In trying to present our own opinions upon a question at issue, we can
often find an advantage in getting first of all a clear statement of the
other side. This must serve as an excuse for here quoting a paragraph
(from a British magazine) which chanced to get itself copied in an
American newspaper:
The truth is, our dramatists have long since forgotten that the
English language is still the medium of the English drama, and that
no branch of literary art is worth a word of praise that wantonly
divorces itself from literature. The foolish dramatist who was once
loquacious concerning what he was pleased to call "the literary
drama" condemned his own craft in a single phrase. No doubt,
prosperity being essential, the audience of our theaters must share
the blame with their favorites. Too idle to listen to exquisite
prose or splendid verse, they prefer the quick antics of comedians,
and in their ear, as in Mr. Pinero's, "theatrical," has a far more
splendid sound than "dramatic." To sum the matter up, that poets
have failed upon the stage is no compliment to the professional
playwrights, who believe themselves the vessels of an esoteric
inspiration. It merely means that literature and the drama travel
by different roads, and they will continue to travel by those roads
so long as the actor is master of the dramatist, so
long as the merits of a drama are judged by the standard of
material prosperity. After all, to get your puppets on and off the
stage is not the sole end of drama, and modesty might suggest that
it is better to fail with Tennyson than to succeed with the gifted
author who is at this moment engaged in whitewashing Julia.
Inexpensive in wit as this paragraph is, it serves the purpose of
showing us that there are still those who believe the drama of our own
time to be a thing of naught. Brief as this quotation is, it is long
enough to reveal that the writer of it had the arrogance of ignorance,
and that he was expressing what he conceived to be opinions, without
taking the trouble to learn anything about the history of the theater or
about the principles of the dramatic art.
The full measure of his ignorance it would be a waste of time to point
out, but it can be estimated by his two remarks, that it was better to
fail with Tennyson than to succeed with Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, and that
there is likely to be no change for the better so long as the merits of
a drama are judged by "the standard of material prosperity." Taking
these assertions in turn, we may note, first, that Tennyson ardently
longed to write a play which should please the playgoers of his own
time; second, that he desired to be judged by these very standards of
material prosperity,--just as Mr. Jones does. Mr. Jones has more than
once succeeded in pleasing the playgoers of his own time, and Tennyson
failed to achieve the particular kind of success he was aiming at. His
failure may have been due to his lack of the native dramatic faculty; it
may have been due to his following of outworn models no longer adjusted
to the conditions of the modern theater; but whatever the reason, there
is no doubt as to the fact itself. He did not attain the goal he was
striving for any more than Browning was able to do so; and it is not for
their eulogists now to say that their goal was unworthy. The test of
"material prosperity" was the very test by which the poets wisht to be
tried, and by this test they both failed--and Mr. Henry Arthur Jones
more than once has succeeded. Tennyson and Mr. Jones were aiming at the
same target--popular success in the theater. Even if Mr. Jones has not
always made a bull's-eye, he has often put his bullet on the target--the
very target which Tennyson mist completely, even if his ball happened to
make a hit on another.
Tennyson desired to meet the conditions which all the great dramatists
have ever been willing to meet. He did not follow their example and
study carefully the circumstances of theatrical representation as they
had done, nor did he make himself master of the secrets of the
dramaturgic art. And this is a chief reason why he was unable to
produce any impression upon the drama of his day; while the dramatic
poets of the past, the masters whom he respected--Sophocles and
Shakspere and Molière--each of them, accepting the formula of the
theater as this had been elaborated by his immediate predecessors,
enlarged this formula, modified it, made it over to suit his own ampler
outlook on life, and thus stamped his own individuality upon the drama
of succeeding generations.
Shakspere and Molière are accepted by us now as the greatest of dramatic
poets; but to their own contemporaries they were known rather as
ingenious playwrights up to every trick of the trade, finding their
profit in every new device of their fellow-craftsmen, and emerging
triumphant from a judgment by "the standard of material prosperity." And
by this same standard, unworthy as it may seem to some, Lope de Vega and
Calderon were judged in their own day. Corneille and Racine also,
Beaumarchais and Sheridan, Hugo and Augier and Rostand. The standard of
material prosperity is not the only test,--indeed, it is not the final
test,--but it is the first and the most imperative, because a dramatist
who fails to please the play-going public of his own time will never
have another chance. There is no known instance of a poet unsuccessful
on the stage in his own country and winning recognition in the theater
after his death. Posterity never reverses the unfavorable verdict of an
author's contemporaries; it has no time to waste on this, for it is too
busy reversing the favorable verdicts which seem to it to be in
disaccord with the real merits of the case.
It was Mark Twain who pithily summed up a prevailing opinion when he
said that "the classics are the books everybody praises--and nobody
reads." Let us hope that this is an overstatement and not the exact
truth; but whatever the proportion of verity in Mark Twain's saying,
there is no doubt that we are running no great risk if we reverse it and
say that when they were first produced the classics were books that
everybody read--and that nobody praised. Shakspere to-day is the prey of
the commentators and of the criticasters, but in his own time Shakspere
was the most popular of the Elizabethan playwrights--so popular that his
name was tagged to plays he had not written, in order that the public
might be tempted to take them into favor. Yet it was years before the
discovery was made that this popular playwright was also the greatest
poet and the profoundest psychologist of all time. Cervantes lived long
enough to be pleased by the widespread enjoyment of his careless
masterpiece; but it was a century at least before the first suspicion
arose that 'Don Quixote' was more than a "funny book." Molière was very
lucky in filling his theater when his own pieces were performed; but
contemporary opinion held that his plays owed their attraction not so
much to their literary merit as to the humorous force of his own acting.
Molière was acknowledged to be the foremost of comic actors, but only
Boileau was sure of his genius as a dramatist; and Boileau's colleagues
in the French Academy never recognized Molière's superiority over all
his immediate rivals.
The very fact that Molière and Shakspere were pleasing the plain people,
that they were able to attract the main body of the unlearned populace,
that they sought frankly to be judged by "the standard of material
prosperity"--this very fact seems to have prevented their contemporaries
from perceiving the literary merit of their plays. Indeed, it is not
unfair to suggest that the cultivated critics of the past--like some
cultivated critics of our own time--are predisposed to deny literary
merit to anything which is broadly popular. They think of literary merit
as something upon which they alone are competent to decide, as something
to be tried by the touchstones they keep in their studies, under lock
and key. The scholarly contemporaries of Shakspere saw that he did not
conform to the classic traditions they revered, and they could not
guess he was establishing a classic tradition of his own. They were so
full of the past that they could not see the present right before their
eyes. They mist in Shakspere's work what they had been trained to
consider as the chief essential of dramatic art; and they were not acute
enough to inquire whether there were not good reasons why he was so
attractive to the vulgar mob whom they despised.
To most critics of the drama "literary merit" is something external,
something added to the play, something adjusted to the structure. They
blame modern playwrights for not putting it in. They take an attitude
toward the drama of their own day like that of the New England farmer,
when he was asked who had been the architect of his house. "Oh, I built
that house myself," was the answer; "but there's a man coming down from
Boston next week to put the architecture on." To this New England
farmer, architecture was not in the planning and the proportion and the
structure; to him it seemed to mean only some sort of jig-saw fretwork
added as an afterthought. To most of those who amuse themselves by
writing about the drama, "literary merit" is chiefly a matter of pretty
speeches, of phrase-making, of simile and metaphor--in short, of
rhetoric.
It seems absurd that at this late day it should be needful to repeat
once more that literature is not a matter of rhetoric; that it is not
external and detachable, but internal and essential. It has to do with
motive and character, with form and philosophy; it is a criticism of
life itself, or else it is mere vanity and vexation. If literature is no
more than a stringing of flowers of speech, then is 'Lucile' a greater
book than 'Robinson Crusoe,' or then is the 'Forest Lovers' a finer book
than 'Huckleberry Finn'; then is Pater a better writer than Benjamin
Franklin or Abraham Lincoln. Books are not made by style alone. Even
lyric poetry is estimated by its fervor and by its sincerity rather than
by the dulcet phrases in which the lyrist has voiced his emotion of the
moment. If verbal felicity alone is all that the poet needs, if he is to
be judged only by the compelling melody of the words he has chosen to
set in array, then is Poe the foremost of lyrists. Even the essay, the
most narrowly literary of all prose-forms, is valued for its wisdom
rather than for its phrasing. The essays of Stevenson, for example, will
survive not because of their style alone, polished as that is and
unexpectedly happy in its phrasing, but because the man who wrote them,
artist as he was in words, had something to say--something which was his
own, the result of his own observation of life from his own angle of
vision. Style is the great antiseptic, no doubt; but style cannot bestow
life on the still-born.
Not only do such critics as the anonymous writer from whom quotation has
been made, persist in thinking of the literary merit of the drama as
"exquisite prose" and "splendid verse,"--in other words as an added
grace, applied externally,--but they also seem to believe that all plays
possessing what they would regard as "literary merit" stand in a class
apart. They are looking for a literary drama which shall be different
from the popular drama. Apparently they expect to be able to recognize a
literary play at first sight--and probably by its excess of applied
ornament. And this attitude is quite as absurd as the other. In no one
of the greater periods of the poetic drama have the plays which we now
revere as masterpieces differed in form from the mass of the other plays
of that epoch. They were better, no doubt, excelling in power, in
elevation, in insight, in skill. But they bore a striking resemblance in
structure and in intent to the host of contemporary plays which we now
perceive to be hopelessly inferior to them.
So far as their outward appearance goes the great plays of Sophocles, of
Shakspere, and of Molière are closely akin to the plays of their
undistinguished contemporaries. It is in their content that they are
immeasurably superior. They differ in degree only, never in kind.
Shakspere early availed himself of the framework of the tragedy-of-blood
that Kyd had made popular; and later he borrowed from Beaumont and
Fletcher the flexible formula of the dramatic-romance. His genius
towered above theirs, but he was content to appropriate their patterns.
Molière modeled many of his earlier plays upon the loosely-knit
comedy-of-masks of the Italian comedians, and the difference between his
work and theirs is not external but internal; it is the difference
between adroitness and cleverness on their part, and supreme comic
genius on his. Probably it was this apparent similarity of Shakspere's
work and Molière's to the uninspired efforts of their competitors which
prevented their contemporaries from discovering their preëminence--the
preëminence which is so obvious to us now that the plays of their
fellow-craftsmen have fallen out of memory.
The blindness of the contemporary critic of Shakspere and of Molière,
inexplicable as it may appear nowadays, has its parallel in the
blindness of the contemporary critic in regard to 'Don Quixote' and 'Gil
Blas,' 'Robinson Crusoe' and the 'Pilgrim's Progress.' He had not the
insight to see in these comparatively commonplace narratives the
essential truth of the enduring masterpiece. He was seeking an outward
and visible sign; he saw nothing unusual, abnormal, eccentric, in these
books, nothing novel, nothing that cried aloud for recognition; and so
he past by on the other side. These books seemed to him in nowise raised
above the common; they were to be enjoyed in some measure, but they
evoked no high commendation; and the contemporary critic never suspected
that these unpretending volumes, unlike the most of their competitors in
public favor, contained the vital spark which alone bestows enduring
life. He failed wholly to guess that these books had in them the
elements of the universal and the permanent--just as he was unable to
perceive that the more obviously literary, rhetorical, academic works he
was ready enough to commend highly, lacked these elements and therefore
were doomed soon to sink into deserved oblivion.
This is precisely the attitude of many a critic of our own time. He is
looking for a literary drama which shall be different in kind from the
popular play; and as he fails to find this to-day--as he would have
failed to find it in every period of the theater's most splendid
achievement--he asserts that the literary drama is nowadays nonexistent.
He does not care to inquire into the genuine qualities of the plays that
happen to be able to attain "the standard of material prosperity." He is
quick to perceive the attempt to be literary in the plays of Mr.
Stephen Phillips, because this promising dramatic poet has so far tended
rather to construct his decoration than to decorate his construction:
and, therefore, the literary merit in Mr. Phillips's acted pieces seems
sometimes to be somewhat external, so to speak, or at least more
ostentatiously paraded. He is forced to credit 'Quality Street' with a
certain literary merit, because Mr. Barrie has published novels which
have an undeniable literary flavor.
Considering literary merit as something applied on the outside, too
obvious to be mistaken, the critic of this type disdains to give to
certain of the plays of Mr. Pinero the discussion they deserve. In the
'Benefit of the Doubt,' in the 'Second Mrs. Tanqueray,' in 'Iris,' Mr.
Pinero has used all his mastery of stage-craft, not for its own sake,
but as the instrument of his searching analysis of life as he sees it.
All three plays bring out the eternal truth of George Eliot's saying
that "Consequences are unpitying." In all three plays the inevitable and
inexorable catastrophe is brought about, not by "the long arm of
coincidence," but rather by the finger of fate itself. In 'Iris' more
particularly we have put before us the figure of a gentle and kindly
creature of compelling personal charm, but weak of will and moving thru
life along the line of least resistance--a feminine counterpart of the
Tito Melema etched with such appalling veracity in 'Romola.' And Mr.
Pinero has the same sincerity in his portrayal of the gradual
disintegration of character under the stress of recurring temptation,
until the woman is driven forth at last stript of all things that she
held desirable, and bare of the last shred of self-respect. The play may
be unpleasant, but it is profoundly moral. It is not spoon-meat for
babes, but it is poignant and vital. The picture of human character
betrayed by its own weakness is so true, so transparently sincere, that
the spectator, however quick he may be to discuss the theme, remains
unconscious of the art by which the wonder has been wrought; he gives
scarcely a thought to the logic of the construction, and to the honesty
with which character is presented--literary merits both of them, if
literature is in fact a criticism of life.
The shrewd remark of M. Jules Lemaître must ever be borne in mind,--that
criticism of our contemporaries is not criticism, it is only
conversation. Yet there is sufficient self-revelation in the fact that
those who have been ready enough to praise the 'Lady of Lyons,' with its
tawdry rhetoric and its shabby morality, have not seen the superiority
of Mr. Pinero over Lord Lytton even as a stylist, as a master of
English, tense, nervous, and flexible, adjusting itself to the thought,
never protruding itself on our vision, and yet withstanding verbal
criticism when we take time afterward to subject it to that test also.
Just as the Elizabethan critics thought little of Shakespeare because he
failed to follow in the footsteps of the great Greeks, so some modern
critics care naught for the best work of the dramatists of our own time,
because this is not cast in the Shakespearean mold. The Elizabethan
critics could not know the difference between the theater of Dionysius
in Athens and the bare cockpit of the Globe in London; and there are
their kin to-day who cannot perceive the difference between the
half-roofed playhouse for which Shakespeare wrote and the
electric-lighted place of amusement to which we are now accustomed.
These latter-day critics do not see why the haphazard structure which
was good enough for Tudor times is not good enough for us; and they have
so little sense of form that they are unaware how the change in the
circumstances of performance has forced a more compact presentation of
the theme than was necessary in the days of "Eliza and our James."
As Mr. John Morley has pointed out, "the prodigy of such amazing results
from such glorious carelessness as Shakespeare's has plunged hundreds of
men of talent into a carelessness most inglorious." The history of
English literature is strewed with wrecked tragedies, lofty enough in
aspiration, but pitifully lacking in inspiration. The same tragedies,
slovenly as they might be in structure and empty of dramatic energy,
were cased in the traditional trappings; they were divided into five
acts and they were bedecked with blank verse; and contemporary critics
made haste to credit them with the literary merit these same critics do
not even look for in 'Iris' and in the 'Second Mrs. Tanqueray,'
tragedies, both of them, of a purifying pathos that Aristotle would have
understood. In fact, there would be no great difficulty in showing how
near Aristotle came to an explicit assertion that in the drama "literary
merit" is almost a by-product--valuable, no doubt, like many another
by-product, but not the chief thing to be sought.
Mr. Pinero has discust Robert Louis Stevenson as a dramatist, and his
lecture contained passages which every man of letters should ponder. He
showed that Stevenson had in him the true dramatic stuff, but that he
refused to serve the severe apprenticeship to play-making that he gladly
gave to novel-writing. Mr. Pinero made plain the further fact that
Stevenson, who was ever a sedulous ape of the masters he admired, had
here set himself a bad pattern to copy. This was not the loose and
rambling Elizabethan model which had led Tennyson and Browning astray;
it was the model of the cheap melodrama of the early years of the
nineteenth century. "Stevenson with all his genius failed to realize
that the art of drama is not stationary, but progressive," said Mr.
Pinero. "By this I do not mean that it is always improving; what I do
mean is that its conditions are always changing and that every dramatist
whose ambition it is to produce live plays is absolutely bound to study
carefully ... the conditions that hold good for its own age and
generation."
This is what every great dramatist has done; it is what Shakespeare did
and Molière also; it is what Stevenson did not care to do, because he
did not understand the necessity of it. He did not borrow the formula of
the most successful of the plays which chanced to be pleasing the public
just then. If he had done this, he could have put into this formula all
the fine writing he so much enjoyed; he might have given to his plays
the utmost polish of style. Instead of trying to write dramas externally
like those popular in the theater of his own time, and making them
internally whatsoever he chose, he went back half a century and tried to
revive a poor formula already defunct. The game was lost before the
cards were dealt. He had refused to consider the conditions of the
problem he was handling--"the problem of how to tell a dramatic story
truly, convincingly, and effectively, on the modern stage"; as Mr.
Pinero described it, "the problem of disclosing the workings of the
human heart by methods which shall not destroy the illusion which a
modern audience expects to enjoy in the modern theater."
Stevenson was here making the mistake which so many men of letters make
when they turn to the theater. He was going upon the theory that the
drama is made literary, not from within, by observation and imagination
and sincerity, but from without, by the application of fine speeches.
His speeches were fine, no doubt, even tho they were not in keeping with
that special kind of play when it had been alive. But as it happened,
that kind of play was dead and gone, and no injection of oratory would
bring it to life again. And here the Scotch story-teller failed to
profit by the example of the French poet whose romances he had so
sympathetically studied. Hugo had also a gift for oratory and a talent
for fine speeches; but when he yearned for theatrical success he went to
the most popular playhouses where the plain people gathered, and he
adopted as his own the formula of play-making which was proving its
value in these boulevard theaters. This was not in itself much better
than the formula Stevenson borrowed and did not trouble to
understand--indeed, the two are not unlike. But Hugo had made his
choice half a century before Stevenson; and when he made it he was
taking possession of the very latest fashion.
Hugo's formula is now fallen out of mode, yet his plays have
accomplished their threescore years and ten. It was Hugo who declared
that there are three classes of theater-goers whom the playwright must
please: the crowd that demands action, the women who wish for emotion,
and the thinkers who seek for character. And it was Hugo's early rival
as a play-maker, the elder Dumas, who asserted that the only rules he
knew for success upon the stage were to make the first act clear, the
last act short, and all the acts interesting. A dramatist who shall
accept the formula which has been found satisfactory by his immediate
contemporaries, and who shall succeed in making all the acts of his play
interesting alike to the crowd, to the women, and to the thinkers, will
be very likely to achieve literary merit without striving for it
specifically.
For we cannot repeat too often that in the drama "literary merit" is a
by-product,--as it is in oratory also. And we cannot assert too
emphatically that the drama has an independent existence--that it does
not lie wholly within the domain of literature. "The art of the drama,"
so M. Emile Faguet has assured us, "touches all the other arts and
includes them." The drama is not intended primarily to be read in the
study; it is devised to be performed on the stage by actors before
spectators. It has a right, therefore, to avail itself of the aid of all
other arts and to enlist them all in its service. This is one of the
reasons why those who have studied the secrets of this art are inclined
to esteem it as the noblest and most powerful of them all. As M. Faguet
has declared, with that sympathetic understanding of the essential
principles of the drama which is common enough in France and only too
rare elsewhere--"it is not contradictory to the definition of dramatic
art that it can synthesize in space like painting, that it can
synthesize in time like poetry, that it can synthesize outside of time
and space like music, that it can unite all the arts without forcing
them to interfere the one with the other, and, therefore, without taking
from any one aught of its force or aught of its dignity; that it can
unite them all in a vast, powerful, and harmonious synthesis embracing
the whole of life and the whole of art."
(1903.)