gagged and thrown back into poverty, is tempted to take flight, but
determines to remain in his native place and fight for its moral, if
not for its physical, sanitation.
Each of these acts is a little drama in itself, while each leads forward
to the next, and marks a distinct phase in the development of
the crisis.
When the younger Dumas asked his father, that master of dramatic
movement, to initiate him into the secret of dramatic craftsmanship, the
great Alexandre replied in this concise formula: "Let your first act be
clear, your last act brief, and the whole interesting." Of the wisdom of
the first clause there can be no manner of doubt. Whether incidentally
or by way of formal exposition, the first act ought to show us clearly
who the characters are, what are their relations and relationships, and
what is the nature of the gathering crisis. It is very important that
the attention of the audience should not be overstrained in following
out needlessly complex genealogies and kinships. How often, at the end
of a first act, does one turn to one's neighbour and say, "Are Edith and
Adela sisters or only half-sisters?" or, "Did you gather what was the
villain's claim to the title?" If a story cannot be made clear without
an elaborate study of one or more family trees, beware of it. In all
probability, it is of very little use for dramatic purposes. But before
giving it up, see whether the relationships, and other relations, cannot
be simplified. Complexities which at first seemed indispensable will
often prove to be mere useless encumbrances.
In _Pillars of Society_ Ibsen goes as far as any playwright ought to go
in postulating fine degrees of kinship--and perhaps a little further.
Karsten Bernick has married into a family whose gradations put something
of a strain on the apprehension and memory of an audience. We have to
bear in mind that Mrs. Bernick has (_a_) a half-sister, Lona Hessel;
(_b_) a full brother, Johan Tönnesen; (_c_) a cousin, Hilmar Tönnesen.
Then Bernick has an unmarried sister, Martha; another relationship,
however simple, to be borne in mind. And, finally, when we see Dina Dorf
living in Bernick's house, and know that Bernick has had an intrigue
with her mother, we are apt to fall into the error of supposing her to
be Bernick's daughter. There is only one line which proves that this is
not so--a remark to the effect that, when Madam Dorf came to the town.
Dina was already old enough to run about and play angels in the theatre.
Any one who does not happen to hear or notice this remark, is almost
certain to misapprehend Dina's parentage. Taking one thing with another,
then, the Bernick family group is rather more complex than is strictly
desirable. Ibsen's reasons for making Lona Hessel a half-sister instead
of a full sister of Mrs. Bernick are evident enough. He wanted her to be
a considerably older woman, of a very different type of character; and
it was necessary, in order to explain Karsten's desertion of Lona for
Betty, that the latter should be an heiress, while the former was
penniless. These reasons are clear and apparently adequate; yet it may
be doubted whether the dramatist did not lose more than he gained by
introducing even this small degree of complexity. It was certainly not
necessary to explain the difference of age and character between Lona
and Betty; while as for the money, there would have been nothing
improbable in supposing that a wealthy uncle had marked his disapproval
of Lona's strong-mindedness by bequeathing all his property to her
younger sister. Again, there is no reason why Hilmar should not have
been a brother of Johan and Betty;[5] in which case we should have had
the simple family group of two brothers and two sisters, instead of the
comparatively complex relationship of a brother and sister, a
half-sister and a cousin.
These may seem very trivial considerations: but nothing is really
trivial when it comes to be placed under the powerful lens of theatrical
presentation. Any given audience has only a certain measure of attention
at command, and to claim attention for inessentials is to diminish the
stock available for essentials. In only one other play does Ibsen
introduce any complexity of relationship, and in that case it does not
appear in the exposition, but is revealed at a critical moment towards
the close. In _Little Eyolf_, Asta and Allmers are introduced to us at
first as half-sister and half-brother; and only at the end of the second
act does it appear that Asta's mother (Allmers' stepmother) was
unfaithful to her husband, and that, Asta being the fruit of this
infidelity, there is no blood kinship between her and Allmers. The
danger of relying upon such complexities is shown by the fact that so
acute a critic as M. Jules Lemaître, in writing of _Little Eyolf_,
mistook the situation, and thought that Asta fled from Allmers because
he was her brother, whereas in fact she fled because he was not. I had
the honour of calling M. Lemaître's attention to this error, which he
handsomely acknowledged.
Complexities of kinship are, of course, not the only complexities which
should, so far as possible, be avoided. Every complexity of relation or
of antecedent circumstance is in itself a weakness, which, if it cannot
be eliminated, must, so to speak, be lived down. No dramatic critic, I
think, can have failed to notice that the good plays are those of which
the story can be clearly indicated in ten lines; while it very often
takes a column to give even a confused idea of the plot of a bad play.
Here, then, is a preliminary test which may be commended to the would-be
playwright, in order to ascertain whether the subject he is
contemplating is or is not a good one: can he state the gist of it in a
hundred words or so, like the "argument" of a Boccaccian novella? The
test, of course, is far from being infallible; for a theme may err on
the side of over-simplicity or emptiness, no less than on the side of
over-complexity. But it is, at any rate, negatively useful: if the
playwright finds that he cannot make his story comprehensible without a
long explanation of an intricate network of facts, he may be pretty sure
that he has got hold of a bad theme, or of one that stands sorely in
need of simplification.[6]
It is not sufficient, however, that a first act should fulfil Dumas's
requirement by placing the situation clearly before us: it ought also to
carry us some way towards the heart of the drama, or, at the very least,
to point distinctly towards that quarter of the horizon where the clouds
are gathering up. In a three-act play this is evidently demanded by the
most elementary principles of proportion. It would be absurd to make
one-third of the play merely introductory, and to compress the whole
action into the remaining two-thirds. But even in a four- or five-act
play, the interest of the audience ought to be strongly enlisted, and
its anticipation headed in a definite direction, before the curtain
falls for the first time. When we find a dramatist of repute neglecting
this principle, we may suspect some reason with which art has no
concern. Several of Sardou's social dramas begin with two acts of more
or less smart and entertaining satire or caricature, and only at the end
of the second or beginning of the third act (out of five) does the drama
proper set in. What was the reason of this? Simply that under the system
of royalties prevalent in France, it was greatly to the author's
interest that his play should fill the whole evening. Sardou needed no
more than three acts for the development of his drama; to have spread it
out thinner would have been to weaken and injure it; wherefore he
preferred to occupy an hour or so with clever dramatic journalism,
rather than share the evening, and the fees, with another dramatist. So,
at least, I have heard his practice explained; perhaps his own account
of the matter may have been that he wanted to paint a broad social
picture to serve as a background for his action.
The question how far an audience ought to be carried towards the heart
of a dramatic action in the course of the first act is always and
inevitably one of proportion. It is clear that too much ought not to be
told, so as to leave the remaining acts meagre and spun-out; nor should
any one scene be so intense in its interest as to outshine all
subsequent scenes, and give to the rest of the play an effect of
anti-climax. If the strange and fascinating creations of Ibsen's last
years were to be judged by ordinary dramaturgic canons, we should have
to admit that in _Little Eyolf_ he was guilty of the latter fault, since
in point of sheer "strength," in the common acceptation of the word, the
situation at the end of the first act could scarcely be outdone, in that
play or any other. The beginner, however, is far more likely to put too
little than too much into his first act: he is more likely to leave our
interest insufficiently stimulated than to carry us too far in the
development of his theme. My own feeling is that, as a general rule,
what Freytag calls the _erregende Moment_ ought by all means to fall
within the first act. What is the _erregende Moment_? One is inclined to
render it "the firing of the fuse." In legal parlance, it might be
interpreted as the joining of issue. It means the point at which the
drama, hitherto latent, plainly declares itself. It means the
germination of the crisis, the appearance on the horizon of the cloud no
bigger than a man's hand. I suggest, then, that this _erregende Moment_
ought always to come within the first act--if it is to come at all There
are plays, as we have seen, which depict life on so even a plane that it
is impossible to say at any given point, "Here the drama sets in," or
"The interest is heightened there."
_Pillars of Society_ is, in a sense, Ibsen's prentice-work in the form
of drama which he afterwards perfected; wherefore it affords us numerous
illustrations of the problems we have to consider. Does he, or does he
not, give us in the first act sufficient insight into his story? I am
inclined to answer the question in the negative. The first act puts us
in possession of the current version of the Bernick-Tönnesen family
history, but it gives us no clear indication that this version is an
elaborate tissue of falsehoods. It is true that Bernick's evident
uneasiness and embarrassment at the mere idea of the reappearance of
Lona and Johan may lead us to suspect that all is not as it seems; but
simple annoyance at the inopportune arrival of the black sheep of the
family might be sufficient to account for this. To all intents and
purposes, we are completely in the dark as to the course the drama is
about to take; and when, at the end of the first act, Lona Hessel
marches in and flutters the social dovecote, we do not know in what
light to regard her, or why we are supposed to sympathize with her. The
fact that she is eccentric, and that she talks of "letting in fresh
air," combines with our previous knowledge of the author's idiosyncrasy
to assure us that she is his heroine; but so far as the evidence
actually before us goes, we have no means of forming even the vaguest
provisional judgment as to her true character. This is almost certainly
a mistake in art. It is useless to urge that sympathy and antipathy are
primitive emotions, and that we ought to be able to regard a character
objectively, rating it as true or false, not as attractive or repellent.
The answer to this is twofold. Firstly, the theatre has never been, and
never will be, a moral dissecting room, nor has the theatrical audience
anything in common with a class of students dispassionately following a
professor's demonstration of cold scientific facts. Secondly, in the
particular case in point, the dramatist makes a manifest appeal to our
sympathies. There can be no doubt that we are intended to take Lona's
part, as against the representatives of propriety and convention
assembled at the sewing-bee; but we have been vouchsafed no rational
reason for so doing. In other words, the author has not taken us far
enough into his action to enable us to grasp the true import and
significance of the situation. He relies for his effect either on the
general principle that an eccentric character must be sympathetic, or on
the knowledge possessed by those who have already seen or read the rest
of the play. Either form of reliance is clearly inartistic. The former
appeals to irrational prejudice; the latter ignores what we shall
presently find to be a fundamental principle of the playwright's
art--namely, that, with certain doubtful exceptions in the case of
historical themes, he must never assume previous knowledge either of
plot or character on the part of his public, but must always have in his
mind's eye a first-night audience, which knows nothing but what he
chooses to tell it.
My criticism of the first act of _Pillars of Society_ may be summed up
in saying that the author has omitted to place in it the _erregende
Moment_. The issue is not joined, the true substance of the drama is not
clear to us, until, in the second act, Bernick makes sure there are no
listeners, and then holds out both hands to Johan, saying: "Johan, now
we are alone; now you must give me leave to thank you," and so forth.
Why should not this scene have occurred in the first act? Materially,
there is no reason whatever. It would need only the change of a few
words to lift the scene bodily out of the second act and transfer it to
the first. Why did Ibsen not do so? His reason is not hard to divine; he
wished to concentrate into two great scenes, with scarcely a moment's
interval between them, the revelation of Bernick's treachery, first to
Johan, second to Lona. He gained his point: the sledge-hammer effect of
these two scenes is undeniable. But it remains a question whether he did
not make a disproportionate sacrifice; whether he did not empty his
first act in order to overfill his second. I do not say he did: I merely
propound the question for the student's consideration. One thing we must
recognize in dramatic art as in all other human affairs; namely, that
perfection, if not unattainable, is extremely rare. We have often to
make a deliberate sacrifice at one point in order to gain some greater
advantage at another; to incur imperfection here that we may achieve
perfection there. It is no disparagement to the great masters to admit
that they frequently show us rather what to avoid than what to do.
Negative instruction, indeed, is in its essence more desirable than
positive. The latter tends to make us mere imitators, whereas the
former, in saving us from dangers, leaves our originality unimpaired.
It is curious to note that, in another play, Ibsen did actually transfer
the _erregende Moment_, the joining of issue, from the second act to the
first. In his early draft of _Rosmersholm_, the great scene in which
Rosmer confesses to Kroll his change of views did not occur until the
second act. There can be no doubt that the balance and proportion of the
play gained enormously by the transference.
After all, however, the essential question is not how much or how little
is conveyed to us in the first act, but whether our interest is
thoroughly aroused, and, what is of equal importance, skilfully carried
forward. Before going more at large into this very important detail of
the playwright's craft, it may be well to say something of the nature of
dramatic interest in general.
* * * * *
[Footnote 1: There are several cases in Greek drama in which a hero
leaves the stage to fight a battle and returns victorious in a few
minutes. See, for example, the _Supplices_ of Euripides.]
[Footnote 2: So far was Shakespeare from ignoring the act-division that
it is a question whether his art did not sometimes suffer from the
supposed necessity of letting a fourth act intervene between the
culmination in the third act and the catastrophe in the fifth.]
[Footnote 3: I think it may be said that the majority of modern serious
plays are in four acts. It is a favourite number with Sir Arthur Pinero,
Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, Mr. Clyde Fitch, and Mr. Alfred Sutro.]
[Footnote 4: This must not be taken to mean that in no case is a change
of scene within the act advisable. The point to be considered is whether
the author does or does not want to give the audience time for
reflection--time to return to the real world--between two episodes. If
it is of great importance that they should not do so, then a rapid
change of scene may be the less of two evils. In this case the lights
should be kept lowered in order to show that no interact is intended;
but the fashion of changing the scene on a pitch-dark stage, without
dropping the curtain, is much to be deprecated. If the revolving stage
should ever become a common institution in English-speaking countries,
dramatists would doubtless be more tempted than they are at present to
change their scenes within the act; but I doubt whether the tendency
would be wholly advantageous. No absolute rule, however, can be laid
down, and it may well be maintained that a true dramatic artist could
only profit by the greater flexibility of his medium.]
[Footnote 5: He was, in the first draft; and Lona Hessel was only a
distant relative of Bernick's.]
[Footnote 6: The Greeks, who knew most things, knew the value of
manageable dimensions and simple structure in a work of art, and had a
word to express that combination of qualities--the word _eusynopton_.]
_CHAPTER IX_
"CURIOSITY" AND "INTEREST"
The paradox of dramatic theory is this: while our aim is, of course, to
write plays which shall achieve immortality, or shall at any rate become
highly popular, and consequently familiar in advance to a considerable
proportion of any given audience, we are all the time studying how to
awaken and to sustain that interest, or, more precisely, that curiosity,
which can be felt only by those who see the play for the first time,
without any previous knowledge of its action. Under modern conditions
especially, the spectators who come to the theatre with their minds an
absolute blank as to what is awaiting them, are comparatively few; for
newspaper criticism and society gossip very soon bruit abroad a general
idea of the plot of any play which attains a reasonable measure of
success. Why, then, should we assume, in the ideal spectator to whom we
address ourselves, a state of mind which, we hope and trust, will not be
the state of mind of the majority of actual spectators?
To this question there are several answers. The first and most obvious
is that to one audience, at any rate, every play must be absolutely new,
and that it is this first-night audience which in great measure
determines its success or failure. Many plays have survived a
first-night failure, and still more have gone off in a rapid decline
after a first-night success. But these caprices of fortune are not to be
counted on. The only prudent course is for the dramatist to direct all
his thought and care towards conciliating or dominating an audience to
which his theme is entirely unknown,[1] and so coming triumphant through
his first-night ordeal. This principle is subject to a certain
qualification in the case of historic and legendary themes. In treating
such subjects, the dramatist is not relieved of the necessity of
developing his story clearly and interestingly, but has, on the
contrary, an additional charge imposed upon him--that of not flagrantly
defying or disappointing popular knowledge or prejudice. Charles I must
not die in a green old age, Oliver Cromwell must not display the manners
and graces of Sir Charles Grandison, Charles II must not be represented
as a model of domestic virtue. Historians may indict a hero or whitewash
a villain at their leisure; but to the dramatist a hero must be (more or
less) a hero, a villain (more or less) a villain, if accepted tradition
so decrees it.[2] Thus popular knowledge can scarcely be said to lighten
a dramatist's task, but rather to impose a new limitation upon him. In
some cases, however, he can rely on a general knowledge of the historic
background of a given period, which may save him some exposition. An
English audience, for instance, does not require to be told what was the
difference between Cavaliers and Roundheads; nor does any audience, I
imagine, look for a historical disquisition on the Reign of Terror. The
dramatist has only to bring on some ruffianly characters in Phrygian
caps, who address each other as "Citizen" and "Citizeness," and at once
the imagination of the audience will supply the roll of the tumbrels and
the silhouette of the guillotine in the background.
To return to the general question: not only must the dramatist reckon
with one all-important audience which is totally ignorant of the story
he has to tell; he must also bear in mind that it is very easy to
exaggerate the proportion of any given audience which will know his plot
in advance, even when his play has been performed a thousand times.
There are inexhaustible possibilities of ignorance in the theatrical
public. A story is told, on pretty good authority, of a late eminent
statesman who visited the Lyceum one night when Sir Henry Irving was
appearing as Hamlet. After the third act he went to the actor's
dressing-room, expressed great regret that duty called him back to
Westminster, and begged Sir Henry to tell him how the play ended, as it
had interested him greatly.[3] One of our most eminent novelists has
assured me that he never saw or read _Macbeth_ until he was present at
(I think) Mr. Forbes Robertson's revival of the play, he being then
nearer fifty than forty. These, no doubt, are "freak" instances; but in
any given audience, even at the most hackneyed classical plays, there
will be a certain percentage of children (who contribute as much as
their elders to the general temper of an audience), and also a
percentage of adult ignoramuses. And if this be so in the case of plays
which have held the stage for generations, are studied in schools, and
are every day cited as matters of common knowledge, how much more
certain may we be that even the most popular modern play will have to
appeal night after night to a considerable number of people who have no
previous acquaintance with either its story or its characters! The
playwright may absolutely count on having to make such an appeal; but he
must remember at the same time that he can by no means count on keeping
any individual effect, more especially any notable trick or device, a
secret from the generality of his audience. Mr. J.M. Barrie (to take a
recent instance) sedulously concealed, throughout the greater part of
_Little Mary_, what was meant by that ever-recurring expression, and
probably relied to some extent on an effect of amused surprise when the
disclosure was made. On the first night, the effect came off happily
enough; but on subsequent nights, there would rarely be a score of
people in the house who did not know the secret. The great majority
might know nothing else about the play, but that they knew. Similarly,
in the case of any mechanical _truc_, as the French call it, or feat of
theatrical sleight-of-hand, it is futile to trust to its taking unawares
any audience after the first. Nine-tenths of all subsequent audiences
are sure to be on the look-out for it, and to know, or think they know,
"how it's done."[4] These are the things which theatrical gossip,
printed and oral, most industriously disseminates. The fine details of a
plot are much less easily conveyed and less likely to be remembered.
To sum up this branch of the argument: however oft-repeated and
much-discussed a play may be, the playwright must assume that in every
audience there will be an appreciable number of persons who know
practically nothing about it, and whose enjoyment will depend, like that
of the first-night audience, on the skill with which he develops his
story. On the other hand, he can never rely on taking an audience by
surprise at any particular point. The class of effect which depends on
surprise is precisely the class of effect which is certain to be
discounted.[5]
We come now to a third reason why a playwright is bound to assume that
the audience to which he addresses himself has no previous knowledge of
his fable. It is simply that no other assumption has, or can have, any
logical basis. If the audience is not to be conceived as ignorant, how
much is it to be assumed to know? There is clearly no possible answer to
this question, except a purely arbitrary one, having no relation to the
facts. In any audience after the first, there will doubtless be a
hundred degrees of knowledge and of ignorance. Many people will know
nothing at all about the play; some people will have seen or read it
yesterday, and will thus know all there is to know; while between these
extremes there will be every variety of clearness or vagueness of
knowledge. Some people will have read and remembered a detailed
newspaper notice; others will have read the same notice and forgotten
almost all of it. Some will have heard a correct and vivid account of
the play, others a vague and misleading summary. It would be absolutely
impossible to enumerate all the degrees of previous knowledge which are
pretty certain to be represented in an average audience; and to which
degree of knowledge is the playwright to address himself? If he is to
have any firm ground under his feet, he must clearly adopt the only
logical course, and address himself to a spectator assumed to have no
previous knowledge whatever. To proceed on any other assumption would
not only be to ignore the all-powerful first-night audience, but to
plunge into a veritable morass of inconsistencies, dubieties and
slovenlinesses.
These considerations, however, have not yet taken us to the heart of the
matter. We have seen that the dramatist has no rational course open to
him but to assume complete ignorance in his audience; but we have also
seen that, as a matter of fact, only one audience will be entirely in
this condition, and that, the more successful the play is, the more
widely will subsequent audiences tend to depart from it. Does it not
follow that interest of plot, interest of curiosity as to coming events,
is at best an evanescent factor in a play's attractiveness--of a certain
importance, no doubt, on the first night, but less and less efficient
the longer the play holds the stage?
In a sense, this is undoubtedly true. We see every day that a mere
story-play--a play which appeals to us solely by reason of the adroit
stimulation and satisfaction of curiosity--very rapidly exhausts its
success. No one cares to see it a second time; and spectators who happen
to have read the plot in advance, find its attraction discounted even on
a first hearing. But if we jump to the conclusion that the skilful
marshalling and development of the story is an unimportant detail, which
matters little when once the first-night ordeal is past, we shall go
very far astray. Experience shows us that dramatic _interest_ is
entirely distinct from mere _curiosity_, and survives when curiosity is
dead. Though a skilfully-told story is not of itself enough to secure
long life for a play, it materially and permanently enhances the
attractions of a play which has other and higher claims to longevity.
Character, poetry, philosophy, atmosphere, are all very good in their
way; but they all show to greater advantage by aid of a well-ordered
fable. In a picture, I take it, drawing is not everything; but drawing
will always count for much.
This separation of interest from curiosity is partly explicable by one
very simple reflection. However well we may know a play beforehand, we
seldom know it by heart or nearly by heart; so that, though we may
anticipate a development in general outline, we do not clearly foresee
the ordering of its details, which, therefore, may give us almost the
same sort of pleasure that it gave us when the story was new to us. Most
playgoers will, I think, bear me out in saying that we constantly find a
great scene or act to be in reality richer in invention and more
ingenious in arrangement than we remembered it to be.
We come, now, to another point that must not be overlooked. It needs no
subtle introspection to assure us that we, the audience, do our own
little bit of acting, and instinctively place ourselves at the point of
view of a spectator before whose eyes the drama is unrolling itself for
the first time. If the play has any richness of texture, we have many
sensations that he cannot have. We are conscious of ironies and
subtleties which necessarily escape him, or which he can but dimly
divine. But in regard to the actual development of the story, we imagine
ourselves back into his condition of ignorance, with this difference,
that we can more fully appreciate the dramatist's skill, and more
clearly resent his clumsiness or slovenliness. Our sensations, in short,
are not simply conditioned by our knowledge or ignorance of what is to
come. The mood of dramatic receptivity is a complex one. We
instinctively and without any effort remember that the dramatist is
bound by the rules of the game, or, in other words, by the inherent
conditions of his craft, to unfold his tale before an audience to which
it is unknown; and it is with implicit reference to these conditions
that we enjoy and appreciate his skill. Even the most unsophisticated
audience realizes in some measure that the playwright is an artist
presenting a picture of life under such-and-such assumptions and
limitations, and appraises his skill by its own vague and instinctive
standards. As our culture increases, we more and more consistently adopt
this attitude, and take pleasure in a playwright's marshalling of
material in proportion to its absolute skill, even if that skill no
longer produces its direct and pristine effect upon us. In many cases,
indeed, our pleasure consists of a delicate blending of surprise with
realized anticipation. We foresaw, and are pleased to recognize, the art
of the whole achievement, while details which had grown dim to us give
us each its little thrill of fresh admiration. Regarded in this aspect,
a great play is like a great piece of music: we can hear it again and
again with ever-new realization of its subtle beauties, its complex
harmonies, and with unfailing interest in the merits and demerits of
each particular rendering.
But we must look deeper than this if we would fully understand the true
nature of dramatic interest. The last paragraph has brought us to the
verge of the inmost secret, but we have yet to take the final step. We
have yet to realize that, in truly great drama, the foreknowledge
possessed by the audience is not a disadvantage with certain incidental
mitigations and compensations, but is the source of the highest pleasure
which the theatre is capable of affording us. In order to illustrate my
meaning, I propose to analyse a particular scene, not, certainly, among
the loftiest in dramatic literature, but particularly suited to my
purpose, inasmuch as it is familiar to every one, and at the same time
full of the essential qualities of drama. I mean the Screen Scene in
_The School for Scandal_.
In her "English Men of Letters" volume on Sheridan, Mrs. Oliphant
discusses this scene. Speaking in particular of the moment at which the
screen is overturned, revealing Lady Teazle behind it, she says--
"It would no doubt have been higher art could the dramatist have
deceived his audience as well as the personages of the play, and
made us also parties in the surprise of the discovery."
There could scarcely be a completer reversal of the truth than this
"hopeless comment," as Professor Brander Matthews has justly called it.
The whole effect of the long and highly-elaborated scene depends upon
our knowledge that Lady Teazle is behind the screen. Had the audience
either not known that there was anybody there, or supposed it to be the
"little French milliner," where would have been the breathless interest
which has held us through a whole series of preceding scenes? When Sir
Peter reveals to Joseph his generous intentions towards his wife, the
point lies in the fact that Lady Teazle overhears; and this is doubly
the case when he alludes to Joseph as a suitor for the hand of Maria.
So, too, with the following scene between Joseph and Charles; in itself
it would be flat enough; the fact that Sir Peter is listening lends it a
certain piquancy; but this is ten times multiplied by the fact that Lady
Teazle, too, hears all that passes. When Joseph is called from the room
by the arrival of the pretended Old Stanley, there would be no interest
in his embarrassment if we believed the person behind the screen to be
the French milliner. And when Sir Peter yields to the temptation to let
Charles into the secret of his brother's frailty, and we feel every
moment more certain that the screen will be overthrown, where would be
the excitement, the tension, if we did not know who was behind it? The
real drama, in fact, passes behind the screen. It lies in the terror,
humiliation, and disillusionment which we know to be coursing each other
through Lady Teazle's soul. And all this Mrs. Oliphant would have
sacrificed for a single moment of crude surprise!
Now let us hear Professor Matthews's analysis of the effect of the
scene. He says:
"The playgoer's interest is really not so much as to what is to happen
as the way in which this event is going to affect the characters
involved. He thinks it likely enough that Sir Peter will discover that
Lady Teazle is paying a visit to Joseph Surface; but what he is really
anxious to learn is the way the husband will take it. What will Lady
Teazle have to say when she is discovered where she has no business to
be? How will Sir Peter receive her excuses? What will the effect be on
the future conduct of both husband and wife? These are the questions
which the spectators are eager to have answered."
This is an admirable exposition of the frame of mind of the Drury Lane
audience of May 8, 1777. who first saw the screen overturned. But in the
thousands of audiences who have since witnessed the play, how many
individuals, on an average, had any doubt as to what Lady Teazle would
have to say, and how Sir Peter would receive her excuses? It would
probably be safe to guess that, for a century past, two-thirds of every
audience have clearly foreknown the outcome of the situation. Professor
Matthews himself has edited Sheridan's plays, and probably knows _The
School for Scandal_ almost by heart; yet we may be pretty sure that any
reasonably good performance of the Screen Scene will to-day give him
pleasure not so very much inferior to that which he felt the first time
he saw it. In this pleasure, it is manifest that mere curiosity as to
the immediate and subsequent conduct of Sir Peter and Lady Teazle can
have no part. There is absolutely no question which Professor Matthews,
or any playgoer who shares his point of view, is "eager to have
answered."
Assuming, then, that we are all familiar with the Screen Scene, and
assuming that we, nevertheless, take pleasure in seeing it reasonably
well acted,[6] let us try to discover of what elements that pleasure is
composed. It is, no doubt, somewhat complex. For one thing, we have
pleasure in meeting old friends. Sir Peter, Lady Teazle, Charles, even
Joseph, are agreeable creatures who have all sorts of pleasant
associations for us. Again, we love to encounter not only familiar
characters but familiar jokes. Like Goldsmith's Diggory, we can never
help laughing at the story of "ould Grouse in the gunroom." The best
order of dramatic wit does not become stale, but rather grows upon us.
We relish it at least as much at the tenth repetition as at the first.
But while these considerations may partly account for the pleasure we
take in seeing the play as a whole, they do not explain why the Screen
Scene in particular should interest and excite us. Another source of
pleasure, as before indicated, may be renewed recognition of the
ingenuity with which the scene is pieced together. However familiar we
may be with it, short of actually knowing it by heart, we do not recall
the details of its dovetailing, and it is a delight to realize afresh
the neatness of the manipulation by which the tension is heightened from
speech to speech and from incident to incident. If it be objected that
this is a pleasure which the critic alone is capable of experiencing, I
venture to disagree. The most unsophisticated playgoer feels the effect
of neat workmanship, though he may not be able to put his satisfaction
into words. It is evident, however, that the mere intellectual
recognition of fine workmanship is not sufficient to account for the
emotions with which we witness the Screen Scene. A similar, though, of
course, not quite identical, effect is produced by scenes of the utmost
simplicity, in which there is no room for delicacy of dovetailing or
neatness of manipulation.
Where, then, are we to seek for the fundamental constituent in dramatic
interest, as distinct from mere curiosity? Perhaps Mrs. Oliphant's
glaring error may put us on the track of the truth. Mrs. Oliphant
thought that Sheridan would have shown higher art had he kept the
audience, as well as Sir Peter and Charles, ignorant of Lady Teazle's
presence behind the screen. But this, as we saw, is precisely the
reverse of the truth: the whole interest of the scene arises from our
knowledge of Lady Teazle's presence. Had Sheridan fallen into Mrs.
Oliphant's mistake, the little shock of surprise which the first-night
audience would have felt when the screen was thrown down would have been
no compensation at all for the comparative tameness and pointlessness of
the preceding passages. Thus we see that the greater part of our
pleasure arises precisely from the fact that we know what Sir Peter and
Charles do not know, or, in other words, that we have a clear vision of
all the circumstances, relations, and implications of a certain
conjuncture of affairs, in which two, at least, of the persons concerned
are ignorantly and blindly moving towards issues of which they do not
dream. We are, in fact, in the position of superior intelligences
contemplating, with miraculous clairvoyance, the stumblings and
tumblings of poor blind mortals straying through the labyrinth of life.
Our seat in the theatre is like a throne on the Epicurean Olympus,
whence we can view with perfect intelligence, but without participation
or responsibility, the intricate reactions of human destiny. And this
sense of superiority does not pall upon us. When Othello comes on the
scene, radiant and confident in Desdemona's love, our knowledge of the
fate awaiting him makes him a hundred times more interesting than could
any mere curiosity as to what was about to happen. It is our prevision
of Nora's exit at the end of the last act that lends its dramatic
poignancy to her entrance at the beginning of the first.
There is nothing absolutely new in this theory.[7] "The irony of fate"
has long been recognized as one of the main elements of dramatic effect.
It has been especially dwelt upon in relation to Greek tragedy, of which
the themes were all known in advance even to "first-day" audiences. We
should take but little interest in seeing the purple carpet spread for
Agamemnon's triumphal entry into his ancestral halls, if it were not for
our foreknowledge of the net and the axe prepared for him. But, familiar
as is this principle, I am not aware that it has hitherto been extended,
as I suggest that it should be, to cover the whole field of dramatic
interest. I suggest that the theorists have hitherto dwelt far too much
on curiosity[8]--which may be defined as the interest of ignorance--and
far too little on the feeling of superiority, of clairvoyance, with
which we contemplate a foreknown action, whether of a comic or of a
tragic cast. Of course the action must be, essentially if not in every
detail, true to nature. We can derive no sense of superiority from our
foreknowledge of an arbitrary or preposterous action; and that, I take
it, is the reason why a good many plays have an initial success of
curiosity, but cease to attract when their plot becomes familiar. Again,
we take no pleasure in foreknowing the fate of wholly uninteresting
people; which is as much as to say that character is indispensable to
enduring interest in drama. With these provisos, I suggest a
reconstruction of our theories of dramatic interest, in which mere
first-night curiosity shall be relegated to the subordinate place which
by right belongs to it.
Nevertheless, we must come back to the point that there is always the
ordeal of the first night to be faced, and that the plays are
comparatively few which have lived-down a bad first-night. It is true
that specifically first-night merit is a trivial matter compared with
what may be called thousandth-performance merit; but it is equally true
that there is no inconsistency between the two orders of merit, and that
a play will never be less esteemed on its thousandth performance for
having achieved a conspicuous first-night success. The practical lesson
which seems to emerge from these considerations is that a wise
theatrical policy would seek to diminish the all-importance of the
first-night, and to give a play a greater chance of recovery than it has
under present conditions, from the depressing effect of an inauspicious
production. This is the more desirable as its initial misadventure may
very likely be due to external and fortuitous circumstances, wholly
unconnected with its inherent qualities.
At the same time, we are bound to recognize that, from the very nature
of the case, our present inquiry must be far more concerned with
first-night than with thousandth-performance merit. Craftsmanship can,
within limits, be acquired, genius cannot; and it is craftsmanship that
pilots us through the perils of the first performance, genius that
carries us on to the apotheosis of the thousandth. Therefore, our
primary concern must be with the arousing and sustaining of curiosity,
though we should never forget that it is only a means to the ultimate
enlistment of the higher and more abiding forms of interest.
* * * * *
[Footnote 1: The view that the dramatist has only to think of pleasing
himself is elsewhere dealt with.]
[Footnote 2: Two dramatists who have read these pages in proof, exclaim
at this passage. The one says, "No, no!" the other asks, "Why?" I can
only reiterate that, where there exists a strong and generally accepted
tradition, the dramatist not only runs counter to it at his peril, but
goes outside the true domain of his art in so doing. New truth, in
history, must be established either by new documents, or by a careful
and detailed re-interpretation of old documents; but the stage is not
the place either for the production of documents or for historical
exegesis. It is needless to say that where the popular mind is unbiased,
the dramatist's hands are free. For instance, I presume that one might,
in England, take any view one pleased of the character of Mary. Queen of
Scots; but a highly unfavourable view would scarcely be accepted by
Scottish audiences. Similarly, it would be both dangerous and
unprofitable to present on the English stage any very damaging "scandal
about Queen Elizabeth." Historical criticism, I understand, does not
accept the view that Robespierre was mainly responsible for the Reign of
Terror, and that his death betokened a general revolt against his
sanguinary tyranny; but it would be very hard for any dramatist to
secure general acceptance for a more accurate reading of his character
and function. Some further remarks on this subject will be found in