At Coney Island and Atlantic City and many other seaside resorts whither
the multitude drifts to drink oblivion of a day, an artist may be watched
at work modeling images in the sand. These he fashions deftly, to entice
the immediate pennies of the crowd; but when his wage is earned, he leaves
his statues to be washed away by the next high surging of the tide. The
sand-man is often a good artist; let us suppose he were a better one. Let
us imagine him endowed with a brain and a hand on a par with those of
Praxiteles. None the less we should set his seashore images upon a lower
plane of art than the monuments Praxiteles himself hewed out of marble.
This we should do instinctively, with no recourse to critical theory; and
that man in the multitude who knew the least about art would express this
judgment most emphatically. The simple reason would be that the art of the
sand-man is lacking in the Intention of Permanence.
The Intention of Permanence, whether it be conscious or subconscious with
the artist, is a necessary factor of the noblest art. Many of us remember
the Court of Honor at the World's Columbian Exposition, at Chicago fifteen
years ago. The sculpture was good and the architecture better. In
chasteness and symmetry of general design, in spaciousness fittingly
restrained, in simplicity more decorative than deliberate decoration, those
white buildings blooming into gold and mirrored in a calm lagoon, dazzled
the eye and delighted the aesthetic sense. And yet, merely because they
lacked the Intention of Permanence, they failed to awaken that solemn happy
heartache that we feel in looking upon the tumbled ruins of some ancient
temple. We could never quite forget that the buildings of the Court of
Honor were fabrics of frame and stucco sprayed with whitewash, and that the
statues were kneaded out of plaster: they were set there for a year, not
for all time. But there is at Paestum a crumbled Doric temple to Poseidon,
built in ancient days to remind the reverent of that incalculable vastness
that tosses men we know not whither. It stands forlorn in a malarious
marsh, yet eternally within hearing of the unsubservient surge. Many of its
massive stones have tottered to the earth; and irrelevant little birds sing
in nests among the capitals and mock the solemn silence that the Greeks
ordained. But the sacred Intention of Permanence that filled and thrilled
the souls of those old builders stands triumphant over time; and if only a
single devastated column stood to mark their meaning, it would yet be a
greater thing than the entire Court of Honor, built only to commemorate the
passing of a year.
In all the arts except the acted drama, it is easy even for the layman to
distinguish work which is immediate and momentary from work which is
permanent and real. It was the turbulent untutored crowd that clamored
loudest in demanding that the Dewey Arch should be rendered permanent in
marble: it was only the artists and the art-critics who were satisfied by
the monument in its ephemeral state of frame and plaster. But in the drama,
the layman often finds it difficult to distinguish between a piece intended
merely for immediate entertainment and a piece that incorporates the
Intention of Permanence. In particular he almost always fails to
distinguish between what is really a character and what is merely an acting
part. When a dramatist really creates a character, he imagines and projects
a human being so truly conceived and so clearly presented that any average
man would receive the impression of a living person if he were to read in
manuscript the bare lines of the play. But when a playwright merely devises
an acting part, he does nothing more than indicate to a capable actor the
possibility of so comporting himself upon the stage as to convince his
audience of humanity in his performance. From the standpoint of criticism,
the main difficulty is that the actor's art may frequently obscure the
dramatist's lack of art, and _vice versa_, so that a mere acting part may
seem, in the hands of a capable actor, a real character, whereas a real
character may seem, in the hands of an incapable actor, an indifferent
acting part. Rip Van Winkle, for example, was a wonderful acting part for
Joseph Jefferson; but it was, from the standpoint of the dramatist, not a
character at all, as any one may see who takes the trouble to read the
play. Beau Brummel, also, was an acting part rather than a character. And
yet the layman, under the immediate spell of the actor's representative
art, is tempted in such cases to ignore that the dramatist has merely
modeled an image in the sand.
Likewise, on a larger scale, the layman habitually fails to distinguish
between a mere theatric entertainment and a genuine drama. A genuine drama
always reveals through its imagined struggle of contesting wills some
eternal truth of human life, and illuminates some real phases of human
character. But a theatric entertainment may present merely a deftly
fabricated struggle between puppets, wherein the art of the actor is given
momentary exercise. To return to our comparison, a genuine drama is carved
out of marble, and incorporates, consciously or not, the Intention of
Permanence; whereas a mere theatric entertainment may be likened to a group
of figures sculptured in the sand.
Those of us who ask much of the contemporary theatre may be saddened to
observe that most of the current dramatists seem more akin to the sand-man
than to Praxiteles. They have built Courts of Honor for forty weeks, rather
than temples to Poseidon for eternity. Yet it is futile to condemn an
artist who does a lesser thing quite well because he has not attempted to
do a greater thing which, very probably, he could not do at all. Criticism,
in order to render any practical service, must be tuned in accordance with
the intention of the artist. The important point for the critic of the
sand-man at Coney Island is not to complain because he is not so enduring
an artist as Praxiteles, but to determine why he is, or is not, as the case
may be, a better artist than the sand-man at Atlantic City.
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