent critics would dispute the assertion that the drama, if not
actually the noblest of the arts, is at all events the most
comprehensive, since it can invoke the aid of all the others without
impairing its own individuality or surrendering its right to be
considered the senior partner in any alliance it may make. Poetry,
oratory, and music, painting, sculpture, and architecture, these the
drama can take into its service, with no danger to its own control. Yet
even if the drama may have the widest range of any of the arts, none the
less are its boundaries clearly defined. What it can do, it does with a
sharpness of effect and with a cogency of appeal no other art can rival.
But there are many things it cannot do; and there are not a few things
that it can attempt only at its peril. Some of these impossibilities and
inexpediencies are psychologic subtleties of character and of sentiment
too delicate and too minute for the magnifying lens of the theater
itself; and some of them are physical, too large in themselves to be
compressed into the rigid area of the stage. In advance of actual
experiment, it is not always possible for even the most experienced of
theatrical experts to decide the question with certainty.
Moreover, there is always the audience to be reckoned with, and even old
stagers like Henry Irving and Victorien Sardou cannot foresee the way
in which the many-headed monster will take what is set before it. When
Percy Fitzgerald and W. G. Wills were preparing an adaptation of the
'Flying Dutchman' for Henry Irving, the actor made a suggestion which
the authors immediately adopted. The romantic legend has for its hero a
sea-captain condemned to eternal life until he can find a maiden willing
to share his lot; and when at last he meets the heroine she has another
lover, who is naturally jealous of the new aspirant to her hand. The
young rival challenges Vanderdecken to a duel, and what Irving proposed
was that the survivor of the fight should agree to throw the body of his
rival into the sea, and that the waves should cast up the condemned
Vanderdecken on the shore, since the ill-fated sailor could not avoid
his doom by death at the hand of man. This was an appropriate
development of the tale; it was really imaginative; and it would have
been strangely moving if it had introduced into it a ballad on the old
theme. But in a play performed before us in a theater its effect was not
altogether what its proposer had hoped for, altho he presented it with
all his marvelous command of theatrical artifice.
The stage-setting Irving bestowed upon this episode was perfectly in
keeping with its tone. The spectators saw the sandy beach of a little
cove shut in by cliffs, with the placid ocean bathed in the sunset glow.
The two men crossed swords on the strand; Vanderdecken let himself be
killed, and the victorious lover carried his rival's body up the rocks
and hurled it into the ocean. Then he departed, and for a moment all
was silence. A shuddering sigh soon swept over the face of the waters,
and a ripple lapped the sand. Then a little wave broke on the beach, and
withdrew, rasping over the stones. At last a huge roller crashed forward
and the sea gave up its dead. Vanderdecken lay high and dry on the
shore, and in a moment he staggered to his feet, none the worse for his
wounds. But unfortunately the several devices for accomplishing this
result, admirable as they were, drew attention each of them to itself.
The audience could not help wondering how the trick of the waves was
being worked, and when the Flying Dutchman was washed up by the water,
it was not the mighty deep rejecting Vanderdecken, again cursed with
life, that the spectators perceived, but rather the dignified Henry
Irving himself, unworthily tumbled about on the dust of his own stage.
In the effort to make visible this imaginative embellishment of the
strange story, its magic potency vanished. The poetry of the striking
improvement on the old tale had been betrayed by its translation into
the material realities of the theater, since the concrete presentation
necessarily contradicted the abstract beauty of the idea.
Here we find ourselves face to face with one of the most obvious
limitations of the stage--that its power of suggestion is often greater
than its power of actual presentation. There are many things, poetic and
imaginative, which the theater can accomplish, after a fashion, but
which it ventures upon only at imminent peril of failure. Many things
which are startlingly effective in the telling are ineffective in the
actual seeing. The mere mechanism needed to represent them will often be
contradictory, and sometimes even destructive. Perhaps it may be
advisable to cite another example, not quite so cogent as Irving's
'Vanderdecken,' and yet carrying the same moral. This other example will
be found in a piece by Sardou, a man who knew all the possibilities of
the theater as intimately as Irving himself, and who was wont to utilize
them with indefatigable skill. Indeed, so frequently did the French
playwright avail himself of stage devices, and so often was he willing
to rely upon them, that not a few critics of our latter-day drama have
been inclined to dismiss him as merely a supremely adroit theatrical
trickster.
In his sincerest play, 'Patrie,' the piece which he dedicated to Motley,
and which he seems himself to have been proudest of, Sardou invented a
most picturesque episode. The Spaniards are in possession of Brussels;
the citizens are ready to rise, and William of Orange is coming to their
assistance. The chiefs of the revolt leave the city secretly and meet
William at night in the frozen moat of an outlying fort. A Spanish
patrol interrupts their consultation, and forces them to conceal
themselves. A little later a second patrol is heard approaching, just
when the return of the first patrol is impending. For the moment it
looks as tho the patriots would be caught between the two Spanish
companies. But William of Orange rises to the occasion. He calls on his
"sea-wolves"; and when the second patrol appears, marching in single
file, there suddenly spring out of the darkness upon every Spanish
soldier two fur-clad creatures, who throttle him, bind him, and throw
him into a hole in the ice of the moat. Then they swiftly fill in this
gaping cavity with blocks of snow, and trample the path level above it.
And almost immediately after the sea-wolves have done their deadly work
and withdrawn again into hiding, the first patrol returns, and passes
all unsuspecting over the bodies of their comrades--a very practical
example of dramatic irony.
As it happened, I had read 'Patrie' some years before I had an
opportunity to see it on the stage, and this picturesque scene had
lingered in my memory so that in the theater I eagerly awaited its
coming. When it arrived at last I was sadly disappointed. The sea-wolves
belied their appetizing name; they irresistibly suggested a group of
trained acrobats, and I found myself carelessly noting the artifices by
the aid of which the imitation snowballs were made to fill the trapdoor
of the stage which represented the yawning hole in the ice of the frozen
moat. The thing told was picturesque, but the thing seen was curiously
unmoving; and I have noted without surprise that in the latest revival
of 'Patrie' the attempt to make this episode effective was finally
abandoned, the sea-wolves being cut out of the play.