I
In his suggestive study of ancient and modern drama, M. Emile Faguet
dwells on the fact that the drama is the only one of the arts which can
employ to advantage the aid of all the other arts. The muses of tragedy
and comedy can borrow narrative from the muse of epic poetry and song
from the muse of lyric poetry. They can avail themselves of oratory,
music, and dancing. They can profit by the assistance of the architect,
the sculptor, and the painter. They can draw on the co-operation of all
the other arts without ceasing to be themselves and without losing any
of their essential qualities. This was seen clearly by Wagner, who
insisted that his music-dramas were really the art-work of the future,
in that they were the result of a combination of all the arts. Quite
possibly the Greeks had the same idea, since Athenian tragedy has many
points of similarity to Wagner's music-drama; it had epic passages and a
lyric chorus set to music; it called for stately dancing against an
architectural background.
But altho the muses of the drama may invoke the help of their seven
sisters, they need not make this appeal unless they choose. They can
give their performances on a bare platform, or in the open air, and
thus get along without painting and architecture. They can disdain the
support of song and dance and music. They can concentrate all their
effort upon themselves and provide a play which is a play and nothing
else. And this is what Ibsen has done in his somber social-dramas.
'Ghosts,' for example, is independent of anything extraneous to the
drama. It is a play, only a play, and nothing more than a play.
Yet it is possible to reduce the drama to an even barer state than we
find in Ibsen's gloomy tragedy in prose. Ibsen's characters speak; they
reveal themselves in speech; and it is by words that they carry on the
story. A story can be presented on the stage, however, without the use
of words, without the aid of the human voice, by the employment of
gesture only, by pure pantomime. No doubt, the drama makes a great
sacrifice when it decides to do without that potent instrument of
emotional appeal, the human voice; and yet it can find its profit, now
and then, in this self-imposed deprivation. Certain stories there are,
not many, and all of them necessarily simplified and made very clear,
which gain by being bereft of the spoken word and by being presented
only in the pantomime. And these stories, simple as they must be, if
they are to be apprehended by sight alone without the aid of sound, are,
nevertheless, capable of supporting an actual play with all the
absolutely necessary elements of a drama.
In his interesting and illuminating volume on the 'Theory of the
Theater,' Mr. Clayton Hamilton has a carefully considered definition of
a play. He asserts that "a play is a story devised to be presented by
actors on a stage before an audience." Perhaps it might be possible to
amend this by saying "in a theater," instead of "on a stage," since we
are now pretty certain that there was no stage in the Greek theater when
Sophocles was writing for it. But this is but a trifling correction, and
the definition as a whole is excellent. It includes every possible kind
of dramatic entertainment, Greek tragedy and Roman comedy, medieval
farce and modern melodrama, the music-drama of Wagner and the
problem-play of Ibsen, the summer song-show and the college boy's
burlesque. Obviously it includes the wordless play, the story devised to
be presented on a stage and before an audience by actors who use gesture
only and who do not speak.
In forgoing the aid of words the drama is only reducing itself to its
absolutely necessary elements--a story, and a story which can be shown
in action. It is not quite true that the skeleton of a good play is
always a pantomime, since there are plays the plot of which cannot be
conveyed to the audience except by actual speech. Yet some of the
greatest plays have plots so transparent that the story is clear, even
if we fail to hear what the actors are saying. It has been asserted that
if 'Hamlet,' for example, were to be performed in a deaf-and-dumb
asylum, the inmates would be able to understand it and to enjoy it. They
would be deprived of the wonderful beauty of Shakspere's verse, no
doubt, and they would scarcely be able even to guess at the deeper
significance of the philosophy which enriches the tragedy; but the story
would unroll itself clearly before their eyes so that they could follow
the succession of scenes with adequate understanding.
With his customary shrewdness and his usual gift of piercing to the
center of what he was engaged in analyzing, Aristotle more than four
thousand years ago saw the necessity of a neatly articulated plot. "If
you string together a set of speeches," he said, "expressive of
character and well finished in point of diction and thought, you will
not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play,
which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and
artistically constructed incidents." No broader statement than this
could be made as to the all-importance of the story itself--and
pantomime is a story and nothing else, a story capable of being
translated by the actions of the performers, without the aid of speech.
Nor need we suppose that a play without words is necessarily devoid of
poetry. There may be poetry in the "set of speeches expressive of
character and well finished in point of thought and diction"; but there
may be poetry also in the theme itself, in the actual story. 'Romeo and
Juliet,' for example, is fundamentally poetic in its theme, and it
retains its poetic quality even when it is made to serve as the libretto
of an opera, as it would also retain this if it should be stripped bare
to be presented in pantomime.
In a recent work on the 'Essentials of Poetry,' Professor William A.
Neilson has made this clear: "Many a drama is a genuine poetic creation,
altho it may be simple to the point of baldness in diction and exhibit
the fundamental qualities of poetry only in the characterization and in
the significance, proportion, and verisimilitude of the plot." That is
to say, the drama can use two kinds of poetry, that which is internal
and contained in the plot, and that which is external and confined to
the language. It can employ
jewels five-words long,
That on the stretched forefinger of all Time
Sparkle forever.
But it can also attain poetry without the use of superb and sonorous
phrases and solely by its choice of theme. This is what the poets have
often felt, and as a result French lyrists, like Theophile Gautier and
Francois Coppee, have not disdained to compose librettos for pantomimic
ballets, 'Giselle' and the 'Korrigane.' One of the most successful of
the recent Russian ballets was simply a representation of Gautier's
poetic fantasy, 'One of Cleopatra's Nights,'