I AM making a plea for Polichinelle and I hope I shall be pardoned for summoning to my assistance some of his more eloquent and illustrious admirers. We have seen that the past has eminently honored him, but there is also ample testimony that he can adapt himself to our present time and taste, nay more, to the various tastes and tempers of this modern day. For there are divers theories and principles among critics of the puppets, but the puppets are so versatile they can play many parts in many manners. “Chacun a son gout!” quoth Polichinelle with a flourish.
There are those who believe that the grotesque is an inherent, indispensable trait of the marionette; that, as Flögel claims, Kasperle, quintessence of grotesque comedy, belongs inseparably to the marionette stage and that everything else is meaningless, insipid, and merely experimental. Similarly, Professor Wundt asserts that the ministration to the sense of the comic is the chief function of the puppets and perhaps the greatest factor in their popularity. He mentions their mirth-provoking superiority to the situation, the element of the unexpected, heightened enormously by wooden creatures who imperturbably proceed upon occasions to contradict the very law of gravity. These traits, he feels, are essential and distinguishing characteristics of marionettes.
In comparing the merry Kasperle theatre of Munich with the serious puppet theatre established by the young artists of that city, Wilhelm Michel emphasizes this point of view. “Pure tragic effects cannot emanate from the marionette stage because, in the first place, there are no human beings acting upon it but rather ironies of humanity, mockeries of men; suffering cannot be given upon it, only travesties of suffering. If this constitutional irony of the puppet is not handled in an artistic spirit, unbearable dissonances occur.... The working of the marionette stage is pure, unmixed gayety. The dolls are not, as our young poets imagine, representatives and agents of submission, but rather delightful little liberators, amiable, amusing victors over the petty doubts which we all carry about with us in unobserved corners of our souls.”
This opinion is undeniably supported by traditional usage. Humor may vary from the buffoonery of Hanswurst to the satirical subtleties of De Neuville’s pupazzi, but the spirit of comedy has had a representative on the puppet stage in every land. What a long list might be compiled, starting with the hunchback Vidusaka of ancient India, then on through Semar of Javanese comedy, Karagheuz of Turkey, Pahlawan of Persia (squeaking in the same feigned voice as the English Punch), to say nothing of Maccus, the Roman Puppet, and Arlecchino, and Pulcinella with their merry train from all over Italy, even including the later Signor Macaroni. There are the German and Austrian Hanswurst and Kasperle, Jackpudding and Punch in England, Polichinelle, Harlequin, Jean Potage, and even more recently Guignol and Guillaume in France, Paprika, Jancsi of Hungary, Picklehoerring of Holland and ever so many more, rollicking and indispensable humorists of the puppet theatre. M. Charles Magnin, most distinguished historian of the marionette, proclaims his unalterable faith in Polichinelle: “Do you know, then, what Polichinelle is? He is the good sense of the people, the brisk sally, the irrepressible laughter. Yes, Polichinelle will laugh and sing as long as the world contains vices, follies and things to ridicule. You see very well that Polichinelle is not near his death. Polichinelle is immortal!”
Professor Pischel agrees that the puppet play is the favorite child of the people and merely the step-child of the cultured because it owes its origin to the common people and is a clearer mirror of their thoughts and feelings than any more finished poetry. Mr. Howard, too, in the Boston Transcript, somewhat resents the marionette performances in the new manner, feeling that the old traditional shows were “more childlike, more simple, more human.”
Innumerable artists of the last few decades, however, esteem the marionette as an excellent medium of serious dramatic expression, possessing a poetic style and a conventionalized, impersonal symbolism. Ernst Ehlert, himself an actor as well as lover of puppets, writes thus of Pühony’s marionettes:
“The object of every work of art, the thing that makes it truly artistic, is the attainment of the greatest possible emotional effect with the simplest possible means. What makes a work of art a real delight is that it does not fully express but merely suggests and excites the imagination of the observer to help in the presentation of the reality. That is why a puppet play is not only more amusing but more artistic than a real one.” He continues: “Puppets, moreover, have style. They are cut out sharply to represent their particular characteristics, and those characteristics are pronounced. The manager of a puppet show has a free hand in the fashioning of such a company as best carries out his creative impulse. But with real actors it is impossible to make them other than they are, to subordinate them entirely to the manager’s will. I have been an actor, both in Germany and in Russia ... so I know.”
Again, Mr. Arthur Symons, after witnessing the fantoccini of the Cortanzi theatre in Rome, expresses the following belief in the art-marionette: “Gesture on the stage is the equivalent of rhythm in verse. In our marionette, then, we get personified gesture, and the gesture, like all forms of emotion, generalized. The appeal in what seems to you these childlike manoeuvers is to a finer because to a more intimately poetic sense of things than the merely rationalistic appeal of our modern plays.” Furthermore, he adds concerning the puppet: “As he is painted so he will smile, as the wires lift or lower his hands so will his gestures be and he will dance when his legs are set in motion. There is not, indeed, the appeal to the senses of the first row in the stalls at a ballet of living dancers. But why leave the ball-room? It is not nature one looks for on the stage in this kind of a spectacle, and our excitement in watching it should remain purely intellectual. This is nothing less than a fantastic and direct return to the masks of the ancient Greeks, that learned artifice by which tragedy and comedy were assisted in speaking to the world in the universal voice by this deliberate generalizing of emotions.”
The marionettes of M. Signoret, as we have seen, from Anatole France’s enthusiastic account, presented the classic drama of all epochs to the satisfaction of the most acutely sensitive critics of Paris. M. Paul Margueritte brilliantly eulogizes them in the following discussion: “They are indefatigable, always ready. And while the name and too familiar face of a living actor imposes upon the public an obsession which renders illusion impossible or very difficult, the puppets being of wood or cardboard possess a droll, mysterious life. Their truthful bearing surprises, even disquiets us. In their essential gestures there is the complete expression of human feelings. We had it proved at the representations of Aristophanes; real actors would not have produced this effect. In them the foreshortening aided the illusion. Their masks in the style of ancient comedy, their few and simple movements, their statuesque poses, gave a singular grace to the spectacle.”
This leads us to the well-known name of Gordon Craig and to his inspired, emphatic utterances concerning the actor and the marionette. No one of late has done as much as he toward reviving the interest in puppets and stimulating curiosity concerning them. His collection of puppets and shadow figures forms a veritable museum of marionettes from all parts of the world. His many articles in The Mask and in a later publication called The Marionettes, both published in Florence at the Arena Goldoni, direct attention to the puppet;—more, it must be admitted, as a model or suggestion to the actor, than as a minor art-form in itself. Recognizing its many merits, Mr. Craig would send the modern actor to the school of the burattini to learn virtues of silence, obedience, “to learn how to indicate instead of imitate.” He deems the stage of to-day devoid, in great part, of genuine dramatic value, filled up with much meaningless realistic detail, inartistic and irritating gestures, and prominent players exhibiting their own peculiar personalities more or less attractively in various rôles. He would agree with Anatole France: “The actors spoil the play for me. I mean good actors,—their talent is too great; it covers everything. There is nothing left but them. Their personality effaces the work which they represent.” Indeed, Gordon Craig boldly proclaims: “The actor must go and in his place comes the inanimate figure, the Über-marionette we may call him until he has won for himself a better name.” And in The Promise of a New Art he has written: “What the wires of the Über-marionette shall be, who shall guide him?—The wires which stretch from Divinity to the soul of the poet are wires which might command him.”
These sentiments are familiar to those acquainted with the art and writings of Mr. Craig, but it is indeed interesting to find somewhat similar ideas expressed in the delightful but “different” manner of a most eminent contemporary, Mr. G. Bernard Shaw. In a letter concerning the puppets of his acquaintance, Mr. Shaw has written: “In my youth (say 1865–75) there was a permanent exhibition in Dublin, the proprietor of which was known as Mons Dark, which is Irish for Monsieur d’Arc. From that show I learned that marionettes can produce a much stronger illusion than bad actors can; and I have often suggested that the Academy of Dramatic Art here try to obtain a marionette performance to teach the students that very important part of the art of acting which consists of not acting: that is, allowing the imagination of the spectator to do its lion’s share of the work.”
Aside, however, from this not insignificant value as an example to the actor of the future, the marionette has a positive and individual contribution to make in the field of drama, a contribution which the marionette alone can provide. There seem to be certain types of plays more advantageously presented by puppets or shadows than by human beings. These little creatures of wood or cardboard have naturally that “sense of being beyond reality” which, according to John Balance, “permeates all good art.” There is an article in the Hyperion, 1909, by Franz Blei, critic and aesthete. He states: “I believe there will always be certain dramatic poetry whose beauty can be more significantly and effectively revealed by shadows than by living actors. The shadow play will supplement the theatre of living actors on one side as the marionette stage already does on the other, in Paul Brann’s very brilliant productions, for example. With shadows, the forcefulness of the verse and the emotional element is very much heightened in effect; with marionettes the significance of the action is intensified to a far greater degree than is attainable by human beings, a point to which H. V. Kleist has already drawn attention in praise of marionettes. With shadow plays, as with puppet performances, the readers should not be professional actors, for their very way of speaking invariably mimics the mannerisms of the man. The limited movements of the shadows, however, suffer from this and also the gestures of the marionettes which have a wider range but which do not in the least resemble the customary stage gestures. Talented dilettantes with good taste are more apt to strike the right note. I fancy that the shadows and marionettes might please some people who had not visited the theatre for quite a while, because they were unwilling to waste their time on highly lifelike but utterly lifeless theatrical productions.”
Professor Brander Matthews, in his Book about the Theatre, also insists upon the adaptability of the marionettes for certain types of drama unsatisfactory when performed by living actors. He suggests that a passion play or any form of drama in which Divinity has perforce to appear is relieved in the puppet show of any tincture of irreverence, all personages of the play, whether heavenly or earthly, appearing equally remote from common humanity upon the miniature stage. The religious plays of Maurice Bouchor, artistic and reverent productions in every detail, beautifully illustrate this point. The atmosphere M. Jules Lemaître describes as “far away in time and space,”—this of the mystery play, Noël. Again Professor Matthews maintains that when Salome was performed by Holden’s marionettes and created the sensation of the season, all vulgarity and grossness which might have been offensive either in the play or in the dance of the seven veils was purged away by the fact that the performers were puppets. “So dextrous was the manipulation of the unseen operator who controlled the wires and strings which gave life to the seductive Salome as she circled around the stage in a most bewitching fashion; so precise and accurate was the imitation of a human dancer, that the receptive spectator could not but feel that here at last a play of doubtful propriety has found its only fit stage and its only proper performance. The memory of that exhibition is a perennial delight to all those who possess it. A thing of beauty it was and it abides in remembrance as a joy forever. It revealed the art of the puppet show at its summit. And the art itself was eternally justified by that one performance of the highest technical skill and the utmost delicacy of taste.”
There are other spheres also in which the puppets have an advantage over mere mortal actors. Fairy stories, legends of miraculous adventure, metamorphoses are tremendously heightened by the quality of strangeness inherent in the marionettes. “For puppet plays,” says Professor Pischel, “are fairy-tales and the fairy-tale is nourished by strangeness.” Transformations, animal fables, fairy flittings in scenes of mysterious glamour are obviously more easily presented by fleshless dolls than by heavy, panting and perspiring actors tricked out in unnatural and unearthly raiment.
Even horseplay humor of the Punch and Judy variety is unobjectionable with puppets where the whacking and thwacking is done by and upon jolly, grotesque little beings who are neither pained nor debased by the procedure. With some such idea William Hazlitt has written:
“That popular entertainment, Punch and the Puppet-show, owes part of its irresistible and universal attraction to nearly the same principle of inspiring inanimate and mechanical agents with sense and consciousness. The drollery and wit of a piece of wood is doubly droll and farcical. Punch is not merry in himself, but ‘he is the cause of heartfelt mirth in other men.’ The wires and pulleys that govern his motion are conductors to carry off the spleen, and all ‘that perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart.’ If we see numbers of people turning the corner of a street, ready to burst with secret satisfaction, and with their faces bathed in laughter we know what is the matter—that they are just come from a puppet-show.
“I have heard no bad judge of such matters say that ‘he liked a comedy better than a tragedy, a farce better than a comedy, a pantomime better than a farce, but a peep-show best of all.’ I look upon it that he who invented puppet shows was a greater benefactor to his species than he who invented Operas!”
The marionette has come to America. Some of the more venturesome of this wandering race have crossed the high seas and entered hopefully into our open country. Are we not to welcome these immigrants? Can we not possibly assimilate them into our national life? Might we not benefit by their contribution? I make a plea for Polichinelle in the United States, the pleasant hours, the joyous moments of his bestowing.
How excellent if schools and playrooms might have their puppet booths for the happier exposition of folk and fairy tales or even for patriotic propaganda! I can see innumerable quaint silhouettes of Pilgrim Fathers bending the knee and giving thanks, or of Indian Chiefs, all feathery, in solemn conclave, with Pocahontas dashing madly forward to save the life of Captain John Smith. It would be delicious to witness George Washington, in shadows, chopping down his father’s little cherry tree: and as for Lincoln and Slavery ... it actually happened that in 1867 Benedict Rivoli produced Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with a company of puppets; it has happened in our vaudeville houses often, why not once in a while in our schools? Small groups of grown folks, too, in city or village, might easily build their own marionette stages and attempt to produce dramas of all times; humorous, satirical, poetic or mystical, each to his taste and independent of the whim of a Broadway manager or the peculiarities of a popular star. It is such a naïve and simple pastime and sometimes so delightful. I should like to suggest it as an antidote for the overdose of moving pictures from which an overwhelming number of us are unconsciously suffering atrophy of the imagination, or a similar insidious malady.9
One must be quite unsophisticated to enjoy the marionettes, or quite sophisticated. Plain people, children and artists, seem to take pleasure in them. One must have something childlike, or artistic, in one’s nature, perhaps merely a little imagination in an unspoiled, vigorous condition. Of course the stiff little figures, the peculiar conventions of the puppet stage are strange to us in America. There are those who do not like puppets and those who do not can not, I suppose. No one must like them: but none should scorn them. To scorn them is, somehow, to show too great disregard and lack of knowledge. And we, over here, who have not as youngsters laughed aloud at the drolleries of Guignol, who have not learned our folk-tales interspersed with the antics of some local Kasperle, who are not surprised by Punch and Judy at a familiar street corner, now and then, who have not been privileged to witness the spectacular faeries of Italian fantoccini, the exquisite shadows of the Chat Noir, the elaborate modern plays at the Munich art-theatre,—how can we really say what we think of the marionette? If we see more of him first; if we give our puppeteers (professional and amateur) more time to master their craft, perhaps, who knows, something nice may come of it all. There are some great words I should like to quote for little Polichinelle, artificial or strange as he may seem. “And therefore, as a stranger, give him welcome.”