before remarked, the last act is almost an independent comedy. Had the
play ended with the fourth act, no one would have felt that anything was
lacking; so that in his fifth act, Ibsen was not so much grappling with
an urgent technical problem, as amusing himself by wringing the last
drop of humour out of the given situation. A more strictly apposite
example may be found in Sir Arthur Pinero's play, _His House in Order_.
Here the action undoubtedly culminates in the great scene between Nina
and Hilary Jesson in the third act; yet we await with eager anticipation
the discomfiture of the Ridgeley family; and when we realize that it is
to be brought about by the disclosure to Filmer of Annabel's secret, the
manifest rightness of the proceeding gives us a little shock of
pleasure. Mr. Somerset Maugham, again, in the last act of _Grace_,
employs an ingenious device to keep the tension at a high pitch. The
matter of the act consists mainly of a debate as to whether Grace Insole
ought, or ought not, to make a certain painful avowal to her husband. As
the negative opinion was to carry the day, Mr. Maugham saw that there
was grave danger that the final scene might appear an almost ludicrous
anticlimax. To obviate this, he made Grace, at the beginning of the act,
write a letter of confession, and address it to Claude; so that all
through the discussion we had at the back of our mind the question "Will
the letter reach his hands? Will the sword of Damocles fall?" This may
seem like a leaf from the book of Sardou; but in reality it was a
perfectly natural and justified expedient. It kept the tension alive
throughout a scene of ethical discussion, interesting in itself, but
pretty clearly destined to lead up to the undramatic alternative--a
policy of silence and inaction. Mr. Clyde Fitch, in the last act of _The
Truth_, made an elaborate and daring endeavour to relieve the
mawkishness of the clearly-foreseen reconciliation between Warder and
Becky. He let Becky fall in with her father's mad idea of working upon
Warder's compassion by pretending that she had tried to kill herself.
Only at the last moment did she abandon the sordid comedy, and so prove
herself (as we are asked to suppose) cured for ever of the habit of
fibbing. Mr. Fitch here showed good technical insight marred by
over-hasty execution. That Becky should be tempted to employ her old
methods, and should overcome the temptation, was entirely right; but the
actual deception attempted was so crude and hopeless that there was no
plausibility in her consenting to it, and no merit in her desisting
from it.
In light comedy and farce it is even more desirable than in serious
drama to avoid a tame and perfunctory last act. Very often a seemingly
trivial invention will work wonders in keeping the interest afoot. In
Mr. Anstey's delightful farce, _The Brass Bottle_, one looked forward
rather dolefully to a flat conclusion; but by the simple device of
letting the Jinny omit to include Pringle in his "act of oblivion," the
author is enabled to make his last scene quite as amusing as any of its
predecessors. Mr. Arnold Bennett, in _The Honeymoon_, had the audacity
to play a deliberate trick on the audience, in order to evade an
anticlimax. Seeing that his third act could not at best be very good, he
purposely put the audience on a false scent, made it expect an
absolutely commonplace ending (the marriage of Flora to Charles Haslam),
and then substituted one which, if not very brilliant, was at least
ingenious and unforeseen. Thus, by defeating the expectation of a
superlatively bad act, he made a positively insignificant act seem
comparatively good. Such feats of craftsmanship are entertaining, but
too dangerous to be commended for imitation.
In some modern plays a full close is achieved by the simple expedient of
altogether omitting the last act, or last scene, and leaving the end of
the play to the imagination. This method is boldly and (I understand)
successfully employed by Mr. Edward Sheldon in his powerful play, _The
Nigger_. Philip Morrow, the popular Governor of one of the Southern
States, has learnt that his grandmother was a quadroon, and that
consequently he has in him a much-attenuated strain of African blood. In
the Southern States, attenuation matters nothing: if the remotest
filament of a man's ancestry runs back to Africa, he is "a nigger all
right." Philip has just suppressed a race-riot in the city, and, from
the balcony of the State Capitol, is to address the troops who have
aided him, and the assembled multitude. Having resolutely parted from
the woman he adores, but can no longer marry, he steps out upon the
balcony to announce that he is a negro, that he resigns the
Governorship, and that henceforth he casts in his lot with his black
brethren. The stage-direction runs thus--
The afternoon sun strikes his figure. At his appearance a shout goes
up--long, steady, enthusiastic cheering; and, after a moment, the
big regimental band begins playing, very slowly, "My Country, 'tis
of Thee." ... All the people in the room are smiling and applauding
enthusiastically; and--as Phil in vain raises his hand for silence,
and the band crashes through the National Anthem, and the roar of
voices still rises from below--
THE CURTAIN FALLS.
One does not know whether to praise Mr. Sheldon for having adroitly
avoided an anticlimax, or to reproach him with having unblushingly
shirked a difficulty. To my sense, the play has somewhat the air of a
hexameter line with the spondee cut off.[5] One _does_ want to see the
peripety through. But if the audience is content to imagine the sequel,
Mr. Sheldon's craftsmanship is justified, and there is no more to be
said. M. Brieux experienced some difficulty in bringing his early play,
_Blanchette_, to a satisfactory close. The third act which he originally
wrote was found unendurably cynical; a more agreeable third act was
condemned as an anticlimax; and for some time the play was presented
with no third act at all. It did not end, but simply left off. No doubt
it is better that a play should stop in the middle than that it should
drag on tediously and ineffectually. But it would be foolish to make a
system of such an expedient. It is, after all, an evasion, not a
solution, of the artist's problem.
An incident which occurred during the rehearsals for the first
production of _A Doll's House_, at the Novelty Theatre, London,
illustrates the difference between the old, and what was then the new,
fashion of ending a play. The business manager of the company, a man of
ripe theatrical experience, happened to be present one day when Miss
Achurch and Mr. Waring were rehearsing the last great scene between Nora
and Helmar. At the end of it, he came up to me, in a state of high
excitement. "This is a fine play!" he said. "This is sure to be a big
thing!" I was greatly pleased. "If this scene, of all others," I
thought, "carries a man like Mr. Smith off his feet, it cannot fail to
hold the British public." But I was somewhat dashed when, a day or two
later, Mr. Smith came up to me again, in much less buoyant spirits. "I
made a mistake about that scene," he said. "They tell me it's the end of
the _last_ act--I thought it was the end of the _first_!"
* * * * *
[Footnote 1: The reader who wishes to pursue the theme may do so to
excellent advantage in Professor Bradley's _Shakespearean Tragedy_.]
[Footnote 2: It is true that in _A Doll's House_, Dr. Rank announces his
approaching demise: but he does not actually die, nor is his fate an
essential part of the action of the play.]
[Footnote 3: The duel, even in countries whose customs permit of it, is
essentially an inartistic end; for it leaves the catastrophe to be
decided either by Chance or Providence--two equally inadmissible
arbiters in modern drama. Alexandre Dumas _fils_, in his preface to
_Héloïse Paranquet_, condemns the duel as a dramatic expedient. "Not to
mention," he says, "the fact that it has been much over-done, we are
bound to recognize that Providence, in a fit of absence of mind,
sometimes suffers the rascal to kill the honest man. Let me recommend my
young colleagues," he proceeds, "never to end a piece which pretends to
reproduce a phase of real life, by an intervention of chance." The
recommendation came rather oddly from the dramatist who, in
_L'Etrangère_, had disposed of his "vibrion," the Duc de Septmonts, by
making Clarkson kill him in a duel. Perhaps he did not reckon
_L'Etrangère_ as pretending to reproduce a phase of real life. A duel
is, of course, perfectly admissible in a French or German play, simply
as part of a picture of manners. Its stupid inconclusiveness may be the
very point to be illustrated. It is only when represented as a moral
arbitrament that it becomes an anachronism.]
[Footnote 4: I am glad to see, from Mr. Malcolm Salaman's introduction
to the printed play, that, even in those days of our hot youth, my own
aesthetic principles were less truculent.]
[Footnote 5: This image is sometimes suggested by an act-ending which
leaves a marked situation obviously unresolved. The curtain should never
be dropped at such a point as to leave the characters in a physical or
mental attitude which cannot last for more than a moment, and must
certainly be followed, then and there, by important developments. In
other words, a situation ought not to be cut short at the very height of
its tension, but only when it has reached a point of--at any rate
momentary--relaxation.]
_BOOK V_
EPILOGUE
_CHAPTER XXII_
CHARACTER AND PSYCHOLOGY
For the invention and ordering of incident it is possible, if not to lay
down rules, at any rate to make plausible recommendations; but the power
to observe, to penetrate, and to reproduce character can neither be
acquired nor regulated by theoretical recommendations. Indirectly, of
course, all the technical discussions of the previous chapters tend, or
ought to tend, towards the effective presentment of character; for
construction, in drama of any intellectual quality, has no other end.
But specific directions for character-drawing would be like rules for
becoming six feet high. Either you have it in you, or you have it not.
Under the heading of character, however, two points arise which may be
worth a brief discussion: first, ought we always to aim at development
in character? second, what do we, or ought we to, mean by "psychology"?
It is a frequent critical complaint that in such-and-such a character
there is "no development": that it remains the same throughout a play;
or (so the reproach is sometimes worded) that it is not a character but
an invariable attitude. A little examination will show us, I think,
that, though the critic may in these cases be pointing to a real fault,
he does not express himself quite accurately.
What is character? For the practical purposes of the dramatist, it may
be defined as a complex of intellectual, emotional, and nervous habits.
Some of these habits are innate and temperamental--habits formed, no
doubt, by far-off ancestors.[1] But this distinction does not here
concern us. Temperamental bias is a habit, like another, only somewhat
older, and, therefore, harder to deflect or eradicate. What do we imply,
then, when we complain that, in a given character, no development has
taken place? We imply that he ought, within the limits of the play, to
have altered the mental habits underlying his speech and actions. But is
this a reasonable demand? Is it consistent with the usual and desirable
time-limits of drama? In the long process of a novel, there may be time
for the gradual alteration of habits: in the drama, which normally
consists of a single crisis, any real change of character would have to
be of a catastrophic nature, in which experience does not encourage us
to put much faith. It was, indeed--as Dryden pointed out in a passage
quoted above[2]--one of the foibles of our easy-going ancestors to treat
character as practically reversible when the time approached for ringing
down the curtain. The same convention survives to this day in certain
forms of drama. Even Ibsen, in his earlier work, had not shaken it off;
witness the sudden ennoblement of Bernick in _Pillars of Society_. But
it can scarcely be that sort of "development" which the critics consider
indispensable. What is it, then, that they have in mind?
By "development" of character, I think they mean, not change, but rather
unveiling, disclosure. They hold, not unreasonably, that a dramatic
crisis ought to disclose latent qualities in the persons chiefly
concerned in it, and involve, not, indeed, a change, but, as it were, an
exhaustive manifestation of character. The interest of the highest order
of drama should consist in the reaction of character to a series of
crucial experiences. We should, at the end of a play, know more of the
protagonist's character than he himself, or his most intimate friend,
could know at the beginning; for the action should have been such as to
put it to some novel and searching test. The word "development" might be
very aptly used in the photographic sense. A drama ought to bring out
character as the photographer's chemicals "bring out" the forms latent
in the negative. But this is quite a different thing from development in
the sense of growth or radical change. In all modern drama, there is
perhaps no character who "develops," in the ordinary sense of the word,
so startlingly as Ibsen's Nora; and we cannot but feel that the poet has
compressed into a week an evolution which, in fact, would have demanded
many months.
The complaint that a character preserves the same attitude throughout
means (if it be justified) that it is not a human being at all, but a
mere embodiment of two or three characteristics which are fully
displayed within the first ten minutes, and then keep on repeating
themselves, like a recurrent decimal. Strong theatrical effects can be
produced by this method, which is that of the comedy of types, or of
"humors." But it is now generally, and rightly, held that a character
should be primarily an individual, and only incidentally (if at all)
capable of classification under this type or that. It is a little
surprising to find Sarcey, so recently as 1889, laying it down that "a
character is a master faculty or passion, which absorbs all the rest....
To study and paint a character is, therefore, by placing a man in a
certain number of situations, to show how this principal motive force in
his nature annihilates or directs all those which, if he had been
another man, would probably have come into action." This dogma of the
"ruling passion" belongs rather to the eighteenth century than to the
close of the nineteenth.
* * * * *
We come now to the second of the questions above propounded, which I
will state more definitely in this form: Is "psychology" simply a more
pedantic term for "character-drawing"? Or can we establish a distinction
between the two ideas? I do not think that, as a matter of fact, any
difference is generally and clearly recognized; but I suggest that it is
possible to draw a distinction which might, if accepted, prove
serviceable both to critics and to playwrights.
Let me illustrate my meaning by an example. In _Bella Donna_, by Messrs.
Robert Hichens and James B. Fagan, we have a murder-story of a not
uncommon or improbable type. A woman of very shady reputation marries an
amiable idealist who is infatuated with her. She naturally finds his
idealism incomprehensible and his amiability tedious. His position as
heir-presumptive to a peerage is shattered by the birth of an
heir-apparent. She becomes passionately enamoured of an Egyptian
millionaire; and she sets to work to poison her husband with
sugar-of-lead, provided by her oriental lover. How her criminal purpose
is thwarted by a wise Jewish physician is nothing to the present
purpose. In intent she is a murderess, no less than Lucrezia Borgia or
the Marquise de Brinvilliers. And the authors have drawn her character
cleverly enough. They have shown her in the first act as a
shallow-souled materialist, and in the later acts as a vain, irritable,
sensual, unscrupulous creature. But have they given us any insight into
her psychology? No, that is just what they have not done. They have
assigned to her certain characteristics without which cruel and
cold-blooded murder would be inconceivable; but they have afforded us no
insight into the moral conditions and, mental processes which make it,
not only conceivable, but almost an everyday occurrence. For the average
human mind, I suppose, the psychology of crime, and especially of
fiendish, hypocritical murder-by-inches, has an undeniable fascination.
To most of us it seems an abhorrent miracle; and it would interest us
greatly to have it brought more or less within the range of our
comprehension, and co-ordinated with other mental phenomena which we can
and do understand. But of such illumination we find nothing in _Bella
Donna_. It leaves the working of a poisoner's mind as dark to us as
ever. So far as that goes, we might just as well have read the report of
a murder-trial, wherein the facts are stated with, perhaps, some
superficial speculation as to motive, but no attempt is made to
penetrate to underlying soul-states. Yet this is surely the highest
privilege of art--to take us behind and beneath those surfaces of things
which are apparent to the detective and the reporter, the juryman and
the judge.
Have we not here, then, the distinction between character-drawing and
psychology? Character-drawing is the presentment of human nature in its
commonly-recognized, understood, and accepted aspects; psychology is, as
it were, the exploration of character, the bringing of hitherto
unsurveyed tracts within the circle of our knowledge and comprehension.
In other words, character-drawing is synthetic, psychology analytic.
This does not mean that the one is necessarily inferior to the other.
Some of the greatest masterpieces of creative art have been achieved by
the synthesis of known elements. Falstaff, for example--there is no more
brilliant or more living character in all fiction; yet it is impossible
to say that Shakespeare has here taken us into previously unplumbed
depths of human nature, as he has in Hamlet, or in Lear. No doubt it is
often very hard to decide whether a given personage is a mere projection
of the known or a divination of the unknown. What are we to say, for
example, of Cleopatra, or of Shylock, or of Macbeth? Richard II, on the
other hand, is as clearly a piece of psychology as the Nurse in _Romeo
and Juliet_ is a piece of character-drawing. The comedy of types
necessarily tends to keep within the limits of the known, and
Molière--in spite of Alceste and Don Juan--is characteristically a
character-drawer, as Racine is characteristically a psychologist. Ibsen
is a psychologist or he is nothing. Earl Skule and Bishop Nicholas,
Hedda Gabler and John Gabriel Borkman are daring explorations of
hitherto uncharted regions of the human soul. But Ibsen, too, was a
character-drawer when it suited him. One is tempted to say that there is
no psychology in Brand--he is a mere incarnation of intransigent
idealism--while Peer Gynt is as brilliant a psychological inspiration as
Don Quixote. Dr. Stockmann is a vigorously-projected character, Hialmar
Ekdal a piece of searching psychology. Finally, my point could scarcely
be better illustrated than by a comparison--cruel but instructive
--between Rebecca in _Rosmersholm_ and the heroine in _Bella
Donna_. Each is, in effect, a murderess, though it was a moral, not a
mineral, poison that Rebecca employed. But while we know nothing
whatever of Mrs. Armine's mental processes, Rebecca's temptations,
struggles, sophistries, hesitations, resolves, and revulsions of feeling
are all laid bare to us, so that we feel her to be no monster, but a
living woman, comprehensible to our intelligence, and, however
blameworthy, not wholly beyond the range of our sympathies. There are
few greater achievements of psychology.
Among the playwrights of to-day, I should call Mr. Granville Barker
above all things a psychologist. It is his instinct to venture into
untrodden fields of character, or, at any rate, to probe deeply into
phenomena which others have noted but superficially, if at all. Hence
the occasional obscurity of his dialogue. Mr. Shaw is not, primarily,
either a character-drawer or a psychologist, but a dealer in personified
ideas. His leading figures are, as a rule, either his mouthpieces or his
butts. When he gives us a piece of real character-drawing, it is
generally in some subordinate personage. Mr. Galsworthy, I should say,
shows himself a psychologist in _Strife_, a character-drawer in _The
Silver Box_ and _Justice_. Sir Arthur Pinero, a character-drawer of
great versatility, becomes a psychologist in some of his studies of
feminine types--in Iris, in Letty, in the luckless heroine of
_Mid-Channel_. Mr. Clyde Fitch had, at least, laudable ambitions in the
direction of psychology. Becky in _The Truth_, and Jinny in _The Girl
with the Green Eyes_, in so far as they are successfully drawn, really
do mean a certain advance on our knowledge of feminine human nature.
Unfortunately, owing to the author's over-facile and over-hasty method
of work, they are now and then a little out of drawing. The most
striking piece of psychology known to me in American drama is the Faith
Healer in William Vaughn Moody's drama of that name. If the last act of
_The Faith Healer_ were as good as the rest of it, one might safely call
it the finest play ever written, at any rate in the English language,
beyond the Atlantic. The psychologists of the modern French stage, I
take it, are M. de Curel and M. de Porto-Riche. MM. Brieux and Hervieu
are, like Mr. Shaw, too much concerned with ideas to probe very deep
into character. In Germany, Hauptmann, and, so far as I understand him,
Wedekind, are psychologists, Sudermann, a vigorous character-drawer.
It is pretty clear that, if this distinction were accepted, it would be
of use to the critic, inasmuch as we should have two terms for two
ideas, instead of one popular term with a rather pedantic synonym. But
what would be its practical use to the artist, the craftsman? Simply
this, that if the word "psychology" took on for him a clear and definite
meaning, it might stimulate at once his imagination and his ambition.
Messrs. Hichens and Fagan, for example, might have asked themselves--or
each other--"Are we getting beneath the surface of this woman's nature?
Are we plucking the heart out of her mystery? Cannot we make the
specific processes of a murderess's mind clearer to ourselves and to our
audiences?" Whether they would have been capable of rising to the
opportunity, I cannot tell; but in the case of other authors one not
infrequently feels: "This man could have taken us deeper into this
problem if he had only thought of it." I do not for a moment mean that
every serious dramatist should always be aiming at psychological
exploration. The character-drawer's appeal to common knowledge and
instant recognition is often all that is required, or that would be in
place. But there are also occasions not a few when the dramatist shows
himself unequal to his opportunities if he does not at least attempt to
bring hitherto unrecorded or unscrutinized phases of character within
the scope of our understanding and our sympathies.
* * * * *
[Footnote 1: If this runs counter to the latest biological orthodoxy, I
am sorry. Habits are at any rate transmissible by imitation, if not
otherwise.]
[Footnote 2: Chapter XIX.]
_CHAPTER XXIII_
DIALOGUE AND DETAILS
The extraordinary progress made by the drama of the English language
during the past quarter of a century is in nothing more apparent than in
the average quality of modern dialogue. Tolerably well-written dialogue
is nowadays the rule rather than the exception. Thirty years ago, the
idea that it was possible to combine naturalness with vivacity and
vigour had scarcely dawned upon the playwright's mind. He passed and
repassed from stilted pathos to strained and verbal wit (often mere
punning); and when a reformer like T.W. Robertson tried to come a little
nearer to the truth of life, he was apt to fall into babyish simplicity
or flat commonness.
Criticism has not given sufficient weight to the fact that English
dramatic writing laboured for centuries--and still labours to some
degree--under a historic misfortune. It has never wholly recovered from
the euphuism--to use the word in its widest sense--of the late sixteenth
century. The influence of John Lyly and his tribe is still traceable,
despite a hundred metamorphoses, in some of the plays of to-day and in
many of the plays of yesterday. From the very beginnings of English
comedy, it was accepted as almost self-evident that "wit"--a factitious,
supererogatory sparkle--was indispensable to all dialogue of a
non-tragic order. Language was a newly discovered and irresistibly
fascinating playground for the fancy. Conversation must be thick-strewn
with verbal quibbles, similes, figures, and flourishes of every
description, else it was unworthy to be spoken on the stage. We all know
how freely Shakespeare yielded to this convention, and so helped to
establish it. Sometimes, not always, his genius enabled him to render it
delightful; but in most of the Elizabethans--though it be heresy to say
so--it is an extremely tedious mannerism. After the Restoration, when
modern light talk came into being in the coffee-houses, the fashion of
the day, no doubt, favoured a straining after wit; so that the
playwrights were in some measure following nature--that very small
corner of nature which they called "the town"--in accepting and making a
law of the Elizabethan convention. The leading characters of Restoration
comedy, from Etherege to Vanbrugh, are consciously and almost
professionally wits. Simile and repartee are as indispensable a part of
a gentleman's social outfit as his wig or his rapier. In Congreve the
word "wit" is almost as common as the thing. When Farquhar made some
movement towards a return to nature, he was rewarded with Pope's line,
which clings like a burr to his memory--
"What pert, low dialogue has Farquhar writ."
If eighteenth-century comedy, as a whole, is not brilliantly written, it
is for lack of talent in the playwrights, not for lack of desire or
intention. Goldsmith, like Farquhar and Steele, vaguely realized the
superiority of humour to wit; but he died too early to exercise much
influence on his successors. In Sheridan the convention of wit
reasserted itself triumphantly, and the scene in which Lady Teazle, Mrs.
Candour, and the rest of the scandalous college sit in a semicircle and
cap malicious similes, came to be regarded as an unapproachable model of
comedy dialogue. The convention maintained itself firmly down to the
days of _Money_ and _London Assurance_, the dullness of the intervening
period being due, not to any change of theory, but to sheer impotence of
practice. T.W. Robertson, as above mentioned, attempted a return to
nature, with occasional and very partial success; but wit, with a dash
of fanciful sentiment, reasserted itself in James Albery; while in H.J.
Byron it degenerated into mere punning and verbal horse-play. I should
not be surprised if the historian of the future were to find in the
plays of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones the first marked symptoms of a
reaction--of a tendency to reject extrinsic and fanciful ornament in
dialogue, and to rely for its effect upon its vivid appropriateness to
character and situation. In the early plays of Sir Arthur Pinero there
is a great deal of extrinsic ornament; especially of that
metaphor-hunting which was one of the characteristic forms of euphuism.
Take this, for example, from _The Profligate_. Dunstan Renshaw has
expressed to Hugh Murray the opinion that "marriages of contentment are
the reward of husbands who have taken the precaution to sow their wild
oats rather thickly"; whereupon the Scotch solicitor replies--
HUGH MURRAY: Contentment! Renshaw, do you imagine that there is no
autumn in the life of a profligate? Do you think there is no moment
when the accursed crop begins to rear its millions of heads above
ground; when the rich man would give his wealth to be able to tread
them back into the earth which rejects the foul load? To-day you
have robbed some honest man of a sweet companion!
DUNSTAN RENSHAW: Look here, Mr. Murray--!
HUGH MURRAY: To-morrow, next week, next month, you may be happy--but
what of the time when those wild oats thrust their ears through the
very seams of the floor trodden by the wife whose respect you will
have learned to covet! You may drag her into the crowded
streets--there is the same vile growth springing up from the chinks
of the pavement! In your house or in the open, the scent of the
mildewed grain always in your nostrils, and in your ears no music
but the wind's rustle amongst the fat sheaves! And, worst of all,
your wife's heart a granary bursting with the load of shame your
profligacy has stored there! I warn you--Mr. Lawrence Kenward!
If we compare this passage with any page taken at random from
_Mid-Channel_, we might think that a century of evolution lay between
them, instead of barely twenty years.
The convention of wit-at-any-price is, indeed, moribund; but it is
perhaps not quite superfluous, even now, to emphasize the difference
between what the French call the "mot d'auteur" and the "mot de
situation." The terms practically explain themselves; but a third class
ought to be added--the "mot de caractère." The "mot d'auteur" is the
distinguishing mark of the Congreve-Sheridan convention. It survives in
full vigour--or, shall one say, it sings its swan-song?--in the works of
Oscar Wilde. For instance, the scene of the five men in the third act of
_Lady Windermere's Fan_ is a veritable running-fire of epigrams wholly
unconnected with the situation, and very slightly related, if at all, to
the characters of the speakers. The mark of the "mot d'auteur" is that
it can with perfect ease be detached from its context. I could fill this
page with sayings from the scene in question, all perfectly
comprehensible without any account of the situation. Among them would be
one of those; profound sayings which Wilde now and then threw off in his
lightest moods, like opals among soap-bubbles. "In the world," says
Dumby, "there are two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and
the other is getting it." This may rank with Lord Illingworth's speech
in _A Woman of No Importance_: "All thought is immoral. Its very essence
is destruction. If you think of anything you kill it. Nothing survives
being thought of." When we hear such sayings as these--or the immortal
"Vulgarity is the behaviour of other people"--we do not enquire too
curiously into their appropriateness to character or situation; but none
the less do they belong to an antiquated conception of drama.
It is useless to begin to give specimens of the "mot de caractère" and
"mot de situation." All really dramatic dialogue falls under one head or
the other. One could easily pick out a few brilliantly effective
examples of each class: but as their characteristic is to fade when
uprooted from the soil in which they grow, they would take up space to
very little purpose.
But there is another historic influence, besides that of euphuism, which
has been hurtful, though in a minor degree, to the development of a
sound style in dialogue. Some of the later Elizabethans, and notably
Webster and Ford, cultivated a fashion of abrupt utterance, whereby an
immensity of spiritual significance--generally tragic--was supposed to
be concentrated into a few brief words. The classic example is
Ferdinand's "Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young," in _The
Duchess of Malfy_. Charles Lamb celebrated the virtues of this pregnant,
staccato style with somewhat immoderate admiration, and thus helped to
set a fashion of spasmodic pithiness in dialogue, which too often
resulted in dense obscurity. Not many plays composed under this
influence have reached the stage; not one has held it. But we find in
some recent writing a qualified recrudescence of the spasmodic manner,
with a touch of euphuism thrown in. This is mainly due, I think, to the
influence of George Meredith, who accepted the convention of wit as the
informing spirit of comedy dialogue, and whose abnormally rapid faculty
of association led him to delight in a sort of intellectual shorthand
which the normal mind finds very difficult to decipher. Meredith was a
man of brilliant genius, which lent a fascination to his very
mannerisms; but when these mannerisms are transferred by lesser men to a
medium much less suited to them--that of the stage--the result is apt to
be disastrous. I need not go into particulars; for no play of which the
dialogue places a constant strain on the intellectual muscles of the
audience ever has held, or ever will hold, a place in living dramatic
literature. I will merely note the curious fact that English--my own
language--is the only language out of the three or four known to me in
which I have ever come across an entirely incomprehensible play. I could
name English plays, both pre-Meredithian and post-Meredithian, which
might almost as well be written in Chinese for all that I can make
of them.
Obscurity and precocity are generally symptoms of an exaggerated dread
of the commonplace. The writer of dramatic prose has, indeed, a very
difficult task if he is to achieve style without deserting nature.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the difficulty lies in
getting criticism to give him credit for the possession of style,
without incurring the reproach of mannerism. How is one to give
concentration and distinction to ordinary talk, while making it still
seem ordinary? Either the distinction will strike the critics, and they
will call it pompous and unreal, or the ordinariness will come home to
them, and they will deny the distinction. This is the dramatist's
constant dilemma. One can only comfort him with the assurance that if he
has given his dialogue the necessary concentration, and has yet kept it
plausibly near to the language of life, he has achieved style, and may
snap his fingers at the critics. Style, in prose drama, is the sifting
of common speech.
It is true, however, that, with equal concentration and equal
naturalness, one man may give his work a beauty of cadence and phrasing
which another man may entirely miss. Two recent writers of English
dramatic prose have stood out from their fellows in respect of the sheer
beauty of their style--I need scarcely name Oscar Wilde and J.M. Synge.
But Wilde's dialogue can by no means be called free from mannerism,[1]
while Synge wrote in a language which had a music of its own, even
before his genius took hold of it.
It does not seem very profitable to try to concentrate into a definition
the distinctive qualities of dramatic dialogue. The late Mrs. Craigie
("John Oliver Hobbes") attempted to do so in the preface to a charming
play, _The Ambassador_; and the result at any rate the sequel--was that
her next play, _The Wisdom of the Wise_, was singularly self-conscious
and artificial. She found in "emotion" the test of dramatic quality in
any given utterance. "Stage dialogue," she says, "may or may not have
many qualities, but it must be emotional." Here we have a statement
which is true in a vague and general sense, untrue in the definite and
particular sense in which alone it could afford any practical guidance.
"My lord, the carriage waits," may be, in its right place, a highly
dramatic speech, even though it be uttered with no emotion, and arouse
no emotion in the person addressed. What Mrs. Craigie meant, I take it,
was that, to be really dramatic, every speech must have some bearing,
direct or indirect, prospective, present, or retrospective, upon
individual human destinies. The dull play, the dull scene, the dull
speech, is that in which we do not perceive this connection; but when
once we are interested in the individuals concerned, we are so quick to
perceive the connection, even though it be exceedingly distant and
indirect, that the dramatist who should always hold the fear of Mrs.
Craigie's aphorism consciously before his eyes would unnecessarily
fetter and restrict himself. Even the driest scientific proposition may,
under special circumstances, become electrical with drama. The statement
that the earth moves round the sun does not, in itself, stir our pulses;
yet what playwright has ever invented a more dramatic utterance than
that which some one invented for Galileo: "E pur si muove!"? In all
this, to be sure, I am illustrating, not confuting, Mrs. Craigie's
maxim. I have no wish to confute it, for, in the largest interpretation,
it is true; but I suggest that it is true only when attenuated almost
beyond recognition, and quite beyond the point at which it can be of any
practical help to the practical dramatist. He must rely on his instinct,
not numb and bewilder it by constantly subjecting it to the dictates of
hard-and-fast aesthetic theory.
We shall scarcely come much nearer to helpful truth than the point we
have already reached, in the principle that all dialogue, except the
merely mechanical parts--the connective tissue of the play--should
consist either of "mots de caractère" or of "mots de situation." But if
we go to French critics for this principle, do not let us go to French
dramatists for models of practice. It is part of the abiding insularity
of our criticism that the same writers who cannot forgive an English
dramatist what they conceive to be a stilted turn of phrase, will pass
without remark, if not with positive admiration, the outrageously
rhetorical style which is still prevalent in French drama. Here, for
instance, is a quite typical passage from _Le Duel_, by M. Henri
Lavedan, an author of no small repute; and it would be easy to find even
more magniloquent tirades in the works of almost any of his
contemporaries. I translate from the concluding scene between the Abbé
and the Duchess:
THE ABBÉ: "In our strange life, there are sometimes unexpected and
decisive moments, sovereign, though we know not why. We feel it,
that is all!--fulgurant moments, which throw, as it were, a flash of
lightning upon our destinies, like those meteors which shine forth
from time to time in the heavens, and of which none can say what
their purple signifies, whether it be a cataclysm or an apotheosis.
Well, it appears to me that we, you and I, are now face to face with
one of these moments!"
THE DUCHESS: "So I, too, believe."
THE ABBÉ: "We must take care, then, that it be an apotheosis. That
is why I want--Mon Dieu, madame! how shall I say it to you? Where
shall I go to find the chosen words, the words of pure gold, of
diamonds, the immaculate words that are worthy of us? All that you
are, all that you are worth, I know, and I alone know. You have
opened, that I might read it, the book of hours that is your mind. I
am in no wise disquieted about you or your future; yet, that I may
be fully reassured before we part, I wish, I wish you to tell me, to
declare to me, that you are at this very moment in absolute repose,
calm as a lake."
And so Monsieur l'Abbé goes on for another page. If it be said that this
ornate eloquence is merely professional, I reply that his brother, the
atheist doctor, and the Duchess herself, are quite as copious in their
rhetoric, and scarcely less ornate.
It is a mistake to suppose that "literary merit" can be imparted to
drama by such flagrant departures from nature; though some critics have
not yet outgrown that superstition. Let the playwright take to heart an
anecdote told by Professor Matthews in his _Inquiries and Opinions_--an
anecdote of a New England farmer, who, being asked who was the architect
of his house, replied: "Oh, I built that house myself; but there's a man
coming down from Boston next week to put on the architecture." Better no
style at all than style thus plastered on.
* * * * *
What is to be said of the possibilities of blank verse as a dramatic
medium? This is a thorny question, to be handled with caution. One can
say with perfect assurance, however, that its possibilities are
problematical, its difficulties and dangers certain.
To discuss the question whether drama in verse is in its very nature
nobler than drama in prose would lead us away from craftsmanship into
the realm of pure aesthetics. For my own part, I doubt it. I suspect
that the drama, like all literature, took its rise in verse, for the
simple reason that verse is easier to make--and to memorize--than prose.
Primitive peoples felt with Goethe--though not quite in the same
sense--that "art is art because it is not nature." Not merely for
emotional, but for all sorts of literary, expression, they demanded a
medium clearly marked off from the speech of everyday life. The drama
"lisped in numbers, for the numbers came." Even of so modern a writer
(comparatively) as Shakespeare, it would scarcely be true to say that he
"chose" verse as his medium, in the same sense in which Ibsen chose
prose. He accepted it just as he accepted the other traditions and
methods of the theatre of his time. In familiar passages he broke away
from it; but on the whole it provided (among other advantages) a
convenient and even necessary means of differentiation between the mimic
personage and the audience, from whom he was not marked off by the
proscenium arch and the artificial lights which make a world apart of
the modern stage.
And Shakespeare so glorified this metrical medium as to give it an
overwhelming prestige. It was extremely easy to write blank verse after
a fashion; and playwrights who found it flow almost spontaneously from
their pens were only too ready to overlook the world-wide difference
between their verse and that of the really great Elizabethans. Just
after the Restoration, there was an attempt to introduce the rhymed
couplet as the medium for heroic plays; but that, on the other hand, was
too difficult to establish itself in general use. Tragedy soon fell back
upon the fatally facile unrhymed iambic, and a reign of stilted, stodgy
mediocrity set in. There is nothing drearier in literature than the
century-and-a-half of English tragedy, from Otway to Sheridan Knowles.
One is lost in wonder at the genius of the actors who could infuse life
and passion into those masterpieces of turgid conventionality. The
worship of the minor Elizabethans, which began with Lamb and culminated
in Swinburne, brought into fashion (as we have seen) a spasmodic rather
than a smoothly rhetorical way of writing, but did not really put new
life into the outworn form. It may almost be called an appalling fact
that for at least two centuries--from 1700 to 1900--not a single
blank-verse play was produced which lives, or deserves to live,[2] on
the stage of to-day.
I have thus glanced at the history of the blank-verse play because I
believe that it can never revive until we clearly realize and admit that
it is, and has been for a century, thoroughly dead, while, for a century
before that again, it was only galvanized into a semblance of life by a
great school of rhetorical acting. The playwright who sets forth with
the idea that, in writing a poetical drama, he is going to continue the
great Elizabethan tradition, is starting on a wild-goose chase. The
great Elizabethan tradition is an incubus to be exorcised. It was
because Mr. Stephen Phillips was not Elizabethanizing, but clothing a
vital and personal conception of drama in verse of very appealing
lyrical quality, that some of us thought we saw in _Paolo and Francesca_
the dawn of a new art. Apparently it was a false dawn; but I still
believe that our orientation was right when we looked for the daybreak
in the lyric quarter of the heavens. The very summits of Shakespeare's
achievement are his glorious lyrical passages. Think of the exquisite
elegiacs of Macbeth! Think of the immortal death-song of Cleopatra! If
verse has any function on the stage, it is that of imparting lyric
beauty to passionate speech. For the mere rhetorical "elevation" of
blank verse we have no use whatever. It consists in saying simple things
with verbose pomposity. But should there arise a man who combines
highly-developed dramatic faculty with great lyric genius, it is quite
possible that he may give us the new poetic drama for which our
idealists are sighing. He will choose his themes, I take it, from
legend, or from the domain of pure fantasy--themes which can be steeped
from first to last in an atmosphere of poetry, as _Tristan und Isolde_
is steeped in an atmosphere of music. Of historic themes, I would
counsel this hypothetical genius to beware. If there are any which can
fittingly be steeped in a lyric atmosphere, they are to be sought on the
outskirts of history, or in the debatable land between history and
legend. The formula of Schiller can no more be revived than the formula
of Chapman or of Rowe. That a new historic drama awaits us in the
future, I have little doubt; but it will be written in prose. The idea
that the poetry of drama is to be sought specifically in verse has long
ago been exploded by Ibsen and Maeterlinck and D'Annunzio and Synge. But
there are, no doubt, themes which peculiarly lend themselves to
lyrico-dramatic treatment, and we shall all welcome the poet who
discovers and develops them.
One warning let me add, in no uncertain voice. If you choose to write a
blank-verse play, write it in blank verse, and not in some nondescript
rhythm which is one long series of jolts and pitfalls to the sensitive
ear. Many playwrights have thought by this means to escape from the
monotony of blank verse; not one (that I ever heard of) has achieved
even temporary success. If you cannot save your blank verse from
monotony without breaking it on the wheel, that merely means that you
cannot write blank verse, and had better let it alone. Again, in spite
of Elizabethan precedent, there is nothing more irritating on the modern
stage than a play which keeps on changing from verse to prose and back
again. It gives the verse-passages an air of pompous self-consciousness.
We seem to hear the author saying, as he shifts his gear, "Look you now!
I am going to be eloquent and impressive!" The most destructive fault a
dramatist can commit, in my judgment, is to pass, in the same work of
art, from one plane of convention to another.[3]
* * * * *
We must now consider for a moment the question--if question it can be
called--of the soliloquy and the aside. The example of Ibsen has gone
far towards expelling these slovenlinesses from the work of all
self-respecting playwrights. But theorists spring up every now and then
to defend them. "The stage is the realm of convention," they argue. "If
you accept a room with its fourth wall removed, which nothing short of
an earthquake could render possible in real life, why should you jib at
the idea--in which, after all, there is nothing absolutely
impossible--that a man should utter aloud the thoughts that are passing
through his mind?"
It is all a question, once more, of planes of convention. No doubt there
is an irreducible minimum of convention in all drama; but how strange is
the logic which leaps from that postulate to the assertion that, if we
admit a minimum, we cannot, or ought not to, exclude a maximum! There
are plays which do not, and there are plays which do, set forth to give
as nearly as possible an exact reproduction of the visual and auditory
realities of life. In the Elizabethan theatre, with its platform stage
under the open sky, any pictorial exactness of reproduction was clearly
impossible. Its fundamental conditions necessitated very nearly[4] a
maximum of convention; therefore such conventions as blank verse and the
soliloquy were simply of a piece with all the rest. In the theatre of
the eighteenth century and early nineteenth, the proscenium arch--the
frame of the picture--made pictorial realism theoretically possible. But
no one recognized the possibility; and indeed, on a candle-lit stage, it
would have been extremely difficult. As a matter of fact, the
Elizabethan platform survived in the shape of a long "apron," projecting
in front of the proscenium, on which the most important parts of the
action took place. The characters, that is to say, were constantly
stepping out of the frame of the picture; and while this visual
convention maintained itself, there was nothing inconsistent or jarring
in the auditory convention of the soliloquy. Only in the last quarter of
the nineteenth century did new methods of lighting, combined with new
literary and artistic influences, complete the evolutionary process, and
lead to the withdrawal of the whole stage--the whole dramatic
domain--within the frame of the picture. It was thus possible to reduce
visual convention to a minimum so trifling that in a well-set "interior"
it needs a distinct effort of attention to be conscious of it at all. In
fact, if we come to think of it, the removal of the fourth wall is
scarcely to be classed as a convention; for in real life, as we do not
happen to have eyes in the back of our heads, we are never visually
conscious of all four walls of a room at once. If, then, in a room that
is absolutely real, we see a man who (in all other respects) strives to
be equally real, suddenly begin to expound himself aloud, in good, set
terms, his own emotions, motives, or purposes, we instantly plump down
from one plane of convention to another, and receive a disagreeable jar
to our sense of reality. Up to that moment, all the efforts of author,
producer, and actor have centred in begetting in us a particular order
of illusion; and lo! the effort is suddenly abandoned, and the illusion
shattered by a crying unreality. In modern serious drama, therefore, the
soliloquy can only be regarded as a disturbing anachronism.[5]
The physical conditions which tended to banish it from the stage were
reinforced by the growing perception of its artistic slovenliness. It
was found that the most delicate analyses could be achieved without its
aid; and it became a point of honour with the self-respecting artist to
accept a condition which rendered his material somewhat harder of
manipulation, indeed, but all the more tempting to wrestle with and
overcome. A drama with soliloquies and asides is like a picture with
inscribed labels issuing from the mouths of the figures. In that way,
any bungler can reveal what is passing in the minds of his personages.
But the glorious problem of the modern playwright is to make his
characters reveal the inmost workings of their souls without saying or
doing anything that they would not say or do in the real world.[6]
There are degrees, however, even in the makeshift and the slovenly; and
not all lapses into anachronism are equally to be condemned. One thing
is so patent as to call for no demonstration: to wit, that the aside is
ten times worse than the soliloquy. It is always possible that a man
might speak his thought, but it is glaringly impossible that he should
speak it so as to be heard by the audience and not heard by others on
the stage. In French light comedy and farce of the mid-nineteenth
century, the aside is abused beyond even the license of fantasy. A man
will speak an aside of several lines over the shoulder of another person
whom he is embracing. Not infrequently in a conversation between two
characters, each will comment aside on every utterance of the other,
before replying to it. The convenience of this method of proceeding is
manifest. It is as though the author stood by and delivered a running
commentary on the secret motives and designs of his characters. But it
is such a crying confession of unreality that, on the English-speaking
stage, at any rate, it would scarcely be tolerated to-day, even in
farce. In serious modern drama the aside is now practically unknown. It
is so obsolete, indeed, that actors are puzzled how to handle it, and
audiences what to make of it. In an ambitious play produced at a leading
London theatre about ten years ago, a lady, on leaving the stage,
announced, in an aside, her intention of drowning herself, and several
critics, the next day, not understanding that she was speaking aside,
severely blamed the gentleman who was on the stage with her for not
frustrating her intention. About the same time, there occurred one of
the most glaring instances within my recollection of inept
conventionalism. The hero of the play was Eugene Aram. Alone in his room
at dead of night, Aram heard Houseman breaking open the outside shutters
of the window. Designing to entrap the robber, what did he do? He went
up to the window and drew back the curtains, with a noise loud enough to
be heard in the next parish. It was inaudible, however, to Houseman on
the other side of the shutters. He proceeded with his work, opened the
window, and slipped in, Aram hiding in the shadow. Then, while Houseman
peered about him with his lantern, not six feet from Aram, and actually
between him and the audience, Aram indulged in a long and loud monologue
as to whether he should shoot Houseman or not, ending with a prayer to
heaven to save him from more blood-guiltiness! Such are the childish
excesses to which a playwright will presently descend when once he
begins to dally with facile convention.
An aside is intolerable because it is _not_ heard by the other person on
the stage: it outrages physical possibility. An overheard soliloquy, on
the other hand, is intolerable because it _is_ heard. It keeps within
the bounds of physical possibility, but it stultifies the only logical
excuse for the soliloquy, namely, that it is an externalization of
thought which would in reality remain unuttered. This point is so clear
that I need not insist upon it.
Are there, in modern drama, any admissible soliloquies? A few brief
ejaculations of joy, or despair, are, of course, natural enough, and no
one will cavil at them. The approach of mental disease is often marked
by a tendency to unrestrained loquacity, which goes on even while the
sufferer is alone; and this distressing symptom may, on rare occasions,
be put to artistic use. Short of actual derangement, however, there are
certain states of nervous surexcitation which cause even healthy people
to talk to themselves; and if an author has the skill to make us realize
that his character is passing through such a crisis, he may risk a
soliloquy, not only without reproach, but with conspicuous psychological
justification. In the third act of Clyde Fitch's play, _The Girl with
the Green Eyes_, there is a daring attempt at such a soliloquy, where
Jinny says: "Good Heavens! why am I maudling on like this to myself out
loud? It's really nothing--Jack will explain once more that he can't
explain"--and so on. Whether the attempt justified itself or not would
depend largely on the acting. In any case, it is clear that the author,
though as a rule somewhat lax in his craftsmanship, was here aiming at
psychological truth.
A word must be said as to a special case of the soliloquy--the letter
which a person speaks aloud as he writes it, or reads over to himself
aloud. This is a convention to be employed as sparingly as possible; but
it is not exactly on a level with the ordinary soliloquy. A letter has
an actual objective existence. The words are formulated in the
character's mind and are supposed to be externalized, even though the
actor may not really write them on the paper. Thus the letter has, so to
speak, the same right to come to the knowledge of the audience as any
other utterance. It is, in fact, part of the dialogue of the play, only
that it happens to be inaudible. A soliloquy, on the other hand, has no
real existence. It is a purely artificial unravelling of motive or
emotion, which, nine times out of ten, would not become articulate at
all, even in the speaker's brain or heart. Thus it is by many degrees a
greater infraction of the surface texture of life than the spoken
letter, which we may call inadvisable rather than inadmissible.
Some theorists carry their solicitude for surface reality to such an
extreme as to object to any communication between two characters which
is not audible to every one on the stage. This is a very idle pedantry.
The difference between a conversation in undertones and a soliloquy or
aside is abundantly plain: the one occurs every hour of the day, the
other never occurs at all. When two people, or a group, are talking
among themselves, unheard by the others on the stage, it requires a
special effort to remember that, as a matter of fact, the others
probably do hear them. Even if the scene be unskilfully arranged, it is
not the audibility of one group, but the inaudibility of the others,
that is apt to strike us as unreal.
* * * * *
This is not the only form of technical pedantry that one occasionally
encounters. Some years ago, a little band of playwrights and would-be
playwrights, in fanatical reaction against the Sardou technique, tried
to lay down a rule that no room on the stage must ever have more than
one door, and that no letter must ever enter into the mechanism of a
play. I do not know which contention was the more ridiculous.
Nothing is commoner in modern house-planning than rooms which have at
least two doors and a French window. We constantly see rooms or halls
which, if transported to the stage, would provide three or four
entrances and exits; and this is even more true of the "central heated"
houses of America than of English houses. The technical purists used
especially to despise the French window--a harmless, agreeable and very
common device. Why the playwright should make "one room one door" an
inexorable canon of art is more than human reason can divine. There are
cases, no doubt, in which probability demands that the dramatist should
be content with one practicable opening to his scene, and should plan
his entrances and exits accordingly. This is no such great feat as might
be imagined. Indeed a playwright will sometimes deliberately place a
particular act in a room with one door, because it happens to facilitate
the movement he desires. It is absurd to lay down any rule in the
matter, other than that the scene should provide a probable locality for
whatever action is to take place in it. I am the last to defend the old
French farce with its ten or a dozen doors through which the characters
kept scuttling in and out like rabbits in a warren. But the fact that we
are tired of conventional laxity is no good reason for rushing to the
other extreme of conventional and hampering austerity.
Similarly, because the forged will and the lost "marriage lines" have
been rightly relegated to melodrama, is there any reason why we should
banish from the stage every form of written document? Mr. Bernard Shaw,
in an article celebrating the advent of the new technique, once wrote,
"Nowadays an actor cannot open a letter or toss off somebody else's
glass of poison without having to face a brutal outburst of jeering."
What an extravagance to bracket as equally exploded absurdities the
opening of a letter and the tossing off of the wrong glass of poison!
Letters--more's the pity--play a gigantic part in the economy of modern
life. The General Post Office is a vast mechanism for the distribution
of tragedy, comedy, melodrama, and farce throughout the country and
throughout the world. To whose door has not Destiny come in the disguise
of a postman, and slipped its decree, with a double rat-tat, into the
letter-box? Whose heart has not sickened as he heard the postman's
footstep pass his door without pausing? Whose hand has not trembled as
he opened a letter? Whose face has not blanched as he took in its
import, almost without reading the words? Why, I would fain know, should
our stage-picture of life be falsified by the banishment of the postman?
Even the revelation brought about by the discovery of a forgotten letter
or bundle of letters is not an infrequent incident of daily life. Why
should it be tabu on the stage? Because the French dramatist, forty
years ago, would sometimes construct a Chinese-puzzle play around some
stolen letter or hidden document, are we to suffer no "scrap of paper"
to play any part whatever in English drama? Even the Hebrew sense of
justice would recoil from such a conclusion. It would be a case of "The
fathers have eaten sour grapes, and other people's children must pay the
penalty." Against such whimsies of reactionary purism, the playwright's
sole and sufficient safeguard is a moderate exercise of common sense.
* * * * *
[Footnote 1: So, too, with the style of Congreve. It is much, and
justly, admired; but who does not feel more than a touch of mannerism in
such a passage as this?--
MILLAMANT: "... Let us never visit together, nor go to a play
together; but let us be very strange and well-bred: let us be as
strange as if we had been married a great while; and as well-bred as
if we were not married at all."
MIRABELL: "Have you any more conditions to offer? Hitherto your
demands are pretty reasonable."
MILLAMANT: "Trifles!--as liberty to pay and receive visits to and
from whom I please; to write and receive letters, without
interrogatories or wry faces on your part; to wear what I please;
and choose conversation with regard only to my own taste; to have no
obligation upon me to converse with wits that I don't like because
they are your acquaintances; or to be intimate with fools because
they may be your relatives.... These articles subscribed, if I
continue to endure you a little longer, I may by degrees dwindle
into a wife."
This is very pretty prose, granted; but it is the prose of literature,
not of life.]
[Footnote 2: From the fact that I do not make an exception in favour of
_The Blot in the Scutcheon_ or _Stratford_, I must leave the reader to
draw what inference he pleases. On the other hand, I believe that a
reconstruction of Tennyson's _Queen Mary_, with a few connecting links
written in, might take a permanent place in the theatre.]
[Footnote 3: Mr. Israel Zangwill, in his symbolic play, _The War-God_,
has put blank verse to what I believe to be a new use, with noteworthy
success. He writes in very strict measure, but without the least
inversion or inflation, without a touch of Elizabethan, or
conventionally poetic, diction. He is thus enabled to use the most
modern expressions, and even slang, without incongruity; while at the
same time he can give rhetorical movement to the speeches of his
symbolic personages, and, in passages of argument, can achieve that
clash of measured phrase against measured phrase which the Greeks called
"stichomythy," and which the French dramatist sometimes produces in
rapid rapier play with the Alexandrine. Mr. Zangwill's practice is in
absolute contradiction of the principle above suggested that blank
verse, to be justified in drama, ought to be lyrical. His verse is a
product of pure intellect and wit, without a single lyric accent. It is
measured prose; if it ever tries to be more, it fails. I think, then,
that he has shown a new use for blank verse, in rhetorico-symbolic
drama. But it is no small literary feat to handle the measure as
he does.]
[Footnote 4: Not quite. The drama of some Oriental peoples recognizes
conventions which the Elizabethans did not admit.]
[Footnote 5: A conversation on the telephone often provides a convenient
and up-to-date substitute for a soliloquy; but that is an expedient
which ought not to be abused.]
[Footnote 6: The soliloquy is often not only slovenly, but a gratuitous
and unnecessary slovenliness. In _Les Corbeaux_, by Henry Becque,
produced in 1889, there occur two soliloquies--one by Teissier (Act ii,
Scene 3), the other by Madame de Saint-Genis (Act in, Scene 10)--either
or both of which could be omitted without leaving any sensible gap. The
latter is wholly superfluous, the former conveys some information which
might have been taken for granted, and could, in any case, have been
conveyed without difficulty in some other way. Yet Becque was, in his
day, regarded as a quite advanced technician.]