CLIMAX
With the play properly introduced in act one, and the development
carried forward upon that firm foundation in the following act or acts,
the playwright approaches that part of his play which will, more than
anything else, settle the fate of his work. As we have noted, if he have
no such scene, he will not have a play at all. If on arrival it fail to
seem indispensable and to be of dynamic quality, the play will be
broken-winged, at best. The proof that he is a genuine playwright by
rightful calling and not a literary person, producing books for closet
reading, lies just here. The moment has come when, with his complication
brought to the point where it must be solved, and all that has gone
before waiting upon that solution, he must produce an effect with one
skillful right-arm stroke which shall make the spectators a unit in the
feeling that the evening has been well spent and his drama is true to
the best tradition of the stage.
The stress has steadily increased to a degree at which it must be
relieved. The strain is at the breaking point. The clash of characters
or of circumstances operating upon characters is such that a crisis is
at hand. By some ingenious interplay of word, action and scene, by an
emotional crescendo crystallizing in a stage picture, by some unexpected
reversion of incident or of human psychology (known in stage technic as
peripety) or by an unforeseen accident in the fall of events, an
electric change is exhibited, with the emotions of the _dramatis
personae_ at white heat and the consequent enthraldom of the audience. Of
all the varied pleasures of the playhouse, this moment, scene, turn of
story, is that which appeals to the largest number and has made the
theater most distinctive. This is not to say that a profound revelation
of character, or a pungent reflection on life, made concrete in a
situation, may not be a finer thing to do. It is merely to recognize a
certain unique thing the stage can do in story telling, as against other
forms, and to confess its universal attraction. While there is much in
latter day play-making that seems to deaden the thrill of the obligatory
scene, a clear comprehension of its central importance is basal in
appreciation of the drama. A play may succeed without it, and a
temporary school of psychologues may even pretend to pooh-pooh it as an
outworn mode of cheap theatrics. The influence of Ibsen, and there is
none more potent, has been cited as against the _scene a faire_, in the
French sense; and it is true that his curtains are less obviously
stressed and appear to aim not so much at the palpably heightened
effects traditional of the development in French hands,--the most
skillful hands in the world. But it remains true that this central and
dominant scene is inherent in the very structure of dramatic writing. To
repeat what was said before, the play that abandons climax may be good
entertainment, but is by so much poorer drama. The best and most
successful dramaturgy of our day therefore will seek to preserve the
obligatory scene, but hide under more subtle technic the ways and means
by which it is secured. The ways of the past became so open in the
attempt to reach the result as to produce in many cases a feeling of
bald artifice. This the later technic will do all in its power to avoid,
while clinging persistently to the principle of climax, a principle of
life just as truly as a principle of art. Physicians speak in a
physiological sense of the grand climacteric of a man's age.
A test of any play may be found in the readiness with which it lends
itself to a simple threefold statement of its story; the proposition, as
it is called by technicians. This tabloid summary of the essence of the
play is valuable in that it reveals plainly two things: whether there is
a play in hand, and what and where is its obligatory scene. All who wish
to train themselves to be critical rather than captious or silly in
their estimate of drama, cannot be too strongly urged to practice this
exercise of reducing a play to its lowest terms, its essential elements.
It will serve to clarify much that might remain otherwise a muddle. And
one of the sure tests of a good play may be found here; if it is not a
workable drama, either it will not readily reduce to a proposition or
else cannot be stated propositionally at all. Further, a play that is a
real play in substance, and not a hopelessly undramatic piece of writing
arbitrarily cut up into scenes or acts, and expressed in dialogue (like
some of the dramas of the Bengalese Taghore), can be stated clearly and
simply in a brief paragraph. This matter of reduction to a skeleton
which is structurally a _sine qua non_ may be illustrated.
A proposition, to define it a little more carefully, is a threefold
statement of the essence of a play, so organically related that each
successive part depends upon and issues from the other. It contains a
condition (or situation), an action, and a result. For instance, the
proposition of _Macbeth_ may be expressed as follows:
I. A man, ambitious to be king, abetted by his wife, gains the throne
through murder.
II. Remorse visits them both.
III. What will be the effect upon the pair?
Reflection upon this schematic summary will show that the interest of
Shakespeare's great drama is not primarily a story interest; plot is not
the chief thing, but character. The essential crux lies in the painful
spectacle of the moral degeneration of husband and wife, sin working
upon each according to their contrasted natures. Both have too much of
the nobler elements in them not to experience regret and the prick of
conscience. This makes the drama called _Macbeth_ a fine example of
psychologic tragedy in the true sense.
Or take a well-known modern play, _Camille:_
I. A young man loves and lives with a member of the demi-monde.
II. His father pleads with her to give him up, for his own sake.
III. What will she do?
It will be observed that the way the lady of the camellias answers the
question is the revelation of her character; so that the play again,
although its story interest is sufficient, is primarily a character
study, surrounded by Dumas fils with a rich atmosphere of understanding
sympathy and with sentiment that to a later taste becomes
sentimentality.
_The School for Scandal_ might be stated in this way:
I. An old husband brings his gay but well-meaning wife to town.
II. Her innocent love of fun involves her in scandal.
III. Will the two be reconciled, and how?
Ibsen's _A Doll's House_ may be thus expressed in a proposition:
I. A young wife has been babified by her husband.
II. Experiences open her eyes to the fact that she is not educated to be
either wife or mother.
III. She leaves her husband until he can see what a woman should be in
the home: a human being, not a doll.
These examples will serve to show what is meant by proposition and
indicate more definitely the central purpose of the dramatic author and
the technical demand made upon him. Be assured that under whatever
varied garb of attraction in incident, scene and character, this
underlying stern architectural necessity abides, and a drama's inability
to reduce itself thus to a formula is a confession that in the
structural sense the building is lop-sided and insecure, or, worse, that
there is no structure there at all: nothing, so to put it, but a front
elevation, a mere architect's suggestion.
As the spectator breathlessly enjoys the climax and watches to see that
unknotting of the knot which gives the French word _denouement_
(unknotting) its meaning, he will notice that the intensity of the
climactic effect is not derived alone from action and word; but that
largely effective in the total result is the picture made upon the
stage, in front of the background of setting which in itself has
pictorial quality, by the grouped characters as the curtain falls.
This effect, conventionally called a _situation_, is for the eye as well
as for the ear and the brain,--better, the heart. It would be an
unfortunate limitation to our theater culture if we did not comprehend
to the full how large a part of the effect of a good play is due to the
ever-changing series of artistic stage pictures furnished by the
dramatist in collaboration with the actors and the stage manager. This
principle is important throughout a play, but gets its most vivid
illustration in the climax; hence, I enlarge upon it at this point.
Among the most novel, fruitful and interesting experiments now being
made in the theater here and abroad may be mentioned the attempts to
introduce more subtle and imaginative treatment of the possibilities of
color and form in stage setting than have hitherto obtained. The
reaction influenced by familiarity with the unadorned simplicity of the
Elizabethans, the Gordon Craig symbolism, the frank attempt to
substitute artistic suggestion for the stupid and expensive reproduction
on the stage of what is called "real life," are phases of this movement,
in which Germany and Russia have been prominent. The stage manager and
scene deviser are daily becoming more important factors in the
production of a play; and along with this goes a clearer perception of
the values of grouping and regrouping on the part of the plastic
elements behind the footlights.[D] Many a scenic moment, many a climax,
may be materially damaged by a failure to place the characters in such
relative positions as shall visualize the dramatic feeling of the scene
and reveal in terms of picture the dramatist's meaning. After all, the
time-honored convention that the main character, or characters, should,
at the moment when they are dominant in the story, take the center of
the stage, is no empty convention; it is based on logic and geometry.
There is a direct correspondence between the unity of emotion
concentrated in a group of persons and the eye effect which reports that
fact. I have seen so fine a climax as that in Jones's _The
Hypocrites_--one of the very best in the modern repertory--well nigh
ruined by a stock company, when, owing to the purely arbitrary demand
that the leading man should have the center at a crucial moment,
although in the logic of the action he did not belong there, the two
young lovers who were dramatically central in the scene were shunted off
to the side, and the leading man, whose true position was in the deep
background, delivered his curtain speech close up to the footlights on a
spot mathematically exact in its historic significance. True dramatic
relations were sacrificed to relative salaries, and, as a result, a
scene which naturally receives half a dozen curtain calls, went off with
comparative tameness. It was a striking demonstration of the importance
of picture on the stage as an externalization of dramatic facts.
If the theater-goer will keep an eye upon this aspect of the drama, he
will add much of interest to the content of his pleasure and do justice
to a very important and easily overlooked phase of technic. It is common
in criticism, often professional, to sneer at the tendency of modern
actors, under the stage manager's guidance, continually to shift
positions while the dialogue is under way; thus producing an
unnecessarily uneasy effect of meaningless action. As a generalization,
it may be said that this is done (though at times no doubt, overdone) on
a principle that is entirely sound: it expresses the desire for a new
picture, a recognition of the law that, in drama, composition to the eye
is as truly a principle as it is in painting. And with that
consideration goes the additional fact that motion implies emotion; than
which there is no surer law in psycho-physics. Abuse of the law, on the
stage, is beyond question possible, and frequently met. But a
redistribution of the positions of actors on the boards, when not
abused, means they have moved under the compulsion of some stress of
feeling and then the movement is an external symbol of an internal state
of mind. The drama must express the things within by things without, in
this way; that is its method. The audience is only properly irritated
when a stage moment which, from the nature of its psychology, calls for
the static, is injured by an unrelated, fussy, bodily activity. Motion
in such a case becomes as foolish as the scene shifting in one of the
highest colored and most phantasmagoric of our dreams. The wise stage
director will not call for a change of picture unless it represents a
psychologic fact.
Two men converse at a table; one communicates to the other, quietly and
in conversational tone, a fact of alarming nature. The other leaps to
his feet with an exclamation and paces the floor as he talks about it;
nothing is more fitting, because nothing is truer to life. The
repressive style of acting to-day, which might try to express this
situation purely by facial work, goes too far in abandoning the
legitimate tools of the craft. Let me repeat that, despite all the
refining upon older, more violent and crudely expressive methods of
technic, the stage must, from its very nature, indicate the emotions of
human beings by objective, concrete bodily reaction. The Greek word for
drama means _doing_. To exhibit feeling is to do something.
Or let us take a more composite group: that which is seen in a drawing
room, with various knots of people talking together just before dinner
is announced. A shift in the groups, besides effecting the double
purpose of pleasing the eye and allowing certain portions of the
dialogue to come forward and get the ear of the audience, also
incidentally tells the truth: these groups in reality would shift and
change more or less by the law of social convenience. The general
greetings of such an occasion would call for it. In a word, then, the
stage is, among other things, a plastic representation of life, forever
making an appeal to the eye. The application of this to the climax shows
how vastly important its pictorial side may be.
The climax that is prolonged is always in danger. Lead up to it slowly
and surely, secure the effect, and then get away from it instantly by
lowering the curtain. Do not fumble with it, or succumb to the
insinuating temptation of clinging to what is so effective. The
dramatist here is like a fond father loath to say _farewell_ to his
favorite child. But say the parting word he must, if he would have his
offspring prosper and not, like many a father ere this, keep the child
with him to its detriment. A second too much, and the whole thing will
he imperiled. At the _denouement_, every syllable must be weighed, nor
found wanting; every extraneous word ruthlessly cut out, the feats of
fine language so welcome in other forms of literary composition shunned
as an arch enemy. Colloquialism, instead of literary speech, even bad
grammar where more formal book-speech seems to dampen the fire, must be
instinctively sought. And whenever the action itself, backed by the
scenery, can convey what is aimed at, silence is best of all; for then,
if ever, silence is indeed golden. All this the spectator will quietly
note, sitting in his seat of judgment, ready to show his pleasure or
displeasure, according to what is done.
A difficulty that blocks the path of every dramatist in proportion as
its removal improves his piece, is that of graduating his earlier
curtains so that the climax (third act or fourth, as it may) is
obviously the outstanding, over-powering effect of the whole play. The
curtain of the first act will do well to possess at least some slight
heightening of the interest maintained progressively from the opening of
the drama; an added crispness perceptible to all who look and listen.
And the crisis of the second act must be differentiated from that of the
first in that it has a tenser emotional value, while yet it is
distinctly below that of the climax, if the obligatory scene is to come
later. Sad indeed the result if any curtain effect in appeal and power
usurp the royal place of the climactic scene! And this skillful
gradation of effects upon a rising scale of interest, while always aimed
at, is by no means always secured. This may happen because the
dramatist, with much good material in his hands, has believed he could
use it prodigally, and been led to overlook the principle of relative
values in his art. A third act climax may secure a tremendous sensation
by the device of keeping the earlier effects leading up to it
comparatively low-keyed and quiet. The tempest may be, in the abstract,
only one in a teapot; but a tempest in effect it is, all the same.
Ibsen's plays often illustrate and justify this statement, as do the
plays of the younger British school, Barker, Baker, McDonald, Houghton,
Hankin. And the reverse is equally true: a really fine climax may be
made pale and ineffective by too much of sensational material introduced
earlier in the play.
The climax of the drama is also the best place to illustrate the fact
that the stage appeal is primarily emotional. If this central scene be
not of emotional value, it is safe to say that the play is doomed; or
will at the most have a languishing life in special performances and be
cherished by the elite. The stage story, we have seen, comes to the
auditor warm and vibrant in terms of feeling. The idea which should be
there, as we saw, must come by way of the heart, whence, as George
Meredith declares, all great thoughts come. Herein lies another
privilege and pitfall of the dramatist. Privilege, because teaching by
emotion will always be most popular; yet a pitfall, because it sets up
a temptation to play upon the unthinking emotions which, once aroused,
sweep conviction along to a goal perhaps specious and undesirable. To
say that the theater is a place for the exercise of the emotions, is not
to say or mean that it is well for it to be a place for the display and
influence of the unregulated emotions. Legitimate drama takes an idea of
the brain, or an inspiration of the imaginative faculties, and conveys
it by the ruddy road of the feelings to the stirred heart of the
audience; it should be, and is in its finest examples, the happy union
of the head and heart, so blended as best to conserve the purpose of
entertainment and popular instruction; popular, for the reason that it
is emotional, concrete, vital; and instructive, because it sinks deeper
in and stays longer (being more keenly felt) than any mere exercise of
the intellect in the world.
The student, whether at home with the book of the play in hand or in his
seat at the theater, will scrutinize the skilled effects of climax,
seeking principles and understanding more clearly his pleasure therein.
In reading Shakespeare, for example, he will see that the obligatory
scene of _The Merchant of Venice_ is the trial scene and the exact
moment when the height is reached and the fall away from it begins, that
where Portia tells the Jew to take his pound of flesh without the
letting of blood. In modern drama, he will think of the scene in
Sudemann's powerful drama, _Magda_, in which Magda's past is revealed to
her fine old father as the climax of the action; and in Pinero's
strongest piece, _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, will put his finger on the
scene of the return of Paula's lover as the crucial thing to show. And
so with the scene of the cross-examination of the woman in Jones's _Mrs.
Dane's Defense_, and the scene in Lord Darlington's rooms in Wilde's
_Lady Windermere's Fan_, and the final scene in Shaw's _Candida_, where
the playwright throws forward the _scene a faire_ to the end, and makes
his heroine choose between husband and lover. These, and many like them,
will furnish ample food for reflection and prove helpful in clarifying
the mind in the essentials of this most important of all the phenomena
of play-building.
It is with the climax, as with everything else in art or in life:
honesty of purpose is at the bottom of the success that is admirable.
Mere effectivism is to be avoided, because it is insincere. In its place
must be effectiveness, which is at once sincere and dramatic.
The climax, let it be now assumed, has been successfully brought off.
The curtain falls on the familiar and pleasant buzz of conversation
which is the sign infallible that the dramatist's dearest ambition has
been attained. Could we but listen to the many detached bits of talk
that fly about the house, or are heard in the lobby, we might hazard a
shrewd guess at the success of the piece. If the talk be favorable, and
the immediate reception of the obligatory scene has been hearty, it
would appear as if the playwright's troubles were over. But hardly so.
Even with his climax a success, he is not quite out of the woods. A
task, difficult and hedged in with the possibilities of mistake, awaits
him; for the last act is just ahead, and it may diminish, even nullify
the favorable impression he has just won by his manipulation of the
_scene a faire_. And so, girding himself for the last battle, he enters
the arena, where many a good man before him has unexpectedly fallen
before the enemy.