doctrine of dramatic criticism that is capable of supporting itself
soundly. First, does the play interest? In other words, how far has the
dramatist succeeded in expressing himself, and the materials before
him, intelligently, eloquently, symmetrically, beautifully? So much for
the criticism of the dramatist as an artist. In the second place, whom
does the play interest? Does it interest inferior persons, or does it
interest cultivated and artistically sensitive persons? So much for the
criticism of the artist as a dramatist.
The major difficulty with critics of the drama has always been that,
having once positively enunciated their critical credos, they have
been constrained to devote their entire subsequent enterprise and
ingenuity to defending the fallacies therein. Since a considerable
number of these critics have been, and are, extraordinarily shrewd and
ingenious men, these defences of error have often been contrived with
such persuasive dexterity and reasonableness that they have endured
beyond the more sound doctrines of less deft critics, doctrines which,
being sound, have suffered the rebuffs that gaunt, grim logic, ever
unprepossessing and unhypnotic, suffers always. “I hope that I am
right; if I am not right, I am still right,” said Brunetière. “Mr.
William Archer is not only, like myself, a convinced, inflexible
determinist,” Henry Arthur Jones has written, “I am persuaded that
he is also, unlike myself, a consistent one. I am sure he takes care
that his practice agrees with his opinions--even when they are wrong.”
Dramatic criticism is an attempt to formulate rules of conduct for the
lovable, wayward, charming, wilful vagabond that is the drama. For the
drama is an art with a feather in its cap and an ironic smile upon its
lips, sauntering impudently over forbidden lawns and through closed
lanes into the hearts of those of us children of the world who have
never grown up. Beside literature, it is the Mother Goose of the arts:
a gorgeous and empurpled Mother Goose for the fireside of impressible
and romantic youth that, looking upward, leans ever hushed and
expectant at the knee of life. It is a fairy tale told realistically,
a true story told as romance. It is the lullaby of disillusion, the
chimes without the cathedral, the fears and hopes and dreams and
passions of those who cannot fully fear and hope and dream and flame of
themselves.
“The drama must have reality,” so Mr. P. P. Howe in his engaging
volume of “Dramatic Portraits,” “but the first essential to our
understanding of an art is that we should not believe it to be actual
life. The spectator who shouts his warning and advice to the heroine
when the villain is approaching is, in the theatre, the only true
believer in the hand of God; and he is liable to find it in a drama
lower than the best.” The art of the drama is one which imposes
upon drama the obligation of depicting at once the inner processes
of life realistically, and the external aspects of life delusively.
Properly and sympathetically to appreciate drama, one must look upon
it synchronously with two different eyes: the one arguing against
the other as to the truth of what it sees, and triumphing over this
doubtful other with the full force of its sophistry. Again inevitably
to quote Coleridge, “Stage presentations are to produce a sort of
temporary half-faith, which the spectator encourages in himself and
supports by a voluntary contribution on his own part, because he knows
that it is at all times in his power to see the thing as it really is.
Thus the true stage illusion as to a forest scene consists, not in the
mind’s judging it to be a forest, but in its remission of the judgment
that it is not a forest.” This obviously applies to drama as well as
to dramatic investiture. One never for a moment believes absolutely
that Mr. John Barrymore is Richard III; one merely agrees, for the sake
of Shakespeare, who has written the play, and Mr. Hopkins, who has
cast it, that Mr. John Barrymore is Richard III, that one may receive
the ocular, aural and mental sensations for which one has paid three
dollars and a half. Nor does one for a moment believe that Mr. Walter
Hampden, whom that very evening one has seen dividing a brobdingnagian
dish of goulash with Mr. Oliver Herford in the Player’s Club and
discussing the prospects of the White Sox, is actually speaking
extemporaneously the rare verbal embroideries of Shakespeare; or that
Miss Ethel Barrymore who is billed in front of Browne’s Chop House to
take a star part in the Actors’ Equity Association’s benefit, is really
the queen of a distant kingdom.
The dramatist, in the theatre, is not a worker in actualities, but in
the essence of actualities that filters through the self-deception of
his spectators. There is no such thing as realism in the theatre: there
is only mimicry of realism. There is no such thing as romance in the
theatre: there is only mimicry of romance. There is no such thing as an
automatic dramatic susceptibility in a theatre audience: there is only
a volitional dramatic susceptibility. Thus, it is absurd to speak of
the drama holding the mirror up to nature; all that the drama can do
is to hold nature up to its own peculiar mirror which, like that in a
pleasure-park carousel, amusingly fattens up nature, or shrinks it, yet
does not at any time render it unrecognizable. One does not go to the
theatre to see life and nature; one goes to see the particular way in
which life and nature happen to look to a cultivated, imaginative and
entertaining man who happens, in turn, to be a playwright. Drama is the
surprising pulling of a perfectly obvious, every-day rabbit out of a
perfectly obvious, every-day silk hat. The spectator has seen thousands
of rabbits and thousands of silk hats, but he has never seen a silk hat
that had a rabbit concealed in it, and he is curious about it.
But if drama is essentially mimetic, so also--as Professor Gilbert
Murray implies--is criticism essentially mimetic in that it is
representative of the work criticized. It is conceivable that one may
criticize Mr. Ziegfeld’s “Follies” in terms of the “Philoctetes” of
Theodectes--I myself have been guilty of even more exceptional feats;
it is not only conceivable, but of common occurrence, for certain of
our academic American critics to criticize the plays of Mr. Shaw in
terms of Scribe and Sardou, and with a perfectly straight face; but
criticism in general is a chameleon that takes on something of the
colour of the pattern upon which it imposes itself. There is drama
in Horace’s “Epistola ad Pisones,” a criticism of drama. There is
the spirit of comedy in Hazlitt’s essay “On the Comic Writers of the
Last Century.” Dryden’s “Essay on Dramatic Poesy” is poetry. There
is something of the music of Chopin in Huneker’s critical essays on
Chopin, and some of Mary Garden’s spectacular histrionism in his essay
on her acting. Walkley, criticizing “L’Enfant Prodigue,” uses the pen
of Pierrot. Criticism, more than drama with her mirror toward nature,
holds the mirror up to the nature of the work it criticizes. Its end
is the revivification of the passion of art which has been spent in
its behalf, but under the terms laid down by Plato. Its aim is to
reconstruct a great work of art on a diminutive scale, that eyes
which are not capable of gazing on high may have it within the reach
of their vision. Its aim is to play again all the full richness of
the artist’s emotional organ tones, in so far as is possible, on the
cold cerebral xylophone that is criticism’s deficient instrument. In
the accomplishment of these aims, it is bound by no laws that art is
not bound by. There is but one rule: there are no rules. Art laughs at
locksmiths.
It has been a favourite diversion of critics since Aristotle’s day to
argue that drama is drama, whether one reads it from a printed page
or sees it enacted in a theatre. Great drama, they announce, is great
drama whether it ever be acted or not; “it speaks with the same voice
in solitude as in crowds”; and “all the more then”--again I quote Mr.
Spingarn--“will the drama itself ‘even apart from representation and
actors,’ as old Aristotle puts it, speak with its highest power to the
imagination fitted to understand and receive it.” Upon this point of
view much of the academic criticism of drama has been based. But may
we not well reply that, for all the fact that Shakespeare would still
be the greatest dramatist who ever lived had he never been played in
the theatre, so, too, would Bach still be the greatest composer who
ever lived had his compositions never been played at all? If drama is
not meant for actors, may we not also argue that music is not meant for
instruments? Are not such expedients less sound criticism than clever
evasion of sound criticism: a frolicsome and agreeable straddling
of the æsthetic see-saw? There is the printed drama--criticize it.
There is the same drama acted--criticize it. Why quibble? Sometimes,
as in the case of “Gioconda” and Duse, they are one. Well and good.
Sometimes, as in the case of “Chantecler” and Maude Adams, they are not
one. Well and good. But where, in either case, the confusion that the
critics lay such stress upon? These critics deal not with theories,
but with mere words. They take two dozen empty words and adroitly seek
therewith to fashion a fecund theory. The result is--words. “Words
which,” said Ruskin, “if they are not watched, will do deadly work
sometimes. There are masked words droning and skulking about us just
now ... (there never were so many, owing to the teaching of catechisms
and phrases at school instead of human meanings) ... there never were
creatures of prey so mischievous, never diplomatists so cunning,
never poisoners so deadly, as these masked words: they are the unjust
stewards of men’s ideas....”
III. THE PLACE OF THE THEATRE
III. THE PLACE OF THE THEATRE
I
The theatre stands in relation to drama much as the art gallery
stands in relation to painting. Its aim is to set off drama in such
surroundings and in such light as to bring it within the comfortable
vision and agreeable scrutiny of the nomad public. To say that fine
drama may produce an equal effect read as acted may be true or not as
you choose, but so too a fine painting may produce an equal effect
beheld in one’s library as in the Uffizi. Art thrives--art leads to
art--on sympathy and a measure of general understanding. Otherwise,
of what use criticism? To divorce the theatre from a consideration of
drama as an art, to contend, as it has been contended from Aristotle’s
day to Corneille’s, and from Dryden’s and Lamb’s to our own, that
“the more lasting and noble design” of drama rests in a reading rather
than a seeing, may be, strictly, a logical æsthetic manœuvre, but
equally a logical æsthetic manœuvre would be a divorcement of canvas
from painting as an art. The theatre is the canvas of drama. The
printed drama is like a bubbling and sunlit spring, encountered only
by wanderers into the hills and awaiting the bottling process of the
theatre to carry its tonic waters far and wide among an expectant and
emotionally ill people.
The criticism that nominates itself to hold drama and the theatre as
things apart is a criticism which, for all its probable integrity and
reason, suffers from an excessive aristocracy, like a duchess in a play
by Mr. Sydney Grundy. Its æsthetic nose is elevated to such a degree
that it may no longer serve as a practical organ of earthly smell,
but merely as a quasi-wax feature to round out the symmetry of the
face. It is criticism in a stiff corset, erect, immobile, lordly--like
the Prussian lieutenant of yesterday, a striking figure, yet just a
little absurd. It is sound, but like many things that are sound in
æsthetics, it has its weak points, even its confounding points. For
they say that propaganda can have no place in art, and along comes a
Hauptmann and writes a “Weavers.” Or they say that art is form, and
along comes a Richard Strauss and composes two songs for baritone and
orchestra that set the critics to a mad chasing of their own tails. Or,
opposing criticism as an art, they say that “criticism is art in form,
but its content is judgment, which takes it out of the intuitional
world into the conceptual world”--and along comes an H. G. Wells with
his “The New Machiavelli” which, like criticism, is art in form and
its content judgment. To hold that the drama as an art may achieve
its highest end read by the individual and not acted in the theatre,
is to hold that music as an art may achieve its highest end played by
but one instrument and not by an orchestra. The theatre is the drama’s
orchestra: upon the wood of its boards and the wind of its puppets is
the melody of drama in all its full richness sounded. What if drama
is art and the theatre not art? What if “Hamlet” is art and electric
lights and cheese-cloth are not art? Schubert’s piano trio, op. 99,
is art, and a pianoforte is a mere wooden box containing a number of
little hammers that hit an equal number of steel and copper wires.
What if I can read a full imagination into “Romeo and Juliet” and thus
people it and make it live for me, without going to the theatre? So,
too, can I read a full melody into the manuscript of a song by Hugo
Wolf and thus make it sing for me, without going to a concert hall. But
why? Is there only one way to appreciate and enjoy art--and since when?
Wagner on a single violin is Wagner; Wagner on all the orchestra is
super-Wagner. To read a great drama is to play “Parsifal” on a cornet
and an oboe.
The object of the theatre is not, as is habitually maintained, a
shrewd excitation of the imagination of a crowd, but rather a shrewd
relaxation of that imagination. It is a faulty axiom that holds the
greatest actor in the theatre to be an audience’s imagination, and
the adroit cultivation of the latter to be ever productive of large
financial return. As I have on more than one occasion pointed out from
available and acutely relevant statistics, the more a dramatist relies
upon the imagination, of an audience, the less the box-office reward
that is his. An audience fills a theatre auditorium not so eager to
perform with its imagination as to have its imagination performed
upon. This is not the paradox it may superficially seem to be. The
difference is the difference between a prompt commercial failure like
Molnar’s “Der Gardeofficier” (“Where Ignorance Is Bliss”) which asks
an audience to perform with its imagination and a great commercial
success like Barrie’s “Peter Pan” which performs upon the audience’s
imagination by supplying to it every detail of imagination, ready-made
and persuasively labelled. The theatre is not a place to which one
goes in search of the unexplored corners of one’s imagination; it is
a place to which one goes in repeated search of the familiar corners
of one’s imagination. The moment the dramatist works in the direction
of unfamiliar corners, he is lost. This, contradictorily enough, is
granted by the very critics who hold to the imagination fallacy which
I have just described. They unanimously agree that a dramatist’s most
successful cultivation of an audience lies in what they term, and
nicely, the mood of recognition, and in the same breath paradoxically
contend that sudden imaginative shock is a desideratum no less.
In this pleasant remission of the active imagination lies one of the
secrets of the charm of the theatre. Nor is the theatre alone in
this. On even the higher plane of the authentic arts a measure of the
same phenomenon assists in what may perhaps not too far-fetchedly be
termed the negative stimulation of the spectator’s fancy. For all the
pretty and winning words to the contrary, no person capable of sound
introspection will admit that a beautiful painting like Giorgione’s
“The Concert” or a beautiful piece of sculpture like Pisano’s Perugian
fountain actually and literally stirs his imagination, and sets it
a-sail across hitherto uncharted æsthetic seas. What such a painting
or piece of sculpture does is to reach out and, with its overpowering
beauty, encompass and æsthetically fence in the antecedent wandering
and uncertain imagination of its spectator. As in the instance of
drama, it does not so much awaken a dormant imagination as soothe an
imagination already awake. Of all the arts, music alone remains a
telegrapher of unborn dreams.
The theatre brings to the art of drama concrete movement, concrete
colour, and concrete final effectiveness: this, in all save a few minor
particulars. The art of drama suffers, true enough, when the theatre,
even at its finest, is challenged by it to produce the values intrinsic
in its ghost of a dead king, or in its battle on Bosworth Field, or in
its ship torn by the tempest, or in its fairy wood on midsummer night,
or in its approaching tread of doom of the gods of the mountain. But
for each such defeat it prospers doubly in the gifts that the theatre
brings to it. Such gifts as the leader Craig has brought to the
furtherance of the beauty of “Electra” and “Hamlet,” as Reinhardt and
his aides have brought to “Ariadne” and “Julius Cæsar,” as Golovine
and Appia and Bakst and Linnebach and half a dozen others have
brought to the classics that have called to them, are not small ones.
They have crystallized the glory of drama, have taken so many loose
jewels and given them substantial and appropriate settings which have
fittingly posed their radiance. To say that the reading imagination
of the average cultured man is superior in power of suggestion and
depiction to the imagination of the theatre is idiotically to say that
the reading imagination of every average cultured man is superior in
these powers to the combined theatrical imaginations of Gordon Craig,
Max Reinhardt and Eleanora Duse operating jointly upon the same play.
Even a commonplace imagination can successfully conjure up a landscape
more beautiful than any painted by Poussin or Gainsborough, or jewels
more opalescent than any painted by Rembrandt, or a woman’s dress more
luminous than any painted by Fortuny, or nymphs more beguiling than
any of Rubens’, yet who so foolish to say--as they are wont foolishly
to say of reading imagination and the drama--that such an imagination
is therefore superior to that of the artists? This, in essence, is
none the less the serious contention of those who decline to reconcile
themselves to the theatrically produced drama. This contention, reduced
to its skeleton, is that, since the vice-president of the Corn Exchange
Bank can picture the chamber in the outbuilding adjoining Gloster’s
castle more greatly to his satisfaction than Adolphe Appia can picture
it for him on the stage, the mental performance of the former is
therefore a finer artistic achievement than the stage performance of
the latter.
II
The word imagination leads critics to queer antics. It is, perhaps,
the most manhandled word in our critical vocabulary. It is used
almost invariably in its literal meaning: no shades and shadows are
vouchsafed to it. Imagination, in good truth, is not the basis of art,
but an overtone. Many an inferior artist has a greater imagination
than many a superior artist. Maeterlinck’s imagination is much richer
than Hauptmann’s, Erik Satie’s is much richer than César Franck’s,
and I am not at all certain that Romain Rolland’s is not twice as
opulent as Thomas Hardy’s. Imagination is the slave of the true artist,
the master of the weak. The true artist beats imagination with the
cat-o’-nine-tails of his individual technic until it cries out in pain,
and this pain is the work of art which is born. The inferior craftsman
comfortably confounds imagination with the finished work, and so pets
and coddles it; and imagination’s resultant mincings and giggles he
then vaingloriously sets forth as resolute art.
The theatre offers to supplement, embroider and enrich the imagination
of the reader of drama with the imaginations of the actor, the scene
designer, the musician, the costumer and the producing director.
Each of these, before he sets himself to his concrete task, has--like
the lay reader--sought the fruits of his own reading imagination.
The fruits of these five reading imaginations are then assembled,
carefully assorted, and the most worthy of them deftly burbanked.
The final staging of the drama is merely a staging of these best
fruits of the various reading imaginations. To say, against this,
that it is most often impossible to render a reading imagination into
satisfactory concrete forms is doubtless to say what is, strictly,
true. But art itself is at its highest merely an approach toward
limitless imagination and beauty. Æsthetics is a pilgrim on the road to
a Mecca that is ever just over the sky-line. Of how many great works
of art can one say, with complete and final conviction, that art in
this particular direction can conceivably go no farther? Is it not
conceivable that some super-Michelangelo will some day fashion an even
more perfect “Slave,” and some super-Shakespeare an even more beautiful
poetic drama?
The detractors of the theatre are often expert in persuasive
half-truths and masters of dialectic sleight-of-hand. Their
performances are often so adroit that the spectator is quick to believe
that the trunk is really empty, yet the false bottom is there for
all its cunning concealment. Take, for example, George Moore, in the
preface to his last play, “The Coming of Gabrielle.” “The illusion
created by externals, scenes, costumes, lighting and short sentences
is in itself illusory,” he professes to believe, though why he numbers
the dramatist’s short sentences among the externals of the stage
is not quite clear. “The best performances of plays and operas are
witnessed at rehearsals. Jean de Reszke was never so like Tristan at
night as he was in the afternoon when he sang the part in a short
jacket, a bowler hat and an umbrella in his hand. The chain armour and
the plumes that he wore at night were but a distraction, setting our
thoughts on periods, on the short swords in use in the ninth century in
Ireland or in Cornwall, on the comfort or the discomfort of the ships
in which the lovers were voyaging, on the absurd night-dress which
is the convention that Isolde should appear in, a garment she never
wore and which we know to be make-believe. But the hat and feathers
that Isolde appears in when she rehearses the part are forgotten the
moment she sings; and if I had to choose to see Forbes-Robertson play
Hamlet or rehearse Hamlet, I should not hesitate for a moment. The
moment he speaks he ceases to be a modern man, but in black hose the
illusion ceases, for we forget the Prince of Denmark and remember the
mummer.” Years ago, in a volume of critical essays given the title
“Another Book on the Theatre,” I took a boyish delight in setting off
precisely the same noisy firework just to hear the folks in the piazza
rocking-chairs let out a yell. These half-truths serve criticism as
sauce serves asparagus: they give tang to what is otherwise often
tasteless food. This is particularly true with criticism at its most
geometrical and profound, since such criticism, save in rare instances,
is not especially lively reading. But, nevertheless, the sauce is not
the asparagus. And when Mr. Moore (doubtless with his tongue in his
cheek) observes that he can much more readily imagine the lusty Frau
Tillie Pfirsich-Melba as Isolde in a pink and green ostrich feather hat
confected in some Friedrichstrasse atelier than in the customary stage
trappings, he allows, by implication, that he might even more readily
imagine the elephantine lady as the seductive Carmen if she had no
clothes on at all.