TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Some minor changes to the text are noted at the [end of the book.] These are indicated by a dashed blue underline.

Books by Brander Matthews

These Many Years, Recollections of a New Yorker

Biographies

Shakspere as a Playwright
Molière, His Life and His Works

Essays and Criticisms

The Principles of Playmaking
French Dramatists of the 19th Century
Pen and Ink, Essays on subjects of more or less importance
Aspects of Fiction, and other Essays
The Historical Novel, and other Essays
Parts of Speech, Essays on English
The Development of the Drama
Inquiries and Opinions
The American of the Future, and other Essays
Gateways to Literature, and other Essays
On Acting
A Book About the Theater
The Principles of Playmaking, and other Discussions of the Drama
Essays on English
The Tocsin of Revolt and other Essays
Playwrights on Playmaking, and other Studies of the Stage

Vignettes of Manhattan; Outlines in Local Color

PLAYWRIGHTS ON PLAYMAKING

AND OTHER

STUDIES OF THE STAGE

PLAYWRIGHTS ON
PLAYMAKING

AND OTHER STUDIES OF THE STAGE

BY

BRANDER MATTHEWS

MEMBER OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS
PROFESSOR OF DRAMATIC LITERATURE IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
NEW YORK · LONDON
1923

Copyright, 1923, by
Charles Scribner’s Sons

Printed in the United States of America

Published September, 1923

To the Memory of

E. L. BURLINGAME

My Friend for more than Forty Years

PREFATORY NOTE

As I have trod the long trail which leads slowly to the summit of three score years and ten, and as I am now swiftly descending into the dim valley beyond, this sheaf of essays is probably the last that I shall garner; and my septuagenarian vanity prompts me to set down here the theories of the theater that I have made my own after half a century of playgoing and of persistent effort to spy out the secrets of stage-craft. To me these theories appear so indisputable and, indeed, so obvious that I am ever surprized when I chance to see them challenged. They are not many, and they can be declared briefly.

I. The drama is an art, the laws of which (like those of all the other arts) are unchanging through the ages, altho their application has varied from century to century and from country to country.

II. The drama (again like the other arts) has its conventions, that is to say, its implied contracts between the artist and his public, without which it could not exist; and while some of these conventions are essential and therefore permanent, others are local and accidental, and therefore temporary.

III. The dramatist, whether he is truly a poet or only an adroit playwright, has always composed his plays with the hope and expectation of seeing them performed, by actors, in a theater, and before an audience; and therefore what he has composed has always been conditioned, consciously or unconsciously, by the players, by the playhouses, and by the playgoers of his own race and of his own time.

These three theories may be more or less implicit in the ‘Poetics’ of Aristotle and in the ‘Dramaturgy’ of Lessing; and it would ill become me not to confess frankly my indebtedness to Francisque Sarcey, for first calling attention to the necessity of dramatic conventions. Among the moderns the influence of the audience seems to have been hinted at first by Castelvetro; James Spedding saw clearly the probable influence exerted upon Shakspere by his fellow actors in the Globe Theater; and Gaston Boissier pointed out the probable influence exerted upon Plautus and Terence by the theaters of Rome; but I venture to believe that I had no predecessor in utilizing all three of these influences to elucidate the technic of Sophocles, of Shakspere and of Molière,—to say nothing of the dramatists of our own day.

IV. I believe that I was also the first to show that the principle of Economy of Attention, which Herbert Spencer applied only to Rhetoric, was applicable to the other arts and more particularly to the drama.

V. Perhaps I may claim a share in the wide acceptance of Brunetière’s ‘Law of the Drama,’—that the drama is differentiated from the other forms of story-telling by the fact that an audience desires to behold a conflict, a stark assertion of the human will, a clash of character upon character.

These theories of the theater, which I feel to be mine, wherever I may have derived them, I have discussed now and again in the present volume, as I discussed them earlier in the ‘Principles of Playmaking,’ in the ‘Development of the Drama,’ in the ‘Study of the Drama’ and in my biographies of Shakspere and Molière. In many years of lecturing to graduate classes I have found them useful in arousing the interest of students always eager to acquire insight into technic. What a dramatist meant to do—that is something about which we may endlessly dispute. What he actually did—that is something we can test and measure.

B. M.

Columbia University
in the City of New York

CONTENTS

I

PLAYWRIGHTS ON PLAYMAKING

I
PLAYWRIGHTS ON PLAYMAKING

I

We have no right to expect that a creator of art should be also a critic of art. He is a creator because he can create, because he can paint a picture, model a statue, tell a story in action on the stage or delineate character in narrative; and he needs only enough of the critical faculty to enable him to achieve the obligatory self-criticism, without which he may go astray. If he is a born story-teller, for instance, he may tell stories by native gift, almost without taking thought as to how he does it; and even if he does it very well, he may be an artist in spite of himself, so to speak. He may achieve his effects without analyzing his processes, perhaps without understanding them or even perceiving them. His methods are intuitive rather than rational; they are personal to him; and he cannot impart them to others.

He may in fact misconceive his own effort and see himself in a false light, sincerely believing that he is doing his work in one way when he is really doing it in another. Zola, for one, was entirely at fault in the opinion he held about his own novels; he was so uncritical that he supposed himself to be a Realist, avid of facts, whereas he was unmistakably a Romanticist, planning epic edifices symmetrical and fantastic and forcing the facts he diligently sought for to fit as best they could into the structure of the dream-dwelling he was building. Zola was a tireless worker dowered with constructive imagination, but he was not more intelligent than the average man; and he was distinctly deficient in critical insight, as was swiftly disclosed when he ventured to discuss the principles of novel-writing and the practices of his fellow-craftsmen.

But there are artists, and not a few, who are keenly intelligent and who are able to philosophize about their calling; and whenever they are moved to talk about the technic of their several arts we shall do well to listen that we may learn. We can make our profit from what Horace and Wordsworth have to say about poetry and from what Pope and Poe have to say about versification. We can gain enlightenment from the remarks of Reynolds and Fromentin and La Farge on painting and from the remarks of Fielding and Scott, Howells and Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson about fiction. We must, of course, make our allowances in each case for the personal equation and for the predilection the artist-critic is likely to possess for the special school of art to which he himself belongs,—and also for the forgivable intolerance he sometimes reveals toward those who are students in other schools.

When the artist who is also a critic addresses the public, he has his eyes directed more often than not particularly to his fellow practitioners. Thus it is that he tends to deal more especially with technic and to talk about the processes of the craft and about the best method of achieving needed effects. Nor is this to be deplored, since we need all the information we can get about technic to enable us to appreciate the artist’s accomplishment,—and who can supply this information so satisfactorily as the artist himself? There may be other points of view than the artist’s, there is that of the public, for one, but the artist’s must ever be the most significant; and what this is we can learn only from him. He at least has practised what he is preaching; and this fact gives a validity to his discourse.

Even in this twentieth century there are critics not a few who persist in dealing with the drama as literature only, deliberately ignoring its necessary connection with the theater. This is a wilful error, which vitiates only too many estimates of the masters of tragedy and comedy, Sophocles, Shakspere, and Molière. Perhaps the best corrective is a consideration of the utterances of the dramatists who have discussed the principles of playmaking. Here we may find light, even if it is sometimes accompanied by more or less heat.

The list of the dramatists who have been tempted to talk about the drama as an art is long, far longer indeed than is suspected by those who have never sought to seek them out. It includes Lope de Vega, Ben Jonson and Dryden, Corneille and Molière, Goethe, Lessing and Grillparzer, Voltaire and Goldoni, Victor Hugo and the two Dumas, Ernest Legouvé and Jules Lemaître, Bronson Howard and William Gillette, Arthur Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones. These are all the names of professional playwrights whose dramas, comic and tragic, withstood the ordeal by fire in the theater. Yet it may be well to point out that they divide themselves into two groups. We may put into the first group those who were critics by profession and whose reputation is due rather to their critical acumen than to their playmaking skill,—Ben Jonson and Dryden, Lessing and Jules Lemaître. Then we put into a second group those who were critics only on occasion, their fame being based on their creative work,—Lope de Vega, Corneille and Molière, Grillparzer and Pinero, to name only a few. It is from these latter that we have a right to expect the most significant statements.

II

The first thing we discover when we compare the opinions of the professional playwrights is that they agree in accepting the judgment of the audience as decisive and final. As their plays were composed for the delight of the spectators, they all feel that they are bound to accept the verdict rendered in the theater. They know better than any one else how vain is the hope of an appeal to any other tribunal. They were seeking success on the stage, not in the study; they desired to arouse and retain the interest of their own contemporaries in their own country. They gave no thought to posterity or to foreign nations. They recognized that they had no right to complain if they could not win over the jury by which they had chosen to be tried. In so far as the dramatists have expressed their opinion on this point they are unanimous.

In Professor William Lyon Phelps’s lively little book on the ‘Twentieth Century Theater,’ he has told us about an unnamed author, who “profoundly influenced not only the stage but also modern thought” and who nevertheless maintained that the “true dramatist must not think of the box-office while he is writing his plays. He must express himself, which is the only reason for writing at all. If what he writes happens to be financially successful, so much the better. But he must not think of popular success while at work.” We cannot doubt the sincerity of these sentiments, since Professor Phelps has frankly informed us that the majority of this author’s pieces “have been failures on the stage.”

The practise of this unnamed author is in sharp opposition to that of Shakspere and Molière, who were shrewd men of business, both of them. Shakspere was susceptible to every veering shift in popular taste, giving the public sex-plays, ‘Measure for Measure’ and ‘All’s Well That Ends Well,’ when other playwrights had stimulated the taste for that type of piece, and following the footsteps of Beaumont and Fletcher after these collaborators had won the favor of playgoers with their more or less spectacular dramatic-romances. Molière made haste to bolster the bill with a robust farce when the box-office receipts revealed to him that the ‘Misanthrope’ was not financially successful. Goethe displayed his customary insight when he told Eckermann that the greatest of English dramatists and the greatest of French dramatists, “wished, above all things, to make money by their theaters.”

This wish of theirs did not interfere with the ability of Shakspere and of Molière “to express himself.” Of course, the dramatic poet desires to express himself; but if he is a born playwright, he never thinks of trying to express himself except in conformity to the conditions of the dramatic art with its triple dependence on the playhouse itself, the players and the playgoers. Professor Phelps’s unnamed author may have “profoundly influenced” both the stage and modern thought, but he was not a born playwright or he would have ever had “popular success” in mind while he was at work. If he did not value the winning of the suffrages of his constituents, why did he present himself at the polls? There are abundant facilities for self-expression in the novel and in the lyric. In the drama self-expression must take thought of the public, of its likes and its dislikes, of its many-headedness and of the variety of its tastes.

The opinions enunciated by this unnamed author are contrary to the practise of Shakspere and Molière, and they are also contrary to the precepts of Lope de Vega and Corneille, who also profoundly influenced both the stage and what in their own day was “modern thought.” Lope de Vega proclaimed his deference to the Italian theorists of the theater, regretting only that the playwrights who worked according to their precepts died “without fame and guerdon.” Then he tells us (with his tongue in his cheek) that “when I have to write a play I lock in the precepts with six keys ... and I write in accordance with that art which they devised who aspired to the applause of the crowd, for since the crowd pays for the plays, it is fitting to talk foolishly to it to satisfy its taste.” Less than a quarter of a century later Corneille said almost exactly the same thing, perhaps sadly but certainly not ironically:

Since we write plays to be performed, our first object is to please the court and the people, and to attract many to the performances. We must, if we can, obey the precepts, so as not to displease the learned and to receive unanimous applause; but above all we must win the vote of the people.

And Molière less than thirty years later is equally plain-spoken:

I am willing to trust the decision of the multitude, and I hold it as difficult to combat a work which the public approves as to defend one which it condemns.

It may be noted that Corneille desired to gain, if possible, the good opinion of the learned, while he held it essential to gain that of the crowd. The younger Dumas once imagined his father replying to those who had asked him if he would not be satisfied if he had achieved the commendation of the best judges only: “No, the approbation of these judges would not amply indemnify me for the coldness of the others, because the drama, which appeals to the many, cannot be satisfied with the approval of the few.” In putting this opinion into the mouth of the elder Dumas, his son was but expressing the belief of every successful playwright who has been moved to discuss the art of the drama; and it may be well to recall the fact that in their own day all the great dramatists were only successful playwrights, their popularity being beyond question even if their greatness was still in doubt.

III

There are other beliefs of the successful playwrights, perhaps not so unanimously expressed, yet widely held. One of them is that the playwright, like the poet, is born and not made. The younger Dumas declared that a man “may become a painter, a sculptor, even a musician, by study—but not a playwright.... It is a freak of nature, which has constructed the vision as to enable him to see things in a certain way.” He added that this very rare faculty is revealed in the first attempt at playwriting, however unambitious this juvenile effort may be. Goethe had said almost the same thing, asserting that “writing for the stage is something peculiar.... It is a craft which one must understand and it requires a talent which one must possess.” In other words, the playwright, like the poet again, must be born, and he must be made also, after he is born, since he needs to master the technic of the trade.

On another occasion Goethe spoke of the prolixity of Schiller’s earlier pieces, a fault which Schiller was never quite able to overcome. Goethe commented that it “is more difficult than is imagined to control a subject properly, to keep it from overpowering one, and to concentrate one’s attention on that alone which is absolutely essential.” The younger Dumas, who always knew what he was driving at, declared that the first qualification of the accomplished dramatist was logic, which “must be implacable from beginning to end.... The playwright must unfailingly place before the spectator that part of the being or thing for or against which he wishes to draw a conclusion.”

Sir Arthur Pinero agrees with Dumas in holding that

dramatic, like poetic, talent is born, not made; if it is to achieve success it must be developed into theatrical talent by hard study and generally by long practice. For theatrical talent consists in the power of making your characters not only tell a story by means of dialog but tell it in such skilfully devised form and order as shall, within the limits of an ordinary theatrical representation, give rise to the greatest amount of that peculiar kind of emotional effect the production of which is the one great function of the theater.

This theatrical talent has to be exercised within the limits of the theater as this exists at the time when the dramatist lives. The principles of playmaking are eternal, no doubt, but the practices of playmaking are modified by the constantly changing conditions of the stage.

Pinero likens the art of the drama to the art of war, the permanent principles of playmaking to strategy, and its variable principles to tactics. Strategy is to-day what it was yesterday; and it was succinctly defined during our Civil War by General Forrest, when he said it consisted in “getting there first with the most men”—that is to say, in gaining an advantageous position for yourself and putting the enemy in a disadvantageous position. It is therefore unchanging in its essential elements, Foch profiting by the example of Napoleon and Cæsar, Hannibal and Alexander. But tactics are in incessant modification, as the soldier has new implements put in his hands by the inventions of the ages, gunpowder unhorsing the man in armor and tanks taking the place of elephants. While the strategy of the drama is constant, its tactics “are always changing,” so Pinero has put it; and

every dramatist whose ambition it is to produce live plays is absolutely bound to study carefully, and I may add respectfully—at any rate not contemptuously—the conditions that hold good for his own age and generation.

The strategy of Shakspere is that of Sophocles, of Molière and of Ibsen, even if the later men did not recognize their own obedience to the laws which had governed the earlier. The tactics of Sophocles were diametrically opposed to those of Shakspere, because the Greek dramatist built his massive plays to conform to the conditions of the immense open air theater of Athens with its extraordinarily intelligent spectators, whereas the English dramatist had to adjust his pieces, comic and tragic, to the bare platform of the half-timbered London playhouse, with its gallants seated on the stage and its rude and turbulent groundlings standing in the unroofed yard. So the tactics of Molière and Ibsen are strangely unlike, the French author fitting his comedies to a long, narrow theater, dimly lighted by candles, with the courtiers accommodated on benches just behind the curtain and with the well-to-do burghers of Paris making up the bulk of the audience, while the stern Scandinavian found his profit in the modern picture-frame stage, with its realistic sets and with its spectators comfortably seated in front of the curtain. Each of the four followed the methods of his own time and place; and each in turn made the best of the theatrical conditions which confronted him. But however much they may differ in practice, in tactics they worked in accord with the same principles, and employed the same strategy.

Bronson Howard admitted that Aeschylus “taught the future world the art of writing a play” but he “did not create the laws of dramatic construction. Those laws exist in the passions and sympathies of the human race.” A little later in the same address, Bronson Howard declared that the laws of dramatic construction “bear about the same relation to human character and human sympathies as the laws of nature bear to the material universe.” In other words, the drama is what it is, what it always has been, what it always will be, because human nature is what it is and was and will be. And this brings us back to the inexorable fact that the eternally dominating element in the theater is the audience. “The dramatist,” so Bronson Howard reminded us, “must remember that his work cannot, like that of the novelist or the poet, pick out the hearts, here and there, that happen to be in sympathy with its subject. He appeals to a thousand hearts at the same moment; he has no choice in the matter; he must do this.” That is to say, the drama is immitigably “a function of the crowd,” as Mr. Walkley has aptly called it.

Finally, Bronson Howard pointed out that there is no great difficulty in obeying the laws of dramatic construction, even if it may be impossible to declare them with precision. “Be honest and sincere” in using

your common sense in the study of your own and other people’s emotions.... The public will be your jury. That public often condescends to be trifled with by mere tricksters, but believe me, it is only a condescension, and very contemptuous. In the long run, the public will judge you, and respect you, according to your artistic sincerity.

What has here been quoted from the critical writings of the dramatists may seem to some rather elementary; but it is perhaps all the more valuable. As Diderot once said, “a man must have a deep knowledge of any art or science before he is in possession of its elements.”

(1920)

II

UNDRAMATIC CRITICISM

II
UNDRAMATIC CRITICISM

I

As criticism has to find its material in the work of the creators it is not surprizing that the masters of the craft have appeared during periods of abundant creation or shortly thereafter. Aristotle was not separated by many years from Sophocles and Euripides. Boileau was the most intimate friend of Molière; and Sainte-Beuve was the contemporary of Hugo and Balzac, altho he did not greatly care for either of them. Coleridge lived in an epoch of ample productivity; and so did Matthew Arnold. Lessing was stimulated by Voltaire and Diderot; and he prepared the way for Goethe and Schiller. And these are only a few of the critics who have held their own by the side of the creators.

But when the creative impulse relaxes, when there is no longer a succession of masterpieces demanding appreciation, then is it that the criticasters have their turn, the pigmies who promulgate edicts for those who are still striving to attain the twin summits of Parnassus. It was not in the rich abundance of Athens but in the thin sterility of Alexandria that the laws of poetry were codified with Draconian severity. It was not under Louis XIV but under Napoleon, when French literature was dying of inanition, that Népomucène Lemercier declared the twenty-five rules which the writer of tragedy must obey and the twenty-two to which the writer of comedy must conform.

There was no living Latin drama when Horace penned his epistle on poetry, and the theaters of Rome were given over to unliterary spectacle. It is unlikely that Horace had ever had occasion to see a worthy play worthily acted. No doubt he had read the works of the great Greeks, but that could not disclose to him the full emotional force of their dramas revealed only by actual performance. To judge a play by reading it is like judging a picture by a photograph. The greater the drama the more completely does it put forth its power when it is made to live by the actor in the theater and before the audience. As a result of Horace’s lack of experience as a spectator, what he has to say about the principles of playmaking has little validity. He is not exercising his own keen critical faculty; he is merely echoing the opinions of Alexandrian criticasters. His counsel to aspiring dramatists was not practical; it was academic in the worst sense of the word. In fact, Horace was only going through the motions of giving advice, since there were no aspiring dramatists in Rome, as there were then no stages on which a play could be acted and no company of actors to perform it.

A comparison of the ‘Poetics’ of Aristotle with the ‘Art of Poetry’ of Horace is as amusing as it is profitable. Aristotle is the earliest and the shrewdest of dramatic critics. Horace had no intimacy with the theater. Horace is sketching from a lay-figure in a studio, whereas Aristotle is drawing from the living model in the open air. When Aristotle discusses the effect of an episode upon an audience, we can be sure that he himself was once one of that audience, and that his memory had retained the intonations and the gestures of the actors as well as the unformulated response of the spectators to the emotional appeal of the plot. Aristotle is as insistent in taking the audience in account as Sarcey was; and his dramatic criticism is as technical as Sarcey’s. Horace had never thrilled to a situation as it slowly unfolded itself in the theater; and therefore what he has to say about the principles of playmaking is more or less beside the mark. It is hit or miss; it may be right or it may be wrong; it is supported by no understanding of dramaturgy; it is undramatic criticism.

The theories which Horace took over second-hand from the Alexandrian criticasters, the supersubtle Italians of the Renascence took third-hand from him. They suffered, as Horace had suffered, from the lack of a living dramatic literature in their own tongue. In the pride of their newfound learning they looked with contempt upon the unliterary types of drama then popular, the Sacred Representations and the Comedy-of-Masks. They never suspected that in these artless exhibitions there were the germs out of which a noble dramatic literature might be evolved. They could not foresee that the Elizabethans would develop their tragedy from the English Mystery-Plays, which were no cruder than the Italian Sacred Representations, and that in the ‘Étourdi’ Molière would lift into literature the loose and lively Comedy-of-Masks. And because they refused to do what Shakspere and Molière were to do, they left Italy barren of drama for centuries. The most of the dramatic poems which are catalogued in the histories of Italian literature were unacted and unactable,—altho now and again one or another did achieve performance by amateurs before an audience of dilettants.

So it is that the host of theorists of the theater in Renascence Italy are undramatic critics, not because they lacked acuteness, but because they knew nothing of the actual theater, the sole region where drama can live, move and have its being. Only infrequently does one of them,—Castelvetro, for example,—venture to give a thought to the audience for whose delight a drama ought to be prepared. As they had no acquaintance with any stage, except the sporadic platform of the strolling acrobat-comedians whom they despised, they had no concrete knowledge as a foundation for their abstract speculation. They were working in a vacuum. And it is small wonder that they complicated their concepts until they had elaborated the Classicist doctrines of the Three Unities and of the total separation of Comedy from Tragedy. The Classicist code was so hampering to the free expansion of the drama that Corneille cried out against its rigor, that Lope de Vega paid it lip-service but disregarded it unhesitatingly, and that Shakspere never gave it a thought—excepting only when he was writing his last play, the ‘Tempest.’

II

Horace’s mistake was in his adventuring himself beyond the boundaries of his knowledge; and the blunder of the Renascence critics was caused by their scornful disregard of the contemporary types of drama in their own time, artless as these might be. But nowadays the theater is flourishing and every man has frequent opportunity to see worthy plays worthily performed and to acquaint himself with the immediate effect of a worthy performance upon the spectators. No apology is acceptable for the undramatic criticism which we discover in not a few of the learned treatises which profess to expound and explain the masterpieces of the mighty dramatists who lived in Periclean Athens and in Elizabethan England. Some of the scholars, who discuss Sophocles and Shakspere, deal with these expert playwrights as if their pieces had been composed not to be seen in swift action in the theater but to be read at leisure in the library. In their eyes ‘Œdipus the King’ and ‘Othello’ are only dramatic poems, and not poetic dramas. They study the printed page under the microscope; and they make no effort to recapture the sound of the spoken word or to visualize the illustrative action.

The undramatic critic of this type has no apprehension of the principles of playmaking, as these are set forth by Aristotle and by Lessing, by Sarcey and by Brunetière. He has made no effort to keep abreast of the “state of the art” of dramatic criticism. He seems never to have considered the triple influence exerted on the form and on the content of a play by the theater for which it was composed, by the actors for whom its characters were intended or by the audience for whose pleasure it was written. It is only occasionally that we have proffered to us a book like the late Professor Goodell’s illuminating analysis of ‘Athenian Tragedy,’ in which we are agreeably surprized to find a Greek scholar elucidating the masterpieces of the Greek drama by the aid of Brunetière’s ‘Law of the Drama’ and Archer’s ‘Playmaking.’ Professor Goodell firmly grasped the fact that the art of the drama is unchanging, no matter how various its manifestations may be in different centuries and in different countries. And he was therefore able to cast light upon the plays of the past by his observation of the plays of the present.

Less satisfactory is an almost contemporary volume on ‘Greek Tragedy,’ which covers the same ground. Altho Professor Norwood has not found his profit in Brunetière or Archer, he makes a valiant effort to visualize actual performance in the Theater of Dionysus more than twenty centuries ago. He deals with Greek plays as poetic dramas and not merely as dramatic poems. But he has fallen victim to the wiles of the late Professor Verrall, one of the most ingenious of undramatic critics; and in his discussion of ‘Agamemnon’ of Æschylus he gives Verrall credit for having solved a series of difficulties. Professor Norwood even goes so far as to declare that “Verrall’s theory should probably be accepted.”

I doubt if a single one of the alleged difficulties even occurred to any of the spectators present at the first performance of the play. The action of ‘Agamemnon’ is swift, irresistible, inevitable; and the audience was allowed no time for cavil. As the story unrolled itself in the theater it was convincing; and if any doubt arose in the mind of any spectator as to anything that had occurred, it could arise only after he had left the theater; and then it was too late. As a play, performed by actors, in a theater, before an audience, ‘Agamemnon’ triumphs. Only when it is considered in the study do we perceive any “difficulties.” In fact, when so considered one difficulty is likely to strike many readers; and it repays consideration.

The play begins with a long monolog from a watchman of the roof of Agamemnon’s palace. The king is at the siege of Troy; and when the beleaguered city is taken a series of beacons on the intervening hills will be lighted, one after another, to convey the glad news. Suddenly the watchman sees the distant flame, the wireless message that Troy has fallen and that the monarch is free to return home. In real life it would be two or three weeks before Agamemnon would arrive; yet in the play, before it is half over, the king comes in; he enters his palace, where he is done to death by his guilty wife and her paramour, Ægisthus. The exigencies of the two hours’ traffic of the stage often compel a playwright to telescope time; but no other dramatist has ever dared so violent a compression as this.

And this is how Verrall solves the difficulty “with lucidity, skill and brilliance,” so Professor Norwood tells us. The story of the series of beacons is a lie concocted by the wife and her lover. There is only one beacon, which Ægisthus lights when he discovers the landing of Agamemnon; it is to warn his accomplice that she may make ready to murder her husband. And as Agamemnon is actually on shore when this single beacon flames up, he is able to arrive in the middle of the play. If we accept this solution of the difficulty we are compelled to believe that Æschylus wrote a play, instantly accepted as a masterpiece, which had to wait for more than two thousand years for a British scholar to explain away an impossibility. This explanation is undoubtedly lucid and skilful and brilliant; but none the less is it a specimen of undramatic criticism. It could never have been put forward by anyone who had an elementary knowledge of the principles of playmaking.

A dramatist never tells lies to his audience; and the audience always accepts the statements of his characters as true—unless he himself takes care to suggest that a given statement is false. The play has to be taken at its face value. The characters talk on purpose to convey all needful information to the spectators. Æschylus may make the queen lie to the king, but when she does this the audience is aware of the truth or surmises it. The dramatist never hesitates to let his characters deceive one another; but if he knows his business he does not deceive the spectators. In real life Agamemnon could not arrive for a fortnight after Troy had fallen; but the Athenian audience could not wait in their seats two weeks, so Æschylus frankly brings on Agamemnon; and the spectators were glad to behold him, asking no inconvenient questions, because they were eager to see what would happen to him. It might be a contradiction of the fact, but it was not a departure from the truth, since the king would assuredly come home sooner or later. Everyone familiar with Sarcey’s discussion of the conventions of the drama is aware that the spectators in the theater are never sticklers for fact; they are willing to accept a contradiction of fact, if that contradiction is for their own profit, as it was in this case. And they accept it unthinkingly; and it is only when they hold the play in their hands to pick it to pieces that they discover any “difficulty.”

III

To say this is to say that Verrall, however lucid and skilful and brilliant, was a discoverer of mares’ nests. And a host of undramatic critics have skilfully exercised their lucid brilliance in discovering mares’ nests in Shakspere’s plays. Most of them are stolid Teutons, with Gervinus and Ulrici in the forefront of the procession. They analyzed the tragedies of Shakspere with the sincere conviction that he was a philosopher with a system as elaborate as those of Kant and Hegel; and they did not seem to suspect that even if a dramatist is a philosopher he is—and must be—first of all a playwright, whose invention and construction are conditioned by the theater for which he is working. Even in the greatest plays philosophy is a by-product; and the main object of the great dramatist is always to arouse and retain and reward the interest of his immediate audience.

He must make his story plain to the comprehension of the average playgoer; and he must therefore provide his characters with motives which are immediately apparent and instantly plausible. Shakspere is ever anxious that his spectators shall not be misled, and he goes so far as to have his villains, Richard III and Iago, frankly inform the audience that they are villains, a confession which in real life neither of these astute scoundrels would ever have made to anybody. The playwright knows that if he loses his case before the jury, he can never move for a retrial; the verdict is without appeal. It may be doubted whether any dramatist has ever cared greatly for the opinion of posterity. Assuredly no popular playwright—and in their own day every great dramatist was a popular playwright—would have found any compensation for the failure of his play in the hope and expectation that two hundred or two thousand years later its difficulties might be explained by a Verrall, however lucid and skilful and brilliant this belated expounder might be.

There are two Shaksperian mares’ nests which may be taken as typical, altho the eggs in them are not more obviously addled than in a host of others. One was discovered in ‘Macbeth,’ in the scene of Banquo’s murder. Macbeth incites two men to make way with Banquo; but when the deed is done, three murderers take part in it. Two of them are the pair we have seen receiving instructions from Macbeth. Who is the third? An undramatic critic once suggested that this third murderer is no less a person than Macbeth himself, joining his hired assassins to make sure that they do the job in workmanlike fashion. The suggester supported his suggestion by an argument in eight points, no one of which carries any weight, because we may be sure that if Shakspere had meant Macbeth to appear in person, he would have taken care to let the audience know it. He would not have left it hidden to be uncovered two and a half centuries after his death by the skilful lucidity of a brilliant undramatic critic.

It is reasonably certain that Burbage, who acted Richard III and Hamlet, also acted Macbeth; and Shakspere would never have sent this renowned performer on the stage to take part in a scene without justifying his share in it and without informing the spectators that their favorite was before them. Shakspere was an actor himself; he knew what actors wanted and what they liked; he took good care of their interests; and we may rest assured that he never asked Burbage to disguise his identity. If he had meant the third murderer to be Macbeth, we should have had the stage direction, “Enter two murderers with Macbeth disguised.” As it is, the stage direction reads “Enter three murderers.”

The other mare’s nest has been found in ‘King Lear.’ It has often been pointed out that Cordelia is absent from a large portion of the action of the tragedy, altho her presence might have aided its effectiveness. It has been noted also that Cordelia and the Fool are never seen on the stage together. And this has prompted the suggestion that the Fool is Cordelia in disguise. Here again we see the undramatic critic at his worst. If Shakspere had meant this, he would have made it plain to the spectators the first time Cordelia appeared as the Fool,—otherwise her assumption of this part would have been purposeless, confusing, futile. Whatever poignancy there might be in the companioning of the mad king by his cast-off daughter all unknown to him, would be unfelt if her assumption of the Fool’s livery was not at once recognized. The suggestion is not only inacceptable, it is unthinkable by anyone who has even an elementary perception of the playmaking art. It could have emanated only from an undramatic critic who was familiar with ‘King Lear’ in the study and not on the stage, who regarded the sublimest of Shakspere’s tragedies as a dramatic poem and not as a poetic drama planned for the playhouse.

Yet this inept suggestion can be utilized to explain the fact that Cordelia and the Fool never meet before the eyes of the spectators. The cast of characters in ‘King Lear’ is very long; and quite possibly it called for more actors than there were in the limited company at the Globe. We know that in the Tudor theater a performer was often called upon to sustain two parts. It is possible that the shaven lad who impersonated Cordelia was the only available actor for the Fool, and that therefore Cordelia—at whatever loss to the effectiveness of the play—could not appear in the scenes in which the Fool had to appear. Cordelia did not don the disguise of the Fool; but the same performer may have doubled the two parts. That much of supposition can be ventured for whatever it may be worth.

IV

It is in England and in Germany that the undramatic critics have been permitted to disport themselves most freely and most frequently. In France they have never been encouraged to pernicious activity. That the French have not suffered from this pest may be due to the honorable existence of the Théâtre Français, where the masterpieces of French tragedy and of French comedy have been kept alive on the stage for which they had been written; or it may be due to the fact that in the literature of France the drama has been continuously more important than it has been in the literature of any other country.

In England and in Germany the drama has had its seasons of abundance and its seasons of famine, whereas in France, altho there might be poor harvests for a succession of years, harvests of some sort there always have been. No period in French literature is as devoid of valid drama as that in English literature during the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century. From 1800 to 1870 the plays of our language which were actable were unreadable and the plays which were readable were unactable. It is in the periods of penury, when there is a divorce between literature and the drama, that the undramatic critic is inspired to chase rainbows. As there is then no vital drama in the theater, and as the pieces then exhibited on the stage have little validity, the undramatic critic is led to the conclusion that since the theater can get along without literature, so the drama can get along without the theater. And that way madness lies.

There is this excuse for the supersubtle critics of the Italian Renascence that they lived not long removed from the middle ages, in which all memory of the acted drama had been lost and in which the belief was general that the comedies of Plautus and Terence had been composed, not for performance by actors in a theater and before an audience, but for a single reciter who should deal with them as a modern elocutionist might stand and deliver ‘Pippa Passes’ or the ‘Cenci.’ But there is no excuse for the English-speaking expounders of Sophocles and Shakspere, because they cannot help knowing that the plays of the Athenian were written to be performed in the Theater of Dionysus and that the plays of the Elizabethan were written to be performed in the Globe theater.

A friend of mine, not yet forty, told me that as an undergraduate he had read half-a-dozen Greek plays with a professor, who was an enthusiastic admirer of Greek literature, who had spent a winter in Athens, and who had acquired modern Greek. This professor spared no pains to make his students appreciate the poetic beauty of Athenian tragedy; but never once did he call their attention to the circumstances of original performance or arouse their interest by pointing out the theatrical effectiveness of the successive situations. To this ardent lover of Greece and of Greek literature, the ‘Agamemnon,’ the ‘Œdipus,’ and the ‘Medea’ were only poems in dialog; they were not plays composed to be acted, adjusted to the conditions of the Athenian theater, and conforming to the conventions tacitly accepted by the Attic audience.

But worse remains behind. The writer of the chapters on Shakspere in the composite ‘Cambridge History of English Literature,’ deals skilfully and cautiously with the dates of composition and performance of each of the plays; but he criticizes them with no examination of their theatrical effectiveness. It is scarcely too much to say that he considers them as dramatic poems intended to be read rather than as poetic dramas intended to be acted. Nothing in either of his chapters is evidence that he ever saw a comedy or a tragedy of Shakspere’s on the stage. He reveals no knowledge of the principles of playmaking; and it may be doubted whether he suspects the existence of these principles. And in one passage of his commentary he has given us the absolute masterpiece of undramatic criticism:

It is, of course, quite true that all of Shakspere’s plays were written to be acted; but it may be questioned whether this is much more than an accident arising from the fact that the drama was the dominant form of literature. It was a happy accident, because of the unique opportunity this form gives of employing both the vehicles of poetry and prose.

(1921)

III

OLD PLAYS AND NEW PLAYGOERS

III
OLD PLAYS AND NEW PLAYGOERS

I

Every dramatist is of necessity subdued to what he works for—the playgoers of his own generation in his own country. Their approval it is that he has to win first of all; and if they render a verdict against him he has no appeal to posterity. It is a matter of record that a play which failed to please the public in its author’s lifetime never succeeded later in establishing itself on the stage. Partizans may prate about the dramatic power of the ‘Blot in the ’Scutcheon,’ but when it is—as it has been half-a-dozen times—galvanized into a semblance of life for a night or a fortnight, it falls prone in the playhouse as dead as it was when Macready first officiated at its funeral. Even the ‘Misanthrope,’ mightiest of Molière’s comedies and worthy of all the acclaim it has received, was not an outstanding triumph when its author impersonated Alceste, and it has rarely rewarded the efforts of the succession of accomplished actors who have tried to follow the footsteps of the master; it is praised, it is admired; but it does not attract the many to the theater, because it does not give them abundantly the special pleasure that only the theater can bestow. ‘Tartuffe’ and the ‘Femmes Savantes’ do this and also half-a-score of Molière’s lighter and less ambitious pieces, supported by stories more theatrically effective than that of the ‘Misanthrope.’

The playwright who is merely a clever craftsman of the stage has no higher aim than to win the suffrages of his contemporaries. He knows what they want—for he is one of them—and he gives them what they want, no more and no less. He does not put himself into his plays; and perhaps his plays would be little better if he did. He is strenuously and insistently “up to date,” as the phrase is; and as a result he is soon “out of date.” He writes to be in the fashion; and the more completely he portrays the fleeting modes of the moment, the more swiftly must he fall out of fashion. The taste of the day is never the taste of after days; and the journalist-dramatist buys his evanescent popularity at a price. Who now is so poor as to pay reverence to Kotzebue and to Scribe, who once had all the managers at their feet? No maker of plays, not Lope de Vega or Dumas—Alexander the Great—was more fertile than Scribe in the invention of effective situations, none was ever more dextrous in the knotting and unknotting of plots, grave and gay. But his fertility and his dexterity have availed him little. He wrote for his own time, not for all time. What sprang up in the morning of his career and bloomed brightly in the sunshine, was by night-fall drooping and withered and desiccated.

The comic dramatists of the Restoration had perforce to gratify the lewd likings of vicious spectators who wanted to see themselves on the stage even more vicious than they were. Congreve and Wycherly put into their comedies what their contemporaries relished, a game flavor that stank in the nostrils of all decent folk. The Puritan shrank with horror from the picture in which the Impuritan recognized his own image. So it was that a scant hundred years after they had insulted the moral sense (which, like Truth, tho “crushed to earth will rise again; the eternal years of God are hers,”) they were swept from the stage. What had delighted under Charles II disgusted under George IV.

Even the frequent attempt to deodorize them failed, for, as Sheridan said—and he knew by experience since he had made his ‘Trip to Scarborough’ out of the ‘Relapse’—the Restoration comedies were “like horses; you rob them of their vice and you rob them of their vigor.” Charles Lamb, who had a whimsical predilection for them, admitted that they were “quite extinct on our stage.” Congreve’s pistol no longer discharged its steel bullets; and Wycherly no longer knocked his victims down with the butt of his gun. Yet they died hard; I am old enough to have seen Daly’s company in the ‘Trip to Scarborough’ and the ‘Recruiting Officer,’ in the ‘Inconstant,’ in ‘She Would and She Would Not’ and the ‘Country Girl’ (Garrick’s skilful cleansing of Wycherly’s unspeakable ‘Country Wife’)—all of which reappeared because they had appealing plots, amusing situations and lively characters and because they did not portray the immorals of the days of Nell Gwyn.

Yet when an adroit playwright who seeks to please the public of his own time by the representation of its manners, happens to be also a creative artist, enamored of life, he is sometimes able so to vitalize his satire of a passing vogue that it has abiding vigor. This is what Molière did when he made fun of the ‘Précieuses Ridicules.’ Even when he was writing this cleverest of skits, the cotery which had clustered around Madame de Rambouillet was disintegrating and would have disappeared without his bold blows. But affectation is undying; it assumes new shapes; it is always a tempting target; and Molière, by the magic of his genius, transcended his immediate purpose. He composed a satire of one special manifestation of pretence which survives after two centuries and a half as an adequate satire of all later manifestations. The Précieuses in Paris have long since been gathered to their mothers; so have the Esthetes across the channel in London; and soon they will be followed to the grave by the Little Groups of Serious Thinkers who are to-day settling the problems of the cosmos by the aid of empty phrases. No one sees the ‘Précieuses Ridicules’ to-day without recognizing that it is almost as fresh as it was when Madame de Rambouillet enjoyed it.

The man of genius is able to please his own generation by his depiction of its foibles and yet to put into his work the permanent qualities which make it pleasing to the generations that come after him. The trick may not be easy, but it can be turned. How it shall be done,—well, that is one of the secrets of genius. In the case of the ‘Précieuses Ridicules’ we can see that Molière framed a plot for his lively little piece that is perennially pleasing, a plot which only a little modified was to support two popular successes nearly two centuries later,—the ‘Ruy Blas’ of Victor Hugo and the ‘Lady of Lyons’ of Bulwer-Lytton. He tinged his dialog with just enough timeliness to hit the taste of the town in 1658; and he did not so surcharge it as to fatigue the playgoers of Paris two centuries and a half later.

II

The likings of the groundlings who stood in the yard of the Globe theater when Shakspere began to write plays were coarser and grosser than those of the burghers whom Molière had to attract to the Petit-Bourbon; and unfortunately Shakspere in his earlier efforts was not as cautious as Molière. In the Falstaff plays, for example, the fat knight is as alive to-day as when Elizabeth is fabled to have expressed the wish to have him shown in love. But the talk of his companions, Nym and Pistol, is too thickly bespangled with the tricks of speech of Elizabethan London to interest American and British theater-goers three hundred years later. There is but a faded appeal in topical allusions which need to be explained before they are appreciated and even before they are understood; and in the playhouse itself footnotes are impossible.

In his earliest pieces, written during his arduous apprenticeship to the craft of playmaking, when he was not yet sure of his footing in the theater, Shakspere had to provide parts for a pair of popular fun-makers,—Will Kempe and another as yet unidentified. They were lusty and robust comedians accustomed to set the house in a roar as soon as they showed their cheerful faces. They created the two Dromios, the two Gobbos, Launce and Speed, Costard and Dull; and it is idle to deny that not a little of the talk that Shakspere put in their mouths is no longer laughter-provoking; it is not only too topical, too deliberately Tudor, it is also too mechanical in its effort at humor to move us to mirth to-day. Their merry jests,—Heaven save the mark!—are not lifted above the level of the patter of the “sidewalk comedians” of our variety-shows. They are frankly “clowns”; and Shakspere has set down for them what the groundlings expected them to utter, only little better than the rough repartee and vigorous innuendo and obvious pun which they would have provided for themselves if they had been free to do as they were wont to do. What he gives them to say is rarely the utterance of the characters they were supposed to be interpreting; and this is because the two Dromios are parts only, are not true characters, and are scarcely to be accepted even as types.

A difference of taste in jests, so George Eliot declared, is “a great strain on the affections”; and it would be insulting to the creator of Bottom and Falstaff to pretend that we have any affectionate regard for Costard and Dull, for Launce and Speed. It is only when Shakspere was coming to the end of his apprenticeship that he found out how to utilize the talents of Kempe and of Kempe’s unknown comrade in comedy, in parts which without ceasing to be adjusted to their personalities were also accusable characters, Dogberry and Touchstone. But when we come to Touchstone we are forced to perceive that Shakspere was the child of his own age even when he refrained from echoing its catchwords. He was cleaner than the majority of his rivals, but he was near enough to Rabelais to be frank of speech. On occasion he can be of the earth, earthy. He bestows upon Touchstone a humor which is at times Rabelaisian in its breadth, in its outspoken plainness of speech, assured of the guffaws of the riffraff and rabble of a Tudor seaport, but a little too coarse for the descendants of the Puritans on either side of the Atlantic to-day. Nearly fifty years ago when Harry Beckett was rehearsing in ‘As You Like It’ for one of the infrequent Shaksperian revivals that Lester Wallack ventured to make, he told me sorrowfully that his part had been sadly shorn, some of Touchstone’s best lines having been sacrificed in deference to the increasing squeamishness of American audiences.

These accessory comic parts are not alone in their readjustment to the modifying moods of a later age. The point of view changes with every generation, and with every change a character is likely to be seen from a different angle. No dramatist, whatever his genius, can foresee the future and forecast the fate of his creatures. The centuries follow one another in orderly procession, and they are increasingly unlike. Moreover, the dramatist of genius, by the very fact that he is a genius, is forever building better than he knew. He may put a character into a play for a special purpose; and after a century or two that character will loom larger than its creator dreamt and will stand forward, refusing to keep the subordinate place for which it was deliberately designed. We listen to the lines he utters and we read into them meanings which the author could not have intended, but which, none the less, are there to be read by us.

We may even accept as tragic a figure whom the playwright expected to be received as comic and who was so received by the audience for which the playwright wrote. Sometimes this is a betrayal of his purpose, as it is when aspiring French actors have seen fit to represent the Figaro of Beaumarchais (in the ‘Marriage of Figaro,’ not in the ‘Barber of Seville’) as a violent and virulent precursor of the French Revolution; or as it is when the same French actors insist on making the Georges Dandin of Molière a subject for pity, tear-compelling rather than laughter-provoking.

It is not a betrayal, however, rather is it a transfiguration when the Shylock of Shakspere is made to arouse our sympathy. I make no doubt that Shakspere projected Shylock as a comic villain, at whom he intended the spectators to laugh, even if they also shuddered because of his bloodthirstiness. Yet by sheer stress of genius this sinister creature, grotesque as he may be, is drawn with such compelling veracity that we cannot but feel for him. We are shocked by the insulting jeers of Gratiano at the moment of his discomfiture. We are glad that his plot against Antonio has failed; none the less do we feel that he has been miserably tricked; we are almost ready to resent the way in which the cards have been stacked against him.

To anyone who has familiarized himself with the attitude of Elizabethan playgoers toward usurers and toward the Jews, it is evident that Shakspere intended the ‘Merchant of Venice’ to be a Portia play; its action begins with talk about Belmont and it ends at Belmont itself; and Shylock is absent from the final act. In spite of this intent of the author, the ‘Merchant of Venice’ has become in our eyes a Shylock play. In fact, Macready four-score years ago used to appear in a three-act version which ended with the trial scene,—a most inartistic perversion of the comedy. After all, the ‘Merchant of Venice’ is a comedy, even if its love-story is sustained and stiffened by a terrible underplot. Shakspere created the abhorrent Shylock that the lovely Portia could cleverly circumvent him and score off him and put him to shame. His hardness of heart was to make more refulgent her brightness of soul. Shylock was set up to be scorned and hated and derided; he is a vindictive moneylender, insisting on a horrible penalty; no one in the play has a good word for him or a kindly thought; his servant detests him and his daughter has no natural affection for him.

When all is said, we cannot but feel that Shakspere in his treatment of Shylock displays a callousness not uncommon in Elizabethan England. And yet—and yet Shakspere is true to his genius; he endows Shylock with life. The Jew stands before us and speaks for himself; and we feel that we understand him better than the genius who made him. Our sympathy goes out to him; and altho we do not wish the play to end otherwise than it does, we are almost ready to regard him as the victim of a miscarriage of justice, guilty though he is. Ellen Terry has quoted from a letter of Henry Irving’s a significant confession: “Shylock is a ferocity, I know—but I cannot play him that way!” Why couldn’t he? It was because the nineteenth century was not the sixteenth, because Victorian audiences were not Elizabethan, because the peoples who have English for their mother-tongue are less callous and more civilized than their forebears of three hundred years ago.

III

While it is more than three hundred years since Shakspere wrote the ‘Merchant of Venice,’ it is less than a hundred and fifty since Sheridan wrote the ‘School for Scandal.’ The gap that yawns between us and Sheridan is not so wide or so deep as the gulf that divides us from Shakspere; but it is obvious enough. Even a hundred years ago Charles Lamb declared that the audiences of his time were becoming more and more unlike those of Sheridan’s day, and that this increasing unlikeness was forcing the actors to modify their methods, a little against their wills. Sheridan’s two brilliant comedies continue to delight us by their solidity of structure, their vigor of characterization and their insistent sparkle of dialog. In the ‘Rivals’ Sheridan is following in the footsteps of his fellow Irishman, Farquhar, and in the ‘School for Scandal’ he is matching himself against Congreve. In both he was carrying on the tradition of Restoration comedy, with its coldheartedness, its hard glitter, its delineation of modes rather than morals. It is perhaps too much to assert that most of his characters are unfeeling; but it is not too much to say that they are regardless of the feelings of others—perhaps because their own emotions are only skin-deep.

It is true that in the ‘Rivals’ Sheridan threw a sop to the admirers of Sentimental Comedy and introduced a couple of high-strung and weepful lovers, Falkland and Julia, who are forever sentimentalizing. But this precious pair have been found so uninteresting that in most of the later performances of the ‘Rivals’—all too infrequent, alas!—they have been omitted altogether or disgraced by relegation to the background.

The vogue of Sentimental Comedy was waning when Sheridan wrote, and it disappeared before he died, yet the playgoers of London and of New York were becoming more tender-hearted than their ancestors who had delighted in the metallic harshness of character-delineation customary in Restoration comedy. They were beginning to look for characters with whom they could sympathize and to desire the villains to remain consistent in their villainy. They were unwilling to remain in what Lamb termed “the regions of pure comedy, where no cold moral reigns.” Lamb called the ‘School for Scandal’ incongruous in that it is “a mixture of sentimental incompatibilities,” Charles Surface being “a pleasant reality” while Joseph Surface was “a no less pleasant poetical foil to it.”

The original performer of Joseph was John Palmer; and Lamb asserted that it required his consummate art “to reconcile the discordant elements.” Then the critic suggested, and this was a century ago, that

a player with Jack’s talents, if we had one now, would not dare do the part in the same manner. He would instinctively avoid every turn which might tend to unrealize, and so to make the character fascinating. He must take his cue from the spectators, who would expect a bad man and a good man as rigidly opposed to each other as the death-beds of those geniuses are contrasted in the prints.

A little later in the same essay—the incomparable analysis of ‘Artificial Comedy’—Lamb pointed out that “Charles must be loved and Joseph hated,” adding that

to balance one disagreeable reality with another, Sir Peter Teazle must be no longer the comic idea of a fretful old bachelor bridegroom, whose teasings (while King played it) were evidently as much played off at you as they were meant to concern anybody on the stage,—he must be a real person, capable in law of sustaining an injury,—a person towards whom duties are to be acknowledged,—the genuine crim. con. antagonist of the villainous seducer Joseph. To realize him more, his sufferings under his unfortunate match must have the downright pungency of life,—must (or should) make you not mirthful but uncomfortable, just as the same predicament would move you in a neighbor or old friend.

I cannot count the number of occasions on which I have enjoyed the performance of the ‘School for Scandal,’—but they must amount to a score at the least. I recall most clearly John Gilbert’s Sir Peter; and I can testify that he had preserved the tradition of King. He was the fretful old bachelor bridegroom, who, when the screen fell and discovered Lady Teazle in the library of Joseph Surface, was wounded not in his heart but in his vanity. He preserved the comic idea, as Sheridan had designed. But John Gilbert was the only Sir Peter I can recall who was able to achieve this histrionic feat.

Of all the many Lady Teazles it has been my good fortune to see, Fanny Davenport stands out most sharply in my memory,—perhaps because she was the first I had ever beheld and perhaps because she was then in the springtime of her buoyant beauty. Certainly when the screen fell she was a lovely picture, like Niobe all tears. Her repentance was sincere beyond all question. She renounced the comic idea, which is that Lady Teazle has been caught in a compromising situation by the elderly husband with whom she is in the habit of quarrelling. Fanny Davenport saw only the pathos of the situation; and she made us see it and feel it and feel for her and hope that her impossible husband would accept her honest explanation,—the explanation which indeed he would have to accept since we as eye-witnesses are ready to testify that it is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

But this rendering of the part is discomposing to the comic idea; and it forces a modification of method upon the actor of Charles Surface. It is in deference to the comic idea that when the screen falls Sheridan made Charles see the humor of the situation and only the humor of it. He is called upon to chaff Sir Peter and Lady Teazle and Joseph, one after the other. If the actor speaks these lines with due regard to the comic idea which created Sir Peter as a peevish old bachelor bridegroom and Lady Teazle as a frivolous woman of fashion, and if the actor of Sir Peter and the actress of Lady Teazle take the situation not only seriously but pathetically as they would in a twentieth century problem-play, then Charles’s speech is heartless and almost brutal. Now Charles is a character as sympathetic to the audience in his way as Lady Teazle is in hers. Charles is to be loved as Joseph is to be hated. And so the impersonator of Charles is compelled to modify his method, to transpose his lines and to recognize that the robust raillery natural to him and appropriate to the predicament must be toned down in deference to our more delicate susceptibilities.

He laughs at Sir Peter first; and then he turns to Joseph, who is fair game and whom the spectators are glad to see held up to scorn. He says “you seem all to have been diverting yourselves here at hide and seek and I don’t see who is out of the secret.” With this he turns to Lady Teazle and asks, “Shall I beg your ladyship to inform me?” So saying he looks at her and perceiving that she is standing silent and ashamed, with downcast eyes, he makes her a bow of apology for his levity. Finally with another thrust at his brother, the unmasked hypocrite, he takes his departure airily, leaving them face to face. If the comic idea suffers from this contradiction of the intent of the comic dramatist, it must find what consolation it can in its sense of humor.

IV

A large share of the success of even the masterpieces of the drama, comic and tragic, is due to the coincidence of its theme and its treatment with the desires, the opinions and the prejudices of the contemporary audiences for whose pleasure it was originally planned. But the play, comic or tragic, as the case may be, can survive through the ages (as the ‘Merchant of Venice’ and the ‘School for Scandal’ have survived) only if this compliance has not been subservient, if the play has the solidity of structure and the universality of topic which will win it a welcome after its author is dead and gone. What is contemporary is three parts temporary, and what is up-to-date is certain soon to be out-of-date. Nevertheless it is always the audience of his own time and of his own place that the playwright has to please, first of all; and if their verdict is against him he has lost his case. Plays have their fates no less than books; and the dispensers of these fates are the spectators assembled in the playhouse. The dramatist who ignores this fact, or who is ignorant of it, does so at his peril. As Lowell once put it with his wonted pungency, “the pressure of public opinion is like the pressure of the atmosphere; you cannot see it, but it is sixteen pounds to the square inch all the same.”

(1921)

IV

TRAGEDIES WITH HAPPY ENDINGS

IV
TRAGEDIES WITH HAPPY ENDINGS

I

In Mrs. Wharton’s acute and often penetrating analysis of ‘French Ways and Their Meaning,’ she dwelt upon the innate intellectual honesty of the French, “the special distinction of the race, which makes it the torch-bearer of the world”; and she asserted that Bishop Butler’s celebrated declaration, “Things are what they are and will be as they will be,” might have been “the motto of the French intellect.” She called it “an axiom that makes dull minds droop, but exalts the brain imaginative enough to be amazed before the marvel of things as they are.”

She pointed out that in Paris the people who go to the moving-pictures to gaze at an empty and external panorama are also the people who flock to the state-subventioned theaters, the Français and the Odéon, to behold the searching tragedies of Corneille and Racine, immitigably veracious in the portrayal of life as it is on the lofty plane of poetry:

The people who assist at these grand tragic performances have a strong enough sense of reality to understand the part that grief and calamity play in life and in art; they feel instinctively that no real art can be based on a humbugging attitude toward life, and it is their intellectual honesty which makes them exact and enjoy its fearless representation.

This intellectual honesty Mrs. Wharton failed to find in the audiences of our American theaters, because it is not a habitual possession of Americans generally. And she ventured to quote a remark which she once heard Howells make on our theatrical taste. They had been talking about the pressure exerted upon the American playwright by the American playgoing public, compelling him to wind up his play, whatever its point of departure, with the suggestion that his hero and heroine lived happily ever after, like the prince and princess who are married off at the end of the fairy-tale. Mrs. Wharton declared that this predilection of our playgoers did not imply a preference for comedy, but that, on the contrary, “our audience wanted to be harrowed (and even slightly shocked) from eight till ten-thirty, and then consoled and reassured before eleven.”

“Yes,” said Howells, “what the American public wants is a tragedy—with a happy ending.”

And Mrs. Wharton added her own comment that what Howells said of the American attitude in the theater “is true of the whole American attitude toward life.” In other words we Americans both in the playhouse and out of it are lacking in the intellectual honesty which the French possess. We are not convinced, and we are not willing to let our plays, and even our novels, convince us, that “things are what they are and will be as they will be.”

With the praise that Mrs. Wharton bestowed upon the French, no one who has profited by the masterpieces of French literature could cavil for a moment. The French are intellectually honest, more so than any other modern nation, and perhaps as much so as the Greeks. There is abundant insincerity in our drama and in our fiction; and no one long familiar with either is justified in denying this. But, none the less, Howells’s characteristically witty remark has not perhaps all the weight which Mrs. Wharton attached to it. And it instantly evokes the desire to ask questions. Is it really true that we Americans like tragedies with happy endings? And, supposing this to be true, are we the only people who have ever revealed this aberration? Finally, if we have revealed it, are there any special reasons for this manifestation of our deficiency in intellectual honesty?

Having propounded these three queries, I propose to answer them myself as best I can, and as the farseeing reader probably expected me to do; and it appears to me prudent to commence by considering the second of them, leaving the first to be taken up immediately thereafter. Are we Americans the only people who like tragedies with happy endings? Here we have a starting point for a discursive inquiry into the tastes of the playgoing public in other countries and in other centuries. Nor need we begin this leisurely loitering by too long a voyage, for we have only to go back a hundred years, more or less, and to tarry a little while in France itself.

II

It was in the minor theatres of Paris at the end of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth that there was slowly developed a new type of play, the melodrama. Its first masters were Ducange and Pixérécourt, who had profited by the experience of their ruder forerunners and who taught the secrets of their special craft to their more expert followers, the fertile Bouchardy, for one, and, for another, the only lately departed Dennery, the most adroit and the most inventive of them all.

A melodrama may be described briefly as a play with a plot and nothing but a plot; it abounds in situations enthralling, intricately combined and adroitly presented; and it contains characters simplified to types, drawn in profile and violently stencilled with the primary colors. It has a Hero, who struggles against his fate and struggles in vain until the final episode, when the Villain, as black as he is painted, is cast into outer darkness, the entirely white Hero being then rewarded for all his sufferings and for all his struggles with the hand of the equally pale Heroine, truly the female of his species. The melodrama may be devoid of veracity, but it is compelling in its progressive interest. It is dextrously devised to delight audiences which want “to be harrowed (and even slightly shocked) from eight to ten-thirty, and then consoled and reassured before eleven.” In short, it is “a tragedy with a happy ending.”

What could be more tragic than the tale of the ‘Two Orphans’? In that ultimate masterpiece of melodrama, two lovely sisters, one of them blind, are severally lost in Paris in the wickedest days of the Regency. We are made to follow their appalling misadventures; and we behold them again and again in danger of death and worse than death. The sword of Damocles was suspended over their fair heads from the first rising of the curtain until within five minutes of its final fall. The odds are a hundred to one, nay, a thousand to one, against their escaping unscathed from their manifold perils. And yet, nevertheless, at the very end, the clouds lift, sunshine floods the stage; and the two heroines are left at last to live happy like two princesses with their two princes in the most entrancing of fairy tales. And many thousand Parisian audiences, laying aside their intellectual honesty for the occasion, dilated with the right emotion, sobbed at the sorrows of the sisters, cheered the rescuers and venomously hissed the villains who had pursued them.

So completely were the playgoers of Paris subdued to what they worked in, that the makers of melodrama were emboldened to strange tricks. Théophile Gautier once described a long-forgotten melodrama by Bouchardy, himself long forgotten, in which an important character was killed off in the third act. Then in the fifth act when the unfortunate but immaculate Hero was absolutely at the mercy of his vicious enemies, and when he could extricate himself from the toils only if he had the talisman he had been seeking in vain,—the needed password, the necessary key, the missing will, the incriminatory documents, or whatever you prefer—when all is lost, even honor, then in the very nick of time, the character who was killed off in the third act, and dead beyond all question, reappears and gives the Hero the talisman (whatever it was). The Hero receives this with joy, commingled with surprize. “I thought you were dead!” he cries; “how is it that you are here now?” “Ah,” answers the traveller from beyond, “that—that is a secret that I must carry back with me into the tomb!”

It is only fair to record that Parisian melodrama was not often as rude and as crude as this in its subterfuges and its expedients. Indeed, it sometimes rose to a far higher level, as in the ‘Don César de Bazan’ of Dennery and in the ‘Lyons Mail’ of Moreau, Giraudin and Delacour. It even served as the model for Victor Hugo’s superb and sonorous ‘Hernani’ and ‘Ruy Blas,’ in which he flung the rich embroidered mantle of his ample lyricism over an arbitrary skeleton of deftly articulated intrigue, as artificial as it was ingenious.

In its earlier manifestations it was imitated in Great Britain, notably by Edward Fitzball, the first playmaker who perceived the theatrical possibilities of the legend of the ‘Flying Dutchman.’ Fitzball did not disdain to intimate that he considered himself the “Victor Hugo of England,”—which tempted Douglas Jerrold to remark that Fitzball was really only the “Victor No Go” of England. In its later manifestations the melodrama of the French supplied a pattern for the ‘Silver King’ of Henry Arthur Jones, one of the most satisfactory specimens of this type of play. The ‘Silver King’ won the high approval of Matthew Arnold, who called it an honest melodrama, relying necessarily “for its main effect on an outer drama of sensational incidents” and none the less attaining the level of literature because the dialog and the sentiments were natural.

By the side of the British ‘Silver King’ of Henry Arthur Jones may be set the American ‘Secret Service’ of William Gillette, which also relies for its main effect on an outer drama of sensational incidents; and yet the sensational incidents are so fitly chosen and so artfully interwoven that they serve to set off the very human hero, an accusable character, a Union spy, with a divided duty before him. Toward the end of the play it becomes evident that this brave and resourceful man is doomed to death; and to this fatality he is himself resigned, wilfully throwing away a chance to escape and welcoming a speedy exit from his impossible position. Yet, once more, just before the curtain falls, the dramatist intervenes, like a god from the machine, sparing his hero’s life, and even permitting the spectators to foresee that hero and heroine will live happily ever after, thus consoling and reassuring the audience before eleven o’clock.

I make bold to say that this happy ending is not inartistic and that it does not outrage our intellectual honesty, for the obvious reason that ‘Secret Service’ is not essentially a tragedy; it is a serio-comic story which never uplifts us to the serene atmosphere of the irresistible and the inevitable in which tragedy lives. It is too brisk in its humor, too lively in its representation of the externalities of life, to justify a fatal conclusion. A true tragedy must not only end sadly, it has also to begin sadly; it has to impress us subtly with a sense of impending disaster, inherent in its theme. What Stevenson said of the short-story, when that is as dramatic as it can be, is applicable to the drama itself. “Make another end to it?” he wrote in answer to a suggestion to that effect. “Ah, yes, but that is not the way I write; the whole tale is unified. To make another end, that is to make the beginning all wrong.... The body and end of a short-story is bone of the bone and blood of the blood of the beginning.” In other words the beginning of a melodrama never demands a tragic ending, and rarely even permits it.

III

Altho modern melodrama was developed in the totally unliterary minor playhouses of Paris more than a hundred years ago, the playgoers of France had not had to wait until the early nineteenth century or even until the early eighteenth to be consoled and reassured by a tragedy with a happy ending. It was in the first half of the seventeenth century that Corneille took over from a Spanish original the first and fieriest of his tragedies, the ‘Cid,’—the story of which leads up to one of the strongest situations in all dramatic literature. The duty is suddenly laid upon a high-strung warrior to fight a duel to the death with the father of the woman whom he loves and who loves him. Seemingly the deadly stroke of his sword has severed the lovers forever, for how could a woman wed the red-handed slayer of her father? Yet it is with this prospective wedding, abruptly brought about, that Corneille ends his play; and he was so dextrous a dramatist, so abundant in emotion and so persuasive in eloquence, that he was able to carry his audience with him, even at the cost of their intellectual honesty.

Nor did the playgoers of England have to await the importation of French melodrama in the original package before they could enjoy reassurance and consolation after being harrowed and even slightly shocked. Indeed, the Londoners had this pleasure provided for them even earlier than it had been vouchsafed to the Parisians. All students of the history of our stage are familiar with the type of play known as tragi-comedy. Its name sufficiently describes it, a name apparently first used in the prolog to a play by Plautus and revived by the Italian theorists of the theater. Dramas of this species sprang up spontaneously in Italy, in Spain and in France; and we find the form flourishing in England in the second half of the sixteenth century, altho it cannot be said to have been more popular among the English than it was among the French. Shakspere’s somber ‘Measure for Measure’ is the most immediately obvious example; and at the performance of this play the spectators were harrowed, and even more than slightly shocked, by a succession of powerful situations, only to be at last reassured and consoled by a happy ending, mechanically and unconvincingly brought about.

In the course of time tragi-comedy modified its methods and became the dramatic-romance, of which Beaumont and Fletcher’s ‘Philaster’ may be taken as one characteristic specimen and Shakspere’s ‘Cymbeline’ as another. Perhaps it would be more exact to say that the dramatic-romance is only an insular sub-species of sentimental tragi-comedy. Most of the best known of the dramatic-romances of Beaumont and Fletcher (or of Fletcher and Massinger) conform to the definition of tragi-comedy, as Professor Ristine has skilfully condensed this from a defence of the type made by Guarini, author of the ‘Pastor Fido’:

Tragi-comedy, far from being a discordant mixture of tragedy and comedy, is a thorough blend of such parts of each as can stand together with verisimilitude, with the result that the deaths of tragedy are reduced to the danger of death, and the whole in every respect a graduated mean between the austerity and the dignity of the one and the pleasantness and ease of the other.

This Italian definition of Renascence tragi-comedy can be transferred to modern melodrama of the more literary kind,—the ‘Silver King,’ for example, and ‘Secret Service,’ in which we find the graduated mean between austere dignity and easy pleasantness. After quoting from Guarini, Professor Ristine gave his own analysis of the elements combined in English tragi-comedy:

Love of some sort is the motive force; intrigue is rife; the darkest villainy is contrasted with the noblest and most exalted virtue. In the course of an action ... in which the characters are enmeshed in a web of disastrous complications, reverse and surprise succeed each other with lightning rapidity.... But final disaster is ingeniously averted.... Wrongs are righted, reconciliation sets in, penitent villainy is forgiven, and the happy ending made complete.

In its turn this American description of English tragi-comedy is applicable also to French melodrama of the less literary kind,—the ‘Lyons Mail’ and the ‘Two Orphans.’

It is possible to find at least one tragedy with a happy ending amid the two score plays which alone have come down to us from all the hundreds acted in the Theater of Dionysus before the assembled citizens of Athens,—probably the most intelligent body of playgoers to which any dramatist has ever been privileged to appeal. The ‘Alcestis’ of Euripides is a beautiful play, grave, inspiring and moving; yet it has been a constant puzzle to the historians of Greek literature, who have never been quite able to declare what manner of tragic drama it is, since it has one character who is frankly humorous and since it has a happy ending,—the revivification of the pathetic heroine who had given her life to save her husband and who is brought back by Hercules, after a combat with Death.

IV

After this desultory ramble through the history of the drama in other centuries and in other countries, we are in better case to consider the first of the three questions suggested by Mrs. Wharton’s assertion that we Americans are deficient in the intellectual honesty which is a recognized characteristic of the French. Is it really true that we like tragedies with happy endings? If it is true, we are no worse off than the English in the time of Shakspere, the French in the time of Corneille and in the time of Hugo, the Greeks in the time of Euripides. But is it true?

It might be urged in our defence that we do not in the least object to the death of the hero and the heroine (or of both together) in the music-drama; and it must be admitted that in serious opera a tragic ending is not only acceptable but is actually expected. It might be pointed out that the final death of the heroine has never in any way interfered with the immense popularity of a host of star-plays, ‘Adrienne Lecouvreur,’ the ‘Dame aux Camélias,’ ‘Froufrou,’ ‘Théodora’ and ‘La Tosca.’ It might be permissible to record that the death of ‘Cyrano de Bergerac,’ (a fatal termination not inherent in the theme of that heroic comedy and in fact almost inconsistent,) did not dampen the pleasure of the American playgoer.

These things must be taken for what they are worth; and perhaps they are not really pertinent to our immediate inquiry, since opera is a very special form of the dramatic art, making an appeal of its own within arbitrary limits, and since a star-play is relished by the majority largely as a vehicle for the exhibition of the histrionic versatility of the star herself or himself, a last dying speech and confession affording the performer an excellent opportunity for the display of his or her virtuosity.

We must go behind Mrs. Wharton’s rather too sweeping accusation and center attention on a single point. American playgoers of to-day enjoy and hugely enjoy seeing on the stage stories which are harrowing, which deal liberally with life and death, and which after all end happily, sending us home consoled and reassured. So have the playgoers of other lands in other times; and the real question is whether we refuse to accept the tragic end when this is ordained by all that has gone before, when it is a fate not to be escaped. In other words, have we the intellectual honesty which shall compel us to accept George Eliot’s stern declaration that “consequences are unpitying”?

Thus put, the question is not easy to answer.

For myself I am inclined to think that when we are at liberty to choose between the happy and the unhappy ending, when one or the other is not imposed upon us by the action or by the atmosphere of the story set before us, we tend to prefer a conclusion which dismisses the hero and the heroine to a vague future felicity. But I am inclined also to believe that we do not shrink from the bitterest end if this has been foreordained from the beginning of time, if the author has been skilful enough and sincere enough to make us feel that his tragedy could not possibly have any other than a tragic termination.

In the ‘Second Mrs. Tanqueray’ the fatal ending is obligatory; it grows out of the nature of things; and the play has established itself. In ‘Mid-Channel’ there is no way out of the difficulty in which the heroine has entangled herself, except through the door of death. On the other hand, the plot of the ‘Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith’ cried aloud for a tragic ending, which the author refused to grant; and perhaps this is one reason why the piece has never taken hold on our playgoing public despite its indisputable qualities.

As it happens there have been seen on our stage in the first and second decades of the twentieth century four plays, unequal in sincerity and different in texture, but all of them variants of the same theme. Two are British, ‘Iris’ by Sir Arthur Pinero, and the ‘Fugitive’ by John Galsworthy; and two are American, the ‘Easiest Way’ by Eugene Walter and ‘Déclassée’ by Miss Zoe Akins. In each of them we are invited to follow the career of a young woman who loves luxury and who moves through life along the line of least resistance, until at last the ground gives way beneath her feet. ‘Iris’ was the first of the four; it is the most delicately artistic and the most veracious. The ‘Easiest Way’ is perhaps the most vigorous. The ‘Fugitive’ is pallid and futile. ‘Déclassée’ is the least important of them all, as it is the least original. The two last-named pieces are unsatisfactory when we bring them to the bar of our intellectual honesty; and yet they both end with the death of the heroine, an arbitrary exit out of the moral entanglements in which she has involved herself. The two earlier plays have a more truly tragic ending, since they leave the heroine alive yet bereft of all that makes life worth living. No one of the four sent the spectators home reassured and consoled.

V

There might seem to be no necessity to put the third question now that the second has been discussed. And yet there may be profit in asking ourselves whether there are any special reasons why the American playgoing public might be expected to lapse from intellectual honesty and to compel our playwrights to violate the logic of their stories and to stultify themselves to achieve a puerile fairy-tale conclusion. Mrs. Wharton put forward one such reason, when she asserted that our attitude in the theater is characteristic “of the whole American attitude toward life.” Here she is drawing an indictment against the American people and not merely against American playgoers.

To enter upon that broad problem would take me too far afield, too far, that is, from the theater itself, within the walls of which this inquiry must be confined. Are there any conditions in the American theater which make against the sincere and searching portrayal of life? I must confess that I think there is at least one such condition, the possible consequences of which are disquieting. This is the change in the composition of the audiences in our American theaters from what they were half-a-century ago—which is as far back as my own memories as a playgoer extend. I think that the average age of the spectators is now considerably less than it was when I was a play-struck boy; and I think also that the proportion of women is distinctly larger than it was in those distant days. If I am right in believing that this change has taken place, and also in anticipating that it is likely to be even more evident in the years that are to come, then there will probably be brought about a slow but certain modification of those implicit desires and of those explicit prejudices of his expected audience, which the playwright has always taken into account even if he is often more or less unconscious that he is so doing.

Water cannot rise higher than its source; and the dramatist cannot soar too loftily above the level of the audience he has to allure. It is always the duty of the dramatist to find the common denominator of the throng. He need not write down to his public, but he must write broad; or otherwise he will fail to arouse and retain the interest of the spectators. If he shrinks from the toil of so presenting his vision of our common humanity that it shall be immediately attractive to his audiences then he is no dramatist, whatever else he may be; and he had better turn at once to sonneteering and to storywriting, arts wherein he can appeal to a chosen few. The theater is for the many-headed multitude; and the theater-poet cannot but accept the condition that confronts him.

If American audiences are younger than they were, then they are not so rich in knowledge of the world, not so ripe in judgment. If they are also more largely feminine, then they will be different from what they have been in the days when the drama attained to its superbest expression. The tragedies of Sophocles were represented in the Theater of Dionysus before the citizens of Athens; and the spectators were all men of more or less maturity. The tragedies and the comedies of Shakspere were written for the Globe Theater in London, in which the spectators were predominantly male. The comedies of Molière were acted in the Palais Royal Theater in Paris, before audiences which included comparatively few women. It is significant that women were admitted to the orchestra seats of the Théâtre Français only about forty years ago; and that Sarcey, a very shrewd observer of things theatrical, was moved more than once to record his regret that this had helped to bring about the more rapid dispersal of the group of old playgoers, experts in playwriting and in acting, who were wont to follow the performances of the Comédie-Française assiduously and devotedly.

And it was almost a hundred years ago that Goethe anticipated Sarcey’s complaint. “What business have young girls in the theater?” he asked. “They do not belong to it; ... the theater is only for men and women, who know something of human affairs.”

But “things are what they are, and will be what they will be.”

(1919)

V

ON THE ADVANTAGE OF HAVING A PATTERN

V
ON THE ADVANTAGE OF HAVING A PATTERN

I

No passage of Stevenson’s has been oftener quoted than his confession how he taught himself the art of letters by playing “the sedulous ape to many masters”; and in this avowal he had been preceded by masters of style as dissimilar in their accomplishment as Franklin and Newman. Stevenson may be overstating the case—he had caught the trick of over-statement from Thoreau—but he is not misstating it when he asserts that this is the only way to learn to write. Certainly it is an excellent way, if we judge by its results in his own case, in Franklin’s and in Newman’s. The method of imitative emulation will help any apprentice of the craft to choose his words, to arrange them in sentences and to build them up in coherent paragraphs. It is a specific against that easy writing which is “cursed hard reading.” But it goes no deeper than the skin, since it affords insufficient support when the novice has to consider his structure as a whole, the total form he will bestow upon his essay, his story, his play.

In the choice of the proper framework for his conception the author’s task is made measurably lighter if he can find a fit pattern ready to his hand. Whether he shall happen upon this when he needs it is a matter of chance, since it depends on what the engineers call “the state of the art.” There have been story-tellers and playwrights not a few who have gone astray and dissipated their energies, not through any fault of their own, but solely because no predecessor had devised a pattern suitable for their immediate purpose. They have wandered afield because the trail had not been blazed by earlier, and possibly less gifted, wayfarers and adventurers.

Perhaps I can make clear what I mean by a concrete example not taken from the art of letters. In Professor John C. Van Dyke’s acute analysis of the traditions of American painting, he has told us that when La Farge designed the ‘Ascension’ for the church of that name in New York,

The architectural place for it was simplified by placing on the chancel wall of the church a heavily gilded moulding, deep-niched, and with an arched top, which acted at once both as a frame and a limit to the picture. The space was practically that of a huge window with a square base and a half-top requiring for its filling two groups of figures one above the other. La Farge placed his standing figures of the apostles and the holy women in the lower space and their perpendicular lines paralleled the uprights of the frame; at the top he placed an oval of angels about the risen Christ, and again the rounded lines of the angel group repeated the curves of the gilded arch.

Then Professor Van Dyke appends this significant comment:

There was no great novelty in this arrangement. It was frankly adopted from Italian Renascence painting and had been used for high altar-pieces by all the later painters—Andrea del Sarto, Raphael, Titian, Palma. They had worked out the best way of filling that up-right-and-arched space, and La Farge followed the tradition because he recognized its sufficiency.

In other words, the art of painting had so far advanced that La Farge was supplied with the pattern best suited to his purpose; and this pattern once accepted, he was at liberty to paint the picture as he saw it, without wasting time in quest of another construction. The picture he put within that frame was his and his only, even if the pattern of it had been devised centuries before he was born. In thus utilizing a framework invented by his predecessors he was not cramped and confined; rather was he set free. So it is that to Milton and to Wordsworth the rigidity of the sonnet was not a hindrance but a help—especially to Wordsworth since it curbed his tendency to diffuseness. Wordsworth himself declared his delight in the restrictions of the sonnet:

In truth the prison into which we doom

Ourselves no prison is: and hence for me,

In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound

Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;

Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be),

Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,

Should find brief solace here, as I have found.

That utterance of Wordsworth’s may be recommended to the ardent advocates of Free Verse,—that is, of the verse which boasts itself to be patternless and to come into being in response solely to the whim of the moment. Sooner or later the Free Versifiers will discover the inexorable truth in Huxley’s saying that it is when a man can do as he pleases that his trouble begins.

Since I have ventured these three quotations I am emboldened to make a fourth—from John Morley’s essay on Macaulay. After informing us about the rules which Comte imposed on himself in composition, Morley tells us that Comte

justified his literary solicitude by insisting on the wholesomeness alike to heart and intelligence of submission to artificial restrictions. He felt, after he had once mastered the habit of the new yoke, that it became the source of continual and unforeseeable improvement even in thought, and he perceived that the reason why verse is a higher kind of literary perfection than prose, is that verse imposes a greater number of rigorous forms.

It is because of their rigorous forms that the ballade and the rondeau have established themselves by the side of the sonnet; and the lyrist who has learnt to love them finds in their fixity no curb on his power of self-expression. So in the kindred art of music, the sonata and the symphony are forms each with a law of its own; yet the composer has abundant liberty within the law. He has all the freedom that is good for him; and the prison to which he dooms himself no prison is.

II

There is however a difference between a fixed form, such as the sonata has and the sonnet, and the more flexible formula, such as the arrangement within a framework which La Farge borrowed from the painters of the Italian Renascence. A pattern of this latter sort is less rigid; in fact, it is easily varied as successive artists modify it to suit themselves.

Consider the eighteenth century essay which Steele devised with the aid of hints he found in the ‘Epistles’ and even in the ‘Satires’ of Horace, and which was enriched and amplified by Addison. The pattern of the ‘Tatler’ and the ‘Spectator’ was taken over by a heterogeny of other essayists in the course of four-score years, notably by Johnson in the ‘Idler’ and the ‘Rambler’; and assuredly Johnson if left to himself could never have invented a formula so simple, so unpretending and so graceful. It was only a little departed from by Goldsmith, and only a little more by Irving in the ‘Sketch-Book,’ which is not so much a periodical (altho it was originally published in parts) as it is a portfolio of essays and of essay-like tales. From Irving, Thackeray borrowed more than the title of his ‘Paris Sketch-Book’ and ‘Irish Sketch-Book.’

Consider the earlier and in some measure stricter form of the essay as it had been developed by Montaigne,—the pattern that Montaigne worked out as he put more and more of himself into the successive editions of his essays. He had begun intending little more than a commonplace-book of anecdotes and quotations; and yet by incessant interpolation and elaboration his book became at last the intimate revelation of his own pungent individuality. This is the pattern that Bacon adopted and adapted to his purpose, less discursive and more monitory, but not less pregnant nor less significant. And it is Montaigne’s formula, not greatly transformed by Bacon, which Emerson found ready to his hand when he made his essays out of his lectures, scattering his pearls of wisdom with a lavish hand and not pausing to string them into a necklace. We cannot doubt that the pattern of Montaigne and Bacon and Emerson owed something also to their memory of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.

Shakspere was as fortunate as Bacon in the fact that he had not to waste time in vainly seeking new forms. He did not invent the sonnet and he did not invent the sonnet-sequence; but he made his profit out of them. Neither the stanza nor the structure of his two narrative poems, ‘Venus and Adonis’ and the ‘Rape of Lucrece,’ was of his contriving; he found them already in use and he did not go in search of any overt novelty of form.

Scott, “beaten out of poetry by Byron,” as he himself phrased it, turned to prose-fiction; and almost by accident he created the pattern of the historical novel, with its romantic heroes and heroines and with its realistic humbler characters. His earliest heroes and heroines in prose were very like his still earlier heroes and heroines in verse; and his realistic characters were the result of his expressed desire to do for the Scottish peasant what Miss Edgeworth had done for the Irish peasant. The first eight of the Waverley novels dealt only with Scottish scenes; then in ‘Ivanhoe,’ and a little later in ‘Quentin Durward,’ Scott enlarged his formula for the presentation of an English and a French theme.

Since Scott’s day his pattern has approved itself to three generations of novelists; and it is not yet outworn. In France Victor Hugo and Alexander Dumas accepted it, each of them altering it at will, feeling free to adjust it to their own differing necessities. In Italy it was employed by Manzoni, in Poland by Sinckiewitz; and in Germany by a horde of uninspired story-tellers. In the United States it was at once borrowed by Cooper for the ‘Spy,’ the first American historical novel. Then Cooper, having proved its value, took the pattern which Scott had created for the telling of a story the action of which took place on land, and in the ‘Pilot’ made it serve for a story the action of which took place mainly on the sea,—perhaps a more striking originality than his contemporaneous employment of it for a series of tales the action of which took place in the forest.

It is one of the most fortunate coincidences in the history of literature that Scott crossed the border and made a foray into English history at the very moment when Cooper was ready to write fiction about his own country; and it was almost equally unfortunate that Charles Brockden Brown was born too early to be able to avail himself of the pattern Scott and Cooper were to handle triumphantly. Brown died a score of years before the publication of ‘Ivanhoe.’ He left half-a-dozen novels of varying value, known only to devoted students of American fiction. He had great gifts; he had invention and imagination; he was a keen observer of human nature; he had a rich faculty of description. (In one of his books there is a portrayal of an epidemic of yellow fever in Philadelphia which almost challenges comparison with De Foe’s ‘Journal of the Plague Year’.) But “the state of the art” of fiction supplied Brown with no model appropriate to his endowment; and therefore he had to do the best he could with the unworthy pattern of the Gothic Romance of Horace Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe and of their belated followers, “Monk” Lewis and Godwin. If Brown had been a contemporary of Cooper, then the author of the ‘Last of the Mohicans’ might have had a worthy rival in his own country.

The state of the art in his own time was a detriment to a far greater story-teller than Brown or Cooper or Scott, to one of the greatest of all story-tellers, to Cervantes. ‘Don Quixote’ abides as the imperishable monument to his genius, to his wisdom, to his insight, to his humor, to his all-embracing sympathy. None the less is it sprawling in its construction and careless in its composition. There were only two models available for Cervantes when he wrote this masterpiece of fiction, the Romance of Chivalry and its antithesis, the Romance of Roguery—the picaresque tale. The Romance of Chivalry was generally chaotic and involute, with a plot at once complicated and repetitious. The Romance of Roguery, born of an inevitable reaction against the highflown and toplofty unreality of the interminable narratives of knight-errantry, was quite as straggling in its episodes; and it was also addicted to cruel and brutal practical joking. For Cervantes these were unworthy patterns; and he had no other. So it is that the method of ‘Don Quixote’ is sometimes unsatisfactory, even when the manner is always beyond all cavil. Moreover, it is evident that Cervantes builded better than he knew; he seems not to have suspected the transcendent quality of his own work; and therefore he did not take his task as seriously as he might. As it has been well said, Cervantes came too early to profit by Cervantes.

How much luckier are the novelists and short-story writers of to-day! The state of the art has advanced to a point unforeseen even a century ago. Whatever theme a writer of fiction may want to treat now, he is never at a loss for a pattern, which will preserve him from the misadventure which befell Cervantes. In its methods, if in nothing else, fiction is a finer art than it was once upon a time. Consider Rudyard Kipling, for example, who is almost infinitely various, and who is always inexpugnably original. Whatever his subject might be, there was always an appropriate pattern at his service; he had only to pick and choose that which best suited his immediate need. Consider Stevenson, again, and how he was able to play the sedulous ape at one time to Scott and Dumas, and at another to Hawthorne and Poe.

III

It is perhaps in the field of playmaking that the utility of the pattern is most obvious. Sophocles modeled himself on Aeschylus, and then modified the formula in his own favor. Calderon took over the pattern that Lope de Vega had developed and the younger playwright departed from it only infrequently. Racine modeled himself upon Corneille; and then transformed the formula he borrowed in obedience to his own genius. Victor Hugo took the theatrically effective (but psychologically empty) pattern of contemporary Parisian melodrama and draped its bare bones with his glittering lyrism. Maeterlinck took the traditional formula of the fairy-play, the féerie, and endowed it with the poetic feeling which delights us in the ‘Blue Bird.’ Oscar Wilde took the framework of Scribe and Sardou; and he was thus enabled adroitly to complicate the situations of ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan.’

Then there is Ibsen, whose skilful construction has demanded the praise of all students of the art and mystery of playmaking. He started where Scribe and Sardou left off. The earliest of his social dramas, the ‘League of Youth,’ is in accord with the pattern of Augier and the younger Dumas. The next, the ‘Doll’s House,’ might have been composed by Sardou—up to the moment in the final act when husband and wife sit down on opposite sides of the table to talk out their future relation. Thereafter Ibsen evolved from this French pattern a pattern of his own which was exactly suited to his later social dramas and which has in its turn been helpful to the more serious dramatists of to-day.

As Shakspere had been content to take the verse-forms of his predecessors and contemporaries, so he never hesitated to employ their playmaking formulas. Kyd had developed the type of play which we call the tragedy-of-blood; and Shakspere borrowed it for his ‘Titus Andronicus’ (if this is his, which is more than doubtful) and even for his ‘Hamlet,’ wherein it is purged of most of its violence. Marlowe lifted into literature the unliterary and loosely knit chronicle-play; and Shakspere enlarged this formula in ‘Richard III’ and ‘Richard II.’ It was in his youth that Shakspere trod in the trail of Kyd and Marlowe; and in his maturity he followed in the footsteps of his younger friends, Beaumont and Fletcher, taking the pattern of their dramatic-romance for his ‘Winter’s Tale’ and ‘Cymbeline.’ Due perhaps to the fact that the state of the art did not provide him with a pattern for what has been called high-comedy, Shakspere did not attempt any searching study of Elizabethan society,—altho, of course, this may have been because Elizabethan society was lacking in the delicate refinements of fashion which are the fit background of high-comedy.

Whatever the explanation may be, it was left for Molière, inspired by the external elegancies of the court of Louis XIV, to create the pattern of high-comedy in ‘Tartuffe’ and the ‘Misanthrope’ and the ‘Femmes Savantes,’—the pattern which was to serve Congreve for the ‘Way of the World,’ Sheridan for the ‘School for Scandal,’ Augier and Sandeau for the ‘Gendre de Monsieur Poirier.’ And Molière really created the formula, with little or no help from any earlier dramatists, either Greek or Latin. Neither in Athens nor in Rome was there the atmosphere of breeding which might have stimulated Menander or Terence to the composition of comedies of this distinction. It is the more remarkable that Molière should have accomplished this feat, since he sought no originality of form in his earlier efforts, contenting himself with the loose and liberal framework of the Italian improvized plays, the Comedy-of-Masks.

One of the many reasons for the sterility of the English drama in the middle of the nineteenth century is that the dramatists of our language seem to have believed it their duty to abide by the patterns which had been acceptable to the Jacobean and Restoration audiences and which were not appropriate to the theater of the nineteenth century, widely different in its size and in its scenic appliances. The English poets apparently despised the stage of their own time; and they made no effort to master its methods. As a result they wrote dramatic poems and not poetic dramas. They did not follow the example of Victor Hugo and lift into literature a type of play which was unliterary. Stevenson, in his unfortunate adventures into playmaking, made the unpardonable mistake of trying to varnish with style a dramatic formula which had long ceased to be popular.

In the past half-century the men of letters of our language have seen a great light. They have no contempt for the dramatic patterns of approved popularity; and of these there are now a great many, suitable for every purpose and adjustable to every need. They have found out how to be theatrically effective without ceasing to be literary in the best sense of the word,—that is to say, they are not relying on “fine writing” but on clear thinking and on the honest presentation of human nature, as they severally see it.

(1921)

VI

DID SHAKSPERE WRITE PLAYS TO FIT HIS ACTORS?

VI
DID SHAKSPERE WRITE PLAYS TO FIT HIS ACTORS?

I

In his consideration of the organization of the Elizabethan dramatic companies Professor Alwin Thaler pointed out that the company of the Globe Theater in London, to which Shakspere belonged, continued to contain the same actors year after year, the secessions and the accessions being few and far between; and he explained that this was “because its members were bound to one another by ties of devoted personal friendship.” He noted that he had “emphasized the influence exerted upon Shakspere the playwright by his intimate knowledge of the men for whom his work was written, and there can be no doubt that in working out some of his greatest characters he must have remembered that Burbage was to act them.” Then Professor Thaler filed a caveat, so to speak.

But the Shakspere muse was not of that sorry sort which produces made-to-order garments to fit the tastes and idiosyncrasies of a single star. Far from being one-man plays, the dramas were written for a great company of actors.... And Richard Burbage, I imagine, would have had little inclination to surrender his place among his peers for the artificial and idolatrous solitude of modern starhood.

In this last sentence Mr. Thaler confuses the issue. The question is not whether Burbage wanted to go starring, supported by a more or less incompetent company, but whether Shakspere did on occasion choose to write a play which is in fact a made-to-order garment to fit the idiosyncrasies of a single star. And when it is put in this way the question is easy to answer. We know that Burbage played Richard III, and if there ever was a star-part, if there ever was a one-man play, if there ever was a piece cut and stitched to the measure of the man who first performed it, then it is Richard III. Here we have a dominating character to whom the other characters are sacrificed; he is etched with bold strokes, whereas most of the others are only faintly outlined. So long as Richard is powerfully seized and rendered, then the rest of the acting is relatively unimportant. Richard is the whole show. And while there is only a single star-part in Richard III—Eclipse first and the rest nowhere—there are twin star-parts in Macbeth, who are vigorously drawn, while the remaining characters are merely brushed in, as Professor Bradley has noted.

Now, if this proves that Shakspere’s muse was of a sorry sort, then that heavenly visitor is in no worse case than the muse of many another dramatist. Sophocles is reported to have devised his great tragic parts specially for one actor, whose name has not come down to us. Racine wrote ‘Phèdre’ and ‘Andromaque,’ his masterpieces, for Mlle. de Champsmeslé. Rostand wrote ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ and ‘Chantecler’ for Coquelin. Sardou wrote ‘Fédora’ and ‘Théodora’ for Sarah Bernhardt. The younger Dumas wrote the ‘Visite de Noces’ for Desclée. Giacommetti wrote ‘Maria Antoinette’ for Ristori and the ‘Morte Civile’ for Salvini. D’Annunzio wrote the ‘Gioconda’ and the ‘Citta Morte’ for Duse. Bulwer-Lytton wrote the ‘Lady of Lyons’ and ‘Richelieu’ for Macready. Gilbert wrote ‘Comedy and Tragedy’ for Mary Anderson. Legouvé has told us in detail the circumstances which led to his writing (in collaboration with Scribe) ‘Adrienne Lecouvreur’ for Rachel. Jules Lemaître has told us how and why he came to compose his ‘Age Difficile’ for Coquelin; and Augustus Thomas has told us how he came to compose his ‘In Mizzoura’ for Goodwin. The line stretches out to the crack of doom. When Shakspere chose to produce made-to-order garments to fit the idiosyncrasies of a single actor, he was in very good company, ancient and modern. And we may go further and assert that very few of these plays are any the worse because they were made-to-order.

The great dramatists, whose works we analyze reverently in the study, were all of them, in their own time, successful playwrights, stimulated now and again by association with the most gifted and the most accomplished of contemporary actors. If they had not made their profit out of the histrionic ability of the foremost performers of their own time and country, they would have been neglecting golden opportunities.

Those who best know the conditions of playwriting will be the least likely to deny that not a few of the great characters in the drama came into being originally as parts for great actors. Of course, these characters are more than parts; they transcend the endowment of any one performer; they have complexity and variety; they are vital and accusable human beings; but they were parts first of all more or less made-to-order. In many cases we know the name of the actor for whose performance the character was conceived, Burbage for one, Mlle. de Champsmeslé for a second, Coquelin for a third. And in many another case we lack definite knowledge and are left to conjecture. There are peculiarities in the ‘Medea’ of Euripides, for instance, which seem to me to point to the probability that it also was a made-to-order garment.

To say that Sophocles and Euripides possibly did this cutting-to-fit, that Shakspere and Racine and Rostand indisputably did it, is not to imply that they did it always or even that they did it often. Perhaps they did it more often than we shall ever know; perhaps they had special actors in mind when they created characters which are not star-parts. And this suggests a broadening of the inquiry.

II

After asserting that Shakspere’s were “far from being one-man plays,” Professor Thaler reminded us that Shakspere’s dramas were written “for a great company of actors”; and what is true of Shakspere

holds good also of the Elizabethan drama in general. Its breadth and variety may be ascribed in no slight degree to the fact that the organization of the dramatic companies provided the great poets of a great age with ample facilities for the interpretation of many characters and many phases of life.

This prompts a question as to whether Shakspere may not have fitted other actors who were his associates at the Globe Theater besides Burbage. That he did deliberately and repeatedly take the measure of the foremost performer in the company and that his dramatic genius was stimulated by the histrionic talent of Burbage, I do not doubt. We cannot help seeing that Shakspere’s heroes become older as Burbage himself advanced in years. Romeo being intended for a fiery young fellow and Lear being composed for a maturer man, who had become a more consummate artist. I have suggested elsewhere the possibility—to my own mind a probability—that Shakspere inserted the part of Jaques into ‘As You Like It’ specially for Burbage. Shakspere took his sequence of incidents from Lodge’s ‘Rosalynd,’ in which there is no character which resembles Jaques; and Jaques has nothing to do with the plot; he remains totally outside the story; he exists for his own sake; and he may very well have been thrust into ‘As You Like It’ because Burbage was too important an actor to be left out of the cast and because Orlando was not the kind of part in which Burbage at that period of his artistic development would appear to best advantage.

If Shakspere made parts thus adjusted to the chief performer at the Globe Theater, may he not also have proportioned other and less important characters to the capabilities of one or another of the actors whose histrionic endowment he was in the best possible position to appreciate aptly, since he was acting every day by their side? Is this something to which the greatest of dramatists would scorn to descend? Has this ever been done by any other playwright in all the long history of the stage?

When we turn the pages of that history in search of support for this suggestion, we find it abundantly and super-abundantly. The succession of comic operas which Gilbert devised to be set to music by Sullivan reveal at once that they were contrived with reference to the capacity and to the characteristics of the chief members of the company at the Savoy Theater. The sequence of broadly humorous pieces, farces which almost rose to be comedies and comedies which almost relaxed into farces, written by Labiche, and by Meilhac and Halévy for the Palais Royal theater were all of them so put together as to provide appropriate parts for the quartet of comedians who made that little house the home of perennial laughter in the third quarter of the nineteenth century.

At the same time Meilhac and Halévy were contriving for the Variétés the librettos of ‘Barbe-Bleue’ and the ‘Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein,’ ‘Belle Hélène’ and ‘La Périchole,’ a series of opera-bouffes enhanced by the scintillating rhythms of Offenbach and adroitly adapted to the special talents of Schneider, of Dupuis and of several of the other more or less permanent members of the company. Almost simultaneously Augier and the younger Dumas were giving to the Comédie-Française their social dramas, always carefully made-to-order to suit the half-dozen leading members of the brilliant company Perrin was then guiding. The ‘Fourchambault’ of Augier and the ‘Étrangère’ of Dumas are masterpieces of this profitable utilization of the pronounced personalities of the performers. The ‘Étrangère,’ in particular, would have been a very different play if it had not contained characters made-to-order for Sarah Bernhardt and Croizette, Got and Coquelin.

A little earlier the series of blank verse plays written by Gilbert for the Haymarket Theater, of which ‘Pygmalion and Galatea’ won the most protracted popularity, had their leading characters plainly made-to-order for Mr. and Mrs. Kendal and for Buckstone himself. And just as ‘Richard III’ and ‘King Lear’ are none the worse because the central character was conceived also as an acting part for Burbage, so Gilbert’s blank verse pieces, Augier’s social dramas, Meilhac and Halévy’s farcical comedies lost nothing by their owing some portion of their inspiration to the necessity of fitting the accomplished comedians by whom the outstanding characters were to be impersonated. I venture to express the opinion that this desire to bring out the best the several actors had to give was helpful rather than not, stimulatingly suggestive to the author when he was setting his invention to work.

When we turn back the pages of stage-history from the nineteenth century to the eighteenth we find perhaps the most striking of all instances of made-to-order parts,—an instance which shows us not one or two or three characters in a play, but almost every one of them, composed and elaborated with an eye single to the original performers. The ‘School for Scandal’ has been seen by hundreds and read by thousands, who have enjoyed its effective situations, its sparkling dialog and its contrasted characters, without any suspicion that the persons of the play were made-to-order parts. Yet this undisputed masterpiece of English comedy is what it is because its clever author had succeeded to the management of Drury Lane, where Garrick had gathered an incomparable company of comedians; and in writing the ‘School for Scandal’ Sheridan peopled his play with the characters which the members of this company could personate most effectively.

King was Sir Peter, Mrs. Abington was Lady Teazle, Palmer was Joseph Surface, Smith was Charles Surface; and they were so perfectly fitted that they played with effortless ease. So closely did Sheridan identify the parts with the performers that when a friend asked him why he had written a five-act comedy ending in the marriage of Charles and Maria without any love-scene for this couple, he is reported to have responded: “But I couldn’t do it. Smith can’t make love—and nobody would want to make love to Priscilla Hopkins!”

III

It may be objected that Sheridan and Augier and Dumas were after all dextrous playwrights and that they are no one of them to be ranked with the truly great dramatists. While they might very well be willing once in a way to turn themselves into dramaturgic tailors, this is a servile complaisance of which the mighty masters of the drama would never be guilty, from which indeed they would shrink with abhorrence. But if we turn the pages of stage-history still further back, from the eighteenth century to the seventeenth, we discover that Molière did this very thing, the adjustment of a whole play to the actors who were to perform it, not once as Sheridan did, but repeatedly and regularly and in all his pieces, in his loftiest comedies no less than his broadest and most boisterous farces. And there will be found few competent critics to deny that Molière is one of the supreme leaders of the drama, with an indisputable right to a place by the side of Sophocles and Shakspere, even if he does not climb to the austere and lofty heights of tragedy.

The more we know about the art of the theater and the more we study the plays of Molière the more clearly do we perceive that he was compelled to do persistently what Sheridan did only once. The company at the Palais Royal was loyal to Molière; nearly all its leading members came to Paris with him and remained with him until his death fifteen years later. This company was strictly limited in number; and as it had a permanent repertory and stood ready to appear in any of its more successful plays at a moment’s notice, outside actors could not be engaged for any special part,—even if there had then been in Paris any available performers at liberty. Molière could not have more parts in any of his pieces than there were members of the company; and he could not put into any of his pieces any character for which there was not a competent performer in the company. No doubt, he must at times have felt this to be a grievous limitation. That he never deals with maternal love may be accounted for by the fact that he had no woman to play agreeable “old women,”—the disagreeable elderly females being still played by men, in accord with the medieval tradition. We know the name of the male actor who appeared as Madame Pernelle in ‘Tartuffe,’ as the wife in the ‘Bourgeois Gentilhomme’ and as the Comtesse d’Escarbagnas.

Molière wrote many parts for his own acting; and as he was troubled with a frequent cough, he sometimes makes coughing a characteristic of the person he was to act. His brother-in-law, Béjart, was lame; and so Molière describes a character written for this actor as having a limp. His sister-in-law, Madeleine Béjart, was an actress of authority; and so the serving maids he wrote for her are domineering and provocative. But when she died and her place was taken by a younger actress with an infectious laugh, the serving maids in all the plays that Molière wrote thereafter are not authoritative, and they are given occasion for repeated cachinnation. And as this recruit, Mlle. Beauval, had a clever little daughter, Molière did not hesitate to compose a part for a child in his ‘Malade Imaginaire.’ When we have familiarized ourselves with the record of the leading man, La Grange, of Madeleine Béjart, of Catherine de Brie, and of Armande Béjart (Molière’s wife), we find it difficult to study the swift succession of comedies without constantly feeling the presence of the actors inside the characters written for them. We recognize that it was not a matter of choice this fitting of the parts to the performers; it was a matter of necessity; and even if it may have irked him at times, Molière made the best of it and probably found his profit in it.

Now Shakspere was subject to the same limitations as Molière. He composed all his plays for one company, the membership of which was fairly constant during a score of years and more. It was also a repertory company with frequent changes of bill. It could never be strengthened by the special engagement of an unattached performer; it had to suffice, such as it was. So far as we can judge by the scant external evidence and by the abundant internal evidence of the plays written for them by Shakspere, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and the rest, the company was composed of unusually competent performers. It is unthinkable that Shakspere should have plotted his superb series of tragedies, making more and more exacting demands on the impersonators of his tragic heroes, unless he had a confident assurance that Burbage would be equal to them. And this confidence could not fail to be a stimulus to him, encouraging him to seek out stories for the ample display of his friend’s great gifts.

From all we have learnt of late about Shakspere we are justified in believing that he was a shrewd man of affairs with a keen eye to the main chance. He was a sharer in the takings at the door; and he could not but know that those plays are most attractive to the public which contain the most parts demanding and rewarding good acting. So we must infer that he put into his plays the characters in which he judged that his comrades could appear to best advantage. He not only wrote good parts for good actors, he wrote special parts for special actors, shaping his characters to the performers who were to impersonate them. In other words he provided, and he had to provide, made-to-order garments.

That he did this repeatedly and regularly, just as Molière was to do it three-quarters of a century later on the other side of the channel, is plainly evident, altho we do not now know the special qualifications of his actors as well as we do those of Molière’s. But we cannot doubt that the company contained one actor of villains, of “heavies” as they are termed in the theater. I hazard a guess that this was Condell, afterwards the associate of Heming in getting out the First Folio; but whoever he was, Condell or another, he was entrusted with Iago, with Edmund in ‘King Lear,’ with the King in ‘Hamlet,’ and with the rest of Shakspere’s bold, bad men.

We know that there were two low comedians in the company, who appeared as the two Dromios, as the two Gobbos, as Launce and Speed; and we know also that one of these was Will Kempe and that when he left the Globe Theater his place was taken by Arnim. Now, we can see that the Dromios, the Gobbos, Launce and Speed are merely “clowns” as the Elizabethans called the funny men,—“Let not your clowns speak more than is set down for them.” The Dromios and the Gobbos and the corresponding parts in Shakspere’s earlier plays, including Peter in ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ are only funny men, with little individuality, almost characterless; and we may surmise that this was due to Shakspere’s own inexperience in the delineation of humorous character. But we may, if we choose, credit it also to the fact that Kempe was only a funny man, and not a character-actor. And we can find support for this in the superior richness and stricter veracity of the low comedy characters composed by Shakspere after Arnim took Kempe’s place,—Dogberry, the porter in ‘Macbeth,’ the gravedigger in ‘Hamlet,’ comic parts which are also characters, equipt with more or less philosophy. And again this may be ascribed either to Shakspere’s own ripening as a humorist or to the richer capacity of Arnim. But why may not these two causes have coöperated?

Then there is the brilliant series of parts composed for a dashing young comedian,—Mercutio, Gratiano, Cassio, Laertes. That these successive characters were all entrusted to the same performer seems to me beyond question; and it seems to me equally indisputable that Shakspere knew what he was doing when he composed these characters. He was assured in advance that they would be well played; and there is no reason to doubt that in composing them he profited by his intimate knowledge of the histrionic endowment of the unidentified member of the company for whom they were written, giving him nothing to do which he was not capable of doing well, and giving him again and again the kind of thing that he had already exhibited the ability to do well.

Another group of parts is equally obviously intended for an actor who had shown himself to be an expert in the impersonation of comic old women, boldly characterized, broadly painted, highly colored in humor,—Mrs. Quickly (who appears in four plays), the nurse in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and Mrs. Overdone in ‘Measure for Measure.’ Here again I venture the guess that this low comedian may have earlier been cast for the Dromio and the Gobbo which was not given to Kempe. And I wish to record my regret that we cannot pick out from the list of the company at the Globe the name of the “creator” of Mrs. Quickly and her sisters, any more than we can identify the “creator” of Mercutio and his brothers.

In my biographies of Shakspere and of Molière I have dwelt in ampler detail with this dependence of the two greatest dramatists of the modern world upon the actors who were their comrades in art and their friends in life; and I have here adduced only a part of the testimony which goes to show that both the English dramatist and the French were visited by the same muse,—whether of the “sorry sort” or not must be left for each of us to decide for himself.

IV

“It is not more difficult to write a good play,” so the Spanish dramatist Benavente has declared, “than it is to write a good sonnet; only one must know how to write it—just as one must know how to write a sonnet. This is the principal resemblance between the drama and the other forms of literature.”

The writing of a sonnet imposes rigorous restrictions on a poet; he must utter his thought completely in fourteen lines, no more and no less, and these lines must conform to a prescribed sequence of rimes. But the masters of the sonnet have proved that this enforced compression and this arbitrary arrangement may be a help rather than a hindrance,—not a stumbling block, but a stepping stone to higher achievement. May not the limitations under which Shakspere had to work, may not the necessity of cutting his cloth to fit his comrades, may not these enforced conditions have also been helpful and not harmful? And if this is possible (and even probable) what warrant have we for thinking scorn of the great dramatist because he was a good work-man, making the best of the only tools he had? In disposing important characters to the acting of Burbage, Shakspere was probably no more conscious of being cribbed, cabined, and confined than was Milton when he shut himself up in the narrow cell of the sonnet.

The artist must be free to express himself, but he attains the loftiest freedom when he accepts the principle of liberty within the law. Many of the masterpieces of the several arts have been produced under restrictions as sharply defined as those of the sonnet, and have been all the finer because of these restrictions. The architect, for one, does not choose what he shall build, he has perforce to design an edifice for a special purpose on a special area. The mural painter has a given wall-space assigned to him, where his work is to be seen under special conditions of light; and often his subject is also prescribed for him. The sculptor is sometimes subordinate to the architect, who decides upon the size and the subject of the group of statuary needed to enhance the beauty of the building. The artist who modelled the figures in the frieze of the Parthenon had little freedom and yet he wrought a mighty masterpiece. Michael Angelo’s David is what it is because the sculptor was asked to utilize a block of marble of unusual size and shape; and his Last Judgment is what it is because he accepted the commission to decorate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In fact, Michael Angelo’s muse was “of that sorry sort which produces made-to-order garments to fit the tastes and idiosyncrasies of a single” patron.

If Shakspere fitted his characters to the actors who were to play them, he was doing what Molière was to do; and this companionship is honorable. He was doing what the sculptor of the Parthenon did and the painter of the Sistine, no more and no less; and he stands in no need of apology.

(1920)

VII

STRANGE SHAKSPERIAN PERFORMANCES

VII
STRANGE SHAKSPERIAN PERFORMANCES

I

If Shakspere could return to earth he would find many things to astonish him, not the least of which would be his own world-wide reputation. He seems to have been, so far as we can judge from his works and from the sparse records that remain, a modest man, with no sense of his own importance and with no pretension of superiority over his fellow-poets. In his lifetime there was scant appreciation for his plays, since the drama was then held to be little better than journalism, scarcely worthy to be criticized as literature. That he was popular, or in other words that his plays pleased the people, and that he was liked personally by his associates,—this seems to be clearly established. But there was no recognition of his supremacy as a poet, as a creator of character or even as a playwright. As Shakspere was a singularly healthy person, we can confidently assume that he did not look upon himself as an unappreciated genius.

Therefore, if he came back to us we cannot doubt that he would stand aghast before the constantly increasing library of books that have been written about him in the past two centuries. Nor can we doubt that this would appeal to his sense of humor. He would probably be interested to look into a few of the commentaries which seek to elucidate him; but he would not long pursue this perusal; and he would shut the books with a laugh or at least with a smile at the obstinate perversity of the critics who have wearied themselves (and not infrequently their readers also) in the vain attempt to explain what originally needed no explanation, since it had been plain enough to the unlettered crowds which flocked into the Globe Theater and stood entranced while his stories enrolled themselves on the stage.