no higher aim than to win the suffrages of his contemporaries. He
knows what they want—for he is one of them—and he gives them what
they want, no more and no less. He does not put himself into his
plays; and perhaps his plays would be little better if he did. He is
strenuously and insistently “up to date,” as the phrase is; and as a
result he is soon “out of date.” He writes to be in the fashion; and
the more completely he portrays the fleeting modes of the moment,
the more swiftly must he fall out of fashion. The taste of the day
is never the taste of after days; and the journalist-dramatist buys
his evanescent popularity at a price. Who now is so poor as to pay
reverence to Kotzebue and to Scribe, who once had all the managers at
their feet? No maker of plays, not Lope de Vega or Dumas—Alexander
the Great—was more fertile than Scribe in the invention of effective
situations, none was ever more dextrous in the knotting and
unknotting of plots, grave and gay. But his fertility and his
dexterity have availed him little. He wrote for his own time, not for
all time. What sprang up in the morning of his career and bloomed
brightly in the sunshine, was by night-fall drooping and withered and
desiccated.
The comic dramatists of the Restoration had perforce to gratify the
lewd likings of vicious spectators who wanted to see themselves on
the stage even more vicious than they were. Congreve and Wycherly
put into their comedies what their contemporaries relished, a game
flavor that stank in the nostrils of all decent folk. The Puritan
shrank with horror from the picture in which the Impuritan recognized
his own image. So it was that a scant hundred years after they had
insulted the moral sense (which, like Truth, tho “crushed to earth
will rise again; the eternal years of God are hers,”) they were swept
from the stage. What had delighted under Charles II disgusted under
George IV.
Even the frequent attempt to deodorize them failed, for, as Sheridan
said—and he knew by experience since he had made his ‘Trip to
Scarborough’ out of the ‘Relapse’—the Restoration comedies were “like
horses; you rob them of their vice and you rob them of their vigor.”
Charles Lamb, who had a whimsical predilection for them, admitted
that they were “quite extinct on our stage.” Congreve’s pistol no
longer discharged its steel bullets; and Wycherly no longer knocked
his victims down with the butt of his gun. Yet they died hard; I am
old enough to have seen Daly’s company in the ‘Trip to Scarborough’
and the ‘Recruiting Officer,’ in the ‘Inconstant,’ in ‘She Would and
She Would Not’ and the ‘Country Girl’ (Garrick’s skilful cleansing
of Wycherly’s unspeakable ‘Country Wife’)—all of which reappeared
because they had appealing plots, amusing situations and lively
characters and because they did not portray the immorals of the days
of Nell Gwyn.
Yet when an adroit playwright who seeks to please the public of
his own time by the representation of its manners, happens to be
also a creative artist, enamored of life, he is sometimes able
so to vitalize his satire of a passing vogue that it has abiding
vigor. This is what Molière did when he made fun of the ‘Précieuses
Ridicules.’ Even when he was writing this cleverest of skits,
the cotery which had clustered around Madame de Rambouillet was
disintegrating and would have disappeared without his bold blows.
But affectation is undying; it assumes new shapes; it is always
a tempting target; and Molière, by the magic of his genius,
transcended his immediate purpose. He composed a satire of one
special manifestation of pretence which survives after two centuries
and a half as an adequate satire of all later manifestations. The
Précieuses in Paris have long since been gathered to their mothers;
so have the Esthetes across the channel in London; and soon they will
be followed to the grave by the Little Groups of Serious Thinkers
who are to-day settling the problems of the cosmos by the aid of
empty phrases. No one sees the ‘Précieuses Ridicules’ to-day without
recognizing that it is almost as fresh as it was when Madame de
Rambouillet enjoyed it.
The man of genius is able to please his own generation by his
depiction of its foibles and yet to put into his work the permanent
qualities which make it pleasing to the generations that come after
him. The trick may not be easy, but it can be turned. How it shall
be done,—well, that is one of the secrets of genius. In the case of
the ‘Précieuses Ridicules’ we can see that Molière framed a plot for
his lively little piece that is perennially pleasing, a plot which
only a little modified was to support two popular successes nearly
two centuries later,—the ‘Ruy Blas’ of Victor Hugo and the ‘Lady
of Lyons’ of Bulwer-Lytton. He tinged his dialog with just enough
timeliness to hit the taste of the town in 1658; and he did not so
surcharge it as to fatigue the playgoers of Paris two centuries and a
half later.
II
The likings of the groundlings who stood in the yard of the Globe
theater when Shakspere began to write plays were coarser and grosser
than those of the burghers whom Molière had to attract to the
Petit-Bourbon; and unfortunately Shakspere in his earlier efforts was
not as cautious as Molière. In the Falstaff plays, for example, the
fat knight is as alive to-day as when Elizabeth is fabled to have
expressed the wish to have him shown in love. But the talk of his
companions, Nym and Pistol, is too thickly bespangled with the tricks
of speech of Elizabethan London to interest American and British
theater-goers three hundred years later. There is but a faded appeal
in topical allusions which need to be explained before they are
appreciated and even before they are understood; and in the playhouse
itself footnotes are impossible.
In his earliest pieces, written during his arduous apprenticeship to
the craft of playmaking, when he was not yet sure of his footing in
the theater, Shakspere had to provide parts for a pair of popular
fun-makers,—Will Kempe and another as yet unidentified. They were
lusty and robust comedians accustomed to set the house in a roar
as soon as they showed their cheerful faces. They created the two
Dromios, the two Gobbos, Launce and Speed, Costard and Dull; and
it is idle to deny that not a little of the talk that Shakspere put
in their mouths is no longer laughter-provoking; it is not only too
topical, too deliberately Tudor, it is also too mechanical in its
effort at humor to move us to mirth to-day. Their merry jests,—Heaven
save the mark!—are not lifted above the level of the patter of
the “sidewalk comedians” of our variety-shows. They are frankly
“clowns”; and Shakspere has set down for them what the groundlings
expected them to utter, only little better than the rough repartee
and vigorous innuendo and obvious pun which they would have provided
for themselves if they had been free to do as they were wont to do.
What he gives them to say is rarely the utterance of the characters
they were supposed to be interpreting; and this is because the two
Dromios are parts only, are not true characters, and are scarcely to
be accepted even as types.
A difference of taste in jests, so George Eliot declared, is “a great
strain on the affections”; and it would be insulting to the creator
of Bottom and Falstaff to pretend that we have any affectionate
regard for Costard and Dull, for Launce and Speed. It is only when
Shakspere was coming to the end of his apprenticeship that he found
out how to utilize the talents of Kempe and of Kempe’s unknown
comrade in comedy, in parts which without ceasing to be adjusted to
their personalities were also accusable characters, Dogberry and
Touchstone. But when we come to Touchstone we are forced to perceive
that Shakspere was the child of his own age even when he refrained
from echoing its catchwords. He was cleaner than the majority of
his rivals, but he was near enough to Rabelais to be frank of
speech. On occasion he can be of the earth, earthy. He bestows upon
Touchstone a humor which is at times Rabelaisian in its breadth, in
its outspoken plainness of speech, assured of the guffaws of the
riffraff and rabble of a Tudor seaport, but a little too coarse
for the descendants of the Puritans on either side of the Atlantic
to-day. Nearly fifty years ago when Harry Beckett was rehearsing in
‘As You Like It’ for one of the infrequent Shaksperian revivals that
Lester Wallack ventured to make, he told me sorrowfully that his part
had been sadly shorn, some of Touchstone’s best lines having been
sacrificed in deference to the increasing squeamishness of American
audiences.
These accessory comic parts are not alone in their readjustment to
the modifying moods of a later age. The point of view changes with
every generation, and with every change a character is likely to be
seen from a different angle. No dramatist, whatever his genius,
can foresee the future and forecast the fate of his creatures. The
centuries follow one another in orderly procession, and they are
increasingly unlike. Moreover, the dramatist of genius, by the very
fact that he is a genius, is forever building better than he knew.
He may put a character into a play for a special purpose; and after
a century or two that character will loom larger than its creator
dreamt and will stand forward, refusing to keep the subordinate place
for which it was deliberately designed. We listen to the lines he
utters and we read into them meanings which the author could not have
intended, but which, none the less, are there to be read by us.
We may even accept as tragic a figure whom the playwright expected
to be received as comic and who was so received by the audience
for which the playwright wrote. Sometimes this is a betrayal of
his purpose, as it is when aspiring French actors have seen fit to
represent the Figaro of Beaumarchais (in the ‘Marriage of Figaro,’
not in the ‘Barber of Seville’) as a violent and virulent precursor
of the French Revolution; or as it is when the same French actors
insist on making the Georges Dandin of Molière a subject for pity,
tear-compelling rather than laughter-provoking.
It is not a betrayal, however, rather is it a transfiguration when
the Shylock of Shakspere is made to arouse our sympathy. I make no
doubt that Shakspere projected Shylock as a comic villain, at whom
he intended the spectators to laugh, even if they also shuddered
because of his bloodthirstiness. Yet by sheer stress of genius
this sinister creature, grotesque as he may be, is drawn with such
compelling veracity that we cannot but feel for him. We are shocked
by the insulting jeers of Gratiano at the moment of his discomfiture.
We are glad that his plot against Antonio has failed; none the less
do we feel that he has been miserably tricked; we are almost ready to
resent the way in which the cards have been stacked against him.
To anyone who has familiarized himself with the attitude of
Elizabethan playgoers toward usurers and toward the Jews, it is
evident that Shakspere intended the ‘Merchant of Venice’ to be a
Portia play; its action begins with talk about Belmont and it ends at
Belmont itself; and Shylock is absent from the final act. In spite
of this intent of the author, the ‘Merchant of Venice’ has become in
our eyes a Shylock play. In fact, Macready four-score years ago used
to appear in a three-act version which ended with the trial scene,—a
most inartistic perversion of the comedy. After all, the ‘Merchant
of Venice’ _is_ a comedy, even if its love-story is sustained and
stiffened by a terrible underplot. Shakspere created the abhorrent
Shylock that the lovely Portia could cleverly circumvent him and
score off him and put him to shame. His hardness of heart was to
make more refulgent her brightness of soul. Shylock was set up to
be scorned and hated and derided; he is a vindictive moneylender,
insisting on a horrible penalty; no one in the play has a good word
for him or a kindly thought; his servant detests him and his daughter
has no natural affection for him.
When all is said, we cannot but feel that Shakspere in his treatment
of Shylock displays a callousness not uncommon in Elizabethan
England. And yet—and yet Shakspere is true to his genius; he endows
Shylock with life. The Jew stands before us and speaks for himself;
and we feel that we understand him better than the genius who made
him. Our sympathy goes out to him; and altho we do not wish the
play to end otherwise than it does, we are almost ready to regard
him as the victim of a miscarriage of justice, guilty though he is.
Ellen Terry has quoted from a letter of Henry Irving’s a significant
confession: “Shylock is a ferocity, I know—but I cannot play him that
way!” Why couldn’t he? It was because the nineteenth century was not
the sixteenth, because Victorian audiences were not Elizabethan,
because the peoples who have English for their mother-tongue are
less callous and more civilized than their forebears of three hundred
years ago.
III
While it is more than three hundred years since Shakspere wrote the
‘Merchant of Venice,’ it is less than a hundred and fifty since
Sheridan wrote the ‘School for Scandal.’ The gap that yawns between
us and Sheridan is not so wide or so deep as the gulf that divides
us from Shakspere; but it is obvious enough. Even a hundred years
ago Charles Lamb declared that the audiences of his time were
becoming more and more unlike those of Sheridan’s day, and that
this increasing unlikeness was forcing the actors to modify their
methods, a little against their wills. Sheridan’s two brilliant
comedies continue to delight us by their solidity of structure, their
vigor of characterization and their insistent sparkle of dialog. In
the ‘Rivals’ Sheridan is following in the footsteps of his fellow
Irishman, Farquhar, and in the ‘School for Scandal’ he is matching
himself against Congreve. In both he was carrying on the tradition
of Restoration comedy, with its coldheartedness, its hard glitter,
its delineation of modes rather than morals. It is perhaps too much
to assert that most of his characters are unfeeling; but it is
not too much to say that they are regardless of the feelings of
others—perhaps because their own emotions are only skin-deep.
It is true that in the ‘Rivals’ Sheridan threw a sop to the admirers
of Sentimental Comedy and introduced a couple of high-strung and
weepful lovers, Falkland and Julia, who are forever sentimentalizing.
But this precious pair have been found so uninteresting that in
most of the later performances of the ‘Rivals’—all too infrequent,
alas!—they have been omitted altogether or disgraced by relegation to
the background.
The vogue of Sentimental Comedy was waning when Sheridan wrote, and
it disappeared before he died, yet the playgoers of London and of
New York were becoming more tender-hearted than their ancestors who
had delighted in the metallic harshness of character-delineation
customary in Restoration comedy. They were beginning to look for
characters with whom they could sympathize and to desire the villains
to remain consistent in their villainy. They were unwilling to remain
in what Lamb termed “the regions of pure comedy, where no cold moral
reigns.” Lamb called the ‘School for Scandal’ incongruous in that
it is “a mixture of sentimental incompatibilities,” Charles Surface
being “a pleasant reality” while Joseph Surface was “a no less
pleasant poetical foil to it.”
The original performer of Joseph was John Palmer; and Lamb asserted
that it required his consummate art “to reconcile the discordant
elements.” Then the critic suggested, and this was a century ago, that
a player with Jack’s talents, if we had one now, would not dare do
the part in the same manner. He would instinctively avoid every
turn which might tend to unrealize, and so to make the character
fascinating. He must take his cue from the spectators, who would
expect a bad man and a good man as rigidly opposed to each other as
the death-beds of those geniuses are contrasted in the prints.
A little later in the same essay—the incomparable analysis of
‘Artificial Comedy’—Lamb pointed out that “Charles must be loved and
Joseph hated,” adding that
to balance one disagreeable reality with another, Sir Peter
Teazle must be no longer the comic idea of a fretful old bachelor
bridegroom, whose teasings (while King played it) were evidently
as much played off at you as they were meant to concern anybody on
the stage,—he must be a real person, capable in law of sustaining
an injury,—a person towards whom duties are to be acknowledged,—the
genuine crim. con. antagonist of the villainous seducer Joseph. To
realize him more, his sufferings under his unfortunate match must
have the downright pungency of life,—must (or should) make you not
mirthful but uncomfortable, just as the same predicament would move
you in a neighbor or old friend.
I cannot count the number of occasions on which I have enjoyed the
performance of the ‘School for Scandal,’—but they must amount to a
score at the least. I recall most clearly John Gilbert’s Sir Peter;
and I can testify that he had preserved the tradition of King. He was
the fretful old bachelor bridegroom, who, when the screen fell and
discovered Lady Teazle in the library of Joseph Surface, was wounded
not in his heart but in his vanity. He preserved the comic idea, as
Sheridan had designed. But John Gilbert was the only Sir Peter I can
recall who was able to achieve this histrionic feat.
Of all the many Lady Teazles it has been my good fortune to see,
Fanny Davenport stands out most sharply in my memory,—perhaps because
she was the first I had ever beheld and perhaps because she was then
in the springtime of her buoyant beauty. Certainly when the screen
fell she was a lovely picture, like Niobe all tears. Her repentance
was sincere beyond all question. She renounced the comic idea, which
is that Lady Teazle has been caught in a compromising situation by
the elderly husband with whom she is in the habit of quarrelling.
Fanny Davenport saw only the pathos of the situation; and she made
us see it and feel it and feel for her and hope that her impossible
husband would accept her honest explanation,—the explanation which
indeed he would have to accept since we as eye-witnesses are ready
to testify that it is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the
truth.
But this rendering of the part is discomposing to the comic idea;
and it forces a modification of method upon the actor of Charles
Surface. It is in deference to the comic idea that when the screen
falls Sheridan made Charles see the humor of the situation and only
the humor of it. He is called upon to chaff Sir Peter and Lady Teazle
and Joseph, one after the other. If the actor speaks these lines with
due regard to the comic idea which created Sir Peter as a peevish old
bachelor bridegroom and Lady Teazle as a frivolous woman of fashion,
and if the actor of Sir Peter and the actress of Lady Teazle take
the situation not only seriously but pathetically as they would in a
twentieth century problem-play, then Charles’s speech is heartless
and almost brutal. Now Charles is a character as sympathetic to the
audience in his way as Lady Teazle is in hers. Charles is to be
loved as Joseph is to be hated. And so the impersonator of Charles
is compelled to modify his method, to transpose his lines and to
recognize that the robust raillery natural to him and appropriate to
the predicament must be toned down in deference to our more delicate
susceptibilities.
He laughs at Sir Peter first; and then he turns to Joseph, who is
fair game and whom the spectators are glad to see held up to scorn.
He says “you seem all to have been diverting yourselves here at hide
and seek and I don’t see who is out of the secret.” With this he
turns to Lady Teazle and asks, “Shall I beg your ladyship to inform
me?” So saying he looks at her and perceiving that she is standing
silent and ashamed, with downcast eyes, he makes her a bow of apology
for his levity. Finally with another thrust at his brother, the
unmasked hypocrite, he takes his departure airily, leaving them face
to face. If the comic idea suffers from this contradiction of the
intent of the comic dramatist, it must find what consolation it can
in its sense of humor.
IV
A large share of the success of even the masterpieces of the drama,
comic and tragic, is due to the coincidence of its theme and its
treatment with the desires, the opinions and the prejudices of
the contemporary audiences for whose pleasure it was originally
planned. But the play, comic or tragic, as the case may be, can
survive through the ages (as the ‘Merchant of Venice’ and the
‘School for Scandal’ have survived) only if this compliance has not
been subservient, if the play has the solidity of structure and the
universality of topic which will win it a welcome after its author
is dead and gone. What is contemporary is three parts temporary, and
what is up-to-date is certain soon to be out-of-date. Nevertheless
it is always the audience of his own time and of his own place that
the playwright has to please, first of all; and if their verdict is
against him he has lost his case. Plays have their fates no less than
books; and the dispensers of these fates are the spectators assembled
in the playhouse. The dramatist who ignores this fact, or who is
ignorant of it, does so at his peril. As Lowell once put it with his
wonted pungency, “the pressure of public opinion is like the pressure
of the atmosphere; you cannot see it, but it is sixteen pounds to the
square inch all the same.”
(1921)
IV
TRAGEDIES WITH HAPPY ENDINGS
IV
TRAGEDIES WITH HAPPY ENDINGS
I
In Mrs. Wharton’s acute and often penetrating analysis of ‘French
Ways and Their Meaning,’ she dwelt upon the innate intellectual
honesty of the French, “the special distinction of the race, which
makes it the torch-bearer of the world”; and she asserted that Bishop
Butler’s celebrated declaration, “Things are what they are and
will be as they will be,” might have been “the motto of the French
intellect.” She called it “an axiom that makes dull minds droop, but
exalts the brain imaginative enough to be amazed before the marvel of
things as they are.”
She pointed out that in Paris the people who go to the
moving-pictures to gaze at an empty and external panorama are also
the people who flock to the state-subventioned theaters, the Français
and the Odéon, to behold the searching tragedies of Corneille and
Racine, immitigably veracious in the portrayal of life as it is on
the lofty plane of poetry:
The people who assist at these grand tragic performances have a
strong enough sense of reality to understand the part that grief
and calamity play in life and in art; they feel instinctively that
no real art can be based on a humbugging attitude toward life, and
it is their intellectual honesty which makes them exact and enjoy
its fearless representation.
This intellectual honesty Mrs. Wharton failed to find in the
audiences of our American theaters, because it is not a habitual
possession of Americans generally. And she ventured to quote a remark
which she once heard Howells make on our theatrical taste. They had
been talking about the pressure exerted upon the American playwright
by the American playgoing public, compelling him to wind up his play,
whatever its point of departure, with the suggestion that his hero
and heroine lived happily ever after, like the prince and princess
who are married off at the end of the fairy-tale. Mrs. Wharton
declared that this predilection of our playgoers did not imply a
preference for comedy, but that, on the contrary, “our audience
wanted to be harrowed (and even slightly shocked) from eight till
ten-thirty, and then consoled and reassured before eleven.”
“Yes,” said Howells, “what the American public wants is a
tragedy—with a happy ending.”
And Mrs. Wharton added her own comment that what Howells said of
the American attitude in the theater “is true of the whole American
attitude toward life.” In other words we Americans both in the
playhouse and out of it are lacking in the intellectual honesty which
the French possess. We are not convinced, and we are not willing to
let our plays, and even our novels, convince us, that “things are
what they are and will be as they will be.”