Since Charles Lamb's essay "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, considered
with reference to their fitness for stage representation," there has
been a great deal of argument as to whether the beauty of words,
especially in verse, is necessarily lost on the stage, and whether a
well-constructed play cannot exist by itself, either in dumb show or
with words in a foreign language, which we may not understand. The
acting, by the Sicilian actors, of "La Figlia di Jorio," seemed to me to
do something towards the solution of part at least of this problem.
The play, as one reads it, has perhaps less than usual of the beauty
which d'Annunzio elaborates in his dramatic speech. It is, on the other
hand, closer to nature, carefully copied from the speech of the peasants
of the Abruzzi, and from what remains of their folk-lore. The story on
which it is founded is a striking one, and the action has, even in
reading, the effect of a melodrama. Now see it on the stage, acted with
the speed and fury of these actors. Imagine oneself ignorant of the
language and of the play. Suddenly the words have become unnecessary;
the bare outlines stand out, perfectly explicit in gesture and motion;
the scene passes before you as if you were watching it in real life; and
this primitively passionate acting, working on an action so cunningly
contrived for its co-operation, gives us at last what the play, as we
read it, had suggested to us, but without complete conviction. The
beauty of the speech had become a secondary matter, or, if we did not
understand it, the desire to know what was being said: the playwright
and his players had eclipsed the poet, the visible action had put out
the calculated cadences of the verse. And the play, from the point of
view of the stage, had fulfilled every requirement, had achieved its
aim.
And still the question remains: how much of this success is due to the
playwright's skill or to the skill of the actors? How is it that in
this play the actors obtain a fine result, act on a higher level, than
in their realistic Sicilian tragedies? D'Annunzio is no doubt a better
writer than Capuana or Verga, and his play is finer as literature than
"Cavalleria Rusticana" or "Malia." But is it great poetry or great
drama, and has the skilful playwright need of the stage and of actors
like these, who come with their own life and ways upon it, in order to
bring the men and women of his pages to life? Can it be said of him that
he has fulfilled the great condition of poetic drama, that, as Coleridge
said, "dramatic poetry must be poetry hid in thought and passion--not
thought or passion disguised in the dress of poetry?"
That is a question which I am not here concerned to answer. Perhaps I
have already answered it. Perhaps Lamb had answered it when he said, of
a performance of Shakespeare in which there were two great actors, that
"it seemed to embody and realise conceptions which had hitherto assumed
no distinct shape," but that, "when the novelty is past, we find to our
cost that instead of realising an idea, we have only materialised and
brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood." If that
is true of Shakespeare, the greatest of dramatic poets, how far is it
from the impression which I have described in speaking of d'Annunzio.
What fine vision was there to bring down? what poetry hid in thought or
passion was lost to us in its passage across the stage?
And now let us consider the play in which these actors have found their
finest opportunity for abandoning themselves to those instincts out of
which they have made their art. "Malia," a Sicilian play of Capuana, is
an exhibition of the witchcraft of desire, and it is justified against
all accusation by that thrill with which something in us responds to it,
admitting: This is I, myself, so it has been given to me to sin and to
suffer. And so, if we think deeply enough we shall find, in these
sinning, suffering, insatiable beings, who present themselves as if
naked before us, the image of our own souls, visible for once, and
unashamed, in the mirror of these bodies. It is we, who shudder before
them, and maybe laugh at the extravagance of their gestures, it is
ourselves whom they are showing to us, caught unawares and set in
symbolical action. Let not the base word realism be used for this
spontaneous energy by which we are shown the devastating inner forces,
by which nature creates and destroys us. Here is one part of life, the
source of its existence: and here it is shown us crude as nature,
absolute as art. This new, living art of the body, which we see
struggling in the clay of Rodin, concentrates itself for once in this
woman who expresses, without reticence and without offence, all that the
poets have ever said of the supreme witchcraft, animal desire, without
passion, carnal, its own self-devouring agony. Art has for once
justified itself by being mere nature.
And, here again, this play is no masterpiece in itself, only the
occasion for a masterpiece of acting. The whole company, Sig. Grasso and
the others, acted with perfect unanimity, singly and in crowds. What
stage-crowd of a hundred drilled and dumpish people, as we see it at our
big theatres, has ever given us that sense of a real, surging crowd as
the dozen or so supers in that last struggle which ends the play? But
the play really existed for Aguglia, and was made by her. Réjane has
done greater things in her own way, in her own way she is a greater
artist. But not even Réjane has given us the whole animal, in its
self-martyrdom, as this woman has given it to us. Such knowledge and
command of the body, and so frank an abandonment to its instinctive
motions, has never been seen on our stage, not even in Sada Yacco and
the Japanese. They could outdo Sarah in a death-scene, but not Aguglia
in the scene in which she betrays her secret. Done by anyone else, it
would have been an imitation of a woman in hysterics, a thing
meaningless and disgusting. Done by her, it was the visible contest
between will and desire, a battle, a shipwreck, in which you watch
helplessly from the shore every plank as the sea tears if off and
swallows it. "I feel as if I had died," said the friend who was with me
in the theatre, speaking out of an uncontrollable sympathy; died with
the woman, she meant, or in the woman's place.
Our critics here have for the most part seen fit, like the French critic
whom I quoted at the beginning, to qualify their natural admiration by a
hesitating consciousness that "la passion paraît decidement avoir
partout ses inconvenients." But the critic who sets himself against a
magnetic current can do no more than accept the shock which has cast him
gently aside. All art is magnetism. The greatest art is a magnetism
through which the soul reaches the soul. There is another, terrible,
authentic art through which the body communicates its thrilling secrets.
And against all these currents there is no barrier and no appeal.