The next step in advance, and one of the most important in the slow
development of the scene-painter's art, took place in France early in
the nineteenth century, and simultaneous with the romanticist movement,
which modified the aims and ambitions of the artists as much as it did
those of the poets. The severe stateliness of the stage-set which was
adequate for the classicist tragedies of Racine and Voltaire, generally
a vague interior of an indefinite palace, stiff and empty, was
hopelessly unsuitable for the fiery dramas of Victor Hugo and the elder
Dumas. An even greater opportunity for spectacular regeneration was
afforded, in these same early decades of the nineteenth century, by the
bold and moving librettos which Scribe constructed for Meyerbeer and
Halevy at the Opera, and for Auber at the Opera-Comique. The exciting
cause of the scenic complexities that we find in Wagner's music-dramas
can be discovered in these librettos of Scribe's, from 'Robert the
Devil' to the 'Africaine.' For one act of 'Robert the Devil,' that in
which the spectral nuns dance among the tombs under the rays of the
moon, Ciceri invented the most striking and novel setting yet exhibited
on any stage--a setting not surpassed in poetic glamor by any since
seen in the theater, altho its eery beauty may have been rivaled by one
scene in the 'Source,' a ballet produced also at the Opera forty-five
years ago--a moon-lit tarn in a forest-glade, with half-seen sylphs
floating lightly over its silvered surface. This exquisitely poetic set
was imported from Paris to New York and inserted in the brilliant
spectacle of the 'White Fawn.'
The ample effect of these scenes was made possible only by the immense
improvement in the illumination of the stage due to the introduction of
gas. Up to the first quarter of the nineteenth century the
stage-decorator had been dependent upon lamps--a few of these arranged
at the rim of the curving apron which jutted out into the auditorium far
beyond the proscenium, and a few more hidden here and there in the flies
and wings. Early in the nineteenth century gas supplanted oil; and a
little later than the middle of the century gas was powerfully
supplemented by the calcium light. Toward the end of the century gas in
its turn gave way to the far more useful electric light, which could be
directed anywhere in any quantity, and which could be controlled and
colored at will. It was Henry Irving, more especially in his marvelous
mounting of a rather tawdry version of 'Faust,' who revealed the
delicate artistic possibilities of our modern facilities for stage
illumination.
In France the romanticist movement of Hugo was swiftly succeeded by the
realistic movement of Balzac, who was the earliest novelist to relate
the leading personages of his studies from life to a characteristic
background and to bring out the intimate association of persons and
places. From prose fiction this evocation of characteristic surroundings
was taken over by the drama; and a persistent effort was made to have
the successive sets of a play suggestive and significant in themselves,
and also representative of the main theme of the piece. The actors were
no longer dependent upon the "float," as the footlights were called;
they did not need to advance out on the apron to let the spectators
follow the changing expression of their faces, and in time the apron was
cut back to the line of the proscenium, and the curtain rose and fell in
a picture-frame which cut the actors off from their proximity to the
audience--a proximity forever tempting the dramatic poet to the purely
oratorical effects proper enough on a platform.
When the modern play calls for an interior this interior now takes on
the semblance of an actual room. Apparently the "box-set," as it is
called, the closed-in room with its walls and its ceiling, was first
seen in England in 1841, when 'London Assurance' was produced; but very
likely it had earlier made its appearance in Paris at the Gymnase. To
supply a room with walls of a seeming solidity, with doors and with
windows, appears natural enough to us, but it was a startling innovation
fourscore years ago. When the 'School for Scandal' had been originally
produced at Drury Lane in 1775, the library of Joseph Surface, where
Lady Teazle hides behind the screen, was represented by a drop at the
back, on which a window was painted, and by wings set starkly parallel
to this back-drop and painted to represent columns. There were no
doors; and Joseph and Charles, Sir Peter and Lady Teazle, walked on thru
the openings between the wings, very much as tho they were passing thru
the non-existent walls. To us, this would be shocking; but it was
perfectly acceptable to English playgoers then; and to them it seemed
natural, since they were familiar with no other way of getting into a
room on the stage.
[Illustration: The screen scene of the 'School for Scandal' at Drury
Lane in 1778 From a contemporary print]
The invention of the box-set, of a room with walls and ceilings, doors
and windows, led inevitably to the appropriate furnishing of this room
with tangible tables and chairs. Even in the eighteenth century the
stage had been very empty; it was adorned only with the furniture
actually demanded by the action of the drama; and the rest of the
furniture, bookcases and sideboards, chairs and tables, was frankly
painted on the wings and on the back-drop by the side of the painted
mantelpieces, the painted windows, and the painted doors. In the plays
of the twentieth century characters sit down and change from seat to
seat; but in the plays produced in England and in France before the
first quarter of the nineteenth century all the actors stood all the
time--or at least they were allowed to sit only under the stress of
dramatic necessity--as in the fourth act of 'Tartuffe,' for instance. In
all of Moliere's comedies there are scarcely half a dozen characters who
have occasion to sit down; and this sitting-down is limited to three or
four of his more than thirty pieces. Nowadays every effort is made to
capture the external realities of life. Sardou was not more careful in
composing his stage-sittings in his fashion than was Ibsen in
prescribing the scenic environment that he needed. The author's minute
descriptions of the scenes where the action of the 'Doll's House' and of
'Ghosts' passes prove that Ibsen had visualized sharply the precise
interior which was, in his mind, the only possible home for the
creatures of his imagination. And Mr. Belasco has recently bestowed upon
the winning personality of his 'Peter Grimm' the exact habitation to
which that appealing creature would return in his desire to undo after
death what in life he had rashly commanded.
V
While the scene-painter of our time is most often called upon to realize
the actual in an interior and to delight us with a room the dominant
quality of which is that it looks as tho it was really lived in by the
personages we see moving around in it, he is not confined to those
domestic scenes. There are other plays than the modern social dramas;
and these other plays make other demands upon the artist. On occasion he
has to supply a gorgeous scenic accompaniment for the Roman and Egyptian
episodes of 'Antony and Cleopatra,' to suggest the blasted heath where
Macbeth may meet the weird sisters, and to call up before our delighted
eyes the placid charm of the Forest of Arden. The awkward and
inconsistent sky-borders, strips of pendent canvas wholly
unsatisfactory as substitutes for the vast depths of the starry heavens,
he is able to dispense with by lowering a little the hangings at the top
edge of the picture-frame, and by thus limiting the upward gaze of the
spectators, so that he can forgo the impossible attempt to imitate the
changing sky. He can achieve an effect of limitless space, as in the
last act of the 'Garden of Allah' (which brings before us the endless
vision of Sahara), by the use of a cyclorama background, the drop being
suspended from a semicircular rod which runs around the top of the
stage, shutting in the view absolutely, and yet yielding itself to a
representation of sand and sky meeting afar off on the faint horizon.
[Illustration: A landscape set Designed by P. Fontanesi in Italy in the
eighteenth century]
[Illustration: A set for the opera of 'Robert le Diable' At the Paris
Opera]
In the past half-century, and more especially since the improvement of
the electric light, scene-painting has become very elaborate and very
expensive. Instead of being kept in its proper place as the decoration
of the drama, as a beautiful accessory of the action, it has often been
pushed to the front, so as to attract attention to itself, and thereby
to distract attention from the play which it was supposed to illuminate.
Sometimes Shakspere has been smothered in scenery, and sometimes the art
of the actor has been subordinated to the art of the scene-painter. Now,
it must be admitted that nothing is too good for the masterpieces of the
drama, and that Sophocles no less than Shakspere ought to be presented
to the public with all the pomp that his lofty themes and his marvelous
workmanship may demand. But the plays of the mighty dramatic poets
ought not to be used merely as pegs on which to hang gorgeous apparel.
After all, the play's the thing; and whenever the scene-painter and his
invading partner, the stage-manager, are prompted to oust the drama from
its pre-eminence, and to substitute an exhibition of their accessory
arts, the result is a betrayal of the playwright.
A well-known British art critic once told me that when the curtain rose
at a certain London revival of 'Twelfth Night,' and disclosed Olivia's
garden, he sat entranced at the beauty of the spectacle before his eyes,
with its subtle harmonies of color, so entranced, indeed, that he found
himself distinctly annoyed when the actors came on the stage and began
to talk. For the moment, at least, he wished them away, as disturbers of
his esthetic delight in the lovely picture on which his eyes were
feasting. But even a stage-setting as captivating as this might very
well be justified if it had been employed to fill a gap in the action,
and to buttress up the interest of an episode where the dramatist had
allowed the appeal of his story to relax. Perrin, the manager of the
Comedie-Francaise thirty years ago, declined to produce a French version
of 'Othello' because he found a certain dramatic emptiness in the scenes
at Cyprus at the opening of the second act, which he felt he would have
to mask by the beauty of spectacular decoration, too costly an expedient
in his opinion for the finances of the theater just then.
[Illustration: The set of the last act of the 'Garden of Allah' From the
model in the Dramatic Museum of Columbia University]
[Illustration: A set for 'Medea' Designed by Herr Gustav Lindemann]
It was Perrin, however, who produced the French version of the
'OEdipus the King' of Sophocles, and who bestowed upon it a single set
of wonderful charm and power, at once dignified, appropriate, and
beautiful in itself. It represented an open space between a temple and
the palace of the ill-fated OEdipus, with an altar in the center, and
with the profile of another temple projected against the distant sky and
relieved by the tall, thin outline of poplar-trees. The monotony of this
rectangular architectural construction was avoided by placing all the
buildings on a slant, the whole elevation of the temple being visible on
the left of the spectators, whereas only a corner of the colonnade of
the palace on the right was displayed. This set at the Theatre-Francais
was the absolute antithesis of the original scenic surroundings in the
theater of Dionysus more than two thousand years ago, when the
masterpiece of Sophocles had been performed in the open-air orchestra,
with only a hut of skins or a temporary wooden building to serve as a
background for the bas-reliefs of the action.
So elaborate, complicated, and costly have stage-sets become in the past
half-century, that there are already signs of the violent reaction that
might be expected. Mr. Gordon Craig, an artist of remarkable
individuality, has gone so far as to propose what is almost an abolition
of scene-painting. He seeks to attain effects of massive simplicity by
the use of unadorned hangings and of undecorated screens, thus
substituting vast spaces for the realistic details of the modern
scene-painter. No doubt, there are a few plays for which this method of
mounting would be appropriate enough--M. Maeterlinck's 'Intruder,' for
one, and his 'Sightless' for another, plays which are independent of
time and space, and in which the action appears to pass in some
undiscovered limbo. As yet the advanced and iconoclastic theories of Mr.
Craig have made few adherents, the most notable being the German,
"Professor" Reinhardt, who lacks Mr. Craig's fine feeling for form and
color, and who is continually tempted into rather ugly eccentricities of
design, being apparently moved by the desire to be different from his
predecessors rather than by the wish to be superior to them.