Whenever the spring comes round and everything beneath the sun looks
wonderful and new, the habitual theatre-goer, who has attended every
legitimate performance throughout the winter season in New York, is moved
to lament that there is nothing new behind the footlights. Week after week
he has seen the same old puppets pulled mechanically through the same old
situations, doing conventional deeds and repeating conventional lines,
until at last, as he watches the performance of yet another play, he feels
like saying to the author, "But, my dear sir, I have seen and heard all
this so many, many times already!" For this spring-weariness of the
frequenter of the theatre, the common run of our contemporary playwrights
must be held responsible. The main trouble seems to be that, instead of
telling us what they think life is like, they tell us what they think a
play is like. Their fault is not--to use Hamlet's phrase--that they
"imitate humanity so abominably": it is, rather, that they do not imitate
humanity at all. Most of our playwrights, especially the newcomers to the
craft, imitate each other. They make plays for the sake of making plays,
instead of for the sake of representing life. They draw their inspiration
from the little mimic world behind the footlights, rather than from the
roaring and tremendous world which takes no thought of the theatre. Their
art fails to interpret life, because they care less about life than they
care about their art. They are interested in what they are doing, instead
of being interested in why they are doing it. "Go to!", they say to
themselves, "I will write a play"; and the weary auditor is tempted to
murmur the sentence of the cynic Frenchman, "_Je n'en vois pas la
nécessité_."
But now, lest we be led into misapprehension, let us understand clearly
that what we desire in the theatre is not new material, but rather a fresh
and vital treatment of such material as the playwright finds made to his
hand. After a certain philosophic critic had announced the startling thesis
that only some thirty odd distinct dramatic situations were conceivable,
Goethe and Schiller set themselves the task of tabulation, and ended by
deciding that the largest conceivable number was less than twenty. It is a
curious paradox of criticism that for new plays old material is best. This
statement is supported historically by the fact that all the great Greek
dramatists, nearly all of the Elizabethans, Corneille, Racine, Molière,
and, to a great extent, the leaders of the drama in the nineteenth century,
made their plays deliberately out of narrative materials already familiar
to the theatre-going public of their times. The drama, by its very nature,
is an art traditional in form and resumptive in its subject-matter. It
would be futile, therefore, for us to ask contemporary playwrights to
invent new narrative materials. Their fault is not that they deal with what
is old, but that they fail to make out of it anything which is new. If, in
the long run, they weary us, the reason is not that they are lacking in
invention, but that they are lacking in imagination.
That invention and imagination are two very different faculties, that the
second is much higher than the first, that invention has seldom been
displayed by the very greatest authors, whereas imagination has always been
an indispensable characteristic of their work,--these points have all been
made clear in a very suggestive essay by Professor Brander Matthews, which
is included in his volume entitled _Inquiries and Opinions_. It remains for
us to consider somewhat closely what the nature of imagination is.
Imagination is nothing more or less than the faculty for
_realisation_,--the faculty by which the mind makes real unto itself such
materials as are presented to it. The full significance of this definition
may be made clear by a simple illustration.
Suppose that some morning at breakfast you pick up a newspaper and read
that a great earthquake has overwhelmed Messina, killing countless
thousands and rendering an entire province desolate. You say, "How very
terrible!"--after which you go blithely about your business, untroubled,
undisturbed. But suppose that your little girl's pet pussy-cat happens to
fall out of the fourth-story window. If you chance to be an author and have
an article to write that morning, you will find the task of composition
heavy. Now, the reason why the death of a single pussy-cat affects you more
than the death of a hundred thousand human beings is merely that you
realise the one and do not realise the other. You do not, by the action of
imagination, make real unto yourself the disaster at Messina; but when you
see your little daughter's face, you at once and easily imagine woe.
Similarly, on the largest scale, we go through life realising only a very
little part of all that is presented to our minds. Yet, finally, we know of
life only so much as we have realised. To use the other word for the same
idea,--we know of life only so much as we have imagined. Now, whatever of
life we make real unto ourselves by the action of imagination is for us
fresh and instant and, in a deep sense, new,--even though the same
materials have been realised by millions of human beings before us. It is
new because we have made it, and we are different from all our
predecessors. Landor imagined Italy, realised it, made it instant and
afresh. In the subjective sense, he created Italy, an Italy that had never
existed before,--Landor's Italy. Later Browning came, with a new
imagination, a new realisation, a new creation,--Browning's Italy. The
materials had existed through immemorable centuries; Landor, by
imagination, made of them something real; Browning imagined them again and
made of them something new. But a Cook's tourist hurrying through Italy is
likely, through deficiency of imagination, not to realise an Italy at all.
He reviews the same materials that were presented to Landor and to
Browning, but he makes nothing out of them. Italy for him is tedious, like
a twice-told tale. The trouble is not that the materials are old, but that
he lacks the faculty for realising them and thereby making of them
something new.
A great many of our contemporary playwrights travel like Cook's tourists
through the traditional subject-matter of the theatre. They stop off here
and there, at this or that eternal situation; but they do not, by
imagination, make it real. Thereby they miss the proper function of the
dramatist, which is to imagine some aspect of the perennial struggle
between human wills so forcibly as to make us realise it, in the full sense
of the word,--realise it as we daily fail to realise the countless
struggles we ourselves engage in. The theatre, rightly considered, is not a
place in which to escape from the realities of life, but a place in which
to seek refuge from the unrealities of actual living in the contemplation
of life realised,--life made real by imagination.
The trouble with most ineffective plays is that the fabricated life they
set before us is less real than such similar phases of actual life as we
have previously realised for ourselves. We are wearied because we have
already unconsciously imagined more than the playwright professionally
imagines for us. With a great play our experience is the reverse of this.
Incidents, characters, motives which we ourselves have never made
completely real by imagination are realised for us by the dramatist.
Intimations of humanity which in our own minds have lain jumbled
fragmentary, like the multitudinous pieces of a shuffled picture-puzzle,
are there set orderly before us, so that we see at last the perfect
picture. We escape out of chaos into life.
This is the secret of originality: this it is that we desire in the
theatre:--not new material, for the old is still the best; but familiar
material rendered new by an imagination that informs it with significance
and makes it real.