IV

Every play contains at least two actors. The suggestion of

states of mind does not come from the hero alone, but is given

by two persons, or groups of persons, at once. These persons

are, normally, in conflict. Othello menaces, Desdemona shrinks;

Nora asserts her right, Hilmar his claim; L'Aiglon vaunts his

inherited personality, Metternich--holds the candle to the

mirror! But what of the spectator? He cannot at once shrink

and menace, assert and deny, as the conditions of sympathetic

reproduction would seem to demand. Real emotion implies a

definite set of reactions of the nature of movements; and two

opposed movements cannot take place at the same time. Ideas,

however, can dwell together in amity. The spectator has a

vivid picture of Othello and Desdemona together; but his

reactions have neutralized each other, and his emotions, lacking

their organic conditions, are in abeyance.

This is the typical dramatic moment, for it is the one which

is alone characteristic of the drama. Only in the simultaneous

realization of two opposing forces is the full mutual checking

of emotional impulses possible, and it is only in this

simultaneous realization that the drama differs from all other

forms of art. When the two antagonistic purposes are actually

presented to the onlooker in the same moment of time, then alone

can be felt the vividness of realization, the tension of conflict,

the balance of emotion, the "alleviation" of the true Katharsis!

But what is this? No emotion after all, when the very traditional

test of our enjoyment of a play is the amount of feeling it

arouses!--when hearts beat, hands clench, tears flow! Emotion

there is, it may not be denied; but not the sympathetic emotions

of the traditional theory.

What emotion? The mutual checking of impulses in a balance, a

tension, a conflict which is yet a bond; and this it is which

is the clue to the excitement or exaltation which in the dramatic

experience usurps the place of definite feeling. We have met

this phenomenon before. Aesthetic emotion in general, we have

heard, consists just in the union of a kind of stimulation or

enhanced life, with repose; a heightening of the vital energies

unaccompanied by any tendency to movement,--in short, that

gathering of forces which we connect with action, and which is

felt the more because action is checked. Just such a repose

through equilibrium of impulses is given by the dramatic conflict.

Introspection makes assurance doubly sure. The tense exaltation

of the typical aesthetic experience, undirected, unlimited, pure

of personal or particular reference, is reproduced in this

nameless ecstasy of the tragic drama. The mysterious Katharsis,

the emotion of tragedy, is, then, a special type of the unique

aesthetic emotion.

And it is the singular peculiar characteristic of the drama--

the face to face confrontation of forces--which furnishes these

conditions. As we might have foreseen, the peculiar Katharsis,

or pleasurable disappearance or alleviation of emotion in

tragedy, is based on just those elements in which the drama

differs from other forms of art. Confrontation, and not action,

as the dramatic principle, is the important deduction from our

theory;--is, indeed, but the objective aspect of it.

The view of confrontation as the dramatic principle is confirmed

by dramatic literature. We emphasize in our study of Greek plays

their simplicity of plot, their absence of intrigue, their

sculptural, bas-relief quality. The Greek drama makes of a poem

a crisis, says M. Faguet. A tragedy is a well-composed group,

a fine contrast, a beautiful effect of imposing symmetry--as

in the "Antigone," "on one side civil law in all its blind

rigor, on the other moral law in all its splendor." The only

element in common with the modern type is found in the conflict

of wills. Could such a play as the "Suppliants" of Euripedes

find any aesthetic justification, save that it has the one

dramatic essential--confrontation, balance of emotions? The

very scenes of short speeches, of objurgation or sententious

repartee, which cannot but have for us an element of the

grotesque, must have been as pleasing as they were to the Greek

audience, from the fact that they brought to sharpest vision

the confrontation of the two antagonists. The mediaeval drama,

which has become popularly known in "Everyman," is nothing but

a succession of duels, material or spiritual. It is indeed the

two profiles confronting one another, our sympathy balanced,

and suspended, as it were, between them, which characterize our

recollections of this whole great field. The modern critics and

comparers of English and French drama are fond of contrasting

the full, rich, even prodigal characterization, rhetorical and

lyrical beauty of the Shakespearean drama with the cold, clear,

logical, but resistless movement of the French. Yet the contrast

is not quite that between characterization and form; the essential

form is common to both. In the first place, Elizabethan drama

was platform drama--that is, by the testimony of contemporaries,

little concerned with anything but the succession of more or less

unconnected scenes between two or three persons. And we see

clearly that the great dramatic power of "Hamlet," for instance,

must lie, not in the movement of a wavering purpose, but in the

separate scenes of his struggle, each one wonderfully rich, vivid,

balanced, but almost a unit in itself. On the theory that the

true dramatic form is logical progress, dramatic--as contrasted

with literary--power would have to be denied to "Hamlet." The

aesthetic meaning of "Lear" is not in the terrible retribution

of pride and self-will, but in the cruel confrontation of father

and daughters.

This is no less true of the first great French plays. It is

certainly not the resistless movement of the intrigue which

makes the "Misanthrope," "Tartufe," the "Precieuses Ridicules,"

masterpieces of comedy as well as of literature. Their dramatic

value lies in their piquancy of confrontation. The tug-of-war

between Alceste and Celimene, between Rodrigue and Chimene in

"Le Cid," is what we think of as dramatic; and it is this same

element which is found as well in the complicated and overflowing

English plays. And in modern French drama, for all its "logic,"

the dominating factor is the "scene a faire,"--what I have called

the scene of confrontation. The notoriously successful scene in

the English drama of to-day, the duel of Sophy and Lord Quex--

tolerably empty of real feeling or significance though it is--

becomes successful merely through the consummate handling of

the face-to-face element. Only by admitting this aesthetic

moment of arrest can we allow dramatic value to such a play as

"Les Affaires sont les Affaires"--a truly static drama. The

hero of this is, in the words of a reviewer, "essentially the

same force in magnitude and direction from the rise to the fall

of the curtain. It does not move; it is we who are taken around

it so that we may see its various facets. It is not moulded by

the successive incidents of the play, but only disclosed by

them; sibi constat." Yet we cannot deny to the play dramatic

power; and the reason for this is, as I believe, because it

does, after all, possess the dramatic essential--not action, but

tension.

V

It will be demanded, however, what place there is then for a

temporal factor, if the typical dramatic experience depends upon

the great scene? It cannot be denied that the drama is a work

of art developed in time, like music and poetry. It comes to a

climax and a resolution; it evolves its harmonies like the

symphony, in irrevocable order. We cannot afford to neglect,

in such an aesthetic analysis, what is an undoubted element in

dramatic effect, the so-called inevitable march of events. In

answer to this objection we may hold that the temporal factor

is a corollary of the primary demand for confrontation. It is

necessary that the confrontation or conflict should be vividly

imagined, with all possible associative reinforcements--that

it should be brought up to the turn of the screw, as it were.

For this, then, motivation is absolutely necessary. An attitude

is only clearly "realized" when it is made to seem inevitable.

It takes complete possession of our minds only when it inhibits

all other possibilities. At any given scene, the power of a

part to reproduce itself in us is measured by the convincing

quality given it by motivation, and for this there must be a

full body of associations to draw on, to round out and complete

understanding. The villain of the play is, for instance, less

completely "suggested" to us, because our associations are

supposedly less rich for such characters; as a beggar hypnotized

and made to feel himself a king has meagre mental equipment for

the part. Now, this inner possession can come about only

through the compelling force of a long course of preparation.

In providing such an accumulation of impulses, none was greater

than the younger Dumas--and none had to be greater! To make

his audience accept--that is, identify itself with--the action

of the hero in "Denise," or the mother's decision in "Les Idees

de Mms. Aubray," so subversive of general social feeling, and

thereby to experience fully the great dramatic moment in each

play, there had to go the effect of innumerable small impulses.

And to realize some situations is even beyond the scope of a

play's development. It is an acute remark of Mr. G.K.

Chesterton's, that many plays nowadays turn on problems of

marriage: which subject is one for slow years of adjustment,

patience, adaptation, endeavor; while the drama requires quick

decisions, bouleversements, etc., and would do wisely to

confine itself to fields in which such bouleversements can be

made credible. At any rate, motivation is desirable for the

dramatic confrontation, and time--the working-out--is an

essential condition of motivation. To make the dramatic

conflict ever sharper and deeper, until it either melts into

harmony, or ceases through the destruction of one element, is

the whole duty of the development, and makes it necessary.

That development is temporal, is, dramatically, only a device

for damming the flood that it may break at last with greater

force.

This, too, is an answer to the objection that if confrontation

is the dramatic essential, bare opposition, because the clearest

confrontation, would be the greatest drama, and the "Suppliants"

of Euripedes be indeed an example of it. Bare opposition is

never real confrontation in our sense, for that must be an

arrest, a mutual antagonism of all impulses of soul and sense.

It must possess the whole man. It needs to take in "all

thoughts, all passions, all delights," to be complete, and the

measure of its completeness is the measure of its aesthetic

value.

In the same way, the demand for profound truth and significance

in the drama is clearly to be reached from the purely dramatic

need. Inner "possession," the condition for our dramatic

tension, depends not alone on the cumulation of suggestions--

suggestion in its, so to speak, quantitative aspect. The

attitude of a character must be necessary in itself: that is,

it must be true to the great and general laws of life. If it

is fundamentally false, even with the longest and completest

preparation, it rings hollow. We cannot completely enter

into it. Thus we see that the one central requirement, the

dramatic germ, leads to the most far-reaching demands for

logic, sanity, and morality in the ideas of a play.

This should not be interpreted as exhausting the aesthetic

value of logic and morality in the drama. The drama is a

species of literature: and these qualities, apart from the

fact that they are necessary to the full dramatic moment,

have also an aesthetic effect proper to themselves. Thus

the development ha the beauty which lies in a necessary

progress; but this beauty is common to the epic, the novel,

and the symphony, while the unity given by the confrontation

and tension of simultaneous forces belongs to the drama alone.

It is therefore development as serving the dramatic end that

I have deduced.

Yet we may well recall here the other aspect of the experience.

Analogous to the pleasure in rhythm and in music, in which the

awaited beat or tone slips, as it were, into a place already

prepared for it, with the satisfaction of harmonious nervous

adjustment, is the pleasure in an inevitable and irrevocable

progress. For it is not felt as inevitable unless the whole

crystallization of the situation makes such, and only such,

an action or thought necessary at a certain point in the

structure, makes it to a certain extent anticipated, and so

recognized with acclaim on its appearance. We will an event

in anticipating and accepting it; and we realize it as it

comes. Nothing more is to be found in the psychological

analysis of the will itself--theoretically, the two states

are nearly identical. Thus this continual anticipation and

"coming true" takes on the feeling-tone of all volition; and

so in music, as I have shown at length, and in drama, and to

a degree in all forms of literature, we have the illusion of

the triumphant will. This is the secret of that creative joy

felt by the spectator at a drama, which has been so often

noted. It is this illusion of the triumphant will, too, which

enters largely into our acceptance of the tragic end. Much

has been said, in the "dispute over tragedy," of the so-called

"Resignation" of the tragic hero, and of the audience in relation

to his fate. But I believe that these writers are wrong in

connecting this resignation primarily with a moral attitude.

What is foreseen as perfectly inevitable, is sufficiently

"accepted" in the psychological sense--that is, vividly imagined

and awaited,--to contribute to this illusion of volition. Hence

arise, for the catastrophe of drama, that exaltation and stern

joy which are indissolubly connected with the experience of

will in real life.