of the great compass of a controlling dramatic tradition, yet this
is not quite true; because other influences--vague perhaps, yet very
authoritative--supply, in some degree, the place of the older tyrant,
custom. The controlling force of living dramatic practice has died away
in the world, and has become dissipated into a thousand traditions.
But in dying, it has left two influences as its heirs--namely, the
influence of criticism, and the influence of academic training. These
two watch-dogs of the drama tend to keep at least some record of the
past. They organize and classify the new varieties of drama which are
constantly springing up. For it appears that a new kind of drama is not
so very difficult a thing for a community to develop. The oratorio, for
example, and modern opera in all its forms, are even more artificial
than the Greek drama, and require an even greater conventional
sympathy on the part of the audience. Yet they have grown up naturally
among us and are true children of stage life. In quite recent years
Wagner, Ibsen, and Mæterlinck has each developed a personal theatre
of his own. Each has drawn to himself a sort of international public,
held together by ties of education, by taste and by the spirit of the
age--such a public as a novelist might collect, but which one would
never have predicted for a playwright. This could only have happened
in an age when there existed a large reading public made up of persons
who were scattered throughout all the nations. For it must be noted
that the reading of plays is as good as a chorus. It warns the people
of what is to come. Not only the reading of plays but the reading of
pamphlets and of essays is necessary in order that people may be primed
to accept any new departure in the drama. The undeniable genius of
Gluck was not able to establish his lyrical drama without the aid of
many writers, talkers, and promoters. It required a war of pamphlets
and the influence of royalty to make the new opera acceptable. Ibsen
and Wagner have been accompanied by a wagonload of pamphlets and
broadsides, as if they were the forerunners of a new circus. Bernard
Shaw went with every play he gave as an advertising agent, a gladiator
and shouting billman that would get the attention of the public at any
price. It was quieter inside the theatre than outside of it, so people
took refuge within.
Let no one think that criticism is an unnecessary part of the modern
drama. Criticism to-day is but the articulate utterance of those
conventions, those assumptions, and prejudices which must accompany and
support any drama in the mind of the audience, and which in simpler
ages hardly needed statement, because they were established. They stood
in the public consciousness much as the walls of the theatre stood in
the market-place, while the plays proceeded within them.
There has always been criticism. Aristotle did not begin it, but he
is the starting-point of that great river of Thought-about-Art which
has accompanied the developments of the arts since Greek times. The
history of criticism is tremendous in volume, in brilliancy, and in
seriousness; and it has a great utility and mission toward the world
at large. If anyone have a curiosity to know what this literature is,
let him glance through Saintsbury’s History of Criticism in three
great tomes of many hundred pages each, in which the great names and
the great theories in criticism are reviewed. This is a part of the
literary history, of the bookish history of the world. From Plato
to Lessing, from Longinus to Santayana there have been acute-minded
individuals who loved the fine arts, poetry, sculpture, music, the
drama, etc., and who busied themselves with speculation upon them.
These men would pluck out the heart of the mystery, they would touch
our quick with their needle, they would satisfy our intellect with
their explanations. And here arises one of the subtlest difficulties
in all psychology; the difficulty of explaining clearly how men of
the greatest intellect may be subject to the grossest self-delusion.
The reasonings of these critics about art are valid as reasonings
of critics about art, so long as they are kept in the arena of the
reasoning of critics about art. But if you try to translate those
reasonings back again into the substance of art itself--if, for
instance, you bid the artist follow the admonition of the critic, you
will find that the artist cannot do this without making a retranslation
of the critic’s ideas into terms which now become incomprehensible
to the critic. In order to take the critic’s advice--to produce the
effects which the critic calls for--the artist must do with his
material things which the critic has not mentioned and does not
conceive of.
The critic, after all, is a parasite. He lives by illustrating the
brains of the artist. He is an illuminator. He has produced a wonderful
literature--a literature of embroidery--and this literature is very
valuable to the world at large; but has, as it were, no mission as
toward the artist. The reason is that the artist gets his experience of
art by working directly and immediately in the art; and the problems he
works on can neither be stated nor solved except in the terms of his
art. The critic, meanwhile, believes that he himself has stated and
solved those problems; but what he says is folly to the ears of the
artist. The misunderstanding must continue forever, and neither of the
parties is to blame for it. Listen to the most good-natured of artists,
Molière, speaking with the authority of unbounded success, upon the
subject that drives lesser men to helpless rage:--
“Vous êtes de plaisantes gens avec vos règles, dont vous
embarrassez les ignorants et nous étourdissez tous les jours.
Il semble, à vous ouïr parler, que ces règles de l’art soient
les plus grands mystères du monde, et cependant ce ne sont que
quelques observations aisées que le bon sens a faites sur ce qui
peut ôter le plaisir que l’on prend à ces sortes de poèmes; et le
même bon sens, qui a fait autrefois ces observations, les fait
aisément tous les jours sans le secours d’Horace et d’Aristote.
Je voudrais bien savoir si la grande règle de toutes les règles
n’est pas de plaire, et si une pièce de théatre qui a attrapé son
but n’a pa suivi un bon chemin. Laissons-nous aller de bonne foi
aux choses qui nous prennent par les entrailles, et ne cherchons
point de raisonnement pour nous empêcher d’avoir du plaisir.”...
Even Molière is a little harsh to the critics. He seems not to remember
that critics are “seized by the entrails” by a set of psychological
terms, by “the sublime,” by “beauty,” by “contrast,” by the very
idea that there should be laws underlying the mysteries of æsthetic
enjoyment--laws which critics proclaim. The fact is that the sincerity
and enthusiasm of the critic carries all before it. It seems to the
critic as if the artist were a poor fool who does not quite understand
himself. Molière has had his say, but what of that? No critic was
listening. The critic feels too keenly about the matter to catch the
drift of Molière’s remarks. You cannot persuade Ruskin that he does not
understand painting. You cannot make Aristotle believe that he stands
in the position of an outsider toward tragic poetry. He smiles at the
suggestion. He feels himself to be quite on the level of his subject.
Before he spoke, it had not spoken. Leave the critic, then, to his
thesis: and let us confess that for everyone except for the artist,
that thesis has a great and stimulating value.
The words of the critical, even though they come from outside the
profession, have a value in preserving and in interpreting good
traditions in art. The real power, however, through which these
traditions live is the teaching done inside of the profession. What the
apprentice learns at the bench from the master-craftsman--this is what
controls the future of art. It is through this teaching that the raw
youth is turned into a craftsman. No one who has not passed through the
mill can conceive the depth to which nature must be affected through
training before art is gained. The artist is as much a product of art
as his own works are. To execute the simplest acts of his profession
he must have passed through a severe novitiate. He cannot sound a note
of it till he has been refashioned, as Mrs. Browning sang, from a reed
into a musical instrument.
There are certain ways of reciting verse and of speaking prose, certain
ways of walking on and off the stage, which are expressive, correct,
and necessary. To drop them is a sign of ignorance and decadence. They
cannot be replaced by something modern that is just as good: they are
a race inheritance. If you lose them you will have to re-discover them
subsequently, just as, if you were to lose the science of harmony, you
would have to discover it again before you could understand the music
of modern times. How is it that these practices and trade secrets of
the arts get preserved during periods of public indifference, when
perhaps the studios might forget them? It is by the institution of
Academies and Lyceums: by the endowment of galleries and theatres. The
nations of Continental Europe long ago resorted to state-supported
schools, galleries, and play-houses as a means of preserving tradition.
On the Continent no one is allowed to forget the old forms. They are
nursed and cultivated. The very nations which need training the least,
because of their natural talent, and of their proximity to the old
Mediterranean seats of culture, get the most of it, because of their
intelligent understanding of what art consists in. Among late-comers
at the table of civilization, and among young people generally, there
prevails an opinion that art is the result of genius, or of natural
temperament, or of race endowment. But the persons who have the
endowment of race, of temperament, and of genius know that art is a
question of training.
It is a sign that civilization has been spreading to find that in
England and in America, men are beginning to adopt Continental ideas
upon the subject of endowed theatres. The chaotic condition of the
English stage has been very largely due to the fact that it has been
nobody’s business to preserve the old recipes. If the public taste
swings away from lyrical drama for a decade, lyrical drama goes by the
board--the very models and old wig stands are thrown out of the window.
In a few years, only a few old actors and playgoers will remember
the lost delights that went with these trappings. A whole province
of human happiness has been eaten up by the sea of oblivion--by that
all-surrounding, ever-active ocean that gnaws away the outlying realms
of the mind, and will eat us back to mere grunts and a sign language
unless we value our inheritance of articulation. Without the support of
schools of acting the present moment remains continually too important.
Those whole classes of exquisite, beautiful things which go out of
fashion and are thereafter all but irrecoverable, should be held before
the public with as firm a hand as orchestral music has been held before
it, and for the same reasons. We are always being told by theatrical
people that the public taste will or will not support something. Does
anybody inquire whether the American public likes Bach or Beethoven,
or does anybody take advice of the press as to how the works of those
masters shall be played? No. The best traditions are followed, the best
performers obtained, and the effect upon the public mind is awaited
with patience and with certainty. That is the way a State Theatre is
run in Europe, and that is the way that a New Theatre should be run in
America.
With regard to music, we have adopted the Continental ideas easily,
because we had no music of our own. But with regard to the drama we
have certain crude ideas of our own, rooted in the existence of a
domestic drama, and these ideas impede our progress. We have, for
instance, a belief that because an audience is used to an inferior
thing, therefore it will continue to prefer that thing to something
better and that the reformer should content himself with giving the
public only a taste now and then of something fine, and should keep in
touch with them in the meantime through concessions to popular taste.
This would be sound reasoning in the mouth of the business manager of
an ordinary theatrical venture; but in the mouth of the manager of
an educational theatre, it is blasphemy. The thesis upon which all
education rests is this: give the best, and it will supplant the less
good.
I doubt if anyone in the country is more grateful than I am to the
managers of the New Theatre. They have begun a great work. The whole
country is in debt to them already. They are showing a spirit which
will make their future work continually improve; and their efforts
have, on the whole, been received with that lack of intelligent
gratitude with which society always receives its benefactors.
Nevertheless their work and their position seem to illustrate so
many points in the subject, that a little incidental criticism of
them is unavoidable. If I find fault with the New Theatre for not
being sufficiently academic, it is only to illustrate how completely
academic standards have been vanishing in America. For instance, the
art of reciting Shakespeare has been all but lost, and the New Theatre
proved this quite unconsciously by a plunge, upon some occasions, into
a sort of household naturalism in its method of reciting romantic
drama. An epoch like the present, in which the current new plays
are naturalistic, will tend to recite Shakespeare in a naturalistic
way. But only the abeyance of good tradition could have led to the
attempt to give Shakespeare’s lines in a conversational manner. We
have forgotten how effective the lines are when conventionally given,
or we should resent this experiment in taking the starch out of them.
Indeed upon certain other occasions the old standards of speech were
last winter brought back in magnificent triumph at the New Theatre. If
it was chiefly to the Englishmen and Englishwomen of the New Theatre
Company that we in America owed this beautiful lesson in speech, let us
none the less be grateful for the lesson and draw from it what profit
we may.
There are people who believe that verse is merely a decorated sort
of prose; and that in connection with the drama, verse is a foolish
superfluity. The people who think this have not heard verse well
recited. The delivery of metrical language in an elevated manner is
the noblest tradition of the stage. It is a thing at the same time
completely artificial and completely beautiful. It lifts the play into
a region native to great thoughts, where lightnings strike, as in their
element, and music like a natural thunder rolls across the scene.
To-day the secret of this majestic convention of verse is lost to the
stage. Neither in the writing of it by the poet nor in the delivery
of it by the actor, nor in the reception and enjoyment of it by the
audience can the thing come off happily except under rare conditions,
when all are prepared for it and when the right planets are in the
ascendant. We live under an eclipse; yet is not the sun extinguished.
Verse will return to the drama as soon as those themes return which
only verse can carry.
All these conventions and settings of which we have been speaking are
but the accessories, the servants of the stage; and, like insolent
lackeys, they sometimes thrust themselves vulgarly forward. The
wardrobe of Louis XIV might easily make the claim that the monarchy
could not be carried on without it. And yet, on the stage, it is not
quite so. On the stage, no particular set of accessories is ever so
important as it thinks itself. The multiplicity of the forces at work
saves us from such shameful subjection to detail. We can always, at
a pinch, get on without any of the accessories. Have you ever, when
charades were being acted, seen some talented person enter the room,
wearing an old hat and having a shawl or perhaps a window curtain drawn
across his shoulders? For some brief moments of inspiration he manages
to make you see Hector of Troy, or The Man that broke the Bank at
Monte Carlo. You cannot tell how it was done, it was so rapid. Yet you
have had a glimpse of an idea. You have been transported somehow and
somewhere. Perhaps the actor cannot do it again; for amateurs strike
sparks and call up spirits by accident. Nevertheless, the thing you
have seen is the essence of drama. An idea has been conveyed; and all
the means that conveyed it have been lost--consumed like gunpowder
in the explosion. We can all remember various amateur performances
and revivals of old plays, in which the accessories were of the
simplest; and in which the suppression of scenery and the focusing
of the audience’s whole attention upon the actors had a wonderfully
stimulating effect upon the talents of the actors. The means were at a
minimum; the idea, the thought was at a maximum. In this amateur spark
we have the key to the real theatre.
The building, the costumes, the incidental music, the blank verse,
all the accessories of a play exist for the purpose of making an
atmosphere of high conductivity, in which that spark of idea may fly
out from the stage, across the footlights, into the audience. During
great moments or great half-hours of a play this same disappearance
of the accessories takes place, and gives us the life of drama. We
are always losing this life, because the accessories have independent
and fluctuating values of their own which attract our attention.
Costume seems to be an advantage in helping to hold the illusion, and
scenery is merely an extension of costume. Either of them may attract
too much attention, and how much this too much is, depends upon the
sensibilities of the auditor. For example, Twelfth Night is injured in
my eyes when it is given with beautiful Italian scenery, no matter how
beautiful. Toby Belch is, in my mind, connected with rural England, and
to see him with Vesuvius in the background shocks me. Nevertheless,
the next man may find in this Italian scenery a gentle stimulus which
heightens his enjoyment of the inner drama. Again, blank verse, when
properly spoken, adds to a play a moving charm like an accompaniment
of music; but when the lines are declaimed with either too much or too
little artifice, they become a nuisance. All the means and vehicles of
expression should fill the mere margin of our attention, ready to step
forward when the mind’s stage is empty and to vanish on the approach of
the dramatic interest.
The Greek stage came as near to the charade as the theatre has ever
come since. Here was no scenery, and the costume was merely suggestive.
Play of feature was out of the question, because of the mask. The
appeal of the natural voice was out of the question, because of
the megaphone mouth-piece. There was nothing left but gesture and
intonation. What a denudation that seems to us! But are you sure that
the imagination is not heightened by just such devices as this? Are you
sure that Hector or Heracles are not made ten times as real by this
absence of realism as they ever could have been made by naturalistic
treatment?
A character comes on the Greek stage, and you perceive by his talk that
he is supposed to be walking in a wood. In a few moments he arrives
at an imaginary point of view. Another character walks on the stage,
and you perceive that this second character is supposed to have come
walking up the valley. Your whole attention is on the story, and any
striking scenery would be an unpleasant intrusion, an inartistic
element. Surely the Greeks were very clever at mechanical contrivances
and could have had scenery if they had desired it. What they had was
much better,--imagination.
It is the same with the French classic stage, whose meagreness of
decoration is almost an offense to the American. The higher the
intelligence of the audience, the less will scenery be valued in plays.
In the case of children’s toys, we all know that a rag doll and a
wooly dog speak a more eloquent language than a mechanical doll and a
realistic dog that walks. But we dare not employ this philosophy in
dressing our stage, because of the lack of imagination in grown people.
I have no doubt that if you had, say, thirty new plays to produce, each
of them as good as Hamlet, and if your audience were to consist of the
most intelligent people in the world, and if your actors were all and
each as good as David Garrick, I have no doubt, I say, that the most
thrilling way you could produce those plays would be on a stage without
scenery and with just such suggestion of costume as should lift the
characters into the world of idea. Such was the Elizabethan method; at
least it was the practice which the Elizabethans stumbled upon in their
riotous career.
The world of idea is what you are seeking, no matter how sure you may
be that you want realism. The power of a play comes from this, that
it makes people believe that the action on the stage is not merely a
story, which has happened and is over--but is a thing which is going
on, a truth, a spiritual, inward reality which has to do with the
life and sentiments of the audience. This is what we want, what we
always want, whether we are playing Lear, or Ibsen, or Uncle Tom’s
Cabin. The different kinds of drama use different means of suggesting
spiritual reality. Poetic images are one way, sideboards and furniture
are another way. Now it must be confessed at once that realism does
tend to convey spiritual truth to people who possess a low degree of
reflective power. A reproduction in detail of something seen in real
life--wax-works, for instance--impresses the unimaginative person
more strongly than a sketch of the same thing done by Rembrandt; yet
both the wax-works and the Rembrandt have the same end in view--to
bring home an idea to the beholder. We may, then, measure the life in
people’s fancy by the weight of suggestion which is requisite to awaken
them--a feather of imagery or a cannon ball of actuality--and in this
we shall not be dealing with several kinds of dramatic principle, but
only with several conditions of education in the audience.
The recent realism seen on our own stage shows a deadness of wit in
our life--the sad unresponsive seriousness of persons who do not
habitually live in the world of imagination. That world seems flat to
them. Nevertheless, the same persons will, with a little encouragement,
begin to enjoy humor, and trust poetry. Put them where they have no
critical responsibility and they will blossom into enjoyment. O blessed
amateurs! I wish someone would write a book and show that the whole
history of art has been but the history of amateurs; and that every
revival of painting, drama, music, architecture, and poetry has been
due to them. They cannot, perhaps, make great music themselves, but
they hand the lyre to Apollo. They have not the training, but they have
the passion that finds talent in others and protects the flame while
it is young. They suspect the secret of a lost art and go in search of
it as for the Golden Fleece. And amateurs, yes the amateurs are the
persons who will keep the drama from ever quite losing all relation to
its ancestor--its good genius--the charade.
The great aim of any drama is to make all the audience and all the
actors think of the same thing at the same moment during the entire
evening. The “argument,” as they used to call it, is the main thing.
It is astonishing what a good name this is for the exposition of
ideas that takes place in a very good play either ancient or modern.
The argument is what both audience and actors breathlessly follow.
We err only when we begin to define what the argument is. It seems,
in truth, to be something too subtle for analysis. In some plays we
think we find it in the plot, in others in the characters, in others
in the language, and so forth. But there is hardly a definition of it
which some famous example will not instantly confute. There is, for
instance, a charm that comes out of As You Like It, and which for three
hundred years has made audiences consent to sit through its three hours
of happy trifling. That charm is the “argument” of As You Like It.
You cannot state the charm. It is as subtle as the ether and as real
as the power of light that moves across the ether. Our senses are not
at fault, but only our theories. There is a fluctuating mystery about
all that happens in the theatre, and perhaps this indefinable power
is what most attaches us to the place. It is not a place of learning,
nor of scholarship, nor of information or ethics, nor even of such
flights of mind as accurate thought can always follow. It is a place of
enchantment.
NORWAY.
In Norway people live in small houses in which the air is very bad. The
people neither wash nor laugh, and common sense is unknown among them.
Each man or woman is endowed with one idea, and that is sufficient for
each. He is satisfied with it, and he is never seen without it. So that
anyone may always very easily recognize the different characters of
a Norwegian play. One knows that each idea is very significant, very
logical, and very much to be noted. Thus, if a character has the idea
of walking upstairs backward instead of forward, one feels perfectly
satisfied about that person. He is always talking about his mania,
and one knows that, in the end, some terrible and logical calamity is
going to result from the perverse habit with which stepdame nature
has endowed him. For all people in Norway are stepchildren of nature,
and are barely endowed with sufficient complexity of intelligence to
prevent them from swallowing poison, falling down wells, or walking
over precipices. Indeed they do all these things, the moment the well
or the poison or the precipice comes between themselves and their
favorite hobby.