THE English drama has been dead for nearly two hundred years. Mr.
Gosse says that in 1700 the English had the most vivacious school of
comedy in Europe. And, if their serious drama was greatly inferior,
still the best tragedies of Dryden and Otway—and perhaps of Lee,
Southerne, and Rowe—made not only a sounding success on the boards, but
a fair bid for literary honors. Ten years later the drama was moribund,
and in 1747 its epitaph was spoken by Garrick in the sonorous prologue
written by Dr. Johnson for the opening of Drury Lane:
Then, crushed by rules and weakened as refined,
For years the power of Tragedy declined:
From bard to bard the frigid caution crept,
Till declamation roared whilst passion slept.
Yet still did Virtue deign the stage to tread;
Philosophy remained though nature fled.
But, forced at length her ancient reign to quit,
She saw great Faustus lay the ghost of wit:
Exulting Folly hailed the joyful day,
And pantomime and song confirmed her sway—
That is, as has been complained a hundred times before and since, the
opera and the spectacular show drove the legitimate drama from the
stage.
The theatre, indeed, is not dead: it has continued to live and to
flourish, and is furnishing entertainment to the public to-day, as it
did two hundred—nay, two thousand—years ago. The theatre, as an
institution, has a life of its own, whose history is recorded in
innumerable volumes. Playhouses have multiplied in London, in the
provinces, in all English-speaking lands. The callings of the actor and
the playwright have given occupation to many, and rich rewards to not a
few. Scholars, critics, and literary men are apt to look at the drama as
if it were simply a department of literature. In reading a play, we
should remember that we are taking the author at a disadvantage. It is
not meant to be read, but to be acted. It is not mere literature: it is
both more and less than literature. The art of the theatre is a
composite art, requiring the help of the scene-painter, the costumer,
the manager, the stage-carpenter, sometimes of the musician and dancer,
nowadays of the electrician; and always and above all demanding the
interpretation of the actor. It is not addressed to the understanding
exclusively, but likewise to the eye and the ear. It is a show, as well
as a piece of writing. The drama can subsist without any dialogue at
all, as in the pantomime; or with the dialogue reduced to its lowest
terms, as in the Italian _commedie a soggetto_, where the actors
improvised the lines. “The skeleton of every play is a pantomime,” says
Professor Brander Matthews, who reminds us that not only buffoonery and
acrobatic performances may be carried on silently by stock characters
like Harlequin, Columbine, Pantaloon, and Punchinello; but a story of a
more pretentious kind may be enacted entirely by gesture and dumb show,
as in the French pantomime play “_L’Enfant Prodigue_.” A good dramatist
includes a good playwright, one who can invent striking situations,
telling climaxes, tableaux, _ensemble_ scenes, spectacular and
histrionic effects, _coups de théâtre_. These things may seem to the
literary student the merely mechanical or technical parts of the art.
Yet, without them, a play will be amateurish, and no really successful
dramatist has ever been lacking in this kind of skill.
Still, although stage presentation, the _mise en scène_, is the
touchstone of a play as play, it is of course quite possible to read a
play with pleasure. It is even better to read it than to see it badly
acted, just as one would rather have no pictures in a novel than such
pictures as disturb one’s ideas of the characters. A musical adept can
take pleasure in reading the score of an opera, though he would rather
hear it performed. This is not to say that a play depends for its effect
upon actual performance in anywhere near the same degree as a musical
composition; for written speech is a far more definite language than
musical notation. I use the latter only as an imperfect illustration.
This professional quality has been much insisted on by practical
playwrights, who are properly contemptuous of closet drama. But just
what is a closet drama? Let it be defined provisionally as a piece meant
to be read and not acted. Yet a play’s chances for representation depend
partly on the condition of the theatre and the demands of the public.
Mr. Yeats, for example, thinks that a play of any poetic or spiritual
depth has no chance to-day in a big London theatre, with an audience
living on the surface of life; and he advises that such plays be tried
in small suburban or country playhouses before audiences of scholars and
simple, unspoiled folk. To the English public, with its desire for
strong action and variety, Racine’s tragedies are nothing but closet
dramas; and yet they are played constantly and with applause in the
French theatre. In the eighteenth century, when the English stage still
maintained a literary tradition,—though it had lost all literary
vitality,—the rankest sort of closet dramas were frequently put on and
listened to respectfully. No manager now would venture to mount such a
thing as “Cato” or “Sophonisba” or “The Castle Spectre.” The modern
public will scarcely endure sheer poetry, or long descriptive and
reflective tirades even in Shakespeare. Such passages have to be cut in
the acting versions. The Elizabethan craving for drama was such that
everything was tried, though some things, when brought to the test of
action, proved failures. Ben Jonson’s heavy tragedies, “Catiline” and
“Sejanus,” failed on the stage; and Daniel’s “Cleopatra” never got so
far as the stage, a rare example of an Elizabethan closet drama. Very
likely, modern literary plays like “Philip Van Artevelde” and Tennyson’s
“Queen Mary” might have succeeded in the seventeenth century. For the
audiences of those days were omnivorous. They hungered for sensation,
but they enjoyed as well fine poetry, noble declamation, philosophy,
sweet singing, and the clown with his funny business, all in close
neighborhood. They cared more for quantity of life than for delicate
art. Their art, indeed, was in some ways quite artless, and the drama
had not yet purged itself of lyric, epic, and didactic elements, nor
attained a purely dramatic type. Since then, the French, whose ideal is
not so much fulness of life as perfection of form, have taught English
playwrights many lessons. Brunetière, speaking of the gradual evolution
and differentiation of literary kinds (_genres_), says that
Shakespeare’s theatre, as theatre, exhibits the art of drama in its
infancy.
Perhaps, then, no hard and fast line can be drawn between an acting
drama and a closet play. It is largely a matter of contemporary taste.
“Cato,” we know, made a prodigious hit. Coleridge’s “Remorse,” a closet
drama if there ever was one, and a very rubbishy affair at that, was put
on by Sheridan, though with many misgivings, and lasted twenty nights, a
good run for those days. No audience now would stand it an hour. And yet
we have seen Sir Henry Irving forcing Tennyson’s dramatic poems into a
temporary _succès d’estime_. “Samson Agonistes” is a closet play,
without question; but is “The Cenci”? Shelley wanted it played, and had
selected Miss O’Niel for the rôle of Beatrice. But it never got itself
played till 1889, when it was given before the Shelley Society at South
Kensington. The picked audience applauded it, just as an academic
audience will applaud a rehearsal of the “Antigone” in the original
Greek; but the dramatic critics sent down by the London newspapers to
report the performance were unconvinced.
Let it be granted, then, that the question in the case of any given play
is a question of more or less. Still, the difference between our modern
literary drama, as a whole, and the Elizabethan drama,—which was also
literary,—as a whole, I take to be this: that in our time literature
has lost touch with the stage. In the seventeenth century, the poets
_wrote for_ the theatre. They knew that their plays would be played. In
the nineteenth century, English poets who adopted the dramatic framework
did not write for the theatre. They did not expect their pieces to be
played, and they addressed themselves consciously to the reader. When
one of them had the luck to get upon the boards, it was an exception,
and the manager generally lost money by it. Thus, in the late thirties
and early forties, in one of those efforts to “elevate the stage,” which
recur with comic persistence in our dramatic annals, Macready rallied
the _literati_ to his aid and presented, among other things, Taylor’s
“Philip Van Artevelde,” Talfourd’s “Ion,” Bulwer’s “Richelieu” and “The
Lady of Lyons,” and Browning’s “Stafford” and “A Blot in the
’Scutcheon.” The only titles on this list that secured a permanent
foothold on the repertoire of the playhouses were Bulwer’s two pieces,
which were precisely the most flimsy of the whole lot, from the literary
point of view. “A Blot in the ’Scutcheon” has been tried again. As I saw
it a number of years ago, with Lawrence Barrett cast for Lord Tresham
and Marie Wainwright as Mildred, it seemed to me—in spite of its
somewhat absurd _motivirung_—decidedly impressive as an acting play. On
the other hand, “In a Balcony,” though very intelligently and
sympathetically presented by Mrs. Lemoyne and Otis Skinner, was too
subtle for a popular audience, and was manifestly unfitted for the
stage.
The closet drama is a quite legitimate product of literary art. The
playhouse has no monopoly of the dramatic form. Indeed, as the closet
dramatist is not bound to consider the practical exigencies of the
theatre, to consult the prejudices of the manager or the spectators,
fill the pockets of the company, or provide a rôle for a star performer,
he has, in many ways, a freer hand than the professional playwright. He
need not sacrifice truth of character and probability of plot to the
need of highly accentuated situations. He does not have to consider
whether a speech is too long, too ornate in diction, too deeply
thoughtful for recitation by an actor. If the action lags at certain
points, let it lag. In short, as the aim of the closet dramatist is
other than the playwright’s, so his methods may be independent.
In the rather bitter preface to the printed version of “Saints and
Sinners” (1891), Mr. Henry Arthur Jones complains of “the English
practice of writing plays to order for a star performer,” together with
other “binding and perplexing . . . conventions and limitations of
playwriting,” as “quite sufficient to account for the literary
degradation of the modern drama.” The English closet drama of the
nineteenth century is an important body of literature, of higher
intellectual value than all the stage plays produced in England during
the same period. It is not necessary to enumerate its triumphs: I will
merely remind the reader, in passing, that work like Byron’s “Manfred,”
Landor’s “Gebir,” George Eliot’s “The Spanish Gypsy,” Beddoes’s “Death’s
Jest-Book,” Arnold’s “Empedocles on Etna,” Tennyson’s “Becket,”
Browning’s “Pippa Passes” and Swinburne’s “Atalanta in Calydon,” is
justified in its assumption of the dramatic form, though its appeal is
only to the closet reader. I do not forget that one or two of these have
been tried upon the stage, but they do not belong there, and, as theatre
pieces, were flat failures.
It is hard to say exactly what qualities ensure stage success. As
reading plays, Lillo’s “George Barnwell” is intolerably stilted,
Knowles’s “Virginius” insipid, “The Lady of Lyons” tawdry; yet all of
them took notoriously, and the last two—as any one can testify who has
seen them performed—retain a certain effectiveness even now. Perhaps
the secret lies in simplicity and directness of construction, unrelaxing
tension, quick movement, and an instinctive seizure of the essentially
dramatic crises in the action. In a word, the thing has “go”; lacking
which, no cleverness of dialogue, no epigrammatic sharpness of wit or
delicate play of humor can save a comedy; and no beauty of style, no
depth or reach of thought, a tragedy. Hence it is pertinent to remark
how many popular playwrights have been actors or in close practical
relations with the theatre. In the seventeenth century this was a matter
of course. Shakespeare was an actor, and Molière and Jonson and Marlowe
and Greene and Otway, and countless others. Cibber was an actor and
stage-manager. Sheridan and both Colmans were managers. Garrick and
Foote wrote plays as well as acted them. Knowles, Boucicault, Robertson,
Pinero and Stephen Phillips have all been actors.
Conceded that this professional point of view has been rightly
emphasized, yet before the acted drama can rank as literature, or even
hope to hold possession of the stage itself for more than a season, it
must stand a further test. It must read well, too. If it is no more than
an after-dinner amusement, without intellectual meaning or vital
relation to life: if it has neither strength nor truth nor beauty as a
criticism of life, or an imaginative representation of life, what
interest can it have for serious people? Let us stay at home and read
our Thackeray. Eugène Scribe was perhaps the cunningest master of
stagecraft who ever wrote. Schlegel ranked him above Molière. He left
the largest fortune ever accumulated by a French man of letters. His
plays were more popular in all the theatres of Europe than anything
since Kotzebue’s melodramas; and all European purveyors for the stage
strove to imitate the adroitness and ingenuity with which his plots were
put together. But if one to-day tries to _read_ any one of his three
hundred and fifty pieces—say, “Adrienne Lecouvreur” or “La Bataille des
Dames”—one will find little in them beyond the mechanical perfection of
the construction, and will feel how powerless mere technical cleverness
is to keep alive false and superficial conceptions.
When it is asserted, then, that the British drama has been dead for
nearly two hundred years, what is really meant is that its _literary_
vitality went out of it some two centuries ago, and has not yet come
back. It is hard to say what causes the breath of life suddenly to enter
some particular literary form, inspire it fully for a few years, and
then desert it for another; leaving it all flaccid and inanimate.
Literary forms have their periods. No one now sits down to compose an
epic poem or a minstrel ballad or a five-act blank verse tragedy without
an uneasy sense of anachronism. The dramatic form had run along in
England for generations, from the mediaeval miracles down to the rude
chronicle histories, Senecan tragedies, and clownish interludes of the
sixteenth century. Suddenly, in the last years of that century, the
spark of genius touched and kindled it into the great drama of
Elizabeth. About the middle of the eighteenth century life abandoned it
again, and took possession of the novel. Fielding is the point of
contact between the dying drama and new-born fiction. The whole process
of the change may be followed in him. “Tom Jones” and “Amelia” still
rank as masterpieces, but who reads “The Modern Husband,” or “Miss Lucy
in Town,” or “Love in Several Masques,” or any other of Fielding’s
plays? How many even know that he wrote any plays? Mr. Shaw attributes
Fielding’s change of base to the government censorship. He writes:
In 1737 Henry Fielding, the greatest practising dramatist, with
the single exception of Shakspere, produced by England between
the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century, devoted his genius
to the task of exposing and destroying parliamentary
corruption. . . . Walpole . . . promptly gagged the stage by a
censorship which is in full force at the present moment [1898].
Fielding, driven out of the trade of Molière and Aristophanes,
took to that of Cervantes; and since then, the English novel has
been one of the glories of literature, whilst the English drama
has been its disgrace.
But Mr. Shaw’s explanation fails to explain, and his estimate of
Fielding’s talent for drama is too high. With the exception of “Tom
Thumb,” his plays are very dull, and it is doubtful whether, given the
freest hand, he would ever have become a great dramatist. It was not
Walpole but the _Zeitgeist_ that was responsible for his failure in one
literary form and his triumph in another. The clock had run down, and
though Goldsmith and Sheridan wound it up once more towards the end of
the century, it only went for an hour or so. It is usual to refer to
their comedy group as the last flare of the literary drama in England
before its final extinction.
In the appendix to Clement Scott’s “The Drama of Yesterday and To-day”
there is given, by way of supplement to Genest, a list of the new plays
put on at London theatres between 1830 and 1900. They number about
twenty-four hundred; and—until we reach the last decade of the
century—it would be hard to pick out a dozen of them which have become
a part of English literature: which any one would think of reading for
pleasure or profit, as one reads, say, the plays of Marlowe or Fletcher
or Congreve. Of course, many of the pieces on the list are of
non-literary kinds—burlesques, vaudevilles, operas, and the like. Then
there is a large body of translations and adaptations from the foreign
drama, more especially from the French of Scribe, Sardou, Dumas, _père
et fils_, d’Hennery, Labiche, Goudinet, Meilhac and Halévy, Ohnet, and
many others. Next to the French theatre, the most abundant feeder of our
modern stage has been contemporary fiction. Nowadays, every successful
novel is immediately dramatized. This has been the case, more or less,
for three-quarters of a century. The Waverley Novels were dramatized in
their time, and Dickens’s stories in theirs, and there are a plenty of
dramatized novels on Scott’s catalogue. But the practice has greatly
increased of recent years. Now, for some reason, a dramatized novel
seldom means a good play; that is to say, permanently good, though it
may act fairly well for a season. One does not care to _read_ the stage
version of “Vanity Fair,” known as “Becky Sharp,” any more than one
would care to read “The School for Scandal” diluted into a novel. The
dramatist conceives and moulds his theme otherwise than the novelist.
“Playwriting,” says Walter Scott, “is the art of forming situations.” To
be sure, Shakespeare took plots from Italian “novels,” so called; that
is, short romantic tales like Boccaccio’s or Bandello’s. But he took
only the bare outline, and altered freely. The modern novel is a far
more elaborate thing. In it, not only incident and character, but a
great part of the dialogue is already done to hand.
Glancing over Clement Scott’s list, old playgoers will find their
memories somewhat pathetically stirred by forgotten fashions and
schools. There are Planché’s extravaganzas, and later Dion Boucicault’s
versatilities—“classical” comedies like “London Assurance,” sentimental
Irish melodramas—“The Shaughraun,” “The Colleen Bawn”—and popular
favorites, such as “Rip Van Winkle”; the equally versatile Tom Taylor,
with his “Our American Cousin,” “The Ticket-of-Leave Man,” etc.;
Burnand’s multifarious _facetiae_; the cockney vulgarities of that very
prolific Mr. H. J. Byron; and, in the late sixties, Robertson’s
“cup-and-saucer” comedies—“Ours,” “Caste,” “Society,” “School.” Three
thousand representations of these fashionable comedies were given inside
of twenty years. How gay, how brilliant, even, the dialogue seemed to us
in those good old days! But take up the text of one of Tom Robertson’s
plays now and try to read it. What has become of the sparkle? Does any
one recall the famous “Ours” _galop_ that we used to dance to _consule
Planco? Eheu fugaces!_
The playwriters whom I have named, and others whom I might have named,
their contemporaries, were the Clyde Fitches, Augustus Thomases, and
George Ades of their generation. They provided a fair article of
entertainment for the public of their time, but they added nothing to
literature. The poverty of the English stage, during these late
centuries, in work of real substance and value, is the more striking
because there has been no dearth of genius in other departments. There
have been great English poets, novelists, humorists, essayists, critics,
historians. Moreover, the literary drama has flourished in other
countries. France has never lacked accomplished artists in this kind:
from Voltaire to Victor Hugo, from Hugo to Rostand, talent always, and
genius not unfrequently, have been at the service of the French
theatres. In Germany—with some breaks—the case has been the same. From
Lessing and Goethe and Schiller down to our own contemporaries, to
Hauptmann, Sudermann, and Halbe, Germany has seldom been without worthy
dramatists. Both the Germans and the French have taken the theatre
seriously. Their actors have been carefully trained, their audiences
intelligently critical, their playhouses in part maintained by
government subventions, as institutions importantly related to the
national life.
It is not that English men of letters have been unwilling to contribute
to the stage. On the contrary, they have shown an eager, although mostly
ineffectual, ambition for dramatic honors. In the eighteenth century it
was well-nigh the rule that a successful writer should try his hand at a
play. Addison did so, and Steele, Pope, Gay, Fielding, Johnson,
Goldsmith, Smollett, Thomson, Mason, Mallet, Chatterton, and many others
who had no natural turn for it, and would not think of such a thing now.
In the nineteenth century the tradition had lost much of its force:
still, we find Scott, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, Thackeray,
Browning, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, all using the dramatic form, and
some of them attempting the stage. Charles Lamb, one of the most ardent
of playgoers and best of dramatic critics, was greatly chagrined by the
failure of his farce, “Mr. H——.” Dickens was a good actor in private
theatricals, and was intensely concerned with the theatre and the
theatrical fortunes of his own dramatized novels. So was Charles Reade,
who collaborated with Tom Taylor in a number of plays, and whose theatre
piece “Masks and Faces,” was the original of his novelette, “Peg
Woffington”—_vice versa_ the usual case. More recently we have seen
Stevenson and Henley collaborating in three plays, “Deacon Brodie” and
“Beau Austin,” performed at London and Montreal in 1884–87, and “Admiral
Guinea,” shown at the Haymarket in 1890; the first and third, low-life
melodrama and broad comedy, of some vigor but no great importance; the
second, an unusually good eighteenth century society play. Most
certainly these experiments do not rank with Stevenson’s romances or
Henley’s poems. Another curious illustration of the attraction of the
dramatic form for the literary mind is Thomas Hardy’s “The Dynasts”
(1904), a drama of the Napoleonic wars, projected in nineteen acts, with
choruses of spirits and personified abstractions; a sort of reversion to
the class of morality and chronicle play exemplified in Bale’s “King
John.” Mr. Hardy is perhaps the foremost living English novelist, but
“The Dynasts” is a dramatic monster, and, happily, a torso. The preface
confesses that the abortion is a “panoramic show” and intended for
“mental performance” only, and suggests an apology for closet drama by
inquiring whether “mental performance alone may not eventually be the
fate of all drama other than that of contemporary or frivolous life.”
Mr. Henry James, too, has tempted the stage, teased, yet fascinated, by
the “insufferable little art”; and the result is a dramatized version of
“Daisy Miller,” and two volumes of “Theatricals”: “Tenants” and
“Disengaged” (1894); “The Album” and “The Reprobate” (1895). These last
were written with a view to their being played at country theatres (an
opportunity having seemingly presented itself), but they never got so
far. In reading them, one feels that a single rehearsal would have
decided their chances. Mr. James, in the preface to the printed plays,
treats his failure with humorous resignation. He complains of “the hard
meagreness inherent in the theatrical form,” and of his own
conscientious effort to avoid supersubtlety and to cultivate an “anxious
simplicity” and a “deadly directness”—to write “something elaborately
plain.” It was to be expected that Mr. James’s habit of refined analysis
would prove but a poor preparation for acted drama; and that his
singular coldness or shyness or reticence would handicap him fatally in
emotional crises. Whenever he is led squarely up to such, he bolts.
Innuendo is not the language of passion. In vain he cries: “See me being
popular: observe this play to the gallery.” The failure is so complete
as to have the finality of a demonstration.
What was less to be expected is the odd way in which this artist drops
realism for melodrama and farce when he exchanges fiction for
playwriting. Sir Ralph Damant, in “The Album,” is a farce or “humor”
character in the Jonsonian sense, his particular obsession being a fixed
idea that all the women in the play want to marry him. In “Disengaged,”
Mrs. Wigmore, a campaigner with a trained daughter, is another farce
character; and there are iterations of phrase and catchwords here and
elsewhere, as in Dickens’s or Jonson’s humorists. In “The Reprobate,”
Paul Doubleday and Pitt Brunt, M.P., have the accentuated contrast of
the Surface brothers. In “The Album,” that innocent old stage trick is
played again, whereby some article—a lace handkerchief, a scrap of
paper, a necklace, or what not—is made the plot centre. In “Daisy
Miller”—dramatized version—the famous little masterpiece is spoiled by
the substitution of a conventional happy ending and the introduction of
a blackmailing villain. All this insinuates a doubt as to the reality of
a realism which turns into improbability and artificiality merely by a
change in the method of presentation. But the doubt is unfair. No
_reductio ad absurdum_ has occurred, but simply another instance of the
law that every art has its own method, and that the method of the novel
is not that of the play. Of course, there are clever things in the
dialogue of these three-act comedies, for Mr. James is always Mr. James.
But the only one of them that comes near to being a practicable theatre
piece is “Tenants,” which has a good plot founded on a French story.
The paralysis of the literary drama, then, has not been due to the
indifference of the literary class. Perhaps it is time thrown away to
seek for its cause. The fact is that, for one reason or another, England
has lost the dramatic habit.
The past fifteen or twenty years have witnessed one more concerted
effort to “elevate the English stage,” and this time with a fair
prospect of results. There is a stir of expectation: the new drama is
announced and already in part arrived. It would be premature to proclaim
success as yet; but thus much may be affirmed, that the dramatic output
of the last quarter-century outweighs that of any other quarter-century
since 1700. Here, for instance, are the titles of a dozen contemporary
plays which it would be hard to match with any equal number produced
during an equal period of time since the failure of Congreve’s latest
and most brilliant comedy, “The Way of the World,” marked the close of
the Restoration drama: W. S. Gilbert’s “Pygmalion and Galatea”; Sydney
Grundy’s “An Old Jew”; Henry Arthur Jones’s “Judah” and “The Liars”;
Arthur Wing Pinero’s “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray” and “The Benefit of the
Doubt”; George Bernard Shaw’s “Candida” and “Arms and the Man”; Oscar
Wilde’s “Salome” and “Lady Windermere’s Fan”; Stephen Phillips’s
“Ulysses”; and W. Butler Yeats’s “The Land of Heart’s Desire.” (I have
gone back a few years to include Mr. Gilbert’s piece, first given at the
Haymarket in 1871.)
Every one of these dramas has been performed with acceptance, every one
of them is a contribution to literature, worthy the attention of
cultivated readers. I do not say that any one of them is a masterpiece,
or that collectively they will hold the stage as Goldsmith’s and
Sheridan’s are still holding it a century and a quarter after their
first production. But I will venture to say that, taken together, they
constitute a more solid and varied group of dramatic works than that
favorite little bunch of “classical” comedies, and offer a securer
ground of hope for the future of the British stage. It will be observed
that half of them are tragedies, or plays of a serious interest; also
that they do not form a school, in the sense in which the French tragedy
of Louis XIV, or the English comedy of the Restoration, was a
school—that is, a compact dramatic group, limited in subject and alike
in manner. They are the work of individual talents, conforming to no
single ideal, but operating on independent lines. And it would be easy
to add a second dozen by the same authors little, if at all, inferior to
those on the first list.
Probably the foremost English playwriter of to-day is Mr. A. W. Pinero,
whether tried by the test of popular success in the theatre, or by the
literary quality of his printed dramas. He learned his art as
Shakespeare learned his, by practical experience as an actor, and by
years of obscure work as a hack writer for the playhouses, adapting from
the French, dramatizing novels, scribbling one-act curtain-raisers and
all kinds of theatrical nondescripts. There is a long list of failures
and half successes to his account before he emerged, about 1885, with a
series of three-act farces, “The Magistrate,” “The Cabinet Minister,”
“The Schoolmistress” and the like, which pleased every one by their
easy, natural style, their fresh invention, the rollicking fun that
carried off their highly improbable entanglements, and the _bonhomie_
and knowledge of the world with which comic character was observed and
portrayed. Absurdity is the kingdom of farce; and, as in the topsyturvy
world of _opera bouffe_, a great part of the effect in these plays is
obtained by setting dignified persons, like prime ministers, cathedral
deans and justices, to doing ludicrously incongruous actions. Thus, the
schoolmistress, outwardly a very prim and proper gentlewoman, leads a
double life, putting in her Christmas vacation as a _figurante_ in comic
opera; anticipating, and perhaps suggesting, Mr. Zangwill’s “Serio-Comic
Governess.”
To these farces succeeded pieces in which social satire, sentimental
comedy, and the comedy of character were mixed in varying proportions:
“Sweet Lavender,” “The Princess and the Butterfly,” “Trelawney of the
Wells,” and others. Of these, the first was, perhaps, the favorite, and
was translated and performed in several languages. It is a very winning
play, with a genuine popular quality, though with a slight twist in its
sentiment. Pinero’s art has deepened in tone, until in such later work
as “The Profligate,” “The Benefit of the Doubt,” “The Second Mrs.
Tanqueray,” “The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith,” and “Iris,” he has dealt
seriously, and sometimes tragically, with the nobler passions. His _chef
d’oeuvre_ in this kind, “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray,” is constructed with
consummate skill, and its psychology is right and true. This is a
problem play (it is unfortunate that we apply this term exclusively to
plays dealing with one particular class of problems), and its ethical
value, as well as its tragical force, lies in its demonstration of the
truth that no one can escape from his past. The past will avenge itself
upon him or her, not only in the unforeseen consequences of old
misdeeds, but in that subtler nemesis, the deterioration of character
which makes life under better conditions irksome and impossible. The
catastrophe comes with the inevitableness of the old Greek
fate-tragedies. In this instance, it is suicide, as in “Hedda Gabler” or
Hauptmann’s “_Vor Sonnenaufgang_.” Though criticised as melodramatic,
the dramatist makes us feel it here to be the only solution. Mr. Pinero
has already achieved the distinction of a “Pinero Birthday Book”; while
“Arthur Wing Pinero: a Study,” by H. Hamilton Fyfe, a book of two
hundred and fifty pages, with a bibliography, reviews his plays
_seriatim_.
Without pushing the analogy too far, we may call Mr. Pinero and Mr.
Bernard Shaw the Goldsmith and Sheridan of the modern stage. In Pinero,
as in Goldsmith, humor more than wit is the prevailing impression. That
“brilliancy” which is often so distressing is absent from his comedy,
whose surfaces do not corruscate, but absorb the light softly. His
satire is good-natured, his worldliness not hard, and his laughter is a
neighbor to tears. Shaw is an Irishman, a journalistic free-lance and
Socialist pamphleteer. He has published three collections of
plays—“Pleasant,” “Unpleasant,” and “For Puritans”—accompanied with
amusingly truculent prefaces, discussing, among other things, whether
his pieces are “better than Shakespeare’s.” Two of his comedies, “Arms
and the Man” and “The Devil’s Disciple,” were put on in New York by Mr.
Mansfield as long ago, if I am right, as 1894 and 1897, respectively.
“Arms and the Man” is an effective theatre piece, with a quick movement,
ingenious misunderstandings, and several exciting moments. Like his
fellow countryman, Sheridan, Mr. Shaw is clever in inventing situations,
though he professes scorn of them as bits of old theatrical lumber, a
concession to the pit. “Candida” was given in America a season or two
ago, and the problems of character which it proposes have been
industriously discussed by the dramatic critics and by social circles
everywhere. The author is reported to have been amused at this, and to
have described his heroine as a most unprincipled woman—a view quite
inconsistent with the key kindly afforded in the stage directions.
These, in all Shaw’s plays, are explicit and profuse, comprising details
of costume, gesture, expression, the furniture and decorations of the
scene, with full character analyses of the _dramatis personae_ in the
manner of Ben Jonson. The italicized portions of the printed play are
little less important than the speeches; and small license of
interpretation is left to the players. This is an extra-dramatic method,
the custom of the novel overflowing upon the stage. But Mr. Shaw defends
the usage and asks: “What would we not give for the copy of ‘Hamlet’
used by Shakespeare at rehearsal, with the original ‘business’ scrawled
by the prompter’s pencil? And if we had, in addition, the descriptive
directions which the author gave on the stage: above all, the character
sketches, however brief, by which he tried to convey to the actor the
sort of person he meant him to incarnate! Well, we should have had all
this if Shakespeare, instead of merely writing out his lines, had
prepared the plays for publication in competition with fiction as
elaborate as that of Meredith.” “I would give half a dozen of
Shakespeare’s plays for one of the prefaces he ought to have written.”
Shaw’s appeal has been more acutely intellectual than Pinero’s, but his
plays are less popular and less satisfying; while the critics, he
complains, refuse to take him seriously. They treat him as an
irresponsible Irishman with a genius for paradox, a puzzling way of
going back on himself, and a freakish delight in mystifying the public.
The heart interest in his plays is small. He has the Celtic subtlety,
but not the Celtic sentiment; in this, too, resembling Sheridan, that
wit rather than humor is the staple of his comedy—a wit which in both
is employed in the service of satire upon sentiment. But the modern
dramatist’s satire cuts deeper and is more caustic. Lydia Languish and
Joseph Surface, Sheridan’s embodiments of romance and sentiment, are
conceived superficially and belong to the comedy of manners, not of
character. Sheridan would not have understood Lamb’s saying that Charles
Surface was the true canting hypocrite of “The School for Scandal.” For
nowadays sentiment and romance take less obvious shapes; and Shaw, who
detests them both and holds a retainer for realism, tests for them with
finer reagents.
And here comes in the influence of Ibsen, perhaps the most noticeable
foreign influence in the recent English drama, from which it has partly
driven out the French, hitherto all-predominant. Ibsen’s introduction to
the English stage dates from 1889 and the years following, although Mr.
Gosse’s studies and the translations of Mr. Havelock Ellis and others
had made a few of his plays known to the reader. As long since as 1880,
a very free version of “A Doll’s House,” under the title “Breaking a
Butterfly,” had been made for the theatre by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones and
a collaborator. The French critic, M. Augustin Filon, in his book, “The
English Stage” (1897), ventures a guess that the Ibsen brand of realism
will be found to agree better with the English character than the
article furnished by Dumas _fils_ and other French dramatists; and he
even suggests the somewhat fantastic theory that an audience of the
fellow countrymen of Darwin and Huxley will listen with a peculiar
sympathy to such a play as “Ghosts,” in which the doctrine of heredity
is so forcibly preached. Ibsen’s masterly construction, quite as much as
his ideas, has been studied with advantage by our dramatists. Thus it is
thought that Pinero, who has shown, in general, very little of Ibsen’s
influence, may have taken a hint from him in the inconclusive ending of
“The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith.” The inconclusive ending is a
practice—perhaps a principle—of the latest realistic schools of drama
and fiction. Life, they contend, has no artificial closes, but flows
continually on, and a play is only a “bleeding slice of life.” In old
tragedy, death is the end. “Troilus and Cressida” is Shakespeare’s only
episodical tragedy, the only one in which the protagonist is not
killed—and, perhaps for that reason, the quarto title-page describes it
as a comedy. But in Ibsenite drama the hero or heroine does not always
die. Sometimes he or she goes away, or sometimes just accepts the
situation and stays on. The sound of the door shutting in “A Doll’s
House” tells us that Nora has gone out into the world to begin a new
career. In “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” one of Shaw’s strongest “Plays
Unpleasant,”—so unpleasant that its production on the boards was
forbidden by the Lord Chamberlain,—when Vivie discovers what her
mother’s profession is, and where the money comes from that sent her to
Newnham, she does nothing melodramatic, but simply utilizes her
mathematical education by entering an actuary’s office. The curtain
falls to the stage direction, “Then she goes at her work with a plunge,
and soon becomes absorbed in her figures.”
Shaw is a convinced Ibsenite and took up the foils for the master in a
series of articles in the _Saturday Review_ in 1895. The new woman, the
emancipated woman so much in evidence in Ibsen, goes in and out through
Shaw’s plays, short-skirted, cigarette-smoking, a business woman with no
nonsense about her, a good fellow, calling her girl friends by their
last names and treating male associates with a brusque _camaraderie_.
But, as he satirizes everything, himself included, he has his laugh at
the Ibsen cult in “The Philanderer.” There is an Ibsen Club, with a bust
of the Norse divinity over the library mantelpiece. One of the rules is
that no womanly woman is to be admitted. At the first symptom of
womanliness, a woman forfeits her membership. What Shaw chiefly shares
with Ibsen is his impatience of heroics, cant, social lies, respectable
prejudices, the conventions of a traditional morality. Face facts, call
things by their names, drag the skeleton out of the closet. Ibsen
brushes these cobwebs aside with a grave logic and a savage contempt; he
makes their hollow unreality the source of tragic wrong. But Shaw’s
lighter temperament is wholly that of the comic artist, and he attacks
cant with the weapons of irony. His favorite characters are audacious,
irreverent young men and women, without illusions and incapable of being
shocked, but delighting in shocking their elders. The clergy are the
professional trustees of this conventional morality and are treated by
Ibsen and Shaw with scant respect. Mrs. Alving in “Ghosts” shows the
same contemptuous toleration of the scruples of the rabbit-like Parson
Manders, as Candida shows for her clerical husband’s preaching and
phrase-making. The present season has witnessed the first appearance on
the American stage of Mr. Shaw’s gayest farce comedy, “You Never Can
Tell.”
I asked an actor, a university graduate, what he thought of the future
of verse drama in acted plays. He inclined to believe that its day had
gone by, even in tragedy; and that the language of the modern serious
drama would be prose, colloquial, never stilted (as it was in “George
Barnwell” and “Richelieu”), but rising, when necessary, into eloquence
and a kind of unmetrical poetry. He instanced several passages in
Pinero’s “Sweet Lavender” and later plays. Still, the blank verse
tradition dies hard. Probably the leading representative of ideal or
poetic drama in the contemporary theatre is Stephen Phillips, whose
“Paolo and Francesca” (1899), “Herod” (1900), and “Ulysses” (1902) have
all been shown upon the boards and highly acclaimed, at least by the
critics. There is no doubt that they are fine dramatic poems with many
passages of delicate, and some of noble, beauty. But whether they are
anything more than excellent closet drama is not yet proved. Mr.
Phillips’s experience as an actor has given him a practical knowledge of
technic; and it may be conceded that his plays are nearer the
requirements of the stage than Browning’s or Tennyson’s. They are
simple, as Browning’s are not; and they have quick movement, where
Tennyson’s are lumbering. Neither is it much against them that their
subjects are antique, taken from Dante, Josephus, and Homer. But they
appear to me poetically rather than dramatically imagined. Shakespeare
and Racine dealt with remote or antique life; yet, each in his own way
modernized and realized it. It is a hackneyed observation that Racine’s
Greeks, Romans, and Turks are French gentlemen and ladies of the court
of Louis XIV. Shakespeare’s Homeric heroes are very un-Homeric. There is
little in either of local color or historical perspective: there is in
both a fulness of handling, an explication of sentiments and characters.
The people are able talkers and reasoners. Mr. Phillips’s method is
implicit, and the atmosphere of things old and foreign is kept, the
distance which lends enchantment to mediaeval Italy, or the later Roman
Empire, or the heroic age. It is as if the “Idylls of the King” were
dramatized,—as, indeed, “Elaine” was dramatized for one of the New York
playhouses by George Lathrop,—retaining all their romantic charm and
all their dramatic unreality.
Still, there are moments of genuine dramatic passion in all three of
these plays: in “Herod,” for instance, where Mariamne acknowledges to
the tetrarch that her love for him is dead. And in “Ulysses,”
Telemachus’s recognition of his father moves one very deeply, producing
its impression, too, by a few speeches in a perfectly simple,
unembroidered diction, by means properly scenic, not poetic like
Tennyson’s. “Ulysses” seems the best of Mr. Phillips’s pieces, more
loosely built than the others, but of more varied interest and more
lifelike. The gods speak in rhyme and the human characters in blank
verse, while some of the more familiar dialogue is in prose; Ctesippus,
an elderly wooer of Penelope, is a comic figure; and there is a good
deal of rough, natural fooling among the wooers, shepherds, and maids in
the great hall of Ithaca. In its use of popular elements and its
romantic freedom of handling, the play contrasts with Robert Bridges’s
“The Return of Ulysses,” which Mr. Yeats praises for its “classical
gravity” and “lyric and meditative” quality. Mr. Phillips opens his
scene on Calypso’s island, and brings his wandering hero home only after
making him descend to the shades. His Ulysses shoots the wooers in full
view of the audience. In Mr. Bridges’s play the action begins in Ithaca,
the unities of time and place are observed, and so is dramatic decency.
The wooers are slain outside, and their slaying is described to Penelope
by a handmaid who sees it from the door. Yet, upon the whole, Mr.
Phillips’s constructive formula is more Sophoclean than Shakespearean.
Not that he adheres to the external conventions of Attic tragedy, the
chorus, the unities, etc., like Matthew Arnold in “Merope”; but that his
plot evolution exhibits the straight, slender line of Sophocles, rather
than the rich composite pattern of Elizabethan tragi-comedy. I have been
told by some who saw “Ulysses” played, that the descent _ad inferos_ was
grotesque in effect. But “Paolo and Francesca” might have gained from an
infusion of grotesque. D’Annunzio’s almost precisely contemporary
version of the immortal tale has just the solid, materialistic treatment
which makes you feel the brutal realities of mediaeval life, the gross
soil in which this “lily of Tartarus” found root. Mr. Phillips’s latest
piece, “The Sin of David,” a tragedy of Cromwell’s England, is now in
its first season.
Among the most interesting of recent dramatic contributions are William
Butler Yeats’s “Plays for an Irish Theatre.” Mr. Yeats’s recent visit to
this country is still fresh in recollection; and doubtless many of my
readers have seen his beautiful little fairy piece, “The Land of Heart’s
Desire.” Probably allegory, or at least symbolism, is the only form in
which the supernatural has any chance in modern drama. The old-fashioned
ghost is too robust an apparition to produce in a sceptical generation
that “willing suspension of disbelief” which, says Coleridge,
constitutes dramatic illusion. Hamlet’s father talks too much; and the
ghosts in “Richard III” are so sociable a company as to quite keep each
other in countenance. The best ghost in Shakespeare is Banquo’s, which
is invisible—a mere “clot on the brain”—and has no “lines” to speak.
The elves in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and the elemental spirits in
“The Tempest” are nothing but machinery. The other world is not the
subject of the play. Hauptmann’s “_Die Versunkene Glocke_” is symbolism,
and so is “The Land of Heart’s Desire.” Maeterlinck’s “_Les Aveugles_”
and Yeats’s “Cathleen Ni Hoolihan” are more formally allegorical. The
poor old woman, in the latter, who takes the bridegroom from his bride,
is Ireland, from whom strangers have taken her “four beautiful green
fields”—the ancient kingdoms of Munster, Leinster, Ulster, and
Connaught.
These Irish plays, indeed, are the nearest thing we have to the work of
the Belgian symbolist, to dramas like “_Les Aveugles_” and
“_L’Intruse_.” And, as in those, the people are peasants, and the
dialogue is homely prose. No brogue: only a few idioms and sometimes not
even that, the whole being supposed to be a translation from the Gaelic
into standard English. Maeterlinck’s dramas have been played on many
theatres. Mr. William Sharp, who twice saw “_L’Intruse_” at Paris, found
it much less impressive in the acting than in the reading, and his
experience was not singular. As for the more romantic pieces, like “_Les
Sept Princesses_” and “_Aglavaine et Sélysette_,” they are about as
shadowy as one of Tieck’s tales. Those who saw Mrs. Patrick Campbell in
“_Pelléas et Mélisande_” will doubtless agree that these dreamlike poems
are hurt by representation. It may be that Maeterlinck, like Baudelaire,
has invented a new shudder. But the matinée audiences laughed at many
things which had thrilled the closet reader.
Yeats’s tragedies, like Maeterlinck’s, belong to the _drame intime_, the
_théâtre statique_. The popular drama—what Yeats calls the “theatre of
commerce”—is dynamic. The true theatre is the human will. Brunetière
shows by an analysis of any one of Racine’s plays—say
“_Andromaque_”—how the action moves forward by a series of decisions.
But Maeterlinck’s people are completely passive: they suffer: they do
not act, but are acted upon by the unearthly powers of which they are
the sport. Yeats’s plays, too, are “plays for marionettes,” spectral
puppet-shows of the Celtic twilight. True, his characters do make
choices: the young wife in “The Land of Heart’s Desire,” the bridegroom
in “Cathleen Ni Hoolihan” make choices, but their apparently free will
is supernaturally influenced. The action is in two worlds. In antique
tragedy, too, man is notoriously the puppet of fate; but, though he acts
in ignorance of the end to which destiny is shaping his deed, he acts
with vigorous self-determination. There is nothing dreamlike about
Orestes or Oedipus or Antigone.
It is said that the plays of another Irishman, Oscar Wilde, are now
great favorites in Germany: “Salome,” in particular, and “Lady
Windermere’s Fan” and “A Woman of No Importance” (“_Eine unbedeutende
Frau_”). This is rather surprising in the case of the last two, which
are society dramas with little action and an excess of cynical wit in
the dialogue. It is hard to understand how the unremitting fire of
repartee, paradox, and “reversed epigram” in such a piece as “Lady
Windermere’s Fan,” the nearest recent equivalent of Congreve comedy—can
survive translation or please the German public.
This “new drama” is very new indeed. In 1882, William Archer, the
translator of Ibsen, published his book, “English Dramatists of To-day,”
in the introduction to which he acknowledged that the English literary
drama did not exist. “I should like to see in England,” he wrote, “a
body of playwrights whose works are not only acted, but printed and
_read_.” Nine years later, Henry Arthur Jones, in the preface to his
printed play, “Saints and Sinners,” denied that there was any relation
between English literature and the modern English drama. A few years
later still, in his introduction to the English translation of M.
Filon’s book, “The English Stage” (1897), Mr. Jones is more hopeful. “If
any one will take the trouble,” he writes, “to examine the leading
English plays of the last ten years, and will compare them with the
serious plays of our country during the last three centuries, I shall be
mistaken if he will not find evidence of the beginnings of an English
drama of greater import and vitality, and of wider aim, than any school
of drama the English theatre has known since the Elizabethans.”
In his book on “The Renaissance of the Drama,” and in many other places,
Mr. Jones has pleaded for a theatre which should faithfully reflect
contemporary life; and in his own plays he has endeavored to furnish
examples of what such a drama should be. His first printed piece,
“Saints and Sinners” (exhibited in 1884), was hardly literature, and did
not stamp its author as a first-class talent. It is a seduction play of
the familiar type, with a set of stock characters: the villain; the
forsaken maid; the steadfast lover who comes back from Australia with a
fortune in the nick of time; the _père noble_, a country clergyman
straight out of “The Vicar of Wakefield”; and a pair of hypocritical
deacons in a dissenting chapel—very much overdone, _pace_ Matthew
Arnold, who complimented Mr. Jones on those concrete examples of
middle-class Philistinism, with its alliterative mixture of business and
bethels. Mr. Jones, like Mr. Shaw, is true to the tradition of the stage
in being fiercely anti-Puritan, and wastes many words in his prefaces in
vindicating the right of the theatre to deal with religious hypocrisy;
as if Tartuffe and Tribulation Wholesome had not been familiar comedy
heroes for nearly three hundred years!
This dramatist served his apprenticeship in melodrama, as Pinero did in
farce; and there are signs of the difference in his greater seriousness,
or heaviness. Indeed, an honest feeling and an earnest purpose are among
his best qualities. M. Filon thinks him the most English of contemporary
writers for the stage. And, as Pinero’s art has gained in depth, Jones’s
has gained in lightness. Crude at first, without complexity or shading
in his character-drawing, without much art in comic dialogue or much
charm and distinction in serious, he has advanced steadily in grasp and
skill and sureness of touch, and stands to-day in the front rank of
modern British dramatists. “The Crusaders,” “The Case of Rebellious
Susan,” “The Masqueraders,” “Judah,” “The Liars,” are all good
plays—or, at least plays with good features—and certainly fall within
the line which divides literary drama from the mere stage play. “Judah,”
for instance, is a solidly built piece, with two or three strong
situations. The heroine is a fasting girl and miraculous healer, a
subject of a kind which Hawthorne often chose; or reminding one of Mr.
Howells’s charlatans in “The Undiscovered Country” and Mr. James’s in
“The Bostonians.” The characterization of the leading persons is sound,
and there is a brace of very diverting broad comedy figures, a male and
a female scientific prig. They are slightly caricatured—Jones is still
a little heavy-handed—but the theatre must over-accentuate now and
again, just as actresses must rouge.
In this play and in “The Crusaders,” social satire is successfully
essayed at the expense of prevailing fads, such as fashionable
philanthropy, slumming parties, neighborhood guilds, and the like. There
is a woman in “The Crusaders,”—a campaigner, a steamboat, a specimen of
the loud, energetic, public, organizing, speech-making, committee and
platform, subscription-soliciting woman,—nearly as good as anything in
our best fiction. Mr. Joseph Knight, who writes a preface to “Judah”
(first put on at the Shaftesbury Theatre, London, 1890), compares its
scientific faddists with the women who swarm to chemistry and biology
lectures in that favorite Parisian comedy, “_Le monde où l’on
s’ennuie_.” There is capital satire of the downright kind in these
plays, but surely it is dangerous to suggest comparison with the gay
irony, the courtly grace, the dash and sparkle of Pailleron’s little
masterpiece. There are no such winged shafts in any English quiver. Upon
the whole, “The Liars” seems to me the best comedy of Mr. Jones’s that I
have read,—I have not read them all,—the most evenly sustained at
every point of character and incident, a fine piece of work in both
invention and construction. The subject, however, is of that
disagreeable variety which the English drama has so often borrowed from
the French, the rescue of a married woman from a compromising position,
by a comic conspiracy in her favor.
The Puritans have always been halfway right in their opposition to the
theatre. The drama, in the abstract and as a form of literature, is of
an ancient house and a noble. But the professional stage tends naturally
to corruption, and taints what it receives. The world pictured in these
contemporary society plays—or in many of them—we are unwilling to
accept as typical. Its fashion is fast and not seldom vulgar. It is a
vicious democracy in which divorces are frequent and the “woman with a
past” is the usual heroine; in which rowdy peers mingle oddly with
manicurists, clairvoyants, barmaids, adventuresses, comic actresses,
faith-healers, etc., and the contact between high life and low-life has
commonly disreputable motives. Surely this is not English life, as we
know it from the best English fiction. And, if the drama is to take
permanent rank with the novel, it must redistribute its emphasis.
-----
[4] This article was printed in the _North American Review_ in two
instalments, in May, 1905, and July, 1907. The growth of the literary
drama in the last fifteen years has been so marked, and plays of such
high quality have been put upon the stage by new writers like Barrie,
Synge, Masefield, Kennedy, Moody, Sheldon, and others, that these
prophecies and reflections may seem out of date. The article is
retained, notwithstanding, for whatever there may be in it that is true
of drama in general.