Auberon. English experiments will do.
Dorriforth. No doubt they would--if there _were_ any. But I don’t see
them.
Amicia. Fortunately: think what some of them might be! Though
Florentia saw nothing I saw many things in this poor little shabby “Due
d’Enghien,” coming over to our roaring London, where the dots have to
be so big on the i’s, with its barely audible note of originality. It
appealed to me, touched me, offered me a poignant suggestion of the way
things happen in life.
Auberon. In life they happen clumsily, stupidly, meanly. One goes to
the theatre just for the refreshment of seeing them happen in another
way--in symmetrical, satisfactory form, with unmistakable effect and
just at the right moment.
Dorriforth. It shows how the same cause may produce the most diverse
consequences. In this truth lies the only hope of art.
Auberon. Oh, art, art--don’t talk about art!
Amicia. Mercy, we must talk about something!
Dorriforth. Auberon hates generalizations. Nevertheless I make bold
to say that we go to the theatre in the same spirit in which we read
a novel, some of us to find one thing and some to find another; and
according as we look for the particular thing we find it.
Auberon. That’s a profound remark.
Florentia. We go to find amusement: that, surely, is what we all go for.
Amicia. There’s such a diversity in our idea of amusement.
Auberon. Don’t you impute to people more ideas than they have?
Dorriforth. Ah, one must do that or one couldn’t talk about them. We
go to be interested; to be absorbed, beguiled and to lose ourselves, to
give ourselves up, in short, to a charm.
Florentia. And the charm is the strange, the extraordinary.
Amicia. Ah, speak for yourself! The charm is the recognition of what we
know, what we feel.
Dorriforth. See already how you differ.
“SO!”
What we surrender ourselves to is the touch of nature, the sense of
life.
Amicia. The first thing is to believe.
Florentia. The first thing, on the contrary, is to _dis_believe.
Auberon. Lord, listen to them!
Dorriforth. The first thing is to folio--to care.
Florentia. I read a novel, I go to the theatre, to forget.
Amicia. To forget what?
Florentia. To forget life; to thro myself into something more beautiful
more exciting: into fable and romance.
Dorriforth. The attraction of fable and romance is that it’s about _us_,
about you and me--or people whose power to suffer and to enjoy is the
same as ours. In other words, we _live_ their experience, for the time,
and that’s hardly escaping from life.
Florentia. I’m not at all particular as to what you call it. Call it an
escape from the common, the prosaic, the immediate.
Dorriforth. You couldn’t put it better. That’s the life that art, with
Auberon’s permission, gives us; that’s the distinction it confers. This
is why the greatest commonness is when our guide turns out a vulgar
fellow--the angel, as we had supposed him, who has taken us by the hand.
Then what becomes of our escape?
Florentia. It’s precisely then that I complain of him. He leads us into
foul and dreary places--into flat and foolish deserts.
Dorriforth. He leads us into his own mind, his own vision of things:
that’s the only place into which the poet _can_ lead us. It’s there that
he finds “As You Like It,” it is there that he finds “Comus,” or “The
Way of the World,” or the Christmas pantomime. It is when he betrays us,
after he has got us in and locked the door, when he can’t keep from us
that we are in a bare little hole and that there are no pictures on the
walls, it is then that the immediate and the foolish overwhelm us.
Amicia. That’s what I liked in the piece we have been looking at. There
was an artistic intention, and the little room wasn’t bare: there was
sociable company in it. The actors were very humble aspirants, they were
common--
Auberon. Ah, when the French give their mind to that--!
Amicia. Nevertheless they struck me as recruits to an interesting cause,
which as yet (the house was so empty) could confer neither money nor
glory. They had the air, poor things, of working for love.
Auberon. For love of what?
Amicia. Of the whole little enterprise--the idea of the Théâtre Libre.
Florentia. Gracious, what you see in things! Don’t you suppose they were
paid?
Amicia. I know nothing about it. I liked their shabbiness--they had
only what was indispensable in the way of dress and scenery. That often
pleases me: the imagination, in certain cases, is more finely persuaded
by the little than by the much.
Dorriforth. I see what Amicia means.
Florentia. I’ll warrant you do, and a great deal more besides.
Dorriforth. When the appointments are meagre and sketchy the
responsibility that rests upon the actors becomes a still more serious
thing, and the spectator’s observation of the way they rise to it a
pleasure more intense. The face and the voice are more to the purpose
than acres of painted canvas, and a touching intonation, a vivid gesture
or two, than an army of supernumeraries.
Auberon. Why not have everything--the face, the voice, the touching
intonations, the vivid gestures, the acres of painted canvas, _and_ the
army of supernumeraries? Why not use bravely and intelligently every
resource of which the stage disposes? What else was Richard Wagner’s
great theory, in producing his operas at Bayreuth?
Dorriforth. Why not, indeed? That would be the ideal. To have the
picture complete at the same time the figures do their part in producing
the particular illusion required--what a perfection and what a joy! I
know no answer to that save the aggressive, objectionable fact. Simply
look at the stage of to-day and observe that these two branches of the
matter never do happen to go together. There is evidently a corrosive
principle in the large command of machinery and decorations--a germ
of perversion and corruption. It gets the upperhand--it becomes the
master. It is so much less easy to get good actors than good scenery
and to represent a situation by the delicacy of personal art than by
“building it in” and having everything real. Surely there is no reality
worth a farthing, on the stage, but what the actor gives, and only when
he has learned his business up to the hilt need he concern himself with
his material accessories. He hasn’t a decent respect for his art unless
he be ready to render his part as if the whole illusion depended on that
alone and the accessories didn’t exist. The acting is everything or it’s
nothing. It ceases to be everything as soon as something else becomes
very important. This is the case, to-day, on the London stage: something
else is very important. The public have been taught to consider it so:
the clever machinery has ended by operating as a bribe and a blind.
Their sense of the rest of the matter has gone to the dogs, as you may
perceive when you hear a couple of occupants of the stalls talking, in a
tone that excites your curiosity, about a performance that’s “splendid.”
Amicia. Do you ever hear the occupants of the stalls talking? Never,
in the _entr’actes_, have I detected, on their lips, a criticism or a
comment.
Dorriforth. Oh, they say “splendid”--distinctly! But a question or
two reveals that their reference is vague: they don’t themselves know
whether they mean the art of the actor or that of the stage-carpenter.
Auberon. Isn’t that confusion a high result of taste? Isn’t it what’s
called a feeling for the _ensemble?_ The artistic effect, as a whole, is
so welded together that you can’t pick out the parts.
Dorriforth. Precisely; that’s what it is in the best cases, and some
examples are wonderfully clever.
Florentia. Then what fault do you find? Dorriforth. Simply this--that
the whole is a pictorial whole, not a dramatic one. There is something
indeed that you can’t pick out, for the very good reason that--in any
serious sense of the word--it isn’t there.
Florentia. The public has taste, then, if it recognizes and delights in
a fine picture.
Dorriforth. I never said it hadn’t, so far as that goes. The public
likes to be amused, and small blame to it. It isn’t very particular
about the means, but it has rather a preference for amusements that I
believes to be “improving,” other things being equal. I don’t think it’s
either very intelligent or at all opinionated, the dear old public it
takes humbly enough what is given it and it doesn’t cry for the moon. It
has an idea that fine scenery is an appeal to its nobler part, and that
it shows a nice critical sense in preferring it to poor. That’s a real
intellectual flight, for the public.
Auberon. Very well, its preference is right, and why isn’t that a
perfectly legitimate state of things?
Dorriforth. Why isn’t it? It distinctly _is!_ Good scenery and poor
acting are better than poor scenery with the same sauce. Only it becomes
then another matter: we are no longer talking about the drama.
Auberon. Very likely that’s the future of the drama, in London--an
immense elaboration of the picture.
Dorriforth. My dear fellow, you take the words out of my mouth.
An immense elaboration of the picture and an immense sacrifice of
everything else: it would take very little more to persuade me that that
will be the only formula for our children. It’s all right, when once we
have buried our dead. I have no doubt that the scenic part of the art,
remarkable as some of its achievements already appear to us, is only in
its infancy, and that we are destined to see wonders done that we now
but faintly conceive. The probable extension of the mechanical arts
is infinite. “Built in,” forsooth! We shall see castles and cities and
mountains and rivers built in. Everything points that way; especially
the constitution of the contemporary multitude. It is huge and
good-natured and common. It likes big, unmistakable, knock-down effects;
it likes to get its money back in palpable, computable change. It’s in
a tremendous hurry, squeezed together, with a sort of generalized gape,
and the last thing it expects of you is that you will spin things fine.
You can’t portray a character, alas, or even, vividly, any sort of human
figure, unless, in some degree, you do that. Therefore the theatre,
inevitably accommodating itself, will be at last a landscape without
figures. I mean, of course, without figures that count. There will
be little illustrations of costume stuck about--dressed manikins; but
they’ll have nothing to say: they won’t even go through the form of
speech.
Amicia. What a hideous prospect!
Dorriforth. Not necessarily, for we shall have grown used to it: we
shall, as I say, have buried our dead. To-day it’s cruel, because our
old ideals are only dying, they are _in extremis_, they are virtually
defunct, but they are above-ground--we trip and stumble on them. We
shall eventually lay them tidily away. This is a bad moment, because
it’s a moment of transition, and we still _miss_ the old superstition,
the bravery of execution, the eloquence of the lips, the interpretation
of character. We miss these things, of course, in proportion as the
ostensible occasion for them is great; we miss them particularly, for
instance, when the curtain rises on Shakespeare. Then we are conscious
of a certain divine dissatisfaction, of a yearning for that which isn’t.
But we shall have got over this discomfort on the day when we have
accepted the ostensible occasion as merely and frankly ostensible, and
the real one as having nothing to do with it.
Florentia. I don’t follow you. As I’m one of the squeezed, gaping
public, I must be dense and vulgar. You do, by-the-way, immense
injustice to that body. They do care for character--care much for it.
Aren’t they perpetually talking about the actor’s conception of it?
Dorriforth. Dear lady, what better proof can there be of their
ineptitude, and that painted canvas and real water are the only things
they understand? The vanity of wasting time over that! Auberon. Over
what? Dorriforth. The actor’s conception of a part. It’s the refuge of
observers who are no observers and critics who are no critics. With what
on earth have we to do save his execution?
Florentia. I don’t in the least agree with you.
Amicia. Are you very sure, my poor Dorriforth?
Auberon. Give him rope and he’ll hang himself.
Dorriforth. It doesn’t need any great license to ask who in the world
holds in his bosom the sacred secret of the right conception. All the
actor can do is to give us his. We must take that one for granted, we
make him a present of it. He must impose his conception upon us--
Auberon (interrupting). I thought you said we accepted it.
Dorriforth. Impose it upon our _attention_. clever Auberon. It is
because we accept his idea that he must repay us by making it vivid, by
showing us how valuable it is. We give him a watch: he must show us what
time it keeps. He winds it up, that is he executes the conception, and
his execution is what we criticise, if we be so moved. Can anything be
more absurd than to hear people discussing the conception of a part of
which the execution doesn’t exist--the idea of a character which never
arrives at form? Think what it is, that form, as an accomplished actor
may give it to us, and admit that we have enough to do to hold him to
this particular honor.
Auberon. Do you mean to say you don’t think some conceptions are better
than some others?
Dorriforth. Most assuredly, some are better: the proof of the pudding
is in the eating. The best are those which yield the most points,
which have the largest face; those, in other words, that are the most
demonstrable, or, in other words still, the most actable. The most
intelligent performer is he who recognizes most surely this “actable”
and distinguishes in it the more from the less. But we are so far from
being in possession of a subjective pattern to which we have a right to
hold him that he is entitled directly to contradict any such absolute by
presenting us with different versions of the same text, each completely
colored, completely consistent with itself. Every actor in whom the
artistic life is strong must often feel the challenge to do that. I
should never think, for instance, of contesting an actress’s right to
represent Lady Macbeth as a charming, insinuating woman, if she really
sees the figure that way. I may be surprised at such a vision; but so
far from being scandalized, I am positively thankful for the extension
of knowledge, of pleasure, that she is able to open to me.
Auberon. A reading, as they say, either commends itself to one’s sense
of truth or it doesn’t. In the one case--
Dorriforth. In the one case I recognize--even--or especially--when the
presumption may have been against the particular attempt, a consummate
illustration of what art can do. In the other I moralize indulgently
upon human rashness.
Florentia. You have an assurance _à taute épreuve_; but you are
deplorably superficial. There is a whole group of plays and a whole
category of acting to which your generalizations quite fail to apply.
Help me, Auberon.
Auberon. You’re easily exhausted. I suppose she means that it’s far from
true everywhere that the scenery is everything. It may be true--I don’t
say it is!--of two or three good-natured playhouses in London. It isn’t
true--how can it be?--of the provincial theatres or of the others in the
capital. Put it even that they would be all scenery if they could; they
can’t, poor things--so they have to provide acting.
Dorriforth. They have to, fortunately; but what do we hear of it?
Florentia. How do you mean, what do we hear of it?
Dorriforth. In what trumpet of fame does it reach us? They do what they
can, the performers Auberon alludes to, and they are brave souls. But I
am speaking of the conspicuous cases, of the exhibitions that draw.
Florentia. There is good acting that draws; one could give you names and
places.
Dorriforth. I have already guessed those you mean. But when it isn’t
too much a matter of the paraphernalia it is too little a matter of
the play. A play nowadays is a rare bird. I should like to see ¦ one.
Florentia. There are lots of them, all the while--the newspapers talk
about them. People talk about them at dinners.
Dorriforth. What do they say about them?
Florentia. The newspapers?
Dorriforth. No, I don’t care for _them_. The people at dinners.
Florentia. Oh. they don’t say anything in particular.
Dorriforth. Doesn’t that seem to show the effort isn’t very suggestive?
Amicia. The conversation at dinners certainly isn’t.
Dorriforth. I mean our contemporary drama. To begin with, you can’t find
it there’s no text.
Florentia. No text?
Auberon. So much the better!
Dorriforth. So much the better if there is to be no criticism. There
is only a dirt prompter’s book. One can’t put one’s hand upon it; one
doesn’t know what one is discussing. There is no “authority”--nothing is
ever published.
Amicia. The pieces wouldn’t bear that.
Dorriforth. It would be a small ordeal to resist--if there were anything
in them. Look at the novels!
Amicia. The text is the French _brochure_. The “adaptation” is
unprintable.
Dorriforth. That’s where it’s so wrong, It ought at least to be as good
as the original.
Auberon. Aren’t there some “rights” to protect--some risk of the play
being stolen if it’s published?
Dorriforth. There may be--I don’t know. Doesn’t that only prove how
little important we regard the drama as being, and how little seriously
we take it, if we won’t even trouble ourselves to bring about decent
civil conditions for its existence? What have we to do with the French
_brochure?_ how does that help us to represent our own life, our
manners, our customs, our ideas, our English types, our English world?
Such a field for comedy, for tragedy, for portraiture, for satire,
as they all make-such subjects as they would yield! Think of London
alone--what a matchless hunting-ground for the satirist--the most
magnificent that ever was. If the occasion always produced the man
London would have produced an Aristophanes. But somehow it doesn’t.
Florentia. Oh, types and ideas, Aristophanes and satire--!
Dorriforth. I’m too ambitious, you mean? I shall presently show you
that I’m not ambitious at all. Everything makes against that--I am only
reading the signs.
Auberon. The plays are arranged to be as English as possible: they are
altered, they are fitted.
Dorriforth. Fitted? Indeed they are, and to the capacity of infants.
They are in too many cases made vulgar, puerile, barbarous. They are
neither fish nor flesh, and with all the point that’s left out and all
the naïveté that’s put in, they cease to place before us any coherent
appeal or any recognizable society.
Auberon. They often make good plays to act, all the same.
Dorriforth. They may; but they don’t make good plays to see or to hear.
The theatre consists of two things, _que diable_--of the stage and the
drama, and I don’t see how you can have it unless you have both, or how
you can have either unless you have the other. They are the two blades
of a pair of scissors.
Auberon. You are very unfair to native talent. There are lots of
_strictly original_ plays--
Amicia. Yes, they put that expression on the posters.
Auberon. I don’t know what they put on the posters; but the plays are
written and acted--produced with great success.
Dorriforth. Produced--partly. A play isn’t fully produced until it is in
a form in which you can refer to it. We have to talk in the air. I can
refer to my Congreve, but I can’t to my Pinero. {*}
* Since the above was written several of Mr. Pinero’s plays
have been published.
Florentia. The authors are not bound to publish them if they don’t wish.
Dorriforth. Certainly not, nor are they in that case bound to insist on
one’s not being a little vague about them. They are perfectly free to
withhold them; they may have very good reasons for it, and I can imagine
some that would be excellent and worthy of all respect. But their
withholding them is one of the signs.
Auberon. What signs?
Dorriforth. Those I just spoke of--those we are trying to read together.
The signs that ambition and desire are folly, that the sun of the drama
has set, that the matter isn’t worth talking about, that it has ceased
to be an interest for serious folk, and that everything--everything, I
mean, that’s anything--is over. The sooner we recognize it the sooner to
sleep, the sooner we get clear of misleading illusions and are purged
of the bad blood that disappointment makes. It’s a pity, because the
theatre--after every allowance is made--_might_ have been a fine thing.
At all events it was a pleasant--it was really almost a noble--dream.
_Requiescat!_
Florentia. I see nothing to confirm your absurd theory. I delight in the
play; more people than ever delight in it with me; more people than ever
go to it, and there are ten theatres in London where there were two of
old.
Dorriforth. Which is what was to demonstrated. Whence do they derive
their nutriment?
Auberon. Why, from the enormous public.
Dorriforth. My dear fellow, I’m not talking of the box-office. What
wealth of dramatic, of histrionic production have we to meet that
enormous demand? There will be twenty theatres ten years hence where
there are ten to-day, and there will be, no doubt, ten times as many
people “delighting in them,” like Florentla. But it won’t alter the fact
that our dream will have been dreamed. Florentia said a word when we
came in which alone speaks volumes.
Florentia. What was my word?
Auberon. You are sovereignly unjust to native talent among the actors--I
leave the dramatists alone. There are many who do excellent, independent
work; strive for perfection, completeness--in short, the things we want.
Dorriforth. I am not in the least unjust to them--I only pity them: they
have so little to put _sous la dent_. It must seem to them at times
that no one will work for them, that they are likely to starve for
parts--forsaken of gods and men.
Florentia. If they work, then, in solitude and sadness, they have the
more honor, and one should recognize more explicitly their great merit.
Dorriforth. Admirably said. Their laudable effort is precisely the one
little loop-hole that I see of escape from the general doom. Certainly
we must try to enlarge it--that small aperture into the blue. We must
fix our eyes on it and make much of it, exaggerate it, do anything with
it tha may contribute to restore a working faith. Precious that must be
to the sincere spirits on the stage who are conscious of all the other
things--formidable things--that rise against them.
Amicia. What other things do you mean?
Dorriforth. Why, for one thing, the grossness and brutality of
London, with its scramble, its pressure, its hustle of engagements, of
preoccupations, its long distances, its late hours, its nightly dinners,
its innumerable demands on the attention, its general congregation of
influences fatal to the isolation, to the punctuality, to the security,
of the dear old playhouse spell. When Florentia said in her charming
way--
Florentia. Here’s my dreadful speech at last.
Dorriforth. When you said that you went to the Théâtre Libre in the
afternoon because you couldn’t spare an evening, I recognized the
death-knell of the drama. _Time_, the very breath of its nostrils,
is lacking. Wagner was clever to go to leisurely Bayreuth among the
hills--the Bayreuth of spacious days, a paradise of “development.”
Talk to a London audience of “development!” The long runs would, if
necessary, put the whole question into a nutshell. Figure to yourself,
for then the question is answered, how an intelligent actor must loathe
them, and what a cruel negation he must find in them of the artistic
life, the life of which the very essence is variety of practice,
freshness of experiment, and to feel that one must do many things in
turn to do any one of them completely.
Auberon. I don’t in the least understand your _acharnement_, in view of
the vagueness of your contention.
Dorriforth. My _acharnement_ is your little joke, and my contention is a
little lesson in philosophy.
Florentia. I prefer a lesson in taste. I had one the other night at the
“Merry Wives.”
Dorriforth. If you come to that, so did I!
Amicia. So she does spare an evening sometimes.
Florentia. It was all extremely quiet and comfortable, and I don’t
in the least recognize Dorriforth’s lurid picture of the dreadful
conditions. There was no scenery--at least not too much; there was just
enough, and it was very pretty, and it was in its place.
Dorriforth. And what else was there?
Florentia. There was very good acting.
Amicia. I also went, and I thought it all, for a sportive, wanton thing,
quite painfully ugly.
Auberon. Uglier than that ridiculous black room, with the invisible
people groping about in it, of your precious “Duc d’Enghien?”
Dorriforth. The black room is doubtless not the last word of art, but it
struck me as a successful application of a happy idea. The contrivance
was perfectly simple--a closer night effect than is usually attempted,
with a few guttering candles, which threw high shadows over the bare
walls, on the table of the court-martial. Out of the gloom came the
voices and tones of the distinguishable figures, and it is perhaps a
fancy of mine that it made them--given the situation, of course--more
impressive and dramatic.
Auberon. You rail against scenery, but what could belong more to the
order of things extraneous to what you perhaps a little priggishly call
the delicacy of personal art than the arrangement you are speaking of?
Dorriforth. I was talking of the abuse of scenery. I never said anything
so idiotic as that the effect isn’t helped by an appeal to the eye and
an adumbration of the whereabouts.
Auberon. But where do you draw the line and fix the limit? What is the
exact dose?
Dorriforth. It’s a question of taste and tact.
Florentia. And did you find taste and tact in that coal-hole of the
Théâtre Libre?
Dorriforth. Coal-hole is again your joke. I found a strong impression
in it--an impression of the hurried, extemporized cross-examination, by
night, of an impatient and mystified prisoner, whose dreadful fate had
been determined in advance, who was to be shot, high-handedly, in
the dismal dawn. The arrangement didn’t worry and distract me: it was
simplifying, intensifying. It gave, what a judicious _mise-en-scène_
should always do, the essence of the matter, and left the embroidery to
the actors.
Florentia. At the “Merry Wives,” where you could see your hand before
your face, I could make out the embroidery.
Dorriforth. Could you, under Falstaff’s pasteboard cheeks and the sad
disfigurement of his mates? There was no excess of scenery, Auberon
says. Why, Falstaff’s very person was nothing _but_ scenery. A false
face, a false figure, false hands, false legs--scarcely a square inch on
which the irrepressible humor of the rogue could break into illustrative
touches. And he is so human, so expressive, of so rich a physiognomy.
One would rather Mr. Beerbohm Tree should have played the part in his
own clever, elegant slimness---that would at least have represented
life. A Falstaff all “make-up” is an opaque substance. This seems to me
an example of what the rest still more suggested, that in dealing with a
production like the “Merry Wives” really the main quality to put
forward is discretion. You must resolve such a production, as a thing
represented, into a tone that the imagination can take an aesthetic
pleasure in. Its grossness must be transposed, as it were, to a fictive
scale, a scale of fainter tints and generalized signs. A filthy,
eruptive, realistic Bardolph and Pistol overlay the romantic with the
literal. Relegate them and blur them, to the eye; let their blotches be
constructive and their raggedness relative.
Amicia. Ah, it was _so_ ugly!
Dorriforth. What a pity then, after all, there wasn’t more painted
canvas to divert you! Ah, decidedly, the theatre of the future must be
that.
Florentia. Please remember your theory that our life’s a scramble, and
suffer me to go and dress for dinner.
1889.