[Footnote 3: A malicious anecdote to a similar effect was current in the
early days of Sir Henry Irving's career. It was said that at Bristol one
night, when Mr. Irving, as Hamlet, "took his call" after the first act,
a man turned to his neighbour in the pit and said, "Can you tell me,
sir, does that young man appear much in this play?" His neighbour
informed him that Hamlet was rather largely concerned in the action,
whereupon the inquirer remarked, "Oh! Then I'm off!"]
[Footnote 4: If it be well done, it may remain highly effective in spite
of being discounted by previous knowledge. For instance, the clock-trick
in _Raffles_ was none the less amusing because every one was on the
look-out for it.]
[Footnote 5: The question whether it is ever politic for a playwright to
keep a secret from his audience is discussed elsewhere. What I have here
in mind is not an ordinary secret, but a more or less tricky effect of
surprise.]
[Footnote 6: The pleasure received from exceptionally good acting is, of
course, a different matter. I assume that the acting is merely competent
enough to pass muster without irritating us, and so distracting our
attention.]
[Footnote 7: I myself expressed it in slightly different terms nearly
ten years ago. "Curiosity," I said, "is the accidental relish of a
single night; whereas the essential and abiding pleasure of the theatre
lies in foreknowledge. In relation to the characters in the drama, the
audience are as gods looking before and after. Sitting in the theatre,
we taste, for a moment, the glory of omniscience. With vision unsealed,
we watch the gropings of purblind mortals after happiness, and smile at
their stumblings, their blunders, their futile quests, their misplaced
exultations, their groundless panics. To keep a secret from us is to
reduce us to their level, and deprive us of our clairvoyant aloofness.
There may be a pleasure in that too; we may join with zest in the game
of blind-man's-buff; but the theatre is in its essence a place where we
are privileged to take off the bandage we wear in daily life, and to
contemplate, with laughter or with tears, the blindfold gambols of our
neighbours."]
[Footnote 8: Here an acute critic writes: "On the whole I agree; but I
do think there is dramatic interest to be had out of curiosity, through
the identification, so to speak, of the audience with the discovering
persons on the stage. It is an interest of sympathy, not to be despised,
rather than an interest of actual curiosity."]
_CHAPTER X_
FORESHADOWING, NOT FORESTALLING
We return now to the point at which the foregoing disquisition--it is
not a digression--became necessary. We had arrived at the general
principle that the playwright's chief aim in his first act ought to be
to arouse and carry forward the interest of the audience. This may seem
a tolerably obvious statement; but it is worth while to examine a little
more closely into its implications.
As to arousing the interest of the audience, it is clear that very
little specific advice can be given. One can only say, "Find an
interesting theme, state its preliminaries clearly and crisply, and let
issue be joined without too much delay." There can be no rules for
finding an interesting theme, any more than for catching the Blue Bird.
At a later stage we may perhaps attempt a summary enumeration of themes
which are not interesting, which have exhausted any interest they ever
possessed, and "repay careful avoidance." But such an enumeration would
be out of place here, where we are studying principles of form apart
from details of matter.
The arousing of interest, however, is one thing, the carrying-forward of
interest is another; and on the latter point there are one or two things
that may profitably be said. Each act, as we have seen, should consist
of, or at all events contain, a subordinate crisis, contributory to the
main crisis of the play: and the art of act-construction lies in giving
to each act an individuality and interest of its own, without so
rounding it off as to obscure even for a moment its subsidiary, and, in
the case of the first act, its introductory, relation to the whole. This
is a point which many dramatists ignore or undervalue. Very often, when
the curtain falls on a first or a second act, one says, "This is a
fairly good act in itself; but whither does it lead? what is to come of
it all?" It awakens no definite anticipation, and for two pins one would
take up one's hat and go home. The author has neglected the art of
carrying-forward the interest.
It is curious to note that in the most unsophisticated forms of
melodrama this art is deliberately ignored. In plays of the type of _The
Worst Woman in London_, it appears to be an absolute canon of art that
every act must have a "happy ending"--that the curtain must always fall
on the hero, or, preferably, the comic man, in an attitude of triumph,
while the villain and villainess cower before him in baffled impotence.
We have perfect faith, of course, that the villain will come up smiling
in the next act, and proceed with his nefarious practices; but, for the
moment, virtue has it all its own way. This, however, is a very artless
formula which has somehow developed of recent years; and it is doubtful
whether even the audiences to which these plays appeal would not in
reality prefer something a little less inept in the matter of
construction. As soon as we get above this level, at all events, the
fostering of anticipation becomes a matter of the first importance. The
problem is, not to cut short the spectator's interest, or to leave it
fluttering at a loose end, but to provide it either with a
clearly-foreseen point in the next act towards which it can reach
onwards, or with a definite enigma, the solution of which is impatiently
awaited. In general terms, a bridge should be provided between one act
and another, along which the spectator's mind cannot but travel with
eager anticipation. And this is particularly important, or particularly
apt to be neglected, at the end of the first act. At a later point, if
the interest does not naturally and inevitably carry itself forward, the
case is hopeless indeed.
To illustrate what is meant by the carrying-forward of interest, let me
cite one or two instances in which it is achieved with conspicuous
success.
In Oscar Wilde's first modern comedy, _Lady Windermere's Fan_, the
heroine, Lady Windermere, has learnt that her husband has of late been
seen to call very frequently at the house of a certain Mrs. Erlynne,
whom nobody knows. Her suspicions thus aroused, she searches her
husband's desk, discovers a private and locked bank-book, cuts it open,
and finds that one large cheque after another has been drawn in favour
of the lady in question. At this inopportune moment, Lord Windermere
appears with a request that Mrs. Erlynne shall be invited to their
reception that evening. Lady Windermere indignantly refuses, her husband
insists, and, finally, with his own hand, fills in an invitation-card
and sends it by messenger to Mrs. Erlynne. Here some playwrights might
have been content to finish the act. It is sufficiently evident that
Lady Windermere will not submit to the apparent insult, and that
something exciting may be looked for at the reception in the following
act. But Oscar Wilde was not content with this vague expectancy. He
first defined it, and then he underlined the definition, in a perfectly
natural and yet ingenious and skilful way. The day happens to be Lady
Windermere's birthday, and at the beginning of the act her husband has
given her a beautiful ostrich-feather fan. When he sends off the
invitation, she turns upon him and says, "If that woman crosses my
threshold, I shall strike her across the face with this fan." Here,
again, many a dramatist might be content to bring down his curtain. The
announcement of Lady Windermere's resolve carries forward the interest
quite clearly enough for all practical purposes. But even this did not
satisfy Wilde. He imagined a refinement, simple, probable, and yet
immensely effective, which put an extraordinarily keen edge upon the
expectancy of the audience. He made Lady Windermere ring for her butler,
and say: "Parker, be sure you pronounce the names of the guests very
distinctly to-night. Sometimes you speak so fast that I miss them. I am
particularly anxious to hear the names quite clearly, so as to make no
mistake." I well remember the effect which this little touch produced on
the first night. The situation was, in itself, open to grave objections.
There is no plausible excuse for Lord Windermere's obstinacy in forcing
Mrs. Erlynne upon his wife, and risking a violent scandal in order to
postpone an explanation which he must know to be ultimately inevitable.
Though one had not as yet learnt the precise facts of the case, one felt
pretty confident that his lordship's conduct would scarcely justify
itself. But interest is largely independent of critical judgment, and,
for my own part, I can aver that, when the curtain fell on the first
act, a five-pound note would not have bribed me to leave the theatre
without assisting at Lady Windermere's reception in the second act. That
is the frame of mind which the author should try to beget in his
audience; and Oscar Wilde, then almost a novice, had, in this one little
passage between Lady Windermere and the butler, shown himself a master
of the art of dramatic story-telling. The dramatist has higher functions
than mere story-telling; but this is fundamental, and the true artist is
the last to despise it.[1]
For another example of a first act brought to what one may call a
judiciously tantalizing conclusion, I turn to Mr. R.C. Carton's comedy
_Wheels within Wheels._ Lord Eric Chantrell has just returned from
abroad after many years' absence. He drives straight to the bachelor
flat of his old chum, Egerton Vartrey. At the flat he finds only his
friend's valet, Vartrey himself has been summoned to Scotland that very
evening, and the valet is on the point of following him. He knows,
however, that his master would wish his old friend to make himself at
home in the flat; so he presently goes off, leaving the newcomer
installed for the night. Lord Eric goes to the bedroom to change his
clothes; and, the stage being thus left vacant, we hear a latch-key
turning in the outer door. A lady in evening dress enters, goes up to
the bureau at the back of the stage, and calmly proceeds to break it
open and ransack it. While she is thus burglariously employed, Lord Eric
enters, and cannot refrain from a slight expression of surprise. The
lady takes the situation with humorous calmness, they fall into
conversation, and it is manifest that at every word Lord Eric is more
and more fascinated by the fair house-breaker. She learns who he is, and
evidently knows all about him; but she is careful to give him no inkling
of her own identity. At last she takes her leave, and he expresses such
an eager hope of being allowed to renew their acquaintance, that it
amounts to a declaration of a peculiar interest in her. Thereupon she
addresses him to this effect: "Has it occurred to you to wonder how I
got into your friend's rooms? I will show you how"--and, producing a
latch-key, she holds it up, with all its questionable implications,
before his eyes. Then she lays it on the table, says: "I leave you to
draw your own conclusions" and departs. A better opening for a light
social comedy could scarcely be devised. We have no difficulty in
guessing that the lady, who is not quite young, and has clearly a strong
sense of humour, is freakishly turning appearances against herself, by
way of throwing a dash of cold water on Lord Eric's sudden flame of
devotion. But we long for a clear explanation of the whole quaint little
episode; and here, again, no reasonable offer would tempt us to leave
the theatre before our curiosity is satisfied. The remainder of the
play, though amusing, is unfortunately not up to the level of the first
act; else _Wheels within Wheels_ would be a little classic of
light comedy.
For a third example of interest carefully carried forward, I turn to a
recent Norwegian play, _The Idyll_, by Peter Egge. At the very rise of
the curtain, we find Inga Gar, wife of an author and journalist, Dr.
Gar, reading, with evident tokens of annoyance and distaste, a new book
of poems by one Rolfe Ringve. Before her marriage, Inga was an actress
of no great talent; Ringve made himself conspicuous by praising her far
beyond her merits; and when, at last, an engagement between them was
announced, people shrugged their shoulders and said: "They are going to
regularize the situation." As a matter of fact (of this we have early
assurance), though Ringve has been her ardent lover, Inga has neither
loved him nor been his mistress. Ringve being called abroad, she has,
during his absence, broken off her engagement to him, and has then,
about a year before the play opens, married Dr. Gar, to whom she is
devoted. While Gar is away on a short lecture tour, Ringve has published
the book of love-poems which we find her reading. They are very
remarkable poems; they have already made a great stir in the literary
world; and interest is all the keener for the fact that they are
evidently inspired by his passion for Inga, and are couched in such a
tone of intimacy as to create a highly injurious impression of the
relations between them. Gar, having just come home, has no suspicion of
the nature of the book; and when an editor, who cherishes a grudge
against him, conceives the malicious idea of asking him to review
Ringve's masterpiece, he consents with alacrity. One or two small
incidents have in the meantime shown us that there is a little rift in
the idyllic happiness of Inga and Gar, arising from her inveterate habit
of telling trifling fibs to avoid facing the petty annoyances of life.
For instance, when Gar asks her casually whether she has read Ringve's
poems, a foolish denial slips out, though she knows that the cut pages
of the book will give her the lie. These incidents point to a state of
unstable equilibrium in the relations between husband and wife;
wherefore, when we see Gar, at the end of the act, preparing to read
Ringve's poems, our curiosity is very keen as to how he will take them.
We feel the next hour to be big with fate for these two people; and we
long for the curtain to rise again upon the threatened household. The
fuse has been fired; we are all agog for the explosion.
In Herr Egge's place, I should have been inclined to have dropped my
curtain upon Gar, with the light of the reading-lamp full upon him, in
the act of opening the book, and then to have shown him, at the
beginning of the second act, in exactly the same position. With more
delicate art, perhaps, the author interposes a little domestic incident
at the end of the first act, while leaving it clearly impressed on our
minds that the reading of the poems is only postponed by a few minutes.
That is the essential point: the actual moment upon which the curtain
falls is of minor importance. What is of vast importance, on the other
hand, is that the expectation of the audience should not be baffled, and
that the curtain should rise upon the immediate sequel to the reading of
the poems. This is, in the exact sense of the words, _a scène à
faire_--an obligatory scene. The author has aroused in us a reasonable
expectation of it, and should he choose to balk us--to raise his
curtain, say, a week, or a month, later--we should feel that we had been
trifled with. The general theory of the _scène à faire_ will presently
come up for discussion. In the meantime, I merely make the obvious
remark that it is worse than useless to awaken a definite expectation in
the breast of the audience, and then to disappoint it.[2]
The works of Sir Arthur Pinero afford many examples of interest very
skilfully carried forward. In his farces--let no one despise the
technical lessons to be learnt from a good farce--there is always an
_adventure_ afoot, whose development we eagerly anticipate. When the
curtain falls on the first act of _The Magistrate_, we foresee the
meeting of all the characters at the Hôtel des Princes, and are
impatient to assist at it. In _The Schoolmistress_, we would not for
worlds miss Peggy Hesseltine's party, which we know awaits us in Act II.
An excellent example, of a more serious order, is to be found in _The
Benefit of the Doubt_. When poor Theo, rebuffed by her husband's chilly
scepticism, goes off on some manifestly harebrained errand, we divine,
as do her relatives, that she is about to commit social suicide by
seeking out John Allingham; and we feel more than curiosity as to the
event--we feel active concern, almost anxiety, as though our own
personal interests were involved. Our anticipation is heightened, too,
when we see Sir Fletcher Portwood and Mrs. Cloys set off upon her track.
This gives us a definite point to which to look forward, while leaving
the actual course of events entirely undefined. It fulfils one of the
great ends of craftsmanship, in foreshadowing without forestalling an
intensely interesting conjuncture of affairs.
I have laid stress on the importance of carrying forward the interest of
the audience because it is a detail that is often overlooked. There is,
as a rule, no difficulty in the matter, always assuming that the theme
be not inherently devoid of interest. One could mention many plays in
which the author has, from sheer inadvertence, failed to carry forward
the interest of the first act, though a very little readjustment, or a
trifling exercise of invention, would have enabled him to do so.
_Pillars of Society_, indeed, may be taken as an instance, though not a
very flagrant one. Such interest as we feel at the end of the first act
is vague and unfocused. We are sure that something is to come of the
return of Lona and Johan, but we have no inkling as to what that
something may be. If we guess that the so-called black sheep of the
family will prove to be the white sheep, it is only because we know that
it is Ibsen's habit to attack respectability and criticize accepted
moral values--it is not because of anything that he has told us, or
hinted to us, in the play itself. In no other case does he leave our
interest at such a loose end as in this, his prentice-work in modern
drama. In _The League of Youth_, an earlier play, but of an altogether
lighter type, the interest is much more definitely carried forward at
the end of the first act. Stensgaard has attacked Chamberlain Bratsberg
in a rousing speech, and the Chamberlain has been induced to believe
that the attack was directed not against himself, but against his enemy
Monsen. Consequently he invites Stensgaard to his great dinner-party,
and this invitation Stensgaard regards as a cowardly attempt at
conciliation. We clearly see a crisis looming ahead, when this
misunderstanding shall be cleared up; and we consequently look forward
with lively interest to the dinner-party of the second act--which ends,
as a matter of fact, in a brilliant scene of comedy.
The principle, to recapitulate, is simply this: a good first act should
never end in a blank wall. There should always be a window in it, with
at least a glimpse of something attractive beyond. In _Pillars of
Society_ there is a window, indeed; but it is of ground glass.
* * * * *
[Footnote 1: That great story-teller, Alexandra Dumas _pere,_ those a
straightforward way of carrying forward the interest at the end of the
first act of _Henri III et sa Cour._ The Due de Guise, insulted by
Saint-Mégrin, beckons to his henchman and says, as the curtain falls,
_"Qu'on me cherche les mêmes hommes qui ont assassiné Dugast!"_]
[Footnote 2: There are limits to the validity of this rule, as applied
to minor incidents. For example, it may sometimes be a point of art to
lead the audience to expect the appearance of one person, when in fact
another is about to enter. But it is exceedingly dangerous to baffle the
carefully fostered anticipation of an important scene. See Chapters
XVII and XXI.]
_BOOK III_
THE MIDDLE
_CHAPTER XI_
TENSION AND ITS SUSPENSION
In the days of the five-act dogma, each act was supposed to have its
special and pre-ordained function. Freytag assigns to the second act, as
a rule, the _Steigerung_ or heightening--the working-up, one might call
it--of the interest. But the second act, in modern plays, has often to
do all the work of the three middle acts under the older dispensation;
wherefore the theory of their special functions has more of a historical
than of a practical interest. For our present purposes, we may treat the
interior section of a play as a unit, whether it consist of one, two, or
three acts.
The first act may be regarded as the porch or vestibule through which we
pass into the main fabric--solemn or joyous, fantastic or austere--of
the actual drama. Sometimes, indeed, the vestibule is reduced to a mere
threshold which can be crossed in two strides; but normally the first
act, or at any rate the greater part of it, is of an introductory
character. Let us conceive, then, that we have passed the vestibule, and
are now to study the principles on which the body of the structure
is reared.
In the first place, is the architectural metaphor a just one? Is there,
or ought there to be, any analogy between a drama and a
finely-proportioned building? The question has already been touched on
in the opening paragraphs of Chapter VIII; but we may now look into it a
little more closely.
What is the characteristic of a fine piece of architecture? Manifestly
an organic relation, a carefully-planned interdependence, between all
its parts. A great building is a complete and rounded whole, just like a
living organism. It is informed by an inner law of harmony and
proportion, and cannot be run up at haphazard, with no definite and
pre-determined design. Can we say the same of a great play?
I think we can. Even in those plays which present a picture rather than
an action, we ought to recognize a principle of selection, proportion,
composition, which, if not absolutely organic, is at any rate the
reverse of haphazard. We may not always be able to define the principle,
to put it clearly in words; but if we feel that the author has been
guided by no principle, that he has proceeded on mere hand-to-mouth
caprice, that there is no "inner law of harmony and proportion" in his
work, then we instinctively relegate it to a low place in our esteem.
Hauptmann's _Weavers_ certainly cannot be called a piece of dramatic
architecture, like _Rosmersholm_ or _Iris_; but that does not mean that
it is a mere rambling series of tableaux. It is not easy to define the
principle of unity in that brilliant comedy _The Madras House_; but we
nevertheless feel that a principle of unity exists; or, if we do not, so
much the worse for the play and its author.
There is, indeed, a large class of plays, often popular, and sometimes
meritorious, in relation to which the architectural metaphor entirely
breaks down. They are what may be called "running fire" plays. We have
all seen children setting a number of wooden blocks on end, at equal
intervals, and then tilting over the first so that it falls against the
second, which in turn falls against the third, and so on, till the whole
row, with a rapid clack-clack-clack, lies flat upon the table. This is
called a "running fire"; and this is the structural principle of a good
many plays. We feel that the playwright is, so to speak, inventing as he
goes along--that the action, like the child's fantastic serpentine of
blocks, might at any moment take a turn in any possible direction
without falsifying its antecedents or our expectations. No part of it is
necessarily involved in any other part. If the play were found too long
or too short, an act might be cut out or written in without
necessitating any considerable readjustments in the other acts. The play
is really a series of episodes,
"Which might, odd bobs, sir! in judicious hands,
Extend from here to Mesopotamy."
The episodes may grow out of each other plausibly enough, but by no
pre-ordained necessity, and with no far-reaching interdependence. We
live, in such plays, from moment to moment, foreseeing nothing, desiring
nothing; and though this frame of mind may be mildly agreeable, it
involves none of that complexity of sensation with which we contemplate
a great piece of architecture, or follow the development of a
finely-constructed drama. To this order belong many cape-and-sword plays
and detective dramas--plays like _The Adventure of Lady Ursula_, _The
Red Robe_, the Musketeer romances that were at one time so popular, and
most plays of the _Sherlock Holmes_ and _Raffles_ type. But pieces of a
more ambitious order have been known to follow the same formula--some of
the works, for instance, of Mr. Charles McEvoy, to say nothing of Mr.
Bernard Shaw.
We may take it, I think, that the architectural analogy holds good of
every play which can properly be said to be "constructed." Construction
means dramatic architecture, or in other words, a careful
pre-arrangement of proportions and interdependencies. But to carry
beyond this point the analogy between the two arts would be fantastic
and unhelpful. The one exists in space, the other in time. The one seeks
to beget in the spectator a state of placid, though it may be of
aspiring, contemplation; the other, a state of more or less acute
tension. The resemblances between music and architecture are, as is well
known, much more extensive and illuminating. It might not be wholly
fanciful to call music a sort of middle term between the two other arts.
A great part of the secret of dramatic architecture lies in the one word
"tension." To engender, maintain, suspend, heighten and resolve a state
of tension--that is the main object of the dramatist's craft.
What do we mean by tension? Clearly a stretching out, a stretching
forward, of the mind. That is the characteristic mental attitude of the
theatrical audience. If the mind is not stretching forward, the body
will soon weary of its immobility and constraint. Attention may be
called the momentary correlative of tension. When we are intent on what
is to come, we are attentive to what is there and then happening. The
term tension is sometimes applied, not to the mental state of the
audience, but to the relation of the characters on the stage. "A scene
of high tension" is primarily one in which the actors undergo a great
emotional strain. But this is, after all, only a means towards
heightening of the mental tension of the audience. In such a scene the
mind stretches forward, no longer to something vague and distant, but to
something instant and imminent.
In discussing what Freytag calls the _erregende Moment,_ we might have
defined it as the starting-point of the tension. A reasonable audience
will, if necessary, endure a certain amount of exposition, a certain
positing of character and circumstance, before the tension sets in; but
when it once has set in, the playwright must on no account suffer it to
relax until he deliberately resolves it just before the fall of the
curtain. There are, of course, minor rhythms of tension and resolution,
like the harmonic vibrations of a violin-string. That is implied when we
say that a play consists of a great crisis worked out through a series
of minor crises. But the main tension, once initiated, must never be
relaxed. If it is, the play is over, though the author may have omitted
to note the fact. Not infrequently, he begins a new play under the
impression that he is finishing the old one. That is what Shakespeare
did in _The Merchant of Venice._ The fifth act is an independent
afterpiece, though its independence is slightly disguised by the fact
that the _erregende Moment_ of the new play follows close upon the end
of the old one, with no interact between. A very exacting technical
criticism might accuse Ibsen of verging towards the same fault in _An
Enemy of the People._ There the tension is practically resolved with Dr.
Stockmann's ostracism at the end of the fourth act. At that point, if it
did not know that there was another act to come, an audience might go
home in perfect content. The fifth act is a sort of epilogue or sequel,
built out of the materials of the preceding drama, but not forming an
integral part of it. With a brief exposition to set forth the antecedent
circumstances, it would be quite possible to present the fifth act as an
independent comedietta.
But here a point of great importance calls for our notice. Though the
tension, once started, must never be relaxed: though it ought, on the
contrary, to be heightened or tightened (as you choose to put it) from
act to act; yet there are times when it may without disadvantage, or
even with marked advantage, be temporarily suspended. In other words,
the stretching-forward, without in any way slackening, may fall into the
background of our consciousness, while other matters, the relevance of
which may not be instantly apparent, are suffered to occupy the
foreground. We know all too well, in everyday experience, that tension
is not really relaxed by a temporary distraction. The dread of a coming
ordeal in the witness-box or on the operating-table may be forcibly
crushed down like a child's jack-in-the-box; but we are always conscious
of the effort to compress it, and we know that it will spring up again
the moment that effort ceases. Sir Arthur Pinero's play, _The
Profligate,_ was written at a time when it was the fashion to give each
act a sub-title; and one of its acts is headed "The Sword of Damocles."
That is, indeed, the inevitable symbol of dramatic tension: we see a
sword of Damocles (even though it be only a farcical blade of painted
lathe) impending over someone's head: and when once we are confident
that it will fall at the fated moment, we do not mind having our
attention momentarily diverted to other matters. A rather flagrant
example of suspended attention is afforded by Hamlet's advice to the
Players. We know that Hamlet has hung a sword of Damocles over the
King's head in the shape of the mimic murder-scene; and, while it is
preparing, we are quite willing to have our attention switched off to
certain abstract questions of dramatic criticism. The scene might have
been employed to heighten the tension. Instead of giving the Players (in
true princely fashion) a lesson in the general principles of their art,
Hamlet might have specially "coached" them in the "business" of the
scene to be enacted, and thus doubly impressed on the audience his
resolve to "tent" the King "to the quick." I am far from suggesting that
this would have been desirable; but it would obviously have been
possible.[1] Shakespeare, as the experience of three centuries has
shown, did right in judging that the audience was already sufficiently
intent on the coming ordeal, and would welcome an interlude of
aesthetic theory.
There are times, moreover, when it is not only permissible to suspend
the tension, but when, by so doing, a great artist can produce a
peculiar and admirable effect. A sudden interruption, on the very brink
of a crisis, may, as it were, whet the appetite of the audience for what
is to come. We see in the Porter scene in Macbeth a suspension of this
nature; but Shakespeare used it sparingly, unless, indeed, we are to
consider as a deliberate point of art the retardation of movement
commonly observable in the fourth acts of his tragedies. Ibsen, on the
other hand, deliberately employed this device on three conspicuous
occasions. The entrance of Dr. Rank in the last act of _A Doll's House_
is a wholly unnecessary interruption to the development of the crisis
between Nora and Helmer. The scene might be entirely omitted without
leaving a perceptible hiatus in the action; yet who does not feel that
this brief respite lends gathered impetus to the main action when it is
resumed? The other instances are offered by the two apparitions of Ulric
Brendel in _Rosmersholm._ The first occurs when Rosmer is on the very
verge of his momentous confession to Kroll, the second when Rosmer and
Rebecca are on the very verge of their last great resolve; and in each
case we feel a distinct value (apart from the inherent quality of the
Brendel scenes) in the very fact that the tension has been momentarily
suspended. Such a _rallentando_ effect is like the apparent pause in the
rush of a river before it thunders over a precipice.
The possibility of suspending tension is of wider import than may at
first sight appear. But for it, our dramas would have to be all bone and
muscle, like the figures in an anatomical textbook. As it is, we are
able, without relaxing tension, to shift it to various planes of
consciousness, and thus find leisure to reproduce the surface aspects of
life, with some of its accidents and irrelevances. For example, when the
playwright has, at the end of his first act, succeeded in carrying
onward the spectator's interest, and giving him something definite to
look forward to, it does not at all follow that the expected scene,
situation, revelation, or what not, should come at the beginning of the
second act. In some cases it must do so; when, as in _The Idyll_ above
cited, the spectator has been carefully induced to expect some imminent
conjuncture which cannot be postponed. But this can scarcely be called a
typical case. More commonly, when an author has enlisted the curiosity
of his audience of some definite point, he will be in no great hurry to
satisfy and dissipate it. He may devote the early part of the second act
to working-up the same line of interest to a higher pitch; or he may
hold it in suspense while he prepares some further development of the
action. The closeness with which a line of interest, once started, ought
to be followed up, must depend in some measure on the nature and tone of
the play. If it be a serious play, in which character and action are
very closely intertwined, any pause or break in the conjoint development
is to be avoided. If, on the other hand, it is a play of light and
graceful dialogue, in which the action is a pretext for setting the
characters in motion rather than the chief means towards their
manifestation, then the playwright can afford to relax the rate of his
progress, and even to wander a little from the straight line of advance.
In such a play, even the old institution of the "underplot" is not
inadmissible; though the underplot ought scarcely to be a "plot," but
only some very slight thread of interest, involving no strain on the
attention.[2] It may almost be called an established practice, on the
English stage, to let the dalliance of a pair of boy-and-girl lovers
relieve the main interest of a more or less serious comedy; and there is
no particular harm in such a convention, if it be not out of keeping
with the general character of the play. In some plays the substance--the
character-action, if one may so call it--is the main, and indeed the
only, thing. In others the substance, though never unimportant, is in
some degree subordinate to the embroideries; and it is for the
playwright to judge how far this subordination may safely be carried.
One principle, however, may be emphasized as almost universally valid,
and that is that the end of an act should never leave the action just
where it stood at the beginning. An audience has an instinctive sense
of, and desire for, progress. It does not like to realize that things
have been merely marking time. Even if it has been thoroughly
entertained, from moment to moment, during the progress of an act, it
does not like to feel at the end that nothing has really happened. The
fall of the curtain gives time for reflection, and for the ordering of
impressions which, while the action was afoot, were more or less vague
and confused. It is therefore of great importance that each act should,
to put it briefly, bear looking back upon--that it should appear to
stand in due proportion to the general design of the play, and should
not be felt to have been empty, or irrelevant, or disappointing. This
is, indeed, a plain corollary from the principle of tension. Suspended
it may be, sometimes with positive advantage; but it must not be
suspended too long; and suspension for a whole act is equivalent to
relaxation.
To sum up: when once a play has begun to move, its movement ought to
proceed continuously, and with gathering momentum; or, if it stands
still for a space, the stoppage ought to be deliberate and purposeful.
It is fatal when the author thinks it is moving, while in fact it is
only revolving on its own axis.
* * * * *
[Footnote 1: This method of heightening the tension would have been
somewhat analogous to that employed by Oscar Wilde in Lady Windermere's
instructions to her butler, cited on p. 115.]
[Footnote 2: Dryden (_Of Dramatic Poesy_, p. 56, ed. Arnold, 1903) says:
"Our plays, besides the main design, have underplots or by-concernments,
of less considerable persons and intrigues, which are carried on with
the motion of the main plot; as they say the orb of the fixed stars, and
those of the planets, though they have motions of their own, are whirled
about by the motion of the _primum mobile_, in which they are
contained." This is an admirable description of the ideal underplot, as
conceived by our forefathers; but we find that two lines of tension jar
with and weaken each other.]
_CHAPTER XII_
PREPARATION: THE FINGER-POST
We shall find, on looking into it, that most of the technical maxims
that have any validity may be traced back, directly or indirectly, to
the great principle of tension. The art of construction is summed up,
first, in giving the mind of an audience something to which to stretch
forward, and, secondly, in not letting it feel that it has stretched
forward in vain. "You will find it infinitely pleasing," says Dryden,[1]
"to be led in a labyrinth of design, where you see some of your way
before you, yet discern not the end till you arrive at it." Or, he might
have added, "if you foresee the end, but not the means by which it is to
be reached." In drama, as in all art, the "how" is often more important
than the "what."
No technical maxim is more frequently cited than the remark of the
younger Dumas: "The art of the theatre is the art of preparations." This
is true in a larger sense than he intended; but at the same time there
are limits to its truth, which we must not fail to observe.
Dumas, as we know, was an inveterate preacher, using the stage as a
pulpit for the promulgation of moral and social ideas which were, in
their day, considered very advanced and daring. The primary meaning of
his maxim, then, was that a startling idea, or a scene wherein such an
idea was implied, ought not to be sprung upon an audience wholly
unprepared to accept it. For instance, in _Monsieur Alphonse,_ a
husband, on discovering that his wife has had an intrigue before their
marriage, and that a little girl whom she wishes to adopt is really her
daughter, instantly raises her from the ground where she lies grovelling
at his feet, and says: "Créature de Dieu, toi qui as failli et te
repens, relève toi, je te pardonne." This evangelical attitude on the
part of Admiral de Montaiglin was in itself very surprising, and perhaps
not wholly admirable, to the Parisian public of 1873; but Dumas had so
"prepared" the _coup de théâtre_ that it passed with very slight
difficulty on the first night, and with none at all at subsequent
performances and revivals. How had he "prepared" it? Why, by playing, in
a score of subtle ways, upon the sympathies and antipathies of the
audience. For instance, as Sarcey points out, he had made M. de
Montaiglin a sailor, "accustomed, during his distant voyages, to long
reveries in view of the boundless ocean, whence he had acquired a
mystical habit of mind.... Dumas certainly would never have placed this
pardon in the mouth of a stockbroker." So far so good; but
"preparation," in the sense of the word, is a device of rhetoric or of
propaganda rather than of dramatic craftsmanship. It is a method of
astutely undermining or outflanking prejudice. Desiring to enforce a
general principle, you invent a case which is specially favourable to
your argument, and insinuate it into the acceptance of the audience by
every possible subtlety of adjustment. You trust, it would seem, that
people who have applauded an act of pardon in an extreme case will be so
much the readier to exercise that high prerogative in the less carefully
"prepared" cases which present themselves in real life. This may or may
not be a sound principle of persuasion; as we are not here considering
the drama as an art of persuasion, we have not to decide between this
and the opposite, or Shawesque, principle of shocking and startling an
audience by the utmost violence of paradox. There is something to be
said for both methods--for conversion by pill-and-jelly and for
conversion by nitroglycerine.
Reverting, now, to the domain of pure craftsmanship, can it be said that
"the art of the theatre is the art of preparation"? Yes, it is very
largely the art of delicate and unobtrusive preparation, of helping an
audience to divine whither it is going, while leaving it to wonder how
it is to get there. On the other hand, it is also the art of avoiding
laborious, artificial and obvious preparations which lead to little or
nothing. A due proportion must always be observed between the
preparation and the result.
To illustrate the meaning of preparation, as the word is here employed,
I may perhaps be allowed to reprint a passage from a review of Mr.
Israel Zangwill's play _Children of the Ghetto_.[2]
"... To those who have not read the novel, it must seem as though
the mere illustrations of Jewish life entirely overlaid and
overwhelmed the action. It is not so in reality. One who knows the
story beforehand can often see that it is progressing even in scenes
which seem purely episodic and unconnected either with each other or
with the general scheme. But Mr. Zangwill has omitted to provide
finger-posts, if I may so express it, to show those who do not know
the story beforehand whither he is leading them. He has neglected
the great art of forecasting, of keeping anticipation on the alert,
which is half the secret of dramatic construction. To forecast,
without discounting, your effects--that is all the Law and the
Prophets. In the first act of _Children of the Ghetto_, for
instance, we see the marriage in jest of Hannah to Sam Levine,
followed by the instant divorce with all its curious ceremonies.
This is amusing so far as it goes; but when the divorce is
completed, the whole thing seems to be over and done with. We have
seen some people, in whom as yet we take no particular interest,
enmeshed in a difficulty arising from a strange and primitive
formalism in the interpretation of law; and we have seen the meshes
cut to the satisfaction of all parties, and the incident to all
appearance closed. There is no finger-post to direct our
anticipation on the way it should go; and those who have not read
the book cannot possibly guess that this mock marriage, instantly
and ceremoniously dissolved, can have any ulterior effect upon the
fortunes of any one concerned. Thus, the whole scene, however
curious in itself, seems motiveless and resultless. How the
requisite finger-post was to be provided I cannot tell. That is not
my business; but a skilful dramatist would have made it his. Then,
in the second act, amid illustrations of social life in the Ghetto,
we have the meeting of Hannah with David Brandon, a prettily-written
scene of love-at-first-sight. But, so far as any one can see, there
is every prospect that the course of true love will run absolutely
smooth. Again we lack a finger-post to direct our interest forward;
nor do we see anything that seems to bring this act into vital
relation with its predecessor. Those who have read the book know
that David Brandon is a 'Cohen,' a priest, a descendant of Aaron,
and that a priest may not marry a divorced woman. Knowing this, we
have a sense of irony, of impending disaster, which renders the
love-scene of the second act dramatic. But to those, and they must
always be a majority in any given audience, who do not know this,
the scene has no more dramatic quality than lies in its actual
substance, which, although pretty enough, is entirely commonplace.
Not till the middle of the third act (out of four) is the obstacle
revealed, and we see that the mighty maze was not without a plan.
Here, then, the drama begins, after two acts and a half of
preparation, during which we were vouchsafed no inkling of what was
preparing. It is capital drama when we come to it, really human,
really tragic. The arbitrary prohibitions of the Mosaic law have no
religious or moral force either for David or for Hannah. They feel
it to be their right, almost their duty, to cast off their shackles.
In any community, save that of strict Judaism, they are perfectly
free to marry. But in thus flouting the letter of the law, Hannah
well knows that she will break her father's heart. Even as she
struggles to shake them off, the traditions of her race take firmer
hold on her; and in the highly dramatic last act (a not unskilful
adaptation to the stage of the crucial scene of the book) she bows
her neck beneath the yoke, and renounces love that the Law may be
fulfilled."
To state the matter in other terms, we are conscious of no tension in
the earlier acts of this play, because we have not been permitted to see
the sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of Hannah and David
Brandon. For lack of preparation, of pointing-forward, we feel none of
that god-like superiority to the people of the mimic world which we have
recognized as the characteristic privilege of the spectator. We know no
more than they do of the implications of their acts, and the network of
embarrassments in which they are involving themselves. Indeed, we know
less than they do: for Hannah, as a well brought-up Jewess, is no doubt
vaguely aware of the disabilities attaching to a divorced woman. A
gentile audience, on the other hand, cannot possibly foresee how--
"Some consequence yet hanging in the stars
Shall bitterly begin his fearful date
With this night's revels."
and, lacking that foreknowledge, it misses the specifically dramatic
effect of the scenes. The author invites it to play at blind-man's-buff
with the characters, instead of unsealing its eyes and enabling it to
watch the game from its Olympian coign of vantage.
Let the dramatist, then, never neglect to place the requisite
finger-posts on the road he would have us follow. It is not, of course,
necessary that we should be conscious of all the implications of any
given scene or incident, but we must know enough of them not only to
create the requisite tension, but to direct it towards the right quarter
of the compass. Retrospective elucidations are valueless and sometimes
irritating. It is in nowise to the author's interest that we should say,
"Ah, if we had only known this, or foreseen that, in time, the effect of
such-and-such a scene would have been entirely different!" We have no
use for finger-posts that point backwards.[3]
In the works of Sir Arthur Pinero I recall two cases in which the lack
of a finger-post impairs the desired effect: slightly, in the one
instance, in the other, very considerably. The third act of that
delightful comedy _The Princess and the Butterfly_ contains no
sufficient indication of Fay Zuliani's jealousy of the friendship
between Sir George Lamorant and the Princess Pannonia. We are rather at
a loss to account for the coldness of her attitude to the Princess, and
her perverse naughtiness in going off to the Opera Ball. This renders
the end of the act practically ineffective. We so little foresee what is
to come of Fay's midnight escapade, that we take no particular interest
in it, and are rather disconcerted by the care with which it is led up
to, and the prominence assigned to it. This, however, is a trifling
fault. Far different is the case in the last act of _The Benefit of the
Doubt_, which goes near to ruining what is otherwise a very fine play.
The defect, indeed, is not purely technical: on looking into it we find
that the author is not in fact working towards an ending which can be
called either inevitable or conspicuously desirable. His failure to
point forward is no doubt partly due to his having nothing very
satisfactory to point forward to. But it is only in retrospect that this
becomes apparent. What we feel while the act is in progress is simply
the lack of any finger-post to afford us an inkling of the end towards
which we are proceeding. Through scene after scene we appear to be
making no progress, but going round and round in a depressing circle.
The tension, in a word, is fatally relaxed. It may perhaps be suggested
as a maxim that when an author finds a difficulty in placing the
requisite finger-posts, as he nears the end of his play, he will do well
to suspect that the end he has in view is defective, and to try if he
cannot amend it.
In the ancient, and in the modern romantic, drama, oracles, portents,
prophecies, horoscopes and such-like intromissions of the supernatural
afforded a very convenient aid to the placing of the requisite
finger-posts--"foreshadowing without forestalling." It has often been
said that _Macbeth_ approaches the nearest of all Shakespeare's
tragedies to the antique model: and in nothing is the resemblance
clearer than in the employment of the Witches to point their skinny
fingers into the fated future. In _Romeo and Juliet_, inward foreboding
takes the place of outward prophecy. I have quoted above Romeo's
prevision of "Some consequence yet hanging in the stars"; and beside it
may be placed Juliet's--
"I have no joy of this contract to-night;
It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden,
Too like the lightning which doth cease to be
Ere one can say it lightens."
In _Othello,_ on the other hand, the most modern of all his plays,
Shakespeare had recourse neither to outward boding, nor to inward
foreboding, but planted a plain finger-post in the soil of human nature,
when he made Brabantio say--
"Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see:
She has deceived her father, and may thee."
Mr. Stephen Phillips, in the first act of _Paolo and Francesca,_ outdoes
all his predecessors, ancient or modern, in his daring use of sibylline
prophecy. He makes Giovanni's blind foster-mother, Angela, foretell the
tragedy in almost every detail, save that, in her vision, she cannot see
the face of Francesca's lover. Mr. Phillips, I take it, is here
reinforcing ancient tradition by a reference to modern "psychical
research." He trusts to our conceiving such clairvoyance to be not
wholly impossible, and giving it what may be called provisional
credence. Whether the device be artistic or not we need not here
consider. I merely point to it as a conspicuous example of the use of
the finger-post.[4]
It need scarcely be said that a misleading finger-post is carefully to
be avoided, except in the rare cases where it may be advisable to beget
a momentary misapprehension on the part of the audience, which shall be
almost instantly corrected in some pleasant or otherwise effective
fashion.[5] It is naturally difficult to think of striking instances of
the misleading finger-posts; for plays which contain such a blunder are
not apt to survive, even in the memory. A small example occurs in a
clever play named _A Modern Aspasia_ by Mr. Hamilton Fyfe. Edward
Meredith has two households: a London house over which his lawful wife,
Muriel, presides; and a country cottage where dwells his mistress,
Margaret, with her two children. One day Muriel's automobile breaks down
near Margaret's cottage, and, while the tyre is being repaired, Margaret
gives her visitor tea, neither of them knowing the other. Throughout the
scene we are naturally wondering whether a revelation is to occur; and
when, towards the close, Muriel goes to Margaret's room, "to put her hat
straight," we have no longer any doubt on the subject. It is practically
inevitable that she should find in the room her husband's photograph, or
some object which she should instantly recognize as his, and should
return to the stage in full possession of the secret. This is so
probable that nothing but a miracle can prevent it: we mentally give the
author credit for bringing about his revelation in a very simple and
natural way; and we are proportionately disappointed when we find that
the miracle has occurred, and that Muriel returns to the sitting-room no
wiser than she left it. Very possibly the general economy of the play
demanded that the revelation should not take place at this juncture.
That question does not here concern us. The point is that, having
determined to reserve the revelation for his next act, the author ought
not, by sending Muriel into Margaret's bedroom, to have awakened in us a
confident anticipation of its occurring there and then. A romantic play
by Mr. J. B. Fagan, entitled _Under Which King?_ offers another small
instance of the same nature. The date is 1746; certain despatches of
vast importance have to be carried by a Hanoverian officer from Moidart
to Fort William. The Jacobites arrange to drug the officer; and, to make
assurance doubly sure, in case the drug should fail to act, they post a
Highland marksman in a narrow glen to pick him off as he passes. The
drug does act; but his lady-love, to save his military honour, assumes
male attire and rides off with the despatches. We hear her horse's hoofs
go clattering down the road; and then, as the curtain falls, we hear a
shot ring out into the night. This shot is a misleading finger-post.
Nothing comes of it: we find in the next act that the marksman has
missed! But marksmen, under such circumstances, have no business to
miss. It is a breach of the dramatic proprieties. We feel that the
author has been trifling with us in inflicting on us this purely
mechanical and momentary "scare." The case would be different if the
young lady knew that the marksman was lying in ambush, and determined to
run the gantlet. In that case the incident would be a trait of
character; but, unless my memory deceives me, that is not the case. On
the stage, every bullet should have its billet--not necessarily in the
person aimed at, but in the emotions or anticipations of the audience.
This bullet may, indeed, give us a momentary thrill of alarm; but it is
dearly bought at the expense of subsequent disillusionment.
We have now to consider the subject of over-preparation, too obtrusive
preparation, mountainous preparation leading only to a mouse-like
effect. This is the characteristic error of the so-called "well-made
play," the play of elaborate and ingenious intrigue. The trouble with
the well-made play is that it is almost always, and of necessity,
ill-made. Very rarely does the playwright succeed in weaving a web which
is at once intricate, consistent, and clear. In nineteen cases out of
twenty there are glaring flaws that have to be overlooked; or else the
pattern is so involved that the mind's eye cannot follow it, and becomes
bewildered and fatigued. A classical example of both faults may be found
in Congreve's so-called comedy _The Double-Dealer_. This is, in fact, a
powerful drama, somewhat in the Sardou manner; but Congreve had none of
Sardou's deftness in manipulating an intrigue. Maskwell is not only a
double-dealer, but a triple--or quadruple-dealer; so that the brain soon
grows dizzy in the vortex of his villainies. The play, it may be noted,
was a failure.
There is a quite legitimate pleasure to be found, no doubt, in a complex
intrigue which is also perspicuous. Plays such as Alexandre Dumas's
_Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle_, or the pseudo-historical dramas of
Scribe-_Adrienne Lecouvreur, Bertrand et Raton, Un Verre d'Eau, Les
Trois Maupin,_ etc.--are amusing toys, like those social or military
tableaux, the figures of which you can set in motion by dropping a penny
in the slot. But the trick of this sort of "preparation" has long been
found out, and even unsophisticated audiences are scarcely to be
thrilled by it. We may accept it as a sound principle, based on common
sense and justified by experience, that an audience should never be
tempted to exclaim, "What a marvellously clever fellow is this
playwright! How infinitely cleverer than the dramatist who constructs
the tragi-comedy of life."
This is what we inevitably exclaim as we watch Victorien Sardou, in whom
French ingenuity culminated and caricatured itself, laying the
foundations of one of his labyrinthine intrigues. The absurdities of
"preparation" in this sense could scarcely be better satirized than in
the following page from Francisque Sarcey's criticism of _Nos Intimes_
(known in English as _Peril_)--a page which is intended, not as satire,
but as eulogy--
At the sixth performance, I met, during the first interact, a man of
infinite taste who ... complained of the lengthiness of this first
act: "What a lot of details," he said, "which serve no purpose, and
had better have been omitted! What is the use of that long story
about the cactus with a flower that is unique in all the world? Why
trouble us with that dahlia-root, which M. Caussade's neighbour has
thrown over the garden wall? Was it necessary to inflict on us all
that talk about the fox that plays havoc in the garden? What have we
to do with that mischievous beast? And that Tolozan, with his
endless digressions! What do we care about his ideas on love, on
metempsychosis, on friendship, etc.? All this stuff only retards
the action."
"On the contrary," I replied, "all this is just what is going to
interest you. You are impatient of these details, because you are
looking out for the scenes of passion which have been promised you.
But reflect that, without these preparations, the scenes of passion
would not touch you. That cactus-flower will play its part, you may
be sure; that dahlia-root is not there for nothing; that fox to
which you object, and of which you will hear more talk during two
more acts, will bring about the solution of one of the most
entertaining situations in all drama."
M. Sarcey does not tell us what his interlocutor replied; but he might
have said, like the hero of _Le Réveillon_: "Are you sure there is no
mistake? Are you defending Sardou, or attacking him?"
For another example of ultra-complex preparation let me turn to a play
by Mr. Sydney Grundy, entitled _The Degenerates_. Mr. Grundy, though an
adept of the Scribe school, has done so much strong and original work
that I apologize for exhuming a play in which he almost burlesqued his
own method; but for that very reason it is difficult to find a more
convincing or more deterrent example of misdirected ingenuity. The
details of the plot need not be recited. It is sufficient to say that
the curtain has not been raised ten minutes before our attention has
been drawn to the fact that a certain Lady Saumarez has her monogram on
everything she wears, even to her gloves: whence we at once foresee that
she is destined to get into a compromising situation, to escape from it,
but to leave a glove behind her. In due time the compromising situation
arrives, and we find that it not only requires a room with three
doors,[6] but that a locksmith has to be specially called in to provide
two of these doors with peculiar locks, so that, when once shut, they
cannot be opened from inside except with a key! What interest can we
take in a situation turning on such contrivances? Sane technic laughs at
locksmiths. And after all this preparation, the situation proves to be a
familiar trick of theatrical thimble-rigging: you lift the thimble, and
instead of Pea A, behold Pea B!--instead of Lady Saumarez it is Mrs.
Trevelyan who is concealed in Isidore de Lorano's bedroom. Sir William
Saumarez must be an exceedingly simple-minded person to accept the
substitution, and exceedingly unfamiliar with the French drama of the
'seventies and 'eighties. If he had his wits about him he would say: "I
know this dodge: it comes from Sardou. Lady Saumarez has just slipped
out by that door, up R., and if I look about I shall certainly find her
fan, or her glove, or her handkerchief somewhere on the premises." The
author may object that such criticism would end in paralysing the
playwright, and that, if men always profited by the lessons of the
stage, the world would long ago have become so wise that there would be
no more room in it for drama, which lives on human folly. "You will tell
me next," he may say, "that I must not make groundless jealousy the
theme of a play, because every one who has seen Othello would at once
detect the machinations of an Iago!" The retort is logically specious,
but it mistakes the point. It would certainly be rash to put any limit
to human gullibility, or to deny that Sir William Saumarez, in the given
situation, might conceivably be hoodwinked. The question is not one of
psychology but of theatrical expediency: and the point is that when a
situation is at once highly improbable in real life and exceedingly
familiar on the stage, we cannot help mentally caricaturing it as it
proceeds, and are thus prevented from lending it the provisional
credence on which interest and emotion depend.
An instructive contrast to _The Degenerates_ may be found in a nearly
contemporary play, _Mrs. Dane's Defence_, by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones. The
first three acts of this play may be cited as an excellent example of
dexterous preparation and development. Our interest in the sequence of
events is aroused, sustained, and worked up to a high tension with
consummate skill. There is no feverish overcrowding of incident, as is
so often the case in the great French story-plays--_Adrienne
Lecouvreur_, for example, or _Fédora_. The action moves onwards,
unhasting, unresting, and the finger-posts are placed just where they
are wanted.
The observance of a due proportion between preparation and result is a
matter of great moment. Even when the result achieved is in itself very
remarkable, it may be dearly purchased by a too long and too elaborate
process of preparation. A famous play which is justly chargeable with
this fault is _The Gay Lord Quex_. The third act is certainly one of the
most breathlessly absorbing scenes in modern drama; but by what long,
and serpentine, and gritty paths do we not approach it! The elaborate
series of trifling incidents by means of which Sophy Fullgarney is first
brought from New Bond Street to Fauncey Court, and then substituted for
the Duchess's maid, is at no point actually improbable; and yet we feel
that a vast effort has been made to attain an end which, owing to the
very length of the sequence of chances, at last assumes an air of
improbability. There is little doubt that the substructure of the great
scene might have been very much simpler. I imagine that Sir Arthur
Pinero was betrayed into complexity and over-elaboration by his desire
to use, as a background for his action, a study of that "curious phase
of modern life," the manicurist's parlour. To those who find this study
interesting, the disproportion between preliminaries and result may be
less apparent. It certainly did not interfere with the success of the
play in its novelty; but it may very probably curtail its lease of life.
What should we know of _The School for Scandal_ to-day, if it consisted
of nothing but the Screen Scene and two laborious acts of preparation?
A too obvious preparation is very apt to defeat its end by begetting a
perversely quizzical frame of mind in the audience. The desired effect
is discounted, like a conjuring trick in which the mechanism is too
transparent. Let me recall a trivial but instructive instance of this
error. The occasion was the first performance of _Pillars of Society_ at
the Gaiety Theatre, London--the first Ibsen performance ever given in
England. At the end of the third act, Krap, Consul Bernick's clerk,
knocks at the door of his master's office and says, "It is blowing up to
a stiff gale. Is the _Indian Girl_ to sail in spite of it?" Whereupon
Bernick, though he knows that the _Indian Girl_ is hopelessly
unseaworthy, replies, "The _Indian Girl_ is to sail in spite of it." It
had occurred to someone that the effect of this incident would be
heightened if Krap, before knocking at the Consul's door, were to
consult the barometer, and show by his demeanour that it was falling
rapidly. A barometer had accordingly been hung, up stage, near the
veranda entrance; and, as the scenic apparatus of a Gaiety matinée was
in those days always of the scantiest, it was practically the one
decoration of a room otherwise bare almost to indecency. It had stared
the audience full in the face through three long acts; and when, at the
end of the third, Krap went up to it and tapped it, a sigh of relief ran
through the house, as much as to say, "At last! so _that_ was what it
was for!"--to the no small detriment of the situation. Here the fault
lay in the obtrusiveness of the preparation. Had the barometer passed
practically unnoticed among the other details of a well-furnished hall,
it would at any rate have been innocent, and perhaps helpful. As it was,
it seemed to challenge the curiosity of the audience, saying, "I am
evidently here with some intention; guess, now, what the intention can
be!" The producer had failed in the art which conceals art.
Another little trait from a play of those far-past days illustrates the
same point. It was a drawing-room drama of the Scribe school. Near the
beginning of an act, some one spilt a bottle of red ink, and mopped it
up with his (or her) handkerchief, leaving the handkerchief on the
escritoire. The act proceeded from scene to scene, and the handkerchief
remained unnoticed; but every one in the audience who knew the rules of
the game, kept his eye on the escritoire, and was certain that that ink
had not been spilt for nothing. In due course a situation of great
intensity was reached, wherein the villain produced a pistol and fired
at the heroine, who fainted. As a matter of fact he had missed her; but
her quick-witted friend seized the gory handkerchief, and, waving it in
the air, persuaded the villain that the shot had taken deadly effect,
and that he must flee for his life. Even in those days, such an
unblushing piece of trickery was found more comic than impressive. It
was a case of preparation "giving itself away."
A somewhat later play, _The Mummy and the Humming Bird_, by Mr. Isaac
Henderson, contains a good example of over-elaborate preparation. The
Earl of Lumley, lost in his chemical studies with a more than Newtonian
absorption, suffers his young wife to form a sentimental friendship with
a scoundrel of an Italian novelist, Signor D'Orelli. Remaining at home
one evening, when Lady Lumley and a party of friends, including
D'Orelli, have gone off to dine at a restaurant, the Earl chances to
look out of the window, and observes an organ-grinder making doleful
music in the snow. His heart is touched, and he invites the music-monger
to join him in his study and share his informal dinner. The conversation
between them is carried on by means of signs, for the organ-grinder
knows no English, and the Earl is painfully and improbably ignorant of
Italian. He does not even know that Roma means Rome, and Londra, London.
This ignorance, however, is part of the author's ingenuity. It leads to
the establishment of a sort of object-speech, by aid of which the Earl
learns that his guest has come to England to prosecute a vendetta
against the man who ruined his happy Sicilian home. I need scarcely say
that this villain is none other than D'Orelli; and when at last he and
the Countess elope to Paris, the object-speech enables Giuseppe to
convey to the Earl, by aid of a brandy-bottle, a siphon, a broken plate,
and half-a-crown, not only the place of their destination, but the very
hotel to which they are going. This is a fair example of that ingenuity
for ingenuity's sake which was once thought the very essence of the
playwright's craft, but has long ago lost all attraction for intelligent
audiences.
We may take it as a rule that any scene which requires an obviously
purposeful scenic arrangement is thereby discounted. It may be strong
enough to live down the disadvantage; but a disadvantage it is none the
less. In a play of Mr. Carton's, _The Home Secretary_, a paper of great
importance was known to be contained in an official despatch-box. When
the curtain rose on the last act, it revealed this despatch-box on a
table right opposite a French window, while at the other side of the
room a high-backed arm-chair discreetly averted its face. Every one
could see at a glance that the romantic Anarchist was going to sneak in
at the window and attempt to abstract the despatch-box, while the
heroine was to lie perdue in the high-backed chair; and when, at the
fated moment, all this punctually occurred, one could scarcely repress
an "Ah!" of sarcastic satisfaction. Similarly, in an able play named Mr.
and Mrs. Daventry, Mr. Frank Harris had conceived a situation which
required that the scene should be specially built for eavesdropping.[7]
As soon as the curtain rose, and revealed a screen drawn halfway down
the stage, with a sofa ensconced behind it, we knew what to expect. Of
course Mrs. Daventry was to lie on the sofa and overhear a duologue
between her husband and his mistress: the only puzzle was to understand
why the guilty pair should neglect the precaution of looking behind the
screen. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Daventry, before she lay down,
switched off the lights, and Daventry and Lady Langham, finding the room
dark, assumed it to be empty. With astounding foolhardiness, considering
that the house was full of guests, and this a much frequented public
room, Daventry proceeded to lock the door, and continue his conversation
with Lady Langham in the firelight. Thus, when the lady's husband came
knocking at the door, Mrs. Daventry was able to rescue the guilty pair
from an apparently hopeless predicament, by calmly switching on the
lights and opening the door to Sir John Langham. The situation was
undoubtedly a "strong" one; but the tendency of modern technic is to
hold "strength" too dearly purchased at such reckless expense of
preparation.
There are, then, very clear limits to the validity of the Dumas maxim
that "The art of the theatre is the art of preparations." Certain it is
that over-preparation is the most fatal of errors. The clumsiest thing a
dramatist can possibly do is to lay a long and elaborate train for the
ignition of a squib. We take pleasure in an event which has been
"prepared" in the sense that we have been led to desire it, and have
wondered how it was to be brought about. But we scoff at an occurrence
which nothing but our knowledge of the tricks of the stage could
possibly lead us to expect, yet which, knowing these tricks, we have
foreseen from afar, and resented in advance.
* * * * *
[Footnote 1: _Of Dramatic Poesy,_ ed. Arnold, 1903, p. 60.]
[Footnote 2: _The World_, December 20, 1899.]
[Footnote 3: At the end of the first act of _Lady Inger of Ostraat_,
Ibsen evidently intends to produce a startling effect through the sudden
appearance of Olaf Skaktavl in Lady Inger's hall. But as he has totally
omitted to tell us who the strange man is, the incident has no meaning
for us. In 1855 Ibsen had all his technical lessons yet to learn.]
[Footnote 4: The fact that Mr. Phillips should have deemed such a
foreshadowing necessary shows how instinctively a dramatist feels that
the logic of his art requires him to assume that his audience is
ignorant of his fable. In reality, very few members of the first-night
audience, or of any other, can have depended on old Angela's
vaticination for the requisite foresight of events. But this does not
prove Angela to be artistically superfluous.]
[Footnote 5: See pp. 118, 240.]
[Footnote 6: There is no special harm in this: the question of exits and
entrances and their mechanism is discussed in Chapter XXIII.]
[Footnote 7: This might be said of the scene of the second act of _The
Benefit of the Doubt_; but here the actual stage-topography is natural
enough. The author, however, is rather over-anxious to emphasize the
acoustic relations of the two rooms.]
_CHAPTER XIII_
THE OBLIGATORY SCENE
I do not know whether it was Francisque Sarcey who invented the phrase
_scène à faire_; but it certainly owes its currency to that valiant
champion of the theatrical theatre, if I may so express it. Note that in
this term I intend no disrespect. My conception of the theatrical
theatre may not be exactly the same as M. Sarcey's; but at all events I
share his abhorrence of the untheatrical theatre.
What is the _scène à faire_? Sarcey has used the phrase so often, and in
so many contexts, that it is impossible to tie him down to any strict
definition. Instead of trying to do so, I will give a typical example of
the way in which he usually employs the term.
In _Les Fourchambault_, by Emile Augier, the first act introduces us to
the household of a merchant, of Havre, who has married a wealthy, but
extravagant woman, and has a son and daughter who are being gradually
corrupted by their mother's worldliness. We learn that Fourchambault,
senior, has, in his youth, betrayed a young woman who was a governess in
his family. He wanted to marry her, but his relations maligned her
character, and he cast her off; nor does he know what has become of her
and her child. In the second act we pass to the house of an energetic
and successful young shipowner named Bernard, who lives alone with his
mother. Bernard, as we divine, is secretly devoted to a young lady named
Marie Letellier, a guest in the Fourchambault house, to whom young
Leopold Fourchambault is paying undesirable attentions. One day Bernard
casually mentions to his mother that the house of Fourchambault is on
the verge of bankruptcy; nothing less than a quarter of a million francs
will enable it to tide over the crisis. Mme. Bernard, to her son's
astonishment, begs him to lend the tottering firm the sum required. He
objects that, unless the business is better managed, the loan will only
postpone the inevitable disaster. "Well, then, my son," she replied,
"you must go into partnership with M. Fourchambault." "I! with that
imbecile!" he exclaims. "My son," she says gravely, and emphatically,
"you must--it is your duty--I demand it of you!" "Ah!" cries Bernard. "I
understand--he is my father!"
After ecstatically lauding this situation and the scenes which have led
up to it, M. Sarcey continues--
When the curtain falls upon the words "He is my father," I at once
see two _scènes à faire_, and I know that they will be _faites_: the
scene between the son and the father whom he is to save, the scene
between Bernard and his half-brother Leopold, who are in love with
the same woman, the one dishonourably and the other secretly and
nobly. What will they say to each other? I have no idea. But it is
precisely this _expectation mingled with uncertainly_ that is one of
the charms of the theatre. I say to myself, "Ah, they will have an
encounter! What will come of it?" And that this is the state of mind
of the whole audience is proved by the fact that when the two
characters of the _scènes à faire_ stand face to face, a thrill of
anticipation runs round the whole theatre.
This, then, is the obligatory scene as Sarcey generally understands
it--a scene which, for one reason or another, an audience expects and
ardently desires. I have italicized the phrase "expectation mingled with
uncertainty" because it expresses in other terms the idea which I have
sought to convey in the formula "foreshadowing without forestalling."
But before we can judge of the merits of M. Sarcey's theory, we must
look into it a little more closely. I shall try, then, to state it in my
own words, in what I believe to be its most rational and
defensible form.
An obligatory scene is one which the audience (more or less clearly and
consciously) foresees and desires, and the absence of which it may with
reason resent. On a rough analysis, it will appear, I think, that there
are five ways in which a scene may become, in this sense, obligatory:
(1) It may be necessitated by the inherent logic of the theme.
(2) It may be demanded by the manifest exigencies of specifically
dramatic effect.
(3) The author himself may have rendered it obligatory by seeming
unmistakably to lead up to it.
(4) It may be required in order to justify some modification of
character or alteration of will, too important to be taken for granted.
(5) It may be imposed by history or legend.
These five classes of obligatory scenes may be docketed, respectively,
as the Logical, the Dramatic, the Structural, the Psychological, and the
Historic. M. Sarcey generally employed the term in one of the first
three senses, without clearly distinguishing between them. It is,
indeed, not always easy to determine whether the compulsion (assuming it
to exist at all) lies in the very essence of the theme or situation, or
only in the author's manipulation of it.
Was Sarcey right in assuming such a compulsion to be a constant and
dominant factor in the playwright's craft? I think we shall see reason
to believe him right in holding that it frequently arises, but wrong if
he went the length of maintaining that there can be no good play without
a definite _scène à faire_--as eighteenth-century landscape painters are
said to have held that no one could be a master of his art till he knew
where to place "the brown tree." I remember no passage in which Sarcey
explicitly lays down so hard and fast a rule, but several in which he
seems to take it for granted.[1]
It may be asked whether--and if so, why--the theory of the obligatory
scene holds good for the dramatist and not for the novelist? Perhaps it
has more application to the novel than is commonly supposed; but in so
far as it applies peculiarly to the drama, the reason is pretty clear.
It lies in the strict concentration imposed on the dramatist, and the
high mental tension which is, or ought to be, characteristic of the
theatrical audience. The leisurely and comparatively passive
novel-reader may never miss a scene which an audience, with its
instincts of logic and of economy keenly alert, may feel to be
inevitable. The dramatist is bound to extract from his material the last
particle of that particular order of effect which the stage, and the
stage alone, can give us. If he fails to do so, we feel that there has
been no adequate justification for setting in motion all the complex
mechanism of the theatre. His play is like a badly-designed engine in
which a large part of the potential energy is dissipated to no purpose.
The novelist, with a far wider range of effects at his command, and
employing no special mechanism to bring them home to us, is much more
free to select and to reject. He is exempt from the law of rigid economy
to which the dramatist must submit. Far from being bound to do things in
the most dramatic way, he often does wisely in rejecting that course, as
unsuited to his medium. Fundamentally, no doubt, the same principle
applies to both arts, but with a wholly different stringency in the case
of the drama. "Advisable" in the novelist's vocabulary is translated by
"imperative" in the dramatist's. The one is playing a long-drawn game,
in which the loss of a trick or two need not prove fatal; the other has
staked his all on a single rubber.
* * * * *
Obligatory scenes of the first type--those necessitated by the inherent
logic of the theme--can naturally arise only in plays to which a
definite theme can be assigned. If we say that woman's claim to possess
a soul of her own, even in marriage, is the theme of _A Doll's House_,
then evidently the last great balancing of accounts between Nora and
Helmer is an obligatory scene. It would have been quite possible for
Ibsen to have completed the play without any such scene: he might, for
instance, have let Nora fulfil her intention of drowning herself; but in
that case his play would have been merely a tragic anecdote with the
point omitted. We should have felt vague intimations of a general idea
hovering in the air, but it would have remained undefined and
undeveloped. As we review, however, the series of Ibsen's plays, and
notice how difficult it is to point to any individual scene and say,
"This was clearly the _scène à faire_," we feel that, though the phrase
may express a useful idea in a conveniently brief form, there is no
possibility of making the presence or absence of a _scène à faire_ a
general test of dramatic merit. In _The Wild Duck_, who would not say
that, theoretically, the scene in which Gregers opens Hialmar's eyes to
the true history of his marriage was obligatory in the highest degree?
Yet Ibsen, as a matter of fact, does not present it to us: he sends the
two men off for "a long walk" together: and who does not feel that this
is a stroke of consummate art? In _Rosmersholm_, as we know, he has
been accused of neglecting, not merely the scene, but the play, _à
faire_; but who will now maintain that accusation? In _John Gabriel
Borhman_, if we define the theme as the clash of two devouring egoisms,
Ibsen has, in the third act, given us the obligatory scene; but he has
done it, unfortunately, with an enfeebled hand; whereas the first and
second acts, though largely expository, and even (in the Foldal scene)
episodic, rank with his greatest achievements.
For abundant examples of scenes rendered obligatory by the logic of the
theme, we have only to turn to the works of those remorseless
dialecticians, MM. Hervieu and Brieux. In such a play as _La Course du
Flambeau_, there is scarcely a scene that may not be called an
obligatory deduction from the thesis duly enunciated, with no small
parade of erudition, in the first ten minutes of the play. It is that,
in handing on the _vital lampada_, as Plato and "le bon poète Lucrèce"
express it, the love of the parent for the child becomes a devouring
mania, to which everything else is sacrificed, while the love of the
child for the parent is a tame and essentially selfish emotion,
absolutely powerless when it comes into competition with the passions
which are concerned with the transmission of the vital flame. This
theorem having been stated, what is the first obligatory scene?
Evidently one in which a mother shall refuse a second marriage, with a
man whom she loves, because it would injure the prospects and wound the
feelings of her adored daughter. Then, when the adored daughter herself
marries, the mother must make every possible sacrifice for her, and the
daughter must accept them all with indifference, as mere matters of
course. But what is the final, triumphant proof of the theorem? Why, of
course, the mother must kill her mother to save the daughter's life! And
this ultra-obligatory scene M. Hervieu duly serves up to us.
Marie-Jeanne (the daughter) is ordered to the Engadine; Sabine (the
mother) is warned that Madame Fontenais (the grandmother) must not go to
that altitude on pain of death; but, by a series of violently artificial
devices, things are so arranged that Marie-Jeanne cannot go unless
Madame Fontenais goes too; and Sabine, rather than endanger her
daughter's recovery, does not hesitate to let her mother set forth,
unwittingly, to her doom. In the last scene of all, Marie-Jeanne
light-heartedly prepares to leave her mother and go off with her husband
to the ends of the earth; Sabine learns that the man she loved and
rejected for Marie-Jeanne's sake is for ever lost to her; and, to
complete the demonstration, Madame Fontenais falls dead at her feet.
These scenes are unmistakably _scènes à faire_, dictated by the logic of
the theme; but they belong to a conception of art in which the free
rhythms of life are ruthlessly sacrificed to the needs of a
demonstration. Obligatory scenes of this order are mere diagrams drawn
with ruler and compass--the obligatory illustrations of an extravagantly
over-systematic lecture.
M. Brieux in some of his plays (not in all) is no less logic-ridden than
M. Hervieu. Take, for instance, _Les Trois Filles de M. Dupont_: every
character is a term in a syllogism, every scene is dictated by an
imperious craving for symmetry. The main theorem may be stated in some
such terms as these: "The French marriage system is immoral and
abominable; yet the married woman is, on the whole, less pitiable than
her unmarried sisters." In order to prove this thesis in due form, we
begin at the beginning, and show how the marriage of Antonin Mairaut and
Julie Dupont is brought about by the dishonest cupidity of the parents
on both sides. The Duponts flatter themselves that they have cheated the
Mairauts, the Mairauts that they have swindled the Duponts; while
Antonin deliberately simulates artistic tastes to deceive Julie, and
Julie as deliberately makes a show of business capacity in order to take
in Antonin. Every scene between father and daughter is balanced by a
corresponding scene between mother and son. Every touch of hypocrisy on
the one side is scrupulously set off against a trait of dishonesty on
the other. Julie's passion for children is emphasized, Antonin's
aversion from them is underlined. But lest he should be accused of
seeing everything in black, M. Brieux will not make the parents
altogether detestable. Still holding the balance true, he lets M.
Mairaut on the one side, and Madame Dupont on the other, develop amiable
impulses, and protest, at a given moment, against the infamies committed
and countenanced by their respective spouses. And in the second and
third acts, the edifice of deception symmetrically built up in the first
act is no less symmetrically demolished. The parents expose and denounce
each other's villainies; Julie and Antonin, in a great scene of conjugal
recrimination, lay bare the hypocrisies of allurement that have brought
them together. Julie then determines to escape from the loathsome
prison-house of her marriage; and this brings us to the second part of
the theorem. The title shows that Julie has two sisters; but hitherto
they have remained in the background. Why do they exist at all? Why has
Providence blessed M. Dupont with "three fair daughters and no more"?
Because Providence foresaw exactly the number M. Brieux would require
for his demonstration. Are there not three courses open to a penniless
woman in our social system--marriage, wage-earning industry, and
wage-earning profligacy? Well, M. Dupont must have one daughter to
represent each of these contingencies. Julie has illustrated the
miseries of marriage; Caroline and Angèle shall illustrate respectively
the still greater miseries of unmarried virtue and unmarried vice. When
Julie declares her intention of breaking away from the house of bondage,
her sisters rise up symmetrically, one on either hand, and implore her
rather to bear the ills she has than to fly to others that she knows not
of. "Symmetry of symmetries, all is symmetry" in the poetics of M.
Brieux. But life does not fall into such obvious patterns. The
obligatory scene which is imposed upon us, not by the logic of life, but
by the logic of demonstration, is not a _scène à faire_, but a _scène
à fuir_.
Mr. Bernard Shaw, in some sense the Brieux of the English theatre, is
not a man to be dominated by logic, or by anything else under the sun.
He has, however, given us one or two excellent examples of the
obligatory scene in the true and really artistic sense of the term. The
scene of Candida's choice between Eugene and Morell crowns the edifice
of _Candida_ as nothing else could. Given the characters and their
respective attitudes towards life, this sententious thrashing-out of the
situation was inevitable. So, too, in _Mrs. Warren's Profession_, the
great scene of the second act between Vivie and her mother is a superb
example of a scene imposed by the logic of the theme. On the other hand,
in Mr. Henry Arthur Jones's finely conceived, though unequal, play,
_Michael and his Lost Angel_, we miss what was surely an obligatory
scene. The play is in fact a contest between the paganism of Audrie
Lesden and the ascetic, sacerdotal idealism of Michael Feversham. In the
second act, paganism snatches a momentary victory; and we confidently
expect, in the third act, a set and strenuous effort on Audrie's part to
break down in theory the ascetic ideal which has collapsed in practice.
It is probable enough that she might not succeed in dragging her lover
forth from what she regards as the prison-house of a superstition; but
the logic of the theme absolutely demands that she should make the
attempt. Mr. Jones has preferred to go astray after some comparatively
irrelevant and commonplace matter, and has thus left his play
incomplete. So, too, in _The Triumph of the Philistines_, Mr. Jones
makes the mistake of expecting us to take a tender interest in a pair of
lovers who have had never a love-scene to set our interest agoing. They
are introduced to each other in the first act, and we shrewdly suspect
(for in the theatre we are all inveterate match-makers) that they are
going to fall in love; but we have not the smallest positive evidence of
the fact before we find, in the second act, that misunderstandings have
arisen, and the lady declines to look at the gentleman. The actress who
played the part at the St. James's Theatre was blamed for failing to
enlist our sympathies in this romance; but what actress can make much of
a love part which, up to the very last moment, is all suspicion and
jealousy? Fancy _Romeo and Juliet_ with the love-scenes omitted, "by
special request!"
* * * * *
In a second class, according to our analysis, we place the obligatory
scene which is imposed by "the manifest exigencies of specifically
dramatic effect." Here it must of course be noted that the conception of
"specifically dramatic effect" varies in some degree, from age to age,
from generation to generation, and even, one may almost say, from
theatre to theatre. Scenes of violence and slaughter were banished from
the Greek theatre, mainly, no doubt, because rapid movement was rendered
difficult by the hieratic trappings of the actors, and was altogether
foreign to the spirit of tragedy; but it can scarcely be doubted that
the tragic poets were the less inclined to rebel against this
convention, because they extracted "specifically dramatic effects" of a
very high order out of their "messenger-scenes." Even in the modern
theatre we are thrilled by the description of Hippolytus dragged at his
own chariot wheel, or Creusa and Creon devoured by Medea's veil of
fire.[2] On the Elizabethan stage, the murder of Agamemnon would no
doubt have been "subjected to our faithful eyes" like the blinding of
Gloucester or the suffocation of Edward II; but who shall say that there
is less "specifically dramatic effect" in Aeschylus's method of
mirroring the scene in the clairvoyant ecstasy of Cassandra? I am much
inclined to think that the dramatic effect of highly emotional narrative
is underrated in the modern theatre.
Again, at one class of theatre, the author of a sporting play--is bound
to exhibit a horse-race on the stage, or he is held to have shirked his
obligatory scene. At another class of theatre, we shall have a scene,
perhaps, in a box in the Grand Stand, where some Lady Gay Spanker shall
breathlessly depict, from start to finish, the race which is visible to
her, but invisible to the audience. At a third class of the theatre, the
"specifically dramatic effect" to be extracted from a horse-race is
found in a scene in a Black-Country slum, where a group of working-men
and women are feverishly awaiting the evening paper which shall bring
them the result of the St. Leger, involving for some of them
opulence--to the extent, perhaps, of a £5 note--and for others ruin.[3]
The difficulty of deciding that any one form of scene is predestined by
the laws of dramatic effect is illustrated in Tolstoy's grisly drama,
_The Power of Darkness_. The scene in which Nikita kills Akoulina's
child was felt to be too horrible for representation; whereupon the
author wrote an alternative scene between Mitritch and Anna, which
passes simultaneously with the murder scene, in an adjoining room. The
two scenes fulfil exactly the same function in the economy of the play;
it can be acted with either of them, it might be acted with both; and it
is impossible to say which produces the intenser or more "specifically
dramatic effect."
The fact remains, however, that there is almost always a dramatic and
undramatic, a more dramatic and a less dramatic, way of doing a thing;
and an author who allows us to foresee and expect a dramatic way of
attaining a given end, and then chooses an undramatic or less dramatic
way, is guilty of having missed the obligatory scene. For a general
discussion of what we mean by the terms "dramatic" and "undramatic" the
reader may refer back to Chapter III. Here I need only give one or two
particular illustrations.
It will be remembered that one of the _scènes à faire_ which M. Sarcey
foresaw in _Les Fourchambault_ was the encounter between the two
brothers; the illegitimate Bernard and the legitimate Leopold. It would
have been quite possible, and quite natural, to let the action of the
play work itself out without any such encounter; or to let the encounter
take place behind the scenes; but this would have been a patent ignoring
of dramatic possibilities, and M. Sarcey would have had ample reason to
pour the vials of his wrath on Augier's head. He was right, however, in
his confidence that Augier would not fail to "make" the scene. And how
did he "make" it? The one thing inevitable about it was that the truth
should be revealed to Leopold; but there were a dozen different ways in
which that might have been effected. Perhaps, in real life, Bernard
would have said something to this effect: "Young man, you are making
questionable advances to a lady in whom I am interested. I beg that you
will cease to persecute her; and if you ask by what right I do so, I
reply that I am in fact your elder brother, that I have saved our father
from ruin, that I am henceforth the predominant partner in his business,
and that, if you do not behave yourself, I shall see that your allowance
is withdrawn, and that you have no longer the means to lead an idle and
dissolute life." This would have been an ungracious but not unnatural
way of going about the business. Had Augier chosen it, we should have
had no right to complain on the score of probability; but it would have
been evident to the least imaginative that he had left the specifically
dramatic opportunities of the scene entirely undeveloped. Let us now see
what he actually did. Marie Letellier, compromised by Leopold's conduct,
has left the Fourchambault house and taken refuge with Mme. Bernard.
Bernard loves her devotedly, but does not dream that she can see
anything in his uncouth personality, and imagines that she loves
Leopold. Accordingly, he determines that Leopold shall marry her, and
tells him so. Leopold scoffs at the idea; Bernard insists; and little by
little the conflict rises to a tone of personal altercation. At last
Leopold says something slighting of Mile. Letellier, and Bernard--who,
be it noted, has begun with no intention of revealing the kinship
between them--loses his self-control and cries, "Ah, there speaks the
blood of the man who slandered a woman in order to prevent his son from
keeping his word to her. I recognize in you your grandfather, who was a
miserable calumniator." "Repeat that word!" says Leopold. Bernard does
so, and the other strikes him across the face with his glove. For a
perceptible interval Bernard struggles with his rage in silence, and
then: "It is well for you," he cries, "that you are my brother!"
We need not follow the scene in the sentimental turning which it then
takes, whereby it comes about, of course, that Bernard, not Leopold,
marries Mile. Letellier. The point is that Augier has justified Sarcey's
confidence by making the scene thoroughly and specifically dramatic; in
other words, by charging it with emotion, and working up the tension to
a very high pitch. And Sarcey was no doubt right in holding that this
was what the whole audience instinctively expected, and that they would
have been more or less consciously disappointed had the author baulked
their expectation.
An instructive example of the failure to "make" a dramatically
obligatory scene may be found in _Agatha_ by Mrs. Humphry Ward and Mr.
Louis Parker. Agatha is believed to be the child of Sir Richard and Lady
Fancourt; but at a given point she learns that a gentleman whom she has
known all her life as "Cousin Ralph" is in reality her father. She has a
middle-aged suitor, Colonel Ford, whom she is very willing to marry; but
at the end of the second act she refuses him, because she shrinks from
the idea, on the one hand, of concealing the truth from him, on the
other hand, of revealing her mother's trespass. This is not, in itself,
a very strong situation, for we feel the barrier between the lovers to
be unreal. Colonel Ford is a man of sense. The secret of Agatha's
parentage can make no real difference to him. Nothing material--no point
of law or of honour--depends on it. He will learn the truth, and all
will come right between them. The only point on which our interest can
centre is the question how he is to learn the truth; and here the
authors go very far astray. There are two, and only two, really dramatic
ways in which Colonel Ford can be enlightened. Lady Fancourt must
realize that Agatha is wrecking her life to keep her mother's secret,
and must either herself reveal it to Colonel Ford, or must encourage and
enjoin Agatha to do so. Now, the authors choose neither of these ways:
the secret slips out, through a chance misunderstanding in a
conversation between Sir Richard Fancourt and the Colonel. This is a
typical instance of an error of construction; and why?--because it
leaves to chance what should be an act of will. Drama means a thing
done, not merely a thing that happens; and the playwright who lets
accident effect what might naturally and probably be a result of
volition, or, in other words, of character, sins against the fundamental
law of his craft. In the case before us, Lady Fancourt and Agatha--the
two characters on whom our interest is centred--are deprived of all
share in one of the crucial moments of the action. Whether the actual
disclosure was made by the mother or by the daughter, there ought to
have been a great scene between the two, in which the mother should have
insisted that, by one or other, the truth must be told. It would have
been a painful, a delicate, a difficult scene, but it was the obligatory
scene of the play; and had we been allowed clearly to foresee it at the
end of the second act, our interest would have been decisively carried
forward. The scene, too, might have given the play a moral relevance
which in fact it lacks. The readjustment of Agatha's scheme of things,
so as to make room for her mother's history, might have been made
explicit and partly intellectual, instead of implicit, inarticulate and
wholly emotional.
This case, then, clearly falls under our second heading. We cannot say
that it is the logic of the theme which demands the scene, for no thesis
or abstract idea is enunciated. Nor can we say that the course of events
is unnatural or improbable; our complaint is that, without being at all
less natural, they might have been highly dramatic, and that in fact
they are not so.