Such to-day is the condition of the drama that the “scenic artist”
and the carpenter are its hope and its pride. They are the props and
pillars of the theatre, without which the edifice would fall to pieces.
But there are “some of us fellows,” as a Bishop of Lincoln used to say
to his brother prelates, who consider scenery an impertinence and its
painter a creature for whose existence there is no warrant of art nor
justification of taste.
I am no _laudator temporis acti_, but I submit that in this matter
of the drama the wisdom of the centuries is better than the caprice
of the moment. For some thousands of years, dramatists, actors and
audiences got on very well without recourse to the mechanical devices
that we esteem necessary to the art of stage representation. Æschylus,
Sophocles, Euripides, Shakspeare—what did they know of scenery and
machinery? You may say that the Greeks knew little of painting, so
could have no scenery. They had something better—imagination. Why
did they not use pulleys, and trap-doors, and real water, and live
horses?—they had _them_; and Ben Jonson and Shakspeare could have had
painters enow, God knows. Why, in their time the stage was lighted with
naked and unashamed candles and strewn with rushes, and favored ones of
the audience—“gentlemen of wit and pleasure about town”—occupied seats
upon it! If the action was supposed to be taking place in a street
in Verona did not the play-bill so explain? A word to the wise was
sufficient: the gentlemen of wit and pleasure went to the play to watch
the actor’s face, observe his gestures, critically note his elocution.
They would have resented with their handy hangers an attempt to obtrude
upon their attention the triumphs of the “scenic artist,” the machinist
and the property-man. As for the “groundlings,” they were there by
sufferance only, and might comprehend or not, as it might or might not
please their Maker to work a miracle in their stupid nowls.
_Now_ it is all for the groundlings; the stage has no longer “patrons,”
and “His Majesty’s Players” are the servants of the masses, to whom
the author’s text must be presented with explanatory notes by those
learned commentators, Messrs. Daub and Toggle—whom may the good devil
besmear with yellows and make mad with a tin moon!
What! shall I go to the theatre to be pleased with colored canvas,
affrighted with a storm that is half dried peas and t’other half
sheet-iron? Shall I take any part of my evening’s pleasure from the
dirty hands of an untidy anarchist who shakes a blue rag to represent
the Atlantic Ocean, while another sandlot orator navigates a cloth-yard
three-decker across the middle distance? Am I to be interested in the
personal appearance of a centre-table and the adventures of half a
dozen chairs—albeit they are better than the one given me to sit on?
Shall makers of fine furniture aspire
To scorn my lower needs and feed my higher?
And vile upholsterers be taught to slight
My body’s comfort for my mind’s delight?
Where is the sense of all these devices for producing an “illusion?”
Illusion, indeed! When you look at art do you wish to persuade yourself
that it is only nature? Take the Laocoön—would it be pleasant or
instructive to forget, for even a moment, that it is a group of
inanimate figures, and think yourself gazing on a living man and two
living children in the folds of two living snakes? When you stand
before a “nativity” by some old master, do you fancy yourself a real
ass at a real manger? Deception is no part of art, for only in its
non-essentials is art a true copy of nature. If it is anything more,
why, then the Shah of Persia was a judicious critic. Shown a picture
of a donkey by Landseer and told that it was worth five hundred
pounds, he contemptuously replied that for five pounds he could buy
the donkey. The man who holds that art should be a certified copy of
nature, and produce an illusion in the mind, has no right to smile at
this anecdote. It is his business in this life not to laugh, but to be
laughed at.
Seeing that stage illusion is neither desirable nor attainable, the
determined efforts to achieve it that have been making during these
last few decades seem very melancholy indeed. It is as if a dog should
spin himself sick in pursuit of his tail, which he neither can catch
nor could profit by if he caught it. Failure displeases in proportion
to the effort, and it would be judicious to stop a little short of
real water, and live horses, and trains of cars that will work. Nay,
why should we have streets and drawing-rooms (with mantel-clocks and
coal scuttles complete) and castles with battlements? Or if the play
is so vilely constructed as to require them, why must the street
have numbered house-doors, the drawing-room an adjoining library and
conservatory, and the battlements a growth of ivy? Of course no sane
mind would justify poor Boucicault’s wall that sinks to represent the
ascent of the man “climbing it” by standing on the ground and working
his legs, but we are only a trifle less ridiculous when we have any
scenic effects at all. The difference is one of degree, and if we are
to have representations of inanimate objects it is hard to say at what
we should stick. Our intellectual gorge may now rise at the spectacle
of a battered and blood-stained “Nancy” dragging her wrecked carcass
along the stage to escape the club of a “Sykes,” for it is as new as
once were the horrible death-agonies constituting the charm of the
acting of a Croizette; but the line of distinction is arbitrary, and
no one can say how soon we shall expect to see the blood of “Cæsar”
spouting from his wound instead of being content with “Antony’s” rather
graphic description of it. It is of the nature of realism never to stop
till it gets to the bottom.
Inasmuch as the actor must wear something—a necessity from which the
actress is largely free—he may as well wear the costume appropriate to
his part. But this is about as far as art permits him to go in the way
of “illusion”; another step and he is on the “unsteadfast footing” of
popular caprice and vulgar fashion. Of course if the playwright has
chosen to make a window, a coach, a horse, church spire, or whale one
of his _dramatis personæ_ we must have it in some form, offensive as it
is; the mistake which was his in so constructing the play is ours when
we go to see it. In the old playbooks the “Scene—a Bridge in Venice,”
“Scene—a Cottage in the Black Forest,” “Scene—a Battle Field,” etc.,
were not intended as instructions to the manager, but to the spectator.
The author did not expect these things to be shown on the stage, but
imagined in the auditorium. They were mere hints and helps to the
imagination, which, as an artist, it was his business to stimulate
and guide, and the modern playwright, as a fool, decrees it his duty
to discourage and repress. The play should require as few accessories
as possible, and to those actually required the manager should confine
himself. We may grant Shakspeare his open grave in _Hamlet_, but the
impertinence of real earth in it we should resent; while the obtrusion
of adjacent tombs and headstones at large is a capital crime. If
we endure a play in which a man is pitched out of a window we must
perforce endure the window; but the cornice, curtains and tassels; the
three or four similar windows with nobody pitched out of them; the
ancestral portrait on the wall and the suit of armor in the niche; what
have these to do with the matter? We can see them anywhere at any time;
we wish to know how not to see them. They are of the vulgarities. They
distract attention from the actor, and under cover of the diversion he
plays badly. Is it any wonder that he does not care to compete with a
gilt cornice and a rep sofa?
On the Athenian stage, a faulty gesture, a sin in rhetoric, a false
quantity or accent—these were visited with the dire displeasure of
an audience in whom the art-sense was sweeter than honey and stronger
than a lion; an audience that went to the play to see the play, to
discriminate, compare, mark the conformity of individual practice to
universal principle: in a word, to criticise. They enjoyed that rarest
and ripest of all pleasures, the use of trained imagination. There was
the naked majesty of art, there the severe simplicity of taste. And
there came not the carpenter with his machines, the upholsterer with
his stuffs, nor the painter with blotches of impertinent color, crazing
the eye and grieving the heart.