There is an old saying that it takes two to make a bargain or a quarrel;
and, similarly, it takes two groups of people to make a play,--those whose
minds are active behind the footlights, and those whose minds are active in
the auditorium. We go to the theatre to enjoy ourselves, rather than to
enjoy the actors or the author; and though we may be deluded into thinking
that we are interested mainly by the ideas of the dramatist or the imagined
emotions of the people on the stage, we really derive our chief enjoyment
from such ideas and emotions of our own as are called into being by the
observance of the mimic strife behind the footlights. The only thing in
life that is really enjoyable is what takes place within ourselves; it is
our own experience, of thought or of emotion, that constitutes for us the
only fixed and memorable reality amid the shifting shadows of the years;
and the experience of anybody else, either actual or imaginary, touches us
as true and permanent only when it calls forth an answering imagination of
our own. Each of us, in going to the theatre, carries with him, in his own
mind, the real stage on which the two hours' traffic is to be enacted; and
what passes behind the footlights is efficient only in so far as it calls
into activity that immanent potential clash of feelings and ideas within
our brain. It is the proof of a bad play that it permits us to regard it
with no awakening of mind; we sit and stare over the footlights with a
brain that remains blank and unpopulated; we do not create within our souls
that real play for which the actual is only the occasion; and since we
remain empty of imagination, we find it impossible to enjoy _ourselves_.
Our feeling in regard to a bad play might be phrased in the familiar
sentence,--"This is all very well; but what is it _to me_?" The piece
leaves us unresponsive and aloof; we miss that answering and _tallying_ of
mind--to use Whitman's word--which is the soul of all experience of worthy
art. But a good play helps us to enjoy ourselves by making us aware of
ourselves; it forces us to think and feel. We may think differently from
the dramatist, or feel emotions quite dissimilar from those of the imagined
people of the story; but, at any rate, our minds are consciously aroused,
and the period of our attendance at the play becomes for us a period of
real experience. The only thing, then, that counts in theatre-going is not
what the play can give us, but what we can give the play. The enjoyment of
the drama is subjective, and the province of the dramatist is merely to
appeal to the subtle sense of life that is latent in ourselves.
There are, in the main, two ways in which this appeal may be made
effectively. The first is by imitation of what we have already seen around
us; and the second is by suggestion of what we have already experienced
within us. We have seen people who were like Hedda Gabler; we have been
people who were like Hamlet. The drama of facts stimulates us like our
daily intercourse with the environing world; the drama of ideas stimulates
us like our mystic midnight hours of solitary musing. Of the drama of
imitation we demand that it shall remain appreciably within the limits of
our own actual observation; it must deal with our own country and our own
time, and must remind us of our daily inference from the affairs we see
busy all about us. The drama of facts cannot be transplanted; it cannot be
made in France or Germany and remade in America; it is localised in place
and time, and has no potency beyond the bounds of its locality. But the
drama of suggestion is unlimited in its possibilities of appeal; ideas are
without date, and burst the bonds of locality and language. Americans may
see the ancient Greek drama of _Oedipus King_ played in modern French by
Mounet-Sully, and may experience thereby that inner overwhelming sense of
the sublime which is more real than the recognition of any simulated
actuality.
The distinction between the two sources of appeal in drama may be made a
little more clear by an illustration from the analogous art of literature.
When Whitman, in his poem on _Crossing Brooklyn Ferry_, writes, "Crowds of
men and women attired in the usual costumes!", he reminds us of the
environment of our daily existence, and may or may not call forth within us
some recollection of experience. In the latter event, his utterance is a
failure; in the former, he has succeeded in stimulating activity of mind by
the process of setting before us a reminiscence of the actual. But when, in
the _Song of Myself_, he writes, "We found our own, O my Soul, in the calm
and cool of the daybreak," he sets before us no imitation of habituated
externality, but in a flash reminds us by suggestion of so much, that to
recount the full experience thereof would necessitate a volume. That second
sentence may well keep us busy for an evening, alive in recollection of
uncounted hours of calm wherein the soul has ascended to recognition of its
universe; the first sentence we may dismiss at once, because it does not
make anything important happen in our consciousness.
It must be confessed that the majority of the plays now shown in our
theatres do not stimulate us to any responsive activity of mind, and
therefore do not permit us, in any real sense, to enjoy ourselves. But
those that, in a measure, do succeed in this prime endeavor of dramatic art
may readily be grouped into two classes, according as their basis of appeal
is imitation or suggestion.