Modern staging, which has been carried in England to its highest point
of excellence, professes to aim at beauty, and is, indeed, often
beautiful in detail. But its real aim is not at the creation of
beautiful pictures, in subordination to the words and actions of the
play, but at supplementing words and actions by an exact imitation of
real surroundings. Imitation, not creation, is its end, and in its
attempt to imitate the general aspect of things it leads the way to the
substitution of things themselves for perfectly satisfactory indications
of them. "Real water" we have all heard of, and we know its place in the
theatre; but this is only the simplest form of this anti-artistic
endeavour to be real. Sir Henry Irving will use, for a piece of
decoration meant to be seen only from a distance, a garland of imitation
flowers, exceedingly well done, costing perhaps two pounds, where two
or three brushes of paint would have supplied its place more
effectively. When d'Annunzio's "Francesca da Rimini" was put on the
stage in Rome, a pot of basil was brought daily from Naples in order
that it might be laid on the window-sill of the room in which Francesca
and Paolo read of Lancelot and Guinevere. In an interview published in
one of the English papers, d'Annunzio declared that he had all his stage
decorations made in precious metal by fine craftsmen, and that he had
done this for an artistic purpose, and not only for the beauty of the
things themselves. The gesture, he said, of the actor who lifts to his
lips a cup of finely-wrought gold will be finer, more sincere, than that
of the actor who uses a gilded "property."
If so, I can but answer, the actor is no actor, but an amateur. The true
actor walks in a world as real in its unreality as that which surrounds
the poet or the enthusiast. The bare boards, chairs, and T-light, in the
midst of which he rehearses, are as significantly palaces or meadows to
him, while he speaks his lines and lives himself into his character, as
all the real grass and real woodwork with which the manager will cumber
the stage on the first night. As little will he need to distinguish
between the gilt and the gold cup as between the imaginary characters
who surround him, and his mere friends and acquaintances who are
speaking for them.
This costly and inartistic aim at reality, then, is the vice of the
modern stage, and, at its best or worst, can it be said that it is
really even what it pretends to be: a perfectly deceptive imitation of
the real thing? I said once, to clinch an argument against it, by giving
it its full possible credit, that the modern staging can give you the
hour of the day and the corner of the country with precise accuracy. But
can it? Has the most gradual of stage-moons ever caught the miraculous
lunar trick to the life? Has the real hedgerow ever brought a breath of
the country upon the stage? I do not think so, and meanwhile, we have
been trying our hardest to persuade ourselves that it is so, instead of
abandoning ourselves to a new, strange atmosphere, to the magic of the
play itself.
What Mr. Craig does is to provide a plain, conventional, or darkened
background for life, as life works out its own ordered lines on the
stage; he gives us suggestion instead of reality, a symbol instead of an
imitation; and he relies, for his effects, on a new system of lighting
from above, not from below, and on a quite new kind of drill, as I may
call it, by which he uses his characters as masses and patterns,
teaching them to move all together, with identical gestures. The eye is
carried right through or beyond these horizons of canvas, and the
imagination with it; instead of stopping entangled among real stalks and
painted gables.
I have seen nothing so imaginative, so restful, so expressive, on the
English stage as these simple and elaborately woven designs, in patterns
of light and drapery and movement, which in "The Masque of Love" had a
new quality of charm, a completeness of invention, for which I would
have given all d'Annunzio's golden cups and Mr. Tree's boats on real
Thames water.
Here, for once, we see the stage treated in the proper spirit, as
material for art, not as a collection of real objects, or the imitation
of real objects. Why should not the visible world be treated in the same
spirit as the invisible world of character and temperament? A fine play
is not the copy of an incident or the stenography of a character. A
poetical play, to limit myself to that, requires to be put on the stage
in such a way as to suggest that atmosphere which, if it is a true poem,
will envelop its mental outlines. That atmosphere, which is of its
essence, is the first thing to be lost, in the staging of most poetical
plays. It is precisely what the stage-manager, if he happens to have the
secret of his own art, will endeavour most persistently to suggest. He
will make it his business to compete with the poet, and not, after the
manner of Drury Lane, with the accidents of life and the vulgarities of
nature.