I
The drama is the only art, excepting oratory and certain forms of music,
that is designed to appeal to a crowd instead of to an individual. The
lyric poet writes for himself, and for such selected persons here and there
throughout the world as may be wisely sympathetic enough to understand his
musings. The essayist and the novelist write for a reader sitting alone in
his library: whether ten such readers or a hundred thousand ultimately read
a book, the writer speaks to each of them apart from all the others. It is
the same with painting and with sculpture. Though a picture or a statue may
be seen by a limitless succession of observers, its appeal is made always
to the individual mind. But it is different with a play. Since a drama is,
in essence, a story devised to be presented by actors on a stage before an
audience, it must necessarily be designed to appeal at once to a multitude
of people. We have to be alone in order to appreciate the _Venus of Melos_
or the _Sistine Madonna_ or the _Ode to a Nightingale_ or the _Egoist_ or
the _Religio Medici_; but who could sit alone in a wide theatre and see
_Cyrano de Bergerac_ performed? The sympathetic presence of a multitude of
people would be as necessary to our appreciation of the play as solitude in
all the other cases. And because the drama must be written for a crowd, it
must be fashioned differently from the other, and less popular, forms of
art.
No writer is really a dramatist unless he recognises this distinction of
appeal; and if an author is not accustomed to writing for the crowd, he can
hardly hope to make a satisfying play. Tennyson, the perfect poet;
Browning, the master of the human mind; Stevenson, the teller of enchanting
tales:--each of them failed when he tried to make a drama, because the
conditions of his proper art had schooled him long in writing for the
individual instead of for the crowd. A literary artist who writes for the
individual may produce a great work of literature that is cast in the
dramatic form; but the work will not be, in the practical sense, a play.
_Samson Agonistes_, _Faust_, _Pippa Passes_, _Peer Gynt_, and the early
dream-dramas of Maurice Maeterlinck, are something else than plays. They
are not devised to be presented by actors on a stage before an audience. As
a work of literature, _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_ is immeasurably greater
than _The Two Orphans_; but as a play, it is immeasurably less. For even
though, in this particular piece, Browning did try to write for the theatre
(at the suggestion of Macready), he employed the same intricately
intellectual method of character analysis that has made many of his poems
the most solitude-compelling of modern literary works. Properly to
appreciate his piece, you must be alone, just as you must be alone to read
_A Woman's Last Word_. It is not written for a crowd; _The Two Orphans_,
less weighty in wisdom, is. The second is a play.
The mightiest masters of the drama--Sophocles, Shakespeare, and
Molière--have recognised the popular character of its appeal and written
frankly for the multitude. The crowd, therefore, has exercised a potent
influence upon the dramatist in every era of the theatre. One person the
lyric poet has to please,--himself; to a single person only, or an
unlimited succession of single persons, does the novelist address himself,
and he may choose the sort of person he will write for; but the dramatist
must always please the many. His themes, his thoughts, his emotions, are
circumscribed by the limits of popular appreciation. He writes less freely
than any other author; for he cannot pick his auditors. Mr. Henry James
may, if he choose, write novels for the super-civilised; but a crowd is
never super-civilised, and therefore characters like those of Mr. James
could never be successfully presented in the theatre. _Treasure Island_ is
a book for boys, both young and old; but a modern theatre crowd is composed
largely of women, and the theme of such a story could scarcely be
successful on the stage.
In order, therefore, to understand the limitations of the drama as an art,
and clearly to define its scope, it is necessary to inquire into the
psychology of theatre audiences. This subject presents two phases to the
student. First, a theatre audience exhibits certain psychological traits
that are common to all crowds, of whatever kind,--a political convention,
the spectators at a ball-game, or a church congregation, for example.
Second, it exhibits certain other traits which distinguish it from other
kinds of crowds. These, in turn, will be considered in the present chapter.