WHEN a subject is too complex and too subtle to admit of any adequate analysis, people dogmatize about it. They believe that they are thus recurring to first principles. But what are the principles? That is just what no one can state. The drama is one of those difficult subjects which lure the writer on and draw him out. It is a subject upon which ideas flow easily, theories form of themselves, and convictions deepen in the very act of improvisation. The writer who will trust his own inspiration can hardly fail to end by saying something very true about the drama. That is the trouble with the drama: so many things are true of it. It is scarcely less confusing than human life itself. The difficult thing is to strike some balance between all these interlocking and oscillating truths.
Consider, for example, how many and illusive are the influences that go to make up a good dramatic performance. The elements are interwoven in our consciousness, mingled and flowing together like motes in the sunbeam, rising, falling, fading, changing, glowing, and ever suffering transformation and re-birth, like the dream-things that they are. No matter what you say about a performance you can hardly be sure that you have hit upon the right explanation. Let us suppose that there has been an evening of inspiring success. Some golden lead of the imagination has sprung up and overshot one performance—paused, passed and vanished—leaving audience and actors, and even critics, to account for it as they may. You think you have a clue to the situation; but you have barely time to rejoice over your discovery, when, on the next evening, disaster follows from the same apparent causes as led to the first success. The fact is that some unseen power has been at work upon one evening and not upon the next. The weather, or the composition of the audience, or the mood of the actors has changed. The fact is that no two occasions are really alike; but they differ in so many ways that one can scarcely catalogue their divergencies.
There is no ill-considered thing that an author may write, or an actor do on the stage, no mistake or violation of common sense and good art, that may not be counterbalanced by some happiness which carries the play in spite of it. And conversely, there is no well-reasoned, profound, and true theory of play-writing or stage management which, if logically carried out, may not prove the very vehicle of damnation. The reason is that your theories are mere nets waved in the air some miles below the stars which they seem to imprison. Your true theories are true only to theory; the conditions always upset them. It is, therefore, not without some trepidation that I tread the paths of this subject. I almost fear the sound of my own voice and the conclusions of my own reason. This fear shall be my compass, this the silken thread, unwinding as I walk, which shall lead me back again out of the labyrinth and into the daylight.
The aim of any dramatic performance is to have something happen on a stage that shall hold people’s attention for two hours and a half or three hours. Anything that does this is a good drama; and there are as many kinds of good drama as there are flowers in the meadow. All of these species are closely related to each other. They are modifications that spring up from the roots of old tradition, like shoots in an asparagus bed.
The different great divisions and species of drama depend on the size and shape of the theatre used, more than on any other one thing. For the great theatre you must have slow speech, or, at any rate, a concentration of theme. For a small modern theatre you must have quicker motion and more variety. Not only the actor but the playwright must have some special size of theatre in his mind as he plans a play, and must adapt his whole art to that size, as he fashions his work. You might call this the first canon of the drama.
Now, we have, at present, no controlling conventions, no overmastering habits of thought about stage matters, and this leads us to forget the original force, not to say tyranny, of convention in other ages. England has had no controlling convention in stage matters since Charles II’s time; and the English stage has thus become a free, wild sort of place where anything is permitted. It is like the exhibition of the “Independents” in Paris, where anyone may hire space and hang what pictures he please, leaving the public to reward or punish him for his temerity.
The disadvantage of this condition of things is that the public does not know what to expect, and therefore fine things may be misunderstood. The playwright is not sufficiently supported by the crutch of tradition. He has lost his task-master; but he has lost also the key to expression. A well-developed, formal tradition is as necessary to any powerful spiritual deliverance as a system of punctuation is to writing. It was not until Haydn and Mozart had developed the form of the symphony and sonata that Beethoven’s work became possible. The same holds true of all the arts; the great artist who finds no harness ready-made for his ideas must set to work like Giotto to painfully create a makeshift of his own.
If we have to-day no great tyrant of contemporary convention in any of the arts, we have a hundred fashions. The age is eclectic; the conventional side of art is at a discount. Now in the drama, the conventional side of art is of peculiar importance. The more you surprise an audience, the less you will please it. The thing that entertains and relaxes people is to have something unmistakable and easy unrolled before them; something in which the problems are plainly stated and solved beyond the possibility of a doubt. The good man and bad man must be labeled; and so must the different sorts of plays receive labels—as, Comedy, Tragedy, Farce, Problem-play, Tank-drama, etc.; otherwise a great part of the attention of the audience will be exhausted in finding the right humor. The modern playwright has thus a problem that is new to the stage, the problem of giving the grand cue to the audience as to which kind of play is coming.
After all, the condition of the contemporary stage is very much like the condition of contemporary painting. Any good historical gallery contains samples from the whole history of art. There are as well-defined classes of pictures as there are of dramas: e. g., the religious picture, the genre picture, the portrait, the landscape, etc.; and within each of these classes there exists a world of half-defined traditions in which educated persons are learned, and by which all artists are somewhat controlled. Now each of these classes was originally the product of an age devoted to it. But to-day the artist is eclectic. He is eclectic in spite of himself because he is not forced by universal expectation to do a particular thing: he must choose. Whether he be painter or dramatist, the artist in Western Europe to-day is born into an epoch of miscellaneous experiment. Let him choose. The spread of international education has brought about this state of things: art is becoming an international commodity.
Let us return to the drama, and seize upon some convenient model of a conventional play—for instance, the old-fashioned melodrama. What a relief it is to find in the opening act of a play that we are upon familiar ground, that we know very well what is coming and can enjoy the elaboration of it. We must have a taste for the whole species or we can never either like or understand the particular example. And so also in judging of any drama of another age we must positively bring the whole of the epoch to bear upon it or we are lost. The Elizabethans before Shakespeare’s time had developed a drama of horrors, or running-mad play, in which the audience knew from the outset that someone was to be dogged and tortured and dragged through a living Inferno before being thrown on the dung-hill. The audience expected to be moved to awe and to a certain sort of solemn horror by the tragedy. The play was to be in blank verse, a narrative play full of incident—with a host of characters and many changes of imaginary scene. The story was to be new to the audience and as exciting as possible. Very often it had, to our modern thinking, no plot; but was a helter-skelter of delirious cruelty, accompanied by torrents of passionately excited words which sometimes broke into great poetry and more often soared in a cloudland of divine bombast. The people loved this language. They reveled in the rhetoric of the dialogue, and wallowed in the boldness of the action. The first line, or even the very name of a horror-play in Elizabeth’s time, was enough to throw the audience into the proper mood. How mistaken is it for one of us to-day to read any old play without conjuring up something of its epoch.
Now let us remember the Greeks, since we cannot escape them. The cultivated, conventional, logical, and over-civilized Greek wished his tragedy to be elegant and in a just measure solemn, not to say awe-inspiring. He expected this, much as we expect coffee after dinner when we dine out. It was to be done through the means of one of the old Greek myths, a thing half history, half fable in its complexion.
In the days of Æschylus the Athenian audience was made up of God-fearing, conservative people who could be moved to awe by the contemplation of religious ideas, and by pictures of lofty moral sufferings. But as time went on, the people became bored by the old Greek religion, and it required more highly colored pictures to satisfy them. In the days of Sophocles there is a certain amount of religious feeling left in the people, though one feels that Sophocles is making use of it for artistic purposes. In Euripides’ day, however, everything has been used up in the way of big moral ideas, and the emphasis is laid on the suffering. Mental agony is manipulated by a skilled hand. The taste is refined, the logic is perfect, the art is wonderful; but the dramas of Euripides were felt in his own day and thereafter to be a little corrupt. People blame Euripides instead of blaming the insensibility of the Athenian theatre-goer who required this sort of enginery to make him weep delicious tears. The thing to be noted in both of these instances—from the English and the Greek stage—is the part played by the audience. It is only through a tacit consent on all hands that a certain game shall be played, that very highly-finished, complex and perfect works of art are produced. There is so much to be conveyed by a drama that unless the audience will agree to take nine-tenths of it for granted, the project is hopeless. The conventions! These are the precious symbols which have been developed by centuries of toil. They possess such telling value that by their aid even mediocrity can do good things, and genius, miracles. How shall we preserve them?
The world of drama appears to-day to be at sea, by reason of the loss 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