who has profited by the masterpieces of French literature could cavil
for a moment. The French are intellectually honest, more so than any
other modern nation, and perhaps as much so as the Greeks. There is
abundant insincerity in our drama and in our fiction; and no one long
familiar with either is justified in denying this. But, none the
less, Howells’s characteristically witty remark has not perhaps all
the weight which Mrs. Wharton attached to it. And it instantly evokes
the desire to ask questions. Is it really true that we Americans like
tragedies with happy endings? And, supposing this to be true, are
we the only people who have ever revealed this aberration? Finally,
if we have revealed it, are there any special reasons for this
manifestation of our deficiency in intellectual honesty?
Having propounded these three queries, I propose to answer them
myself as best I can, and as the farseeing reader probably expected
me to do; and it appears to me prudent to commence by considering
the second of them, leaving the first to be taken up immediately
thereafter. Are we Americans the only people who like tragedies with
happy endings? Here we have a starting point for a discursive inquiry
into the tastes of the playgoing public in other countries and in
other centuries. Nor need we begin this leisurely loitering by too
long a voyage, for we have only to go back a hundred years, more or
less, and to tarry a little while in France itself.
II
It was in the minor theatres of Paris at the end of the eighteenth
century and at the beginning of the nineteenth that there was slowly
developed a new type of play, the melodrama. Its first masters were
Ducange and Pixérécourt, who had profited by the experience of their
ruder forerunners and who taught the secrets of their special craft
to their more expert followers, the fertile Bouchardy, for one, and,
for another, the only lately departed Dennery, the most adroit and
the most inventive of them all.
A melodrama may be described briefly as a play with a plot and
nothing but a plot; it abounds in situations enthralling,
intricately combined and adroitly presented; and it contains
characters simplified to types, drawn in profile and violently
stencilled with the primary colors. It has a Hero, who struggles
against his fate and struggles in vain until the final episode, when
the Villain, as black as he is painted, is cast into outer darkness,
the entirely white Hero being then rewarded for all his sufferings
and for all his struggles with the hand of the equally pale Heroine,
truly the female of his species. The melodrama may be devoid of
veracity, but it is compelling in its progressive interest. It is
dextrously devised to delight audiences which want “to be harrowed
(and even slightly shocked) from eight to ten-thirty, and then
consoled and reassured before eleven.” In short, it is “a tragedy
with a happy ending.”
What could be more tragic than the tale of the ‘Two Orphans’? In
that ultimate masterpiece of melodrama, two lovely sisters, one of
them blind, are severally lost in Paris in the wickedest days of the
Regency. We are made to follow their appalling misadventures; and
we behold them again and again in danger of death and worse than
death. The sword of Damocles was suspended over their fair heads
from the first rising of the curtain until within five minutes of
its final fall. The odds are a hundred to one, nay, a thousand to
one, against their escaping unscathed from their manifold perils.
And yet, nevertheless, at the very end, the clouds lift, sunshine
floods the stage; and the two heroines are left at last to live happy
like two princesses with their two princes in the most entrancing
of fairy tales. And many thousand Parisian audiences, laying aside
their intellectual honesty for the occasion, dilated with the right
emotion, sobbed at the sorrows of the sisters, cheered the rescuers
and venomously hissed the villains who had pursued them.
So completely were the playgoers of Paris subdued to what they worked
in, that the makers of melodrama were emboldened to strange tricks.
Théophile Gautier once described a long-forgotten melodrama by
Bouchardy, himself long forgotten, in which an important character
was killed off in the third act. Then in the fifth act when the
unfortunate but immaculate Hero was absolutely at the mercy of his
vicious enemies, and when he could extricate himself from the toils
only if he had the talisman he had been seeking in vain,—the needed
password, the necessary key, the missing will, the incriminatory
documents, or whatever you prefer—when all is lost, even honor, then
in the very nick of time, the character who was killed off in the
third act, and dead beyond all question, reappears and gives the
Hero the talisman (whatever it was). The Hero receives this with
joy, commingled with surprize. “I thought you were dead!” he cries;
“how is it that you are here now?” “Ah,” answers the traveller from
beyond, “that—that is a secret that I must carry back with me into
the tomb!”
It is only fair to record that Parisian melodrama was not often as
rude and as crude as this in its subterfuges and its expedients.
Indeed, it sometimes rose to a far higher level, as in the ‘Don César
de Bazan’ of Dennery and in the ‘Lyons Mail’ of Moreau, Giraudin
and Delacour. It even served as the model for Victor Hugo’s superb
and sonorous ‘Hernani’ and ‘Ruy Blas,’ in which he flung the rich
embroidered mantle of his ample lyricism over an arbitrary skeleton
of deftly articulated intrigue, as artificial as it was ingenious.
In its earlier manifestations it was imitated in Great Britain,
notably by Edward Fitzball, the first playmaker who perceived the
theatrical possibilities of the legend of the ‘Flying Dutchman.’
Fitzball did not disdain to intimate that he considered himself the
“Victor Hugo of England,”—which tempted Douglas Jerrold to remark
that Fitzball was really only the “Victor No Go” of England. In
its later manifestations the melodrama of the French supplied a
pattern for the ‘Silver King’ of Henry Arthur Jones, one of the
most satisfactory specimens of this type of play. The ‘Silver King’
won the high approval of Matthew Arnold, who called it an honest
melodrama, relying necessarily “for its main effect on an outer drama
of sensational incidents” and none the less attaining the level of
literature because the dialog and the sentiments were natural.
By the side of the British ‘Silver King’ of Henry Arthur Jones may
be set the American ‘Secret Service’ of William Gillette, which
also relies for its main effect on an outer drama of sensational
incidents; and yet the sensational incidents are so fitly chosen and
so artfully interwoven that they serve to set off the very human
hero, an accusable character, a Union spy, with a divided duty
before him. Toward the end of the play it becomes evident that this
brave and resourceful man is doomed to death; and to this fatality
he is himself resigned, wilfully throwing away a chance to escape
and welcoming a speedy exit from his impossible position. Yet, once
more, just before the curtain falls, the dramatist intervenes, like
a god from the machine, sparing his hero’s life, and even permitting
the spectators to foresee that hero and heroine will live happily
ever after, thus consoling and reassuring the audience before eleven
o’clock.
I make bold to say that this happy ending is not inartistic and
that it does not outrage our intellectual honesty, for the obvious
reason that ‘Secret Service’ is not essentially a tragedy; it is a
serio-comic story which never uplifts us to the serene atmosphere
of the irresistible and the inevitable in which tragedy lives. It
is too brisk in its humor, too lively in its representation of
the externalities of life, to justify a fatal conclusion. A true
tragedy must not only end sadly, it has also to begin sadly; it has
to impress us subtly with a sense of impending disaster, inherent
in its theme. What Stevenson said of the short-story, when that is
as dramatic as it can be, is applicable to the drama itself. “Make
another end to it?” he wrote in answer to a suggestion to that
effect. “Ah, yes, but that is not the way I write; the whole tale
is unified. To make another end, that is to make the beginning all
wrong.... The body and end of a short-story is bone of the bone and
blood of the blood of the beginning.” In other words the beginning of
a melodrama never demands a tragic ending, and rarely even permits it.
III
Altho modern melodrama was developed in the totally unliterary minor
playhouses of Paris more than a hundred years ago, the playgoers of
France had not had to wait until the early nineteenth century or even
until the early eighteenth to be consoled and reassured by a tragedy
with a happy ending. It was in the first half of the seventeenth
century that Corneille took over from a Spanish original the first
and fieriest of his tragedies, the ‘Cid,’—the story of which leads
up to one of the strongest situations in all dramatic literature.
The duty is suddenly laid upon a high-strung warrior to fight a
duel to the death with the father of the woman whom he loves and
who loves him. Seemingly the deadly stroke of his sword has severed
the lovers forever, for how could a woman wed the red-handed slayer
of her father? Yet it is with this prospective wedding, abruptly
brought about, that Corneille ends his play; and he was so dextrous
a dramatist, so abundant in emotion and so persuasive in eloquence,
that he was able to carry his audience with him, even at the cost of
their intellectual honesty.
Nor did the playgoers of England have to await the importation of
French melodrama in the original package before they could enjoy
reassurance and consolation after being harrowed and even slightly
shocked. Indeed, the Londoners had this pleasure provided for them
even earlier than it had been vouchsafed to the Parisians. All
students of the history of our stage are familiar with the type of
play known as tragi-comedy. Its name sufficiently describes it, a
name apparently first used in the prolog to a play by Plautus and
revived by the Italian theorists of the theater. Dramas of this
species sprang up spontaneously in Italy, in Spain and in France; and
we find the form flourishing in England in the second half of the
sixteenth century, altho it cannot be said to have been more popular
among the English than it was among the French. Shakspere’s somber
‘Measure for Measure’ is the most immediately obvious example; and at
the performance of this play the spectators were harrowed, and even
more than slightly shocked, by a succession of powerful situations,
only to be at last reassured and consoled by a happy ending,
mechanically and unconvincingly brought about.
In the course of time tragi-comedy modified its methods and became
the dramatic-romance, of which Beaumont and Fletcher’s ‘Philaster’
may be taken as one characteristic specimen and Shakspere’s
‘Cymbeline’ as another. Perhaps it would be more exact to say that
the dramatic-romance is only an insular sub-species of sentimental
tragi-comedy. Most of the best known of the dramatic-romances of
Beaumont and Fletcher (or of Fletcher and Massinger) conform to the
definition of tragi-comedy, as Professor Ristine has skilfully
condensed this from a defence of the type made by Guarini, author of
the ‘Pastor Fido’:
Tragi-comedy, far from being a discordant mixture of tragedy and
comedy, is a thorough blend of such parts of each as can stand
together with verisimilitude, with the result that the deaths of
tragedy are reduced to the danger of death, and the whole in every
respect a graduated mean between the austerity and the dignity of
the one and the pleasantness and ease of the other.
This Italian definition of Renascence tragi-comedy can be transferred
to modern melodrama of the more literary kind,—the ‘Silver King,’
for example, and ‘Secret Service,’ in which we find the graduated
mean between austere dignity and easy pleasantness. After quoting
from Guarini, Professor Ristine gave his own analysis of the elements
combined in English tragi-comedy:
Love of some sort is the motive force; intrigue is rife; the
darkest villainy is contrasted with the noblest and most exalted
virtue. In the course of an action ... in which the characters are
enmeshed in a web of disastrous complications, reverse and surprise
succeed each other with lightning rapidity.... But final disaster
is ingeniously averted.... Wrongs are righted, reconciliation
sets in, penitent villainy is forgiven, and the happy ending made
complete.
In its turn this American description of English tragi-comedy is
applicable also to French melodrama of the less literary kind,—the
‘Lyons Mail’ and the ‘Two Orphans.’
It is possible to find at least one tragedy with a happy ending
amid the two score plays which alone have come down to us from all
the hundreds acted in the Theater of Dionysus before the assembled
citizens of Athens,—probably the most intelligent body of playgoers
to which any dramatist has ever been privileged to appeal. The
‘Alcestis’ of Euripides is a beautiful play, grave, inspiring and
moving; yet it has been a constant puzzle to the historians of Greek
literature, who have never been quite able to declare what manner
of tragic drama it is, since it has one character who is frankly
humorous and since it has a happy ending,—the revivification of the
pathetic heroine who had given her life to save her husband and who
is brought back by Hercules, after a combat with Death.
IV
After this desultory ramble through the history of the drama in
other centuries and in other countries, we are in better case to
consider the first of the three questions suggested by Mrs. Wharton’s
assertion that we Americans are deficient in the intellectual
honesty which is a recognized characteristic of the French. Is it
really true that we like tragedies with happy endings? If it is true,
we are no worse off than the English in the time of Shakspere, the
French in the time of Corneille and in the time of Hugo, the Greeks
in the time of Euripides. But is it true?
It might be urged in our defence that we do not in the least object
to the death of the hero and the heroine (or of both together) in the
music-drama; and it must be admitted that in serious opera a tragic
ending is not only acceptable but is actually expected. It might be
pointed out that the final death of the heroine has never in any
way interfered with the immense popularity of a host of star-plays,
‘Adrienne Lecouvreur,’ the ‘Dame aux Camélias,’ ‘Froufrou,’
‘Théodora’ and ‘La Tosca.’ It might be permissible to record that the
death of ‘Cyrano de Bergerac,’ (a fatal termination not inherent in
the theme of that heroic comedy and in fact almost inconsistent,) did
not dampen the pleasure of the American playgoer.
These things must be taken for what they are worth; and perhaps they
are not really pertinent to our immediate inquiry, since opera is a
very special form of the dramatic art, making an appeal of its own
within arbitrary limits, and since a star-play is relished by the
majority largely as a vehicle for the exhibition of the histrionic
versatility of the star herself or himself, a last dying speech and
confession affording the performer an excellent opportunity for the
display of his or her virtuosity.
We must go behind Mrs. Wharton’s rather too sweeping accusation
and center attention on a single point. American playgoers of
to-day enjoy and hugely enjoy seeing on the stage stories which are
harrowing, which deal liberally with life and death, and which after
all end happily, sending us home consoled and reassured. So have the
playgoers of other lands in other times; and the real question is
whether we refuse to accept the tragic end when this is ordained by
all that has gone before, when it is a fate not to be escaped. In
other words, have we the intellectual honesty which shall compel us
to accept George Eliot’s stern declaration that “consequences are
unpitying”?
Thus put, the question is not easy to answer.
For myself I am inclined to think that when we are at liberty to
choose between the happy and the unhappy ending, when one or the
other is not imposed upon us by the action or by the atmosphere
of the story set before us, we tend to prefer a conclusion which
dismisses the hero and the heroine to a vague future felicity. But I
am inclined also to believe that we do not shrink from the bitterest
end if this has been foreordained from the beginning of time, if the
author has been skilful enough and sincere enough to make us feel
that his tragedy could not possibly have any other than a tragic
termination.
In the ‘Second Mrs. Tanqueray’ the fatal ending is obligatory; it
grows out of the nature of things; and the play has established
itself. In ‘Mid-Channel’ there is no way out of the difficulty in
which the heroine has entangled herself, except through the door of
death. On the other hand, the plot of the ‘Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith’
cried aloud for a tragic ending, which the author refused to grant;
and perhaps this is one reason why the piece has never taken hold on
our playgoing public despite its indisputable qualities.
As it happens there have been seen on our stage in the first and
second decades of the twentieth century four plays, unequal in
sincerity and different in texture, but all of them variants of the
same theme. Two are British, ‘Iris’ by Sir Arthur Pinero, and the
‘Fugitive’ by John Galsworthy; and two are American, the ‘Easiest
Way’ by Eugene Walter and ‘Déclassée’ by Miss Zoe Akins. In each of
them we are invited to follow the career of a young woman who loves
luxury and who moves through life along the line of least resistance,
until at last the ground gives way beneath her feet. ‘Iris’ was
the first of the four; it is the most delicately artistic and the
most veracious. The ‘Easiest Way’ is perhaps the most vigorous. The
‘Fugitive’ is pallid and futile. ‘Déclassée’ is the least important
of them all, as it is the least original. The two last-named pieces
are unsatisfactory when we bring them to the bar of our intellectual
honesty; and yet they both end with the death of the heroine, an
arbitrary exit out of the moral entanglements in which she has
involved herself. The two earlier plays have a more truly tragic
ending, since they leave the heroine alive yet bereft of all that
makes life worth living. No one of the four sent the spectators home
reassured and consoled.
V
There might seem to be no necessity to put the third question now
that the second has been discussed. And yet there may be profit
in asking ourselves whether there are any special reasons why
the American playgoing public might be expected to lapse from
intellectual honesty and to compel our playwrights to violate the
logic of their stories and to stultify themselves to achieve a
puerile fairy-tale conclusion. Mrs. Wharton put forward one such
reason, when she asserted that our attitude in the theater is
characteristic “of the whole American attitude toward life.” Here she
is drawing an indictment against the American people and not merely
against American playgoers.
To enter upon that broad problem would take me too far afield, too
far, that is, from the theater itself, within the walls of which this
inquiry must be confined. Are there any conditions in the American
theater which make against the sincere and searching portrayal
of life? I must confess that I think there is at least one such
condition, the possible consequences of which are disquieting. This
is the change in the composition of the audiences in our American
theaters from what they were half-a-century ago—which is as far back
as my own memories as a playgoer extend. I think that the average age
of the spectators is now considerably less than it was when I was a
play-struck boy; and I think also that the proportion of women is
distinctly larger than it was in those distant days. If I am right in
believing that this change has taken place, and also in anticipating
that it is likely to be even more evident in the years that are to
come, then there will probably be brought about a slow but certain
modification of those implicit desires and of those explicit
prejudices of his expected audience, which the playwright has always
taken into account even if he is often more or less unconscious that
he is so doing.
Water cannot rise higher than its source; and the dramatist cannot
soar too loftily above the level of the audience he has to allure. It
is always the duty of the dramatist to find the common denominator of
the throng. He need not write down to his public, but he must write
broad; or otherwise he will fail to arouse and retain the interest
of the spectators. If he shrinks from the toil of so presenting his
vision of our common humanity that it shall be immediately attractive
to his audiences then he is no dramatist, whatever else he may be;
and he had better turn at once to sonneteering and to storywriting,
arts wherein he can appeal to a chosen few. The theater is for the
many-headed multitude; and the theater-poet cannot but accept the
condition that confronts him.
If American audiences are younger than they were, then they are
not so rich in knowledge of the world, not so ripe in judgment. If
they are also more largely feminine, then they will be different
from what they have been in the days when the drama attained to its
superbest expression. The tragedies of Sophocles were represented
in the Theater of Dionysus before the citizens of Athens; and the
spectators were all men of more or less maturity. The tragedies
and the comedies of Shakspere were written for the Globe Theater in
London, in which the spectators were predominantly male. The comedies
of Molière were acted in the Palais Royal Theater in Paris, before
audiences which included comparatively few women. It is significant
that women were admitted to the orchestra seats of the Théâtre
Français only about forty years ago; and that Sarcey, a very shrewd
observer of things theatrical, was moved more than once to record his
regret that this had helped to bring about the more rapid dispersal
of the group of old playgoers, experts in playwriting and in acting,
who were wont to follow the performances of the Comédie-Française
assiduously and devotedly.
And it was almost a hundred years ago that Goethe anticipated
Sarcey’s complaint. “What business have young girls in the theater?”
he asked. “They do not belong to it; ... the theater is only for men
and women, who know something of human affairs.”
But “things are what they are, and will be what they will be.”
(1919)
V
ON THE ADVANTAGE OF HAVING A PATTERN
V
ON THE ADVANTAGE OF HAVING A PATTERN
I
No passage of Stevenson’s has been oftener quoted than his confession
how he taught himself the art of letters by playing “the sedulous
ape to many masters”; and in this avowal he had been preceded by
masters of style as dissimilar in their accomplishment as Franklin
and Newman. Stevenson may be overstating the case—he had caught the
trick of over-statement from Thoreau—but he is not misstating it when
he asserts that this is the only way to learn to write. Certainly it
is an excellent way, if we judge by its results in his own case, in
Franklin’s and in Newman’s. The method of imitative emulation will
help any apprentice of the craft to choose his words, to arrange them
in sentences and to build them up in coherent paragraphs. It is a
specific against that easy writing which is “cursed hard reading.”
But it goes no deeper than the skin, since it affords insufficient
support when the novice has to consider his structure as a whole,
the total form he will bestow upon his essay, his story, his play.
In the choice of the proper framework for his conception the author’s
task is made measurably lighter if he can find a fit pattern ready
to his hand. Whether he shall happen upon this when he needs it is a
matter of chance, since it depends on what the engineers call “the
state of the art.” There have been story-tellers and playwrights not
a few who have gone astray and dissipated their energies, not through
any fault of their own, but solely because no predecessor had devised
a pattern suitable for their immediate purpose. They have wandered
afield because the trail had not been blazed by earlier, and possibly
less gifted, wayfarers and adventurers.
Perhaps I can make clear what I mean by a concrete example not taken
from the art of letters. In Professor John C. Van Dyke’s acute
analysis of the traditions of American painting, he has told us that
when La Farge designed the ‘Ascension’ for the church of that name in
New York,