Chapter XXIII Dialogue and Details
The extraordinary progress made by the drama of the English language during the past quarter of a century is in nothing more apparent than in the average quality of modern dialogue. Tolerably well-written dialogue is nowadays the rule rather than the exception. Thirty years ago, the idea that it was possible to combine naturalness with vivacity and vigour had scarcely dawned upon the playwright’s mind. He passed and repassed from stilted pathos to strained and verbal wit (often mere punning); and when a reformer like T.W. Robertson tried to come a little nearer to the truth of life, he was apt to fall into babyish simplicity or flat commonness.
Criticism has not given sufficient weight to the fact that English dramatic writing laboured for centuries—and still labours to some degree—under a historic misfortune. It has never wholly recovered from the euphuism—to use the word in its widest sense—of the late sixteenth century. The influence of John Lyly and his tribe is still traceable, despite a hundred metamorphoses, in some of the plays of to-day and in many of the plays of yesterday. From the very beginnings of English comedy, it was accepted as almost self-evident that “wit”—a factitious, supererogatory sparkle—was indispensable to all dialogue of a non-tragic order. Language was a newly discovered and irresistibly fascinating playground for the fancy. Conversation must be thick-strewn with verbal quibbles, similes, figures, and flourishes of every description, else it was unworthy to be spoken on the stage. We all know how freely Shakespeare yielded to this convention, and so helped to establish it. Sometimes, not always, his genius enabled him to render it delightful; but in most of the Elizabethans—though it be heresy to say so—it is an extremely tedious mannerism. After the Restoration, when modern light talk came into being in the coffee-houses, the fashion of the day, no doubt, favoured a straining after wit; so that the playwrights were in some measure following nature—that very small corner of nature which they called “the town”—in accepting and making a law of the Elizabethan convention. The leading characters of Restoration comedy, from Etherege to Vanbrugh, are consciously and almost professionally wits. Simile and repartee are as indispensable a part of a gentleman’s social outfit as his wig or his rapier. In Congreve the word “wit” is almost as common as the thing. When Farquhar made some movement towards a return to nature, he was rewarded with Pope’s line, which clings like a burr to his memory—
“What pert, low dialogue has Farquhar writ.”
If eighteenth-century comedy, as a whole, is not brilliantly written, it is for lack of talent in the playwrights, not for lack of desire or intention. Goldsmith, like Farquhar and Steele, vaguely realized the superiority of humour to wit; but he died too early to exercise much influence on his successors. In Sheridan the convention of wit reasserted itself triumphantly, and the scene in which Lady Teazle, Mrs. Candour, and the rest of the scandalous college sit in a semicircle and cap malicious similes, came to be regarded as an unapproachable model of comedy dialogue. The convention maintained itself firmly down to the days of Money and London Assurance, the dullness of the intervening period being due, not to any change of theory, but to sheer impotence of practice. T.W. Robertson, as above mentioned, attempted a return to nature, with occasional and very partial success; but wit, with a dash of fanciful sentiment, reasserted itself in James Albery; while in H.J. Byron it degenerated into mere punning and verbal horse-play. I should not be surprised if the historian of the future were to find in the plays of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones the first marked symptoms of a reaction—of a tendency to reject extrinsic and fanciful ornament in dialogue, and to rely for its effect upon its vivid appropriateness to character and situation. In the early plays of Sir Arthur Pinero there is a great deal of extrinsic ornament; especially of that metaphor-hunting which was one of the characteristic forms of euphuism. Take this, for example, from The Profligate. Dunstan Renshaw has expressed to Hugh Murray the opinion that “marriages of contentment are the reward of husbands who have taken the precaution to sow their wild oats rather thickly”; whereupon the Scotch solicitor replies—
HUGH MURRAY: Contentment! Renshaw, do you imagine that there is no autumn in the life of a profligate? Do you think there is no moment when the accursed crop begins to rear its millions of heads above ground; when the rich man would give his wealth to be able to tread them back into the earth which rejects the foul load? To-day you have robbed some honest man of a sweet companion!
DUNSTAN RENSHAW: Look here, Mr. Murray—!
HUGH MURRAY: To-morrow, next week, next month, you may be happy—but what of the time when those wild oats thrust their ears through the very seams of the floor trodden by the wife whose respect you will have learned to covet! You may drag her into the crowded streets—there is the same vile growth springing up from the chinks of the pavement! In your house or in the open, the scent of the mildewed grain always in your nostrils, and in your ears no music but the wind’s rustle amongst the fat sheaves! And, worst of all, your wife’s heart a granary bursting with the load of shame your profligacy has stored there! I warn you—Mr. Lawrence Kenward!
If we compare this passage with any page taken at random from Mid-Channel, we might think that a century of evolution lay between them, instead of barely twenty years.
The convention of wit-at-any-price is, indeed, moribund; but it is perhaps not quite superfluous, even now, to emphasize the difference between what the French call the “mot d’auteur” and the “mot de situation.” The terms practically explain themselves; but a third class ought to be added—the “mot de caractère.” The “mot d’auteur” is the distinguishing mark of the Congreve-Sheridan convention. It survives in full vigour—or, shall one say, it sings its swan-song?—in the works of Oscar Wilde. For instance, the scene of the five men in the third act of Lady Windermere’s Fan is a veritable running-fire of epigrams wholly unconnected with the situation, and very slightly related, if at all, to the characters of the speakers. The mark of the “mot d’auteur” is that it can with perfect ease be detached from its context. I could fill this page with sayings from the scene in question, all perfectly comprehensible without any account of the situation. Among them would be one of those; profound sayings which Wilde now and then threw off in his lightest moods, like opals among soap-bubbles. “In the world,” says Dumby, “there are two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.” This may rank with Lord Illingworth’s speech in A Woman of No Importance: “All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of anything you kill it. Nothing survives being thought of.” When we hear such sayings as these—or the immortal “Vulgarity is the behaviour of other people”—we do not enquire too curiously into their appropriateness to character or situation; but none the less do they belong to an antiquated conception of drama.
It is useless to begin to give specimens of the “mot de caractère” and “mot de situation.” All really dramatic dialogue falls under one head or the other. One could easily pick out a few brilliantly effective examples of each class: but as their characteristic is to fade when uprooted from the soil in which they grow, they would take up space to very little purpose.
But there is another historic influence, besides that of euphuism, which has been hurtful, though in a minor degree, to the development of a sound style in dialogue. Some of the later Elizabethans, and notably Webster and Ford, cultivated a fashion of abrupt utterance, whereby an immensity of spiritual significance—generally tragic—was supposed to be concentrated into a few brief words. The classic example is Ferdinand’s “Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young,” in The Duchess of Malfy. Charles Lamb celebrated the virtues of this pregnant, staccato style with somewhat immoderate admiration, and thus helped to set a fashion of spasmodic pithiness in dialogue, which too often resulted in dense obscurity. Not many plays composed under this influence have reached the stage; not one has held it. But we find in some recent writing a qualified recrudescence of the spasmodic manner, with a touch of euphuism thrown in. This is mainly due, I think, to the influence of George Meredith, who accepted the convention of wit as the informing spirit of comedy dialogue, and whose abnormally rapid faculty of association led him to delight in a sort of intellectual shorthand which the normal mind finds very difficult to decipher. Meredith was a man of brilliant genius, which lent a fascination to his very mannerisms; but when these mannerisms are transferred by lesser men to a medium much less suited to them—that of the stage—the result is apt to be disastrous. I need not go into particulars; for no play of which the dialogue places a constant strain on the intellectual muscles of the audience ever has held, or ever will hold, a place in living dramatic literature. I will merely note the curious fact that English—my own language—is the only language out of the three or four known to me in which I have ever come across an entirely incomprehensible play. I could name English plays, both pre-Meredithian and post-Meredithian, which might almost as well be written in Chinese for all that I can make of them.
Obscurity and precocity are generally symptoms of an exaggerated dread of the commonplace. The writer of dramatic prose has, indeed, a very difficult task if he is to achieve style without deserting nature. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the difficulty lies in getting criticism to give him credit for the possession of style, without incurring the reproach of mannerism. How is one to give concentration and distinction to ordinary talk, while making it still seem ordinary? Either the distinction will strike the critics, and they will call it pompous and unreal, or the ordinariness will come home to them, and they will deny the distinction. This is the dramatist’s constant dilemma. One can only comfort him with the assurance that if he has given his dialogue the necessary concentration, and has yet kept it plausibly near to the language of life, he has achieved style, and may snap his fingers at the critics. Style, in prose drama, is the sifting of common speech.
It is true, however, that, with equal concentration and equal naturalness, one man may give his work a beauty of cadence and phrasing which another man may entirely miss. Two recent writers of English dramatic prose have stood out from their fellows in respect of the sheer beauty of their style—I need scarcely name Oscar Wilde and J.M. Synge. But Wilde’s dialogue can by no means be called free from mannerism,111 while Synge wrote in a language which had a music of its own, even before his genius took hold of it.
It does not seem very profitable to try to concentrate into a definition the distinctive qualities of dramatic dialogue. The late Mrs. Craigie (“John Oliver Hobbes”) attempted to do so in the preface to a charming play, The Ambassador; and the result at any rate the sequel—was that her next play, The Wisdom of the Wise, was singularly self-conscious and artificial. She found in “emotion” the test of dramatic quality in any given utterance. “Stage dialogue,” she says, “may or may not have many qualities, but it must be emotional.” Here we have a statement which is true in a vague and general sense, untrue in the definite and particular sense in which alone it could afford any practical guidance. “My lord, the carriage waits,” may be, in its right place, a highly dramatic speech, even though it be uttered with no emotion, and arouse no emotion in the person addressed. What Mrs. Craigie meant, I take it, was that, to be really dramatic, every speech must have some bearing, direct or indirect, prospective, present, or retrospective, upon individual human destinies. The dull play, the dull scene, the dull speech, is that in which we do not perceive this connection; but when once we are interested in the individuals concerned, we are so quick to perceive the connection, even though it be exceedingly distant and indirect, that the dramatist who should always hold the fear of Mrs. Craigie’s aphorism consciously before his eyes would unnecessarily fetter and restrict himself. Even the driest scientific proposition may, under special circumstances, become electrical with drama. The statement that the earth moves round the sun does not, in itself, stir our pulses; yet what playwright has ever invented a more dramatic utterance than that which some one invented for Galileo: “E pur si muove!”? In all this, to be sure, I am illustrating, not confuting, Mrs. Craigie’s maxim. I have no wish to confute it, for, in the largest interpretation, it is true; but I suggest that it is true only when attenuated almost beyond recognition, and quite beyond the point at which it can be of any practical help to the practical dramatist. He must rely on his instinct, not numb and bewilder it by constantly subjecting it to the dictates of hard-and-fast aesthetic theory.
We shall scarcely come much nearer to helpful truth than the point we have already reached, in the principle that all dialogue, except the merely mechanical parts—the connective tissue of the play—should consist either of “mots de caractère” or of “mots de situation.” But if we go to French critics for this principle, do not let us go to French dramatists for models of practice. It is part of the abiding insularity of our criticism that the same writers who cannot forgive an English dramatist what they conceive to be a stilted turn of phrase, will pass without remark, if not with positive admiration, the outrageously rhetorical style which is still prevalent in French drama. Here, for instance, is a quite typical passage from Le Duel, by M. Henri Lavedan, an author of no small repute; and it would be easy to find even more magniloquent tirades in the works of almost any of his contemporaries. I translate from the concluding scene between the Abbé and the Duchess:
THE ABBÉ: “In our strange life, there are sometimes unexpected and decisive moments, sovereign, though we know not why. We feel it, that is all!—fulgurant moments, which throw, as it were, a flash of lightning upon our destinies, like those meteors which shine forth from time to time in the heavens, and of which none can say what their purple signifies, whether it be a cataclysm or an apotheosis.
Well, it appears to me that we, you and I, are now face to face with one of these moments!”
THE DUCHESS: “So I, too, believe.”
THE ABBÉ: “We must take care, then, that it be an apotheosis. That is why I want—Mon Dieu, madame! how shall I say it to you? Where shall I go to find the chosen words, the words of pure gold, of diamonds, the immaculate words that are worthy of us? All that you are, all that you are worth, I know, and I alone know. You have opened, that I might read it, the book of hours that is your mind. I am in no wise disquieted about you or your future; yet, that I may be fully reassured before we part, I wish, I wish you to tell me, to declare to me, that you are at this very moment in absolute repose, calm as a lake.”
And so Monsieur l’Abbé goes on for another page. If it be said that this ornate eloquence is merely professional, I reply that his brother, the atheist doctor, and the Duchess herself, are quite as copious in their rhetoric, and scarcely less ornate.
It is a mistake to suppose that “literary merit” can be imparted to drama by such flagrant departures from nature; though some critics have not yet outgrown that superstition. Let the playwright take to heart an anecdote told by Professor Matthews in his Inquiries and Opinions—an anecdote of a New England farmer, who, being asked who was the architect of his house, replied: “Oh, I built that house myself; but there’s a man coming down from Boston next week to put on the architecture.” Better no style at all than style thus plastered on.
What is to be said of the possibilities of blank verse as a dramatic medium? This is a thorny question, to be handled with caution. One can say with perfect assurance, however, that its possibilities are problematical, its difficulties and dangers certain.
To discuss the question whether drama in verse is in its very nature nobler than drama in prose would lead us away from craftsmanship into the realm of pure aesthetics. For my own part, I doubt it. I suspect that the drama, like all literature, took its rise in verse, for the simple reason that verse is easier to make—and to memorize—than prose. Primitive peoples felt with Goethe—though not quite in the same sense—that “art is art because it is not nature.” Not merely for emotional, but for all sorts of literary, expression, they demanded a medium clearly marked off from the speech of everyday life. The drama “lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.” Even of so modern a writer (comparatively) as Shakespeare, it would scarcely be true to say that he “chose” verse as his medium, in the same sense in which Ibsen chose prose. He accepted it just as he accepted the other traditions and methods of the theatre of his time. In familiar passages he broke away from it; but on the whole it provided (among other advantages) a convenient and even necessary means of differentiation between the mimic personage and the audience, from whom he was not marked off by the proscenium arch and the artificial lights which make a world apart of the modern stage.
And Shakespeare so glorified this metrical medium as to give it an overwhelming prestige. It was extremely easy to write blank verse after a fashion; and playwrights who found it flow almost spontaneously from their pens were only too ready to overlook the world-wide difference between their verse and that of the really great Elizabethans. Just after the Restoration, there was an attempt to introduce the rhymed couplet as the medium for heroic plays; but that, on the other hand, was too difficult to establish itself in general use. Tragedy soon fell back upon the fatally facile unrhymed iambic, and a reign of stilted, stodgy mediocrity set in. There is nothing drearier in literature than the century-and-a-half of English tragedy, from Otway to Sheridan Knowles. One is lost in wonder at the genius of the actors who could infuse life and passion into those masterpieces of turgid conventionality. The worship of the minor Elizabethans, which began with Lamb and culminated in Swinburne, brought into fashion (as we have seen) a spasmodic rather than a smoothly rhetorical way of writing, but did not really put new life into the outworn form. It may almost be called an appalling fact that for at least two centuries—from 1700 to 1900—not a single blank-verse play was produced which lives, or deserves to live,112 on the stage of to-day.
I have thus glanced at the history of the blank-verse play because I believe that it can never revive until we clearly realize and admit that it is, and has been for a century, thoroughly dead, while, for a century before that again, it was only galvanized into a semblance of life by a great school of rhetorical acting. The playwright who sets forth with the idea that, in writing a poetical drama, he is going to continue the great Elizabethan tradition, is starting on a wild-goose chase. The great Elizabethan tradition is an incubus to be exorcised. It was because Mr. Stephen Phillips was not Elizabethanizing, but clothing a vital and personal conception of drama in verse of very appealing lyrical quality, that some of us thought we saw in Paolo and Francesca the dawn of a new art. Apparently it was a false dawn; but I still believe that our orientation was right when we looked for the daybreak in the lyric quarter of the heavens. The very summits of Shakespeare’s achievement are his glorious lyrical passages. Think of the exquisite elegiacs of Macbeth! Think of the immortal death-song of Cleopatra! If verse has any function on the stage, it is that of imparting lyric beauty to passionate speech. For the mere rhetorical “elevation” of blank verse we have no use whatever. It consists in saying simple things with verbose pomposity. But should there arise a man who combines highly-developed dramatic faculty with great lyric genius, it is quite possible that he may give us the new poetic drama for which our idealists are sighing. He will choose his themes, I take it, from legend, or from the domain of pure fantasy—themes which can be steeped from first to last in an atmosphere of poetry, as Tristan und Isolde is steeped in an atmosphere of music. Of historic themes, I would counsel this hypothetical genius to beware. If there are any which can fittingly be steeped in a lyric atmosphere, they are to be sought on the outskirts of history, or in the debatable land between history and legend. The formula of Schiller can no more be revived than the formula of Chapman or of Rowe. That a new historic drama awaits us in the future, I have little doubt; but it will be written in prose. The idea that the poetry of drama is to be sought specifically in verse has long ago been exploded by Ibsen and Maeterlinck and D’Annunzio and Synge. But there are, no doubt, themes which peculiarly lend themselves to lyrico-dramatic treatment, and we shall all welcome the poet who discovers and develops them.
One warning let me add, in no uncertain voice. If you choose to write a blank-verse play, write it in blank verse, and not in some nondescript rhythm which is one long series of jolts and pitfalls to the sensitive ear. Many playwrights have thought by this means to escape from the monotony of blank verse; not one (that I ever heard of) has achieved even temporary success. If you cannot save your blank verse from monotony without breaking it on the wheel, that merely means that you cannot write blank verse, and had better let it alone. Again, in spite of Elizabethan precedent, there is nothing more irritating on the modern stage than a play which keeps on changing from verse to prose and back again. It gives the verse-passages an air of pompous self-consciousness. We seem to hear the author saying, as he shifts his gear, “Look you now! I am going to be eloquent and impressive!” The most destructive fault a dramatist can commit, in my judgment, is to pass, in the same work of art, from one plane of convention to another.113
We must now consider for a moment the question—if question it can be called—of the soliloquy and the aside. The example of Ibsen has gone far towards expelling these slovenlinesses from the work of all self-respecting playwrights. But theorists spring up every now and then to defend them. “The stage is the realm of convention,” they argue. “If you accept a room with its fourth wall removed, which nothing short of an earthquake could render possible in real life, why should you jib at the idea—in which, after all, there is nothing absolutely impossible—that a man should utter aloud the thoughts that are passing through his mind?”
It is all a question, once more, of planes of convention. No doubt there is an irreducible minimum of convention in all drama; but how strange is the logic which leaps from that postulate to the assertion that, if we admit a minimum, we cannot, or ought not to, exclude a maximum! There are plays which do not, and there are plays which do, set forth to give as nearly as possible an exact reproduction of the visual and auditory realities of life. In the Elizabethan theatre, with its platform stage under the open sky, any pictorial exactness of reproduction was clearly impossible. Its fundamental conditions necessitated very nearly114 a maximum of convention; therefore such conventions as blank verse and the soliloquy were simply of a piece with all the rest. In the theatre of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth, the proscenium arch—the frame of the picture—made pictorial realism theoretically possible. But no one recognized the possibility; and indeed, on a candle-lit stage, it would have been extremely difficult. As a matter of fact, the Elizabethan platform survived in the shape of a long “apron,” projecting in front of the proscenium, on which the most important parts of the action took place. The characters, that is to say, were constantly stepping out of the frame of the picture; and while this visual convention maintained itself, there was nothing inconsistent or jarring in the auditory convention of the soliloquy. Only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century did new methods of lighting, combined with new literary and artistic influences, complete the evolutionary process, and lead to the withdrawal of the whole stage—the whole dramatic domain—within the frame of the picture. It was thus possible to reduce visual convention to a minimum so trifling that in a well-set “interior” it needs a distinct effort of attention to be conscious of it at all. In fact, if we come to think of it, the removal of the fourth wall is scarcely to be classed as a convention; for in real life, as we do not happen to have eyes in the back of our heads, we are never visually conscious of all four walls of a room at once. If, then, in a room that is absolutely real, we see a man who (in all other respects) strives to be equally real, suddenly begin to expound himself aloud, in good, set terms, his own emotions, motives, or purposes, we instantly plump down from one plane of convention to another, and receive a disagreeable jar to our sense of reality. Up to that moment, all the efforts of author, producer, and actor have centred in begetting in us a particular order of illusion; and lo! the effort is suddenly abandoned, and the illusion shattered by a crying unreality. In modern serious drama, therefore, the soliloquy can only be regarded as a disturbing anachronism.115
The physical conditions which tended to banish it from the stage were reinforced by the growing perception of its artistic slovenliness. It was found that the most delicate analyses could be achieved without its aid; and it became a point of honour with the self-respecting artist to accept a condition which rendered his material somewhat harder of manipulation, indeed, but all the more tempting to wrestle with and overcome. A drama with soliloquies and asides is like a picture with inscribed labels issuing from the mouths of the figures. In that way, any bungler can reveal what is passing in the minds of his personages. But the glorious problem of the modern playwright is to make his characters reveal the inmost workings of their souls without saying or doing anything that they would not say or do in the real world.116
There are degrees, however, even in the makeshift and the slovenly; and not all lapses into anachronism are equally to be condemned. One thing is so patent as to call for no demonstration: to wit, that the aside is ten times worse than the soliloquy. It is always possible that a man might speak his thought, but it is glaringly impossible that he should speak it so as to be heard by the audience and not heard by others on the stage. In French light comedy and farce of the mid-nineteenth century, the aside is abused beyond even the license of fantasy. A man will speak an aside of several lines over the shoulder of another person whom he is embracing. Not infrequently in a conversation between two characters, each will comment aside on every utterance of the other, before replying to it. The convenience of this method of proceeding is manifest. It is as though the author stood by and delivered a running commentary on the secret motives and designs of his characters. But it is such a crying confession of unreality that, on the English-speaking stage, at any rate, it would scarcely be tolerated to-day, even in farce. In serious modern drama the aside is now practically unknown. It is so obsolete, indeed, that actors are puzzled how to handle it, and audiences what to make of it. In an ambitious play produced at a leading London theatre about ten years ago, a lady, on leaving the stage, announced, in an aside, her intention of drowning herself, and several critics, the next day, not understanding that she was speaking aside, severely blamed the gentleman who was on the stage with her for not frustrating her intention. About the same time, there occurred one of the most glaring instances within my recollection of inept conventionalism. The hero of the play was Eugene Aram. Alone in his room at dead of night, Aram heard Houseman breaking open the outside shutters of the window. Designing to entrap the robber, what did he do? He went up to the window and drew back the curtains, with a noise loud enough to be heard in the next parish. It was inaudible, however, to Houseman on the other side of the shutters. He proceeded with his work, opened the window, and slipped in, Aram hiding in the shadow. Then, while Houseman peered about him with his lantern, not six feet from Aram, and actually between him and the audience, Aram indulged in a long and loud monologue as to whether he should shoot Houseman or not, ending with a prayer to heaven to save him from more blood-guiltiness! Such are the childish excesses to which a playwright will presently descend when once he begins to dally with facile convention.
An aside is intolerable because it is not heard by the other person on the stage: it outrages physical possibility. An overheard soliloquy, on the other hand, is intolerable because it is heard. It keeps within the bounds of physical possibility, but it stultifies the only logical excuse for the soliloquy, namely, that it is an externalization of thought which would in reality remain unuttered. This point is so clear that I need not insist upon it.
Are there, in modern drama, any admissible soliloquies? A few brief ejaculations of joy, or despair, are, of course, natural enough, and no one will cavil at them. The approach of mental disease is often marked by a tendency to unrestrained loquacity, which goes on even while the sufferer is alone; and this distressing symptom may, on rare occasions, be put to artistic use. Short of actual derangement, however, there are certain states of nervous surexcitation which cause even healthy people to talk to themselves; and if an author has the skill to make us realize that his character is passing through such a crisis, he may risk a soliloquy, not only without reproach, but with conspicuous psychological justification. In the third act of Clyde Fitch’s play, The Girl with the Green Eyes, there is a daring attempt at such a soliloquy, where Jinny says: “Good Heavens! why am I maudling on like this to myself out loud? It’s really nothing—Jack will explain once more that he can’t explain”—and so on. Whether the attempt justified itself or not would depend largely on the acting. In any case, it is clear that the author, though as a rule somewhat lax in his craftsmanship, was here aiming at psychological truth.
A word must be said as to a special case of the soliloquy—the letter which a person speaks aloud as he writes it, or reads over to himself aloud. This is a convention to be employed as sparingly as possible; but it is not exactly on a level with the ordinary soliloquy. A letter has an actual objective existence. The words are formulated in the character’s mind and are supposed to be externalized, even though the actor may not really write them on the paper. Thus the letter has, so to speak, the same right to come to the knowledge of the audience as any other utterance. It is, in fact, part of the dialogue of the play, only that it happens to be inaudible. A soliloquy, on the other hand, has no real existence. It is a purely artificial unravelling of motive or emotion, which, nine times out of ten, would not become articulate at all, even in the speaker’s brain or heart. Thus it is by many degrees a greater infraction of the surface texture of life than the spoken letter, which we may call inadvisable rather than inadmissible.
Some theorists carry their solicitude for surface reality to such an extreme as to object to any communication between two characters which is not audible to every one on the stage. This is a very idle pedantry. The difference between a conversation in undertones and a soliloquy or aside is abundantly plain: the one occurs every hour of the day, the other never occurs at all. When two people, or a group, are talking among themselves, unheard by the others on the stage, it requires a special effort to remember that, as a matter of fact, the others probably do hear them. Even if the scene be unskilfully arranged, it is not the audibility of one group, but the inaudibility of the others, that is apt to strike us as unreal.
This is not the only form of technical pedantry that one occasionally encounters. Some years ago, a little band of playwrights and would-be playwrights, in fanatical reaction against the Sardou technique, tried to lay down a rule that no room on the stage must ever have more than one door, and that no letter must ever enter into the mechanism of a play. I do not know which contention was the more ridiculous.
Nothing is commoner in modern house-planning than rooms which have at least two doors and a French window. We constantly see rooms or halls which, if transported to the stage, would provide three or four entrances and exits; and this is even more true of the “central heated” houses of America than of English houses. The technical purists used especially to despise the French window—a harmless, agreeable and very common device. Why the playwright should make “one room one door” an inexorable canon of art is more than human reason can divine. There are cases, no doubt, in which probability demands that the dramatist should be content with one practicable opening to his scene, and should plan his entrances and exits accordingly. This is no such great feat as might be imagined. Indeed a playwright will sometimes deliberately place a particular act in a room with one door, because it happens to facilitate the movement he desires. It is absurd to lay down any rule in the matter, other than that the scene should provide a probable locality for whatever action is to take place in it. I am the last to defend the old French farce with its ten or a dozen doors through which the characters kept scuttling in and out like rabbits in a warren. But the fact that we are tired of conventional laxity is no good reason for rushing to the other extreme of conventional and hampering austerity.
Similarly, because the forged will and the lost “marriage lines” have been rightly relegated to melodrama, is there any reason why we should banish from the stage every form of written document? Mr. Bernard Shaw, in an article celebrating the advent of the new technique, once wrote, “Nowadays an actor cannot open a letter or toss off somebody else’s glass of poison without having to face a brutal outburst of jeering.” What an extravagance to bracket as equally exploded absurdities the opening of a letter and the tossing off of the wrong glass of poison! Letters—more’s the pity—play a gigantic part in the economy of modern life. The General Post Office is a vast mechanism for the distribution of tragedy, comedy, melodrama, and farce throughout the country and throughout the world. To whose door has not Destiny come in the disguise of a postman, and slipped its decree, with a double rat-tat, into the letter-box? Whose heart has not sickened as he heard the postman’s footstep pass his door without pausing? Whose hand has not trembled as he opened a letter? Whose face has not blanched as he took in its import, almost without reading the words? Why, I would fain know, should our stage-picture of life be falsified by the banishment of the postman? Even the revelation brought about by the discovery of a forgotten letter or bundle of letters is not an infrequent incident of daily life. Why should it be tabu on the stage? Because the French dramatist, forty years ago, would sometimes construct a Chinese-puzzle play around some stolen letter or hidden document, are we to suffer no “scrap of paper” to play any part whatever in English drama? Even the Hebrew sense of justice would recoil from such a conclusion. It would be a case of “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and other people’s children must pay the penalty.” Against such whimsies of reactionary purism, the playwright’s sole and sufficient safeguard is a moderate exercise of common sense.
Notes
1 It is against “technic” in this sense of the term that the hero of Mr. Howells’s admirable novel, The Story of a Play, protests in vigorous and memorable terms. “They talk,” says Maxwell, “about a knowledge of the stage as if it were a difficult science, instead of a very simple piece of mechanism whose limitations and possibilities anyone may see at a glance. All that their knowledge of it comes to is claptrap, pure and simple.... They think that their exits and entrances are great matters and that they must come on with such a speech, and go off with another; but it is not of the least importance how they come or go, if they have something interesting to say or do.” Maxwell, it must be remembered, is speaking of technic as expounded by the star actor, who is shilly-shallying—as star actors will—over the production of his play. He would not, in his calmer moments, deny that it is of little use to have something interesting to say, unless you know how to say it interestingly. Such a denial would simply be the negation of the very idea of art.
[2] A dramatist of my acquaintance adds this footnote: “But, by the Lord! They have to give advice. I believe I write more plays of other people’s than I do of my own.”
3 It may be hoped, too, that even the accomplished dramatist may take some interest in considering the reasons for things which he does, or does not do, by instinct.
4 This is not a phrase of contempt. The would-be intelligent playgoer is vastly to be preferred to the playgoer who makes a boast of his unintelligence.
5 In all the arts, however, the very idea of craftsmanship implies some sort of external percipient, or, in other words, some sort of an audience. In point of sheer self-expression, a child’s scrabblings with a box of crayons may deserve to rank with the most masterly canvas of Velasquez or Vermeer. The real difference between the dramatist and other artists, is that they can be their own audience, in a sense in which he cannot.
6 Let me guard against the possibility that this might be interpreted as a sneer at The Dynasts—a great work by a great poet.
7 For instance, Il ne faut jurer de rien. Il faut qu’une porte soit ouverte où fermée. Un bienfait n’est jamais perdu. There is also a large class of pieces of which the title, though not itself a proverb, makes direct allusion to some fable or proverbial saying: for example, Les Brebis de Panurge, La Chasse aux Corbeaux, La Cigale chez les Fourmis.
8 I learn, on the best authority, that I am wrong, in point of fact, as to the origin of Strife. The play arose in Mr. Galsworthy’s mind from his actually having seen in conflict the two men who were the prototypes of Anthony and Roberts, and thus noted the waste and inefficacy arising from the clash of strong characters unaccompanied by balance. It was accident that led him to place the two men in an environment of capital and labour. In reality, both of them were, if not capitalists, at any rate on the side of capital. This interesting correction of fact does not invalidate the theory above stated.
9 Mr. Henry Arthur Jones writes to me: “Sometimes I start with a scene only, sometimes with a complete idea. Sometimes a play splits into two plays, sometimes two or three ideas combine into a concrete whole. Always the final play is altered out of all knowledge from its first idea.” An interesting account of the way in which two very different plays by M. de Curel: L’Envers d’une Sainte and L’Invitée,—grew out of one and the same initial idea, may be found in L’Année Psychologique, 1894, p. 121.
10 In my discussion of this point, I have rather simplified Aristotle’s position. He appears to make action the essential element in tragedy and not merely the necessary vehicle of character. “In a play,” he says, “they do not act in order to portray the characters, they include the characters for the sake of the action. So that it is the action in it, i.e. its Fable or Plot, that is the end and purpose of the tragedy, and the end is everywhere the chief thing. Besides this, a tragedy is impossible without action, but there may be one without character.” (Bywater’s Translation.) The last sentence is, in my view, the gist of the matter; the preceding sentences greatly overstate the case. There was a lively controversy on the subject in the Times Literary Supplement in May, 1902. It arose from a review of Mr. Phillips’s Paolo and Francesco, and Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. Churton Collins, and Mr. A.B. Walkley took part in it.
11 “Are the first beginnings of imaginative conception directed by the will? Are they, indeed, conscious at all? Do they not rather emerge unbidden from the vague limbo of sub-consciousness?” A.B. Walkley, Drama and Life, p. 85.
12 Sardou kept a file of about fifty dossiers, each bearing the name of an unwritten play, and containing notes and sketches for it. Dumas, on the other hand, always finished one play before he began to think of another. See L’Année Psychologique, 1894, pp. 67, 76.
13 “My experience is,” a dramatist writes to me, “that you never deliberately choose a theme. You lie awake, or you go walking, and suddenly there flashes into your mind a contrast, a piece of spiritual irony, an old incident carrying some general significance. Round this your mind broods, and there is the germ of your play.” Again be writes: “It is not advisable for a playwright to start out at all unless he has so felt or seen something, that he feels, as it matures in his mind, that he must express it, and in dramatic form.”
14 Etudes Critiques, vol. vii, pp. 153 and 207.
15 In the most aggravated cases, the misunderstanding is maintained by a persevering use of pronouns in place of proper names: “he” and “she” being taken by the hearer to mean A. and B., when the speaker is in fact referring to X. and Y. This ancient trick becomes the more irritating the longer the quiproquo is dragged out.
16 The Lowland Scottish villager. It is noteworthy that Mr. J.M. Barrie, who himself belongs to this race, has an almost unique gift of extracting dramatic effect out of taciturnity, and even out of silence.
17 There is a somewhat similar incident in Clyde Fitch’s play, The Moth and the Flame.
18 Les Corbeaux, by Henri Becque, might perhaps be classed as a bankruptcy play, though the point of it is that the Vigneron family is not really bankrupt at all, but is unblushingly fleeced by the partner and the lawyer of the deceased Vigneron, who play into each other’s hands.
19 “Dramatic” has recently become one of the most overworked words in the vocabulary of journalism. It constantly appears, not only in the text of the picturesque reporter, but in head-lines and on bulletin-boards. When, on July 20, 1911, Mr. Asquith wrote to Mr. Balfour to inform him that the King had guaranteed the creation of peers, should it prove necessary for the passing of the Parliament Bill, one paper published the news under this headline: “DRAMATIC ANNOUNCEMENT BY THE PRIME MINISTER,” and the parliamentary correspondent of another paper wrote: “With dramatic suddenness and swiftness, the Prime Minister hurled his thunderbolt at the wavering Tory party yesterday.” As a matter of fact, the letter was probably not “hurled” more suddenly or swiftly than the most ordinary invitation to dinner: nor can its contents have been particularly surprising to any one. It was probably the conclusiveness, the finality, of the announcement that struck these writers as “dramatic.” The letter put an end to all dubiety with a “short, sharp shock.” It was, in fact, crisp. As a rule, however, “dramatic” is employed by the modern journalist simply as a rather pretentious synonym for the still more hackneyed “startling.”
20 As a specimen, and a successful specimen, of this new technic, I may cite Miss Elizabeth Baker’s very interesting play, Chains. There is absolutely no “story” in it, no complication of incidents, not even any emotional tension worth speaking of. Another recent play of something the same type, The Way the Money Goes, by Lady Bell, was quite thrilling by comparison. There we saw a workman’s wife bowed down by a terrible secret which threatened to wreck her whole life—the secret that she had actually run into debt to the amount of £30. Her situation was dramatic in the ordinary sense of the word, very much as Nora’s situation is dramatic when she knows that Krogstad’s letter is in Helmer’s hands. But in Chains there is not even this simple form of excitement and suspense. A city clerk, oppressed by the deadly monotony and narrowness of his life, thinks of going to Australia—and doesn’t go: that is the sum and substance of the action. Also, by way of underplot, a shopgirl, oppressed by the deadly monotony and narrowness of her life, thinks of escaping from it by marrying a middle-aged widower—and doesn’t do it. If any one had told the late Francisque Sarcey, or the late Clement Scott, that a play could be made out of this slender material, which should hold an audience absorbed through four acts, and stir them to real enthusiasm, these eminent critics would have thought him a madman. Yet Miss Baker has achieved this feat, by the simple process of supplementing competent observation with a fair share of dramatic instinct.
21 If the essence of drama is crisis, it follows that nothing can be more dramatic than a momentous choice which may make or mar both the character and the fortune of the chooser and of others. There is an element of choice in all action which is, or seems to be, the product of free will; but there is a peculiar crispness of effect when two alternatives are clearly formulated, and the choice is made after a mental struggle, accentuated, perhaps, by impassioned advocacy of the conflicting interests. Such scenes are Coriolanus, v. 3, the scene between Ellida, Wangel, and the Stranger in the last act of The Lady from the Sea, and the concluding scene of Candida.
22 Sardou wrote careful and detailed scenarios, Dumas fils held it a waste of time to do so. Pailleron wrote “enormous” scenarios, Meilhac very brief ones, or none at all. Mr. Galsworthy, rather to my surprise, disdains, and even condemns, the scenario, holding that a theme becomes lifeless when you put down its skeleton on paper. Sir Arthur Pinero says: “Before beginning to write a play, I always make sure, by means of a definite scheme, that there is a way of doing it; but whether I ultimately follow that way is a totally different matter.” Mr. Alfred Sutro practically confesses to a scenario. He says: “Before I start writing the dialogue of a play, I make sure that I shall have an absolutely free hand over the entrances and exits: in other words, that there is ample and legitimate reason for each character appearing in any particular scene, and ample motive for his leaving it.” Mr. Granville Barker does not put on paper a detailed scenario. He says: “I plan the general scheme, and particularly the balance of the play, in my head; but this, of course, does not depend entirely on entrances and exits.” Mr. Henry Arthur Jones says: “I know the leading scenes, and the general course of action in each act, before I write a line. When I have got the whole story clear, and divided into acts, I very carefully construct the first act, as a series of scenes between such and such of the characters. When the first act is written I carefully construct the second act in the same way—and so on. I sometimes draw up twenty scenarios for an act before I can get it to go straight.”
23 A friend of the late Clyde Fitch writes to me: “Fitch was often astonished at the way in which his characters developed. He tried to make them do certain things: they did others.”
24 This account of the matter seems to find support in a statement, by M. François de Curel, an accomplished psychologist, to the effect that during the first few days of work at a play he is “clearly conscious of creating,” but that gradually he gets “into the skin” of his characters, and appears to work by instinct. No doubt some artists are actually subject to a sort of hallucination, during which they seem rather to record than to invent the doings of their characters. But this somewhat morbid condition should scarcely be cultivated by the dramatist, whose intelligence should always keep a light rein on his more instinctive mental processes. See L’Année Psychologique, 1894. p. 120.
25 Sir Arthur Pinero says: “The beginning of a play to me is a little world of people. I live with them, get familiar with them, and they tell me the story.” This may sound not unlike the remark of the novelist above quoted; but the intention was quite different. Sir Arthur simply meant that the story came to him as the characters took on life in his imagination. Mr. H.A. Jones writes: “When you have a character or several characters you haven’t a play. You may keep these in your mind and nurse them till they combine in a piece of action; but you haven’t got your play till you have theme, characters, and action all fused. The process with me is as purely automatic and spontaneous as dreaming; in fact it is really dreaming while you are awake.”
26 “Here,” says a well-known playwright, “is a common experience. You are struck by an idea with which you fall in love. ‘Ha!’ you say. ‘What a superb scene where the man shall find the missing will under the sofa! If that doesn’t make them sit up, what will?’ You begin the play. The first act goes all right, and the second act goes all right. You come to the third act, and somehow it won’t go at all. You battle with it for weeks in vain; and then it suddenly occurs to you, ‘Why, I see what’s wrong! It’s that confounded scene where the man finds the will under the sofa! Out it must come!’ You cut it out, and at once all goes smooth again. But you have thrown overboard the great effect that first tempted you.”
27 The manuscripts of Dumas fils are said to contain, as a rule, about four times as much matter as the printed play! (Parigot: Génie et Métier, p. 243). This probably means, however, that he preserved tentative and ultimately rejected scenes, which most playwrights destroy as they go along.
28 Lowell points out that this assertion of Heminge and Condell merely shows them to have been unfamiliar with the simple phenomenon known as a fair copy.
29 Since writing this I have learnt that my conjecture is correct, at any rate as regards some of M. Hervieu’s plays.
30 See Chapters XIII and XVI.
31 This view is expressed with great emphasis by Dumas fils in the preface to La Princesse Georges. “You should not begin your work,” he says, “until you have your concluding scene, movement and speech clear in your mind. How can you tell what road you ought to take until you know where you are going?” It is perhaps a more apparent than real contradiction of this rule that, until Iris was three parts finished, Sir Arthur Pinero intended the play to end with the throttling of Iris by Maldonado. The actual end is tantamount to a murder, though Iris is not actually killed.
32 See Chapter XVIII.
33 See Chapter XX.
34 Most of the dramatists whom I have consulted are opposed to the principle of “roughing out” the big scenes first, and then imbedding them, as it were, in their context. Sir Arthur Pinero goes the length of saying: “I can never go on to page 2 until I am sure that page 1 is as right as I can make it. Indeed, when an act is finished, I send it at once to the printers, confident that I shall not have to go back upon it.” Mr. Alfred Sutro says: “I write a play straight ahead from beginning to end, taking practically as long over the first act as over the last three.” And Mr. Granville Barker: “I always write the beginning of a play first and the end last: but as to writing ’straight ahead’—it sounds like what one may be able to do in Heaven.” But almost all dramatists, I take it, jot down brief passages of dialogue which they may or may not eventually work into the texture of their play.
35 One is not surprised to learn that Sardou “did his stage-management as he went along,” and always knew exactly the position of his characters from moment to moment.
36 And aurally, it may be added. Sarcey comments on the impossibility of a scene in Zola’s Pot Bouille in which the so-called “lovers,” Octave Mouret and Blanche, throw open the window of the garret in which they are quarrelling, and hear the servants in the courtyard outside discussing their intrigue. In order that the comments of the servants might reach the ears of the audience, they had to be shouted in a way (says M. Sarcey) that was fatal to the desired illusion.
37 Partially, too, they were under the influence of antiquity; but the ancients were very discreet in their use of significant names. Only in satyr-plays, in the comic epics, and for a few extravagant characters in comedy (such as the boastful soldier) were grotesque appellations employed. For the rest, the Greek habit of nomenclature made it possible to use significant names which were at the same time probable enough in daily life. For example, a slave might be called Onesimus, “useful,” or a soldier Polemon, to imply his warlike function; but both names would be familiar to the audience in actual use.
38 Writing of Le Supplice d’une Femme, Alexandre Dumas fils said: “This situation I declare to be one of the most dramatic and interesting in all drama. But a situation is not an idea. An idea, has a beginning, a middle and an end: an exposition, a development, a conclusion. Any one can relate a dramatic situation: the art lies in preparing it, getting it accepted, rendering it possible, especially in untying the knot.”
39 This is what we regard as peculiarly the method of Ibsen. There is, however, this essential difference, that, instead of narrating his preliminaries in cold blood, Ibsen, in his best work, dramatizes the narration.
40 See Chapter XII.
41 This must not be taken to imply that, in a good stage-version of the play, Fortinbras should be altogether omitted. Mr. Forbes Robertson, in his Lyceum revival of 1897, found several advantages in his retention. Among the rest, it permitted the retention of one of Hamlet’s most characteristic soliloquies.
42 I omit all speculation as to the form which the story assumed in the Ur-Hamlet. We have no evidence on the point; and, as the poet was no doubt free to remodel the material as he thought fit, even in following his original he was making a deliberate artistic choice.
43 Shakespeare committed it in Romeo and Juliet, where he made Friar Laurence, in the concluding scene, retell the whole story of the tragedy. Even in so early a play, such a manifest redundancy seems unaccountable. A narrative of things already seen may, of course, be a trait of character in the person delivering it; but, in that case, it will generally be mendacious (for instance, Falstaff and the men in buckram). Or it may be introduced for the sake of its effect upon the characters to whom the narration is addressed. But in these cases its purpose is no longer to convey information to the audience—it belongs, not to the “intelligence department,” but to the department of analysis.
44 I say “variety” rather than complexity because I take it that the emotions of all concerned are here too intense to be very complex. The effect of the scene would appear to lie in the rapidly increasing intensity of comparatively simple emotions in Hamlet, in the King, in the Queen, and in the amazed and bewildered courtiers.
45 This excludes Love’s Comedy, Brand, Peer Gynt, and Emperor and Galilean.
46 See, for example, King Henry VIII, Act IV, and the opening scene of Tennyson’s Queen Mary.
47 This rule of economy does not necessarily exclude a group of characters performing something like the function of the antique Chorus; that is to say, commenting upon the action from a more or less disinterested point of view. The function of Kaffee-Klatsch in Pillars of Society is not at all that of the Chorus, but rather that of the Euripidean Prologue, somewhat thinly disguised.
48 It is perhaps worth nothing that Gabriele d’Annunzio in La Gioconda, reverts to, and outdoes, the French classic convention, by giving us three actors and four confidants. The play consists of a crisis in three lives, passively, though sympathetically, contemplated by what is in effect a Chorus of two men and two women. It would be interesting to inquire why, in this particular play, such an abuse of the confidant seems quite admissible, if not conspicuously right.
49 Dryden, in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy, represents this method as being characteristic of Greek tragedy as a whole. The tragic poet, he says, “set the audience, as it were, at the post where the race is to be concluded; and, saving them the tedious expectation of seeing the poet set out and ride the beginning of the course, they suffer you not to behold him, till he is in sight of the goal and just upon you.” Dryden seems to think that the method was forced upon them by “the rule of time.”
50 It is a rash enterprise to reconstruct Ibsen, but one cannot help wondering how he would have planned A Doll’s House had he written it in the ‘eighties instead of the ‘seventies. One can imagine a long opening scene between Helmer and Nora in which a great deal of the necessary information might have been conveyed; while it would have heightened by contrast the effect of the great final duologue as we now possess it. Such information as could not possibly have been conveyed in dialogue with Helmer might, one would think, have been left for Nora’s first scene with Krogstad, the effect of which it would have enhanced. Perhaps Mrs. Linden might with advantage have been retained, though not in her present character of confidant, in order to show Nora in relation to another woman.
51 See Chapter XXIII.
52 Henri Becque’s two best-known plays aptly exemplify the two types of opening. In Les Corbeaux we have almost an entire act of calm domesticity in which the only hint of coming trouble is an allusion to Vigneron’s attacks of vertigo. In La Parisienne Clotilde and Lafont are in the thick of a vehement quarrel over a letter. It proceeds for ten minutes or so, at the end of which Clotilde says, “Prenez garde, voilà mon mari!”—and we find that the two are not husband and wife, but wife and lover.
53 Mrs. Craigie (“John Oliver Hobbes”) opened her very successful play, The Ambassador, with a scene between Juliet Desborough and her sister Alice, a nun, who apparently left her convent specially to hear her sister’s confession, and then returned to it for ever. This was certainly not an economical form of exposition, but it was not unsuited to the type of play.
54 In that charming comedy, Rosemary, by Messrs. Parker and Carson, there is a gap of fifty years between the last act and its predecessor; but the so-called last act is only an “epi-monologue.”
55 Or at most two closely connected characters: for instance, a husband and wife.
56 There are several cases in Greek drama in which a hero leaves the stage to fight a battle and returns victorious in a few minutes. See, for example, the Supplices of Euripides.
57 So far was Shakespeare from ignoring the act-division that it is a question whether his art did not sometimes suffer from the supposed necessity of letting a fourth act intervene between the culmination in the third act and the catastrophe in the fifth.
58 I think it may be said that the majority of modern serious plays are in four acts. It is a favourite number with Sir Arthur Pinero, Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, Mr. Clyde Fitch, and Mr. Alfred Sutro.
59 This must not be taken to mean that in no case is a change of scene within the act advisable. The point to be considered is whether the author does or does not want to give the audience time for reflection—time to return to the real world—between two episodes. If it is of great importance that they should not do so, then a rapid change of scene may be the less of two evils. In this case the lights should be kept lowered in order to show that no interact is intended; but the fashion of changing the scene on a pitch-dark stage, without dropping the curtain, is much to be deprecated. If the revolving stage should ever become a common institution in English-speaking countries, dramatists would doubtless be more tempted than they are at present to change their scenes within the act; but I doubt whether the tendency would be wholly advantageous. No absolute rule, however, can be laid down, and it may well be maintained that a true dramatic artist could only profit by the greater flexibility of his medium.
60 He was, in the first draft; and Lona Hessel was only a distant relative of Bernick’s.
61 The Greeks, who knew most things, knew the value of manageable dimensions and simple structure in a work of art, and had a word to express that combination of qualities—the word eusynopton.
62 The view that the dramatist has only to think of pleasing himself is elsewhere dealt with.
63 Two dramatists who have read these pages in proof, exclaim at this passage. The one says, “No, no!” the other asks, “Why?” I can only reiterate that, where there exists a strong and generally accepted tradition, the dramatist not only runs counter to it at his peril, but goes outside the true domain of his art in so doing. New truth, in history, must be established either by new documents, or by a careful and detailed re-interpretation of old documents; but the stage is not the place either for the production of documents or for historical exegesis. It is needless to say that where the popular mind is unbiased, the dramatist’s hands are free. For instance, I presume that one might, in England, take any view one pleased of the character of Mary. Queen of Scots; but a highly unfavourable view would scarcely be accepted by Scottish audiences. Similarly, it would be both dangerous and unprofitable to present on the English stage any very damaging “scandal about Queen Elizabeth.” Historical criticism, I understand, does not accept the view that Robespierre was mainly responsible for the Reign of Terror, and that his death betokened a general revolt against his sanguinary tyranny; but it would be very hard for any dramatist to secure general acceptance for a more accurate reading of his character and function. Some further remarks on this subject will be found in Chapter XIII.
64 A malicious anecdote to a similar effect was current in the early days of Sir Henry Irving’s career. It was said that at Bristol one night, when Mr. Irving, as Hamlet, “took his call” after the first act, a man turned to his neighbour in the pit and said, “Can you tell me, sir, does that young man appear much in this play?” His neighbour informed him that Hamlet was rather largely concerned in the action, whereupon the inquirer remarked, “Oh! Then I’m off!”
65 If it be well done, it may remain highly effective in spite of being discounted by previous knowledge. For instance, the clock-trick in Raffles was none the less amusing because every one was on the look-out for it.
66 The question whether it is ever politic for a playwright to keep a secret from his audience is discussed elsewhere. What I have here in mind is not an ordinary secret, but a more or less tricky effect of surprise.
67 The pleasure received from exceptionally good acting is, of course, a different matter. I assume that the acting is merely competent enough to pass muster without irritating us, and so distracting our attention.
68 I myself expressed it in slightly different terms nearly ten years ago. “Curiosity,” I said, “is the accidental relish of a single night; whereas the essential and abiding pleasure of the theatre lies in foreknowledge. In relation to the characters in the drama, the audience are as gods looking before and after. Sitting in the theatre, we taste, for a moment, the glory of omniscience. With vision unsealed, we watch the gropings of purblind mortals after happiness, and smile at their stumblings, their blunders, their futile quests, their misplaced exultations, their groundless panics. To keep a secret from us is to reduce us to their level, and deprive us of our clairvoyant aloofness. There may be a pleasure in that too; we may join with zest in the game of blind-man’s-buff; but the theatre is in its essence a place where we are privileged to take off the bandage we wear in daily life, and to contemplate, with laughter or with tears, the blindfold gambols of our neighbours.”
69 Here an acute critic writes: “On the whole I agree; but I do think there is dramatic interest to be had out of curiosity, through the identification, so to speak, of the audience with the discovering persons on the stage. It is an interest of sympathy, not to be despised, rather than an interest of actual curiosity.”
70 That great story-teller, Alexandra Dumas pere, those a straightforward way of carrying forward the interest at the end of the first act of Henri III et sa Cour. The Due de Guise, insulted by Saint-Mégrin, beckons to his henchman and says, as the curtain falls, “Qu’on me cherche les mèmes hommes qui ont assassiné Dugast!”
71 There are limits to the validity of this rule, as applied to minor incidents. For example, it may sometimes be a point of art to lead the audience to expect the appearance of one person, when in fact another is about to enter. But it is exceedingly dangerous to baffle the carefully fostered anticipation of an important scene. See Chapters XVII and XXI.
72 This method of heightening the tension would have been somewhat analogous to that employed by Oscar Wilde in Lady Windermere’s instructions to her butler, cited on p. 115.
73 Dryden (Of Dramatic Poesy, p. 56, ed. Arnold, 1903) says: “Our plays, besides the main design, have underplots or by-concernments, of less considerable persons and intrigues, which are carried on with the motion of the main plot; as they say the orb of the fixed stars, and those of the planets, though they have motions of their own, are whirled about by the motion of the primum mobile, in which they are contained.” This is an admirable description of the ideal underplot, as conceived by our forefathers; but we find that two lines of tension jar with and weaken each other.
74 Of Dramatic Poesy, ed. Arnold, 1903, p. 60.
75 The World, December 20, 1899.
76 At the end of the first act of Lady Inger of Ostraat, Ibsen evidently intends to produce a startling effect through the sudden appearance of Olaf Skaktavl in Lady Inger’s hall. But as he has totally omitted to tell us who the strange man is, the incident has no meaning for us. In 1855 Ibsen had all his technical lessons yet to learn.
77 The fact that Mr. Phillips should have deemed such a foreshadowing necessary shows how instinctively a dramatist feels that the logic of his art requires him to assume that his audience is ignorant of his fable. In reality, very few members of the first-night audience, or of any other, can have depended on old Angela’s vaticination for the requisite foresight of events. But this does not prove Angela to be artistically superfluous.
78 See pp. 118, 240.
79 There is no special harm in this: the question of exits and entrances and their mechanism is discussed in Chapter XXIII.
80 This might be said of the scene of the second act of The Benefit of the Doubt; but here the actual stage-topography is natural enough. The author, however, is rather over-anxious to emphasize the acoustic relations of the two rooms.
81 For example, in his criticism of Becque’s La Parisienne (Quarante Ans de Théâtre, VI, p. 364), he tells how, at the end o£ the second act, one of his neighbours said to him, “Eh! bien, vous voilà bien attrapé! O est la scène à faire?” “I freely admit,” he continues, “that there is no scène à faire; if there had been no third act I should not have been greatly astonished. When you make it your business to recite on the stage articles from the Vie Parisienne, it makes no difference whether you stop at the end of the second article or at the end of the third.” This clearly implies that a play in which there is no scène à faire is nothing but a series of newspaper sketches. Becque, one fancies, might have replied that the scene between Clotilde and Monsieur Simpson at the beginning of Act III was precisely the scène à faire demanded by the logic of his cynicism.
82 I need scarcely direct the reader’s attention to Mr. Gilbert Murray’s noble renderings of these speeches.
83 Such a scene occurs in that very able play, The Way the Money Goes, by Lady Bell.
84 In Mr. Stephen Phillips’s play he does not actually play on the lyre, but he improvises and recites an ode to the conflagration.
85 And, after all, Mr. Shaw does not run counter to the legend. He exhibits Caesar and Napoleon “in their well-known attitudes”: only, by an odd metempsychosis, the soul of Mr. Shaw has somehow entered into them.
86 That great spiritual drama known as the Book of Job opens, after the Prologue in Heaven, with one of the most startling of peripeties.
87 The first act of Mr. Gilbert Murray’s Carlyon Sahib contains an incident of this nature; but it can scarcely be called a peripety, since the victim remains unconscious of his doom.
88 For the benefit of American readers, it may be well to state that the person who changes a Bank of England note is often asked to write his or her name on the back of it. It must have been in a moment of sheer aberration that the lady in question wrote her own name.
89 M. Bernstein, dishing up a similar theme with a piquant sauce of sensuality, made but a vulgar and trivial piece of work of it.
90 One of the most striking peripeties in recent English drama occurs in the third act of The Builder of Bridges, by Mr. Alfred Sutro.
91 The malignant caricature of Cromwell in W.G. Wills’ Charles I did not, indeed, prevent the acceptance of the play by the mid-Victorian public; but it will certainly shorten the life of the one play which might have secured for its author a lasting place in dramatic literature. It is unimaginable that future generations should accept a representation of Cromwell as
“A mouthing patriot, with an itching palm,
In one hand menace, in the other greed.”
92 It is only fair to say that Sarcey drew a distinction between antecedent events and what he calls “postulates of character.” He did not maintain that an audience ought to accept a psychological impossibility, merely because it was placed outside the frame of the picture. See Quarante Ans de Théâtre, vii, p. 395.
93 This phrase, which occurs in Mr. Haddon Chambers’s romantic melodrama, Captain Swift, was greeted with a burst of laughter by the first-night audience; but little did we then think that Mr. Chambers was enriching the English language. It is not, on examination, a particularly luminous phrase: “the three or four arms of coincidence” would really be more to the point. But it is not always the most accurate expression that is fittest to survive.
94 The abuse of coincidence is a legacy to modern drama from the Latin comedy, which, again, was founded on the Greek New Comedy. It is worth noting that in the days of Menander the world really was much smaller than it is to-day, when “thalassic” has grown into “oceanic” civilization. Travellers in those days followed a few main routes; half a dozen great seaports were rendezvous for all the world; the slave-trade was active, and kidnappings and abductions with the corresponding meetings and recognitions were no doubt frequent. Thus such a plot as that of the Menaechmi was by no means the sheer impossibility which Shakespeare made it by attaching indistinguishable Dromios to his indistinguishable Antipholuses. To reduplicate a coincidence is in fact to multiply it by a figure far beyond my mathematics. It may be noted, too, that the practice of exposing children, on which the Oedipus, and many plays of Menander, are founded, was common in historic Greece, and that the hapless children were generally provided with identification-tokens gnorismata.
95 I am here writing from memory, having been unable to obtain a copy of The City; but my memory is pretty clear.
96 For instance: “If you can get a word with him by pretending that you are his wife, tell him to hold his tongue until morning; that will give me all the start I need.”
97 In The Idyll, by Herr Egge, of which some account is given in Chapter X, the author certainly does right in not allowing the audience for a moment to share the hero’s doubts as to the heroine’s past. It would have been very easy for him to have kept the secret; but he takes the earliest opportunity of assuring us that her relations with Ringve were quite innocent.
98 The fact that a great poet can ignore such precepts with impunity is proved by the exquisite anticlimax of the third act of D’Annunzio’s La Gioconda.
99 Of Dramatic Poesy, ed. Arnold, 1903, p. 51.
100 In Mr. Somerset Maugham’s Grace the heroine undergoes a somewhat analogous change of heart, coming to love the husband whom she has previously despised. But we have no difficulty in accepting her conversion, partly because its reasons are clear and fairly adequate, partly because there is no question of convincing the husband, who has never realized her previous contempt for him.
101 I have good reason for believing that, in M. Maeterlinck’s original scheme, Prinzivalle imposed no such humiliating condition. Giovanna went of her own motive to appeal to his clemency; and her success was so complete that her husband, on her return, could not believe that it had been won by avowable means. This is a really fine conception—what a pity that the poet departed from it!
102 Much has been made of the Censor’s refusal to license Monna Vanna; but I think there is more to be said for his action in this than in many other cases. In those countries where the play has succeeded, I cannot but suspect that the appeal it made was not wholly to the higher instincts of the public.
103 I am not sure what was the precise relationship of this play to the same author’s Beau Brummel. D’Orsay’s death scene was certainly a repetition of Brummel’s.
104 The reader who wishes to pursue the theme may do so to excellent advantage in Professor Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy.
105 It is true that in A Doll’s House, Dr. Rank announces his approaching demise: but he does not actually die, nor is his fate an essential part of the action of the play.
106 The duel, even in countries whose customs permit of it, is essentially an inartistic end; for it leaves the catastrophe to be decided either by Chance or Providence—two equally inadmissible arbiters in modern drama. Alexandre Dumas fils, in his preface to Héloïse Paranquet, condemns the duel as a dramatic expedient. “Not to mention,” he says, “the fact that it has been much over-done, we are bound to recognize that Providence, in a fit of absence of mind, sometimes suffers the rascal to kill the honest man. Let me recommend my young colleagues,” he proceeds, “never to end a piece which pretends to reproduce a phase of real life, by an intervention of chance.” The recommendation came rather oddly from the dramatist who, in L’Etrangère, had disposed of his “vibrion,” the Duc de Septmonts, by making Clarkson kill him in a duel. Perhaps he did not reckon L’Etrangère as pretending to reproduce a phase of real life. A duel is, of course, perfectly admissible in a French or German play, simply as part of a picture of manners. Its stupid inconclusiveness may be the very point to be illustrated. It is only when represented as a moral arbitrament that it becomes an anachronism.
107 I am glad to see, from Mr. Malcolm Salaman’s introduction to the printed play, that, even in those days of our hot youth, my own aesthetic principles were less truculent.
108 This image is sometimes suggested by an act-ending which leaves a marked situation obviously unresolved. The curtain should never be dropped at such a point as to leave the characters in a physical or mental attitude which cannot last for more than a moment, and must certainly be followed, then and there, by important developments. In other words, a situation ought not to be cut short at the very height of its tension, but only when it has reached a point of—at any rate momentary—relaxation.
109 If this runs counter to the latest biological orthodoxy, I am sorry. Habits are at any rate transmissible by imitation, if not otherwise.
110 Chapter XIX.
111 So, too, with the style of Congreve. It is much, and justly, admired; but who does not feel more than a touch of mannerism in such a passage as this?—
MILLAMANT: “... Let us never visit together, nor go to a play
together; but let us be very strange and well-bred: let us be as
strange as if we had been married a great while; and as well-bred as
if we were not married at all.”
MIRABELL: “Have you any more conditions to offer? Hitherto your
demands are pretty reasonable.”
MILLAMANT: “Trifles!—as liberty to pay and receive visits to and
from whom I please; to write and receive letters, without
interrogatories or wry faces on your part; to wear what I please;
and choose conversation with regard only to my own taste; to have no
obligation upon me to converse with wits that I don’t like because
they are your acquaintances; or to be intimate with fools because
they may be your relatives.... These articles subscribed, if I
continue to endure you a little longer, I may by degrees dwindle
into a wife.”
This is very pretty prose, granted; but it is the prose of literature, not of life.
112 From the fact that I do not make an exception in favour of The Blot in the Scutcheon or Stratford, I must leave the reader to draw what inference he pleases. On the other hand, I believe that a reconstruction of Tennyson’s Queen Mary, with a few connecting links written in, might take a permanent place in the theatre.
113 Mr. Israel Zangwill, in his symbolic play, The War-God, has put blank verse to what I believe to be a new use, with noteworthy success. He writes in very strict measure, but without the least inversion or inflation, without a touch of Elizabethan, or conventionally poetic, diction. He is thus enabled to use the most modern expressions, and even slang, without incongruity; while at the same time he can give rhetorical movement to the speeches of his symbolic personages, and, in passages of argument, can achieve that clash of measured phrase against measured phrase which the Greeks called “stichomythy,” and which the French dramatist sometimes produces in rapid rapier play with the Alexandrine. Mr. Zangwill’s practice is in absolute contradiction of the principle above suggested that blank verse, to be justified in drama, ought to be lyrical. His verse is a product of pure intellect and wit, without a single lyric accent. It is measured prose; if it ever tries to be more, it fails. I think, then, that he has shown a new use for blank verse, in rhetorico-symbolic drama. But it is no small literary feat to handle the measure as he does.
114 Not quite. The drama of some Oriental peoples recognizes conventions which the Elizabethans did not admit.
115 A conversation on the telephone often provides a convenient and up-to-date substitute for a soliloquy; but that is an expedient which ought not to be abused.
116 The soliloquy is often not only slovenly, but a gratuitous and unnecessary slovenliness. In Les Corbeaux, by Henry Becque, produced in 1889, there occur two soliloquies—one by Teissier (Act ii, Scene 3), the other by Madame de Saint-Genis (Act in, Scene 10)—either or both of which could be omitted without leaving any sensible gap. The latter is wholly superfluous, the former conveys some information which might have been taken for granted, and could, in any case, have been conveyed without difficulty in some other way. Yet Becque was, in his day, regarded as a quite advanced technician.