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Title: The Theory of the Theatre

Author: Clayton Hamilton

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_Uniform with This Volume_

Studies in Stagecraft

_By_ CLAYTON HAMILTON

_Second Printing_

CONTENT: The New Art of Making Plays. The Pictorial Stage. The Decorative
Drama. The Drama of Illusion. The Modern Art of Stage Direction. A Plea for
a New Type of Play. The Period of Pragmatism. The Undramatic Drama. The
Value of Stage Conventions. The Supernatural Drama. The Irish National
Theatre. The Personality of the Playwright. Themes and Stories of the
Stage. Plausibility in Plays. Infirmity of Purpose. Where to Begin a Play.
Continuity of Structure. Rhythm and Tempo. The Plays of Yesteryear. A New
Defense of Melodrama. The Art of the Moving-Picture Play. The One-Act Play
in America. Organizing an Audience. The Function of Dramatic Criticism.

_$1.50 net_


HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

NEW YORK




THE THEORY OF THE THEATRE

AND OTHER PRINCIPLES OF DRAMATIC CRITICISM


BY

CLAYTON HAMILTON

AUTHOR OF "MATERIALS AND METHODS OF FICTION"


NEW YORK

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY


_Published April, 1910_




TO

BRANDER MATTHEWS

MENTOR AND FRIEND

WHO FIRST AWAKENED MY CRITICAL INTEREST IN THE THEORY OF THE THEATRE




PREFACE


Most of the chapters which make up the present volume have already
appeared, in earlier versions, in certain magazines; and to the editors of
_The Forum_, _The North American Review_, _The Smart Set_, and _The
Bookman_, I am indebted for permission to republish such materials as I
have culled from my contributions to their pages. Though these papers were
written at different times and for different immediate circles of
subscribers, they were all designed from the outset to illustrate certain
steady central principles of dramatic criticism; and, thus collected, they
afford, I think, a consistent exposition of the most important points in
the theory of the theatre. The introductory chapter, entitled _What is a
Play?_, has not, in any form, appeared in print before; and all the other
papers have been diligently revised, and in many passages entirely
rewritten.

C.H.

NEW YORK CITY: 1910.




CONTENTS


THE THEORY OF THE THEATRE

CHAPTER                                          PAGE

   I. WHAT IS A PLAY?                               3
  II. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THEATRE AUDIENCES          30
 III. THE ACTOR AND THE DRAMATIST                  59
  IV. STAGE CONVENTIONS IN MODERN TIMES            73
   V. ECONOMY OF ATTENTION IN THEATRICAL
       PERFORMANCES                                95
  VI. EMPHASIS IN THE DRAMA                       112
 VII. THE FOUR LEADING TYPES OF DRAMA             127
VIII. THE MODERN SOCIAL DRAMA                     133


OTHER PRINCIPLES OF DRAMATIC
CRITICISM

   I. THE PUBLIC AND THE DRAMATIST                153
  II. DRAMATIC ART AND THE THEATRE BUSINESS       161
 III. THE HAPPY ENDING IN THE THEATRE             169
  IV. THE BOUNDARIES OF APPROBATION               175
   V. IMITATION AND SUGGESTION IN THE DRAMA       179
  VI. HOLDING THE MIRROR UP TO NATURE             184
 VII. BLANK VERSE ON THE CONTEMPORARY STAGE       193
VIII. DRAMATIC LITERATURE AND THEATRIC JOURNALISM 199
  IX. THE INTENTION OF PERMANENCE                 207
   X. THE QUALITY OF NEW ENDEAVOR                 212
  XI. THE EFFECT OF PLAYS UPON THE PUBLIC         217
 XII. PLEASANT AND UNPLEASANT PLAYS               222
XIII. THEMES IN THE THEATRE                       228
 XIV. THE FUNCTION OF IMAGINATION                 233

      INDEX                                       241




THE THEORY OF THE THEATRE




I

WHAT IS A PLAY?


A play is a story devised to be presented by actors on a stage before an
audience.

This plain statement of fact affords an exceedingly simple definition of
the drama,--a definition so simple indeed as to seem at the first glance
easily obvious and therefore scarcely worthy of expression. But if we
examine the statement thoroughly, phrase by phrase, we shall see that it
sums up within itself the entire theory of the theatre, and that from this
primary axiom we may deduce the whole practical philosophy of dramatic
criticism.

It is unnecessary to linger long over an explanation of the word "story." A
story is a representation of a series of events linked together by the law
of cause and effect and marching forward toward a predestined
culmination,--each event exhibiting imagined characters performing imagined
acts in an appropriate imagined setting. This definition applies, of
course, to the epic, the ballad, the novel, the short-story, and all other
forms of narrative art, as well as to the drama.

But the phrase "devised to be presented" distinguishes the drama sharply
from all other forms of narrative. In particular it must be noted that a
play is not a story that is written to be read. By no means must the drama
be considered primarily as a department of literature,--like the epic or
the novel, for example. Rather, from the standpoint of the theatre, should
literature be considered as only one of a multitude of means which the
dramatist must employ to convey his story effectively to the audience. The
great Greek dramatists needed a sense of sculpture as well as a sense of
poetry; and in the contemporary theatre the playwright must manifest the
imagination of the painter as well as the imagination of the man of
letters. The appeal of a play is primarily visual rather than auditory. On
the contemporary stage, characters properly costumed must be exhibited
within a carefully designed and painted setting illuminated with
appropriate effects of light and shadow; and the art of music is often
called upon to render incidental aid to the general impression. The
dramatist, therefore, must be endowed not only with the literary sense, but
also with a clear eye for the graphic and plastic elements of pictorial
effect, a sense of rhythm and of music, and a thorough knowledge of the
art of acting. Since the dramatist must, at the same time and in the same
work, harness and harmonise the methods of so many of the arts, it would be
uncritical to centre studious consideration solely on his dialogue and to
praise him or condemn him on the literary ground alone.

It is, of course, true that the very greatest plays have always been great
literature as well as great drama. The purely literary element--the final
touch of style in dialogue--is the only sure antidote against the opium of
time. Now that Aeschylus is no longer performed as a playwright, we read
him as a poet. But, on the other hand, we should remember that the main
reason why he is no longer played is that his dramas do not fit the modern
theatre,--an edifice totally different in size and shape and physical
appointments from that in which his pieces were devised to be presented. In
his own day he was not so much read as a poet as applauded in the theatre
as a playwright; and properly to appreciate his dramatic, rather than his
literary, appeal, we must reconstruct in our imagination the conditions of
the theatre in his day. The point is that his plays, though planned
primarily as drama, have since been shifted over, by many generations of
critics and literary students, into the adjacent province of poetry; and
this shift of the critical point of view, which has insured the
immortality of Aeschylus, has been made possible only by the literary
merit of his dialogue. When a play, owing to altered physical conditions,
is tossed out of the theatre, it will find a haven in the closet only if it
be greatly written. From this fact we may derive the practical maxim that
though a skilful playwright need not write greatly in order to secure the
plaudits of his own generation, he must cultivate a literary excellence if
he wishes to be remembered by posterity.

This much must be admitted concerning the ultimate importance of the
literary element in the drama. But on the other hand it must be granted
that many plays that stand very high as drama do not fall within the range
of literature. A typical example is the famous melodrama by Dennery
entitled _The Two Orphans_. This play has deservedly held the stage for
nearly a century, and bids fair still to be applauded after the youngest
critic has died. It is undeniably a very good play. It tells a thrilling
story in a series of carefully graded theatric situations. It presents
nearly a dozen acting parts which, though scarcely real as characters, are
yet drawn with sufficient fidelity to fact to allow the performers to
produce a striking illusion of reality during the two hours' traffic of the
stage. It is, to be sure--especially in the standard English
translation--abominably written. One of the two orphans launches wide-eyed
upon a soliloquy beginning, "Am I mad?... Do I dream?"; and such sentences
as the following obtrude themselves upon the astounded ear,--"If you
persist in persecuting me in this heartless manner, I shall inform the
police." Nothing, surely, could be further from literature. Yet thrill
after thrill is conveyed, by visual means, through situations artfully
contrived; and in the sheer excitement of the moment, the audience is made
incapable of noticing the pompous mediocrity of the lines.

In general, it should be frankly understood by students of the theatre that
an audience is not capable of hearing whether the dialogue of a play is
well or badly written. Such a critical discrimination would require an
extraordinary nicety of ear, and might easily be led astray, in one
direction or the other, by the reading of the actors. The rhetoric of
Massinger must have sounded like poetry to an Elizabethan audience that had
heard the same performers, the afternoon before, speaking lines of
Shakespeare's. If Mr. Forbes-Robertson is reading a poorly-written part, it
is hard to hear that the lines are, in themselves, not musical. Literary
style is, even for accomplished critics, very difficult to judge in the
theatre. Some years ago, Mrs. Fiske presented in New York an English
adaptation of Paul Heyse's _Mary of Magdala_. After the first
performance--at which I did not happen to be present--I asked several
cultivated people who had heard the play whether the English version was
written in verse or in prose; and though these people were themselves
actors and men of letters, not one of them could tell me. Yet, as appeared
later, when the play was published, the English dialogue was written in
blank verse by no less a poet than Mr. William Winter. If such an
elementary distinction as that between verse and prose was in this case
inaudible to cultivated ears, how much harder must it be for the average
audience to distinguish between a good phrase and a bad! The fact is that
literary style is, for the most part, wasted on an audience. The average
auditor is moved mainly by the emotional content of a sentence spoken on
the stage, and pays very little attention to the form of words in which the
meaning is set forth. At Hamlet's line, "Absent thee from felicity a
while"--which Matthew Arnold, with impeccable taste, selected as one of his
touchstones of literary style--the thing that really moves the audience in
the theatre is not the perfectness of the phrase but the pathos of Hamlet's
plea for his best friend to outlive him and explain his motives to a world
grown harsh.

That the content rather than the literary turn of dialogue is the thing
that counts most in the theatre will be felt emphatically if we compare
the mere writing of Moliere with that of his successor and imitator,
Regnard. Moliere is certainly a great writer, in the sense that he
expresses clearly and precisely the thing he has to say; his verse, as well
as his prose, is admirably lucid and eminently speakable. But assuredly, in
the sense in which the word is generally used, Moliere is not a poet; and
it may fairly be said that, in the usual connotation of the term, he has no
style. Regnard, on the other hand, is more nearly a poet, and, from the
standpoint of style, writes vastly better verse. He has a lilting fluency
that flowers every now and then into a phrase of golden melody. Yet Moliere
is so immeasurably his superior as a playwright that most critics
instinctively set Regnard far below him even as a writer. There can be no
question that M. Rostand writes better verse than Emile Augier; but there
can be no question, also, that Augier is the greater dramatist. Oscar Wilde
probably wrote more clever and witty lines than any other author in the
whole history of English comedy; but no one would think of setting him in
the class with Congreve and Sheridan.

It is by no means my intention to suggest that great writing is not
desirable in the drama; but the point must be emphasised that it is not a
necessary element in the immediate merit of a play _as a play_. In fact,
excellent plays have often been presented without the use of any words at
all. Pantomime has, in every age, been recognised as a legitimate
department of the drama. Only a few years ago, Mme. Charlotte Wiehe acted
in New York a one-act play, entitled _La Main_, which held the attention
enthralled for forty-five minutes during which no word was spoken. The
little piece told a thrilling story with entire clearness and coherence,
and exhibited three characters fully and distinctly drawn; and it secured
this achievement by visual means alone, with no recourse whatever to the
spoken word. Here was a work which by no stretch of terminology could have
been included in the category of literature; and yet it was a very good
play, and _as drama_ was far superior to many a literary masterpiece in
dialogue like Browning's _In a Balcony_.

Lest this instance seem too exceptional to be taken as representative, let
us remember that throughout an entire important period in the history of
the stage, it was customary for the actors to improvise the lines that they
spoke before the audience. I refer to the period of the so-called _commedia
dell'arte_, which flourished all over Italy throughout the sixteenth
century. A synopsis of the play--partly narrative and partly
expository--was posted up behind the scenes. This account of what was to
happen on the stage was known technically as a _scenario_. The actors
consulted this scenario before they made an entrance, and then in the
acting of the scene spoke whatever words occurred to them. Harlequin made
love to Columbine and quarreled with Pantaloon in new lines every night;
and the drama gained both spontaneity and freshness from the fact that it
was created anew at each performance. Undoubtedly, if an actor scored with
a clever line, he would remember it for use in a subsequent presentation;
and in this way the dialogue of a comedy must have gradually become more or
less fixed and, in a sense, written. But this secondary task of formulating
the dialogue was left to the performers; and the playwright contented
himself with the primary task of planning the plot.

The case of the _commedia dell'arte_ is, of course, extreme; but it
emphasises the fact that the problem of the dramatist is less a task of
writing than a task of constructing. His primary concern is so to build a
story that it will tell itself to the eye of the audience in a series of
shifting pictures. Any really good play can, to a great extent, be
appreciated even though it be acted in a foreign language. American
students in New York may find in the Yiddish dramas of the Bowery an
emphatic illustration of how closely a piece may be followed by an auditor
who does not understand the words of a single line. The recent
extraordinary development in the art of the moving picture, especially in
France, has taught us that many well-known plays may be presented in
pantomime and reproduced by the kinetoscope, with no essential loss of
intelligibility through the suppression of the dialogue. Sardou, as
represented by the biograph, is no longer a man of letters; but he remains,
scarcely less evidently than in the ordinary theatre, a skilful and
effective playwright. _Hamlet_, that masterpiece of meditative poetry,
would still be a good play if it were shown in moving pictures. Much, of
course, would be sacrificed through the subversion of its literary element;
but its essential interest _as a play_ would yet remain apparent through
the unassisted power of its visual appeal.

There can be no question that, however important may be the dialogue of a
drama, the scenario is even more important; and from a full scenario alone,
before a line of dialogue is written, it is possible in most cases to
determine whether a prospective play is inherently good or bad. Most
contemporary dramatists, therefore, postpone the actual writing of their
dialogue until they have worked out their scenario in minute detail. They
begin by separating and grouping their narrative materials into not more
than three or four distinct pigeon-holes of time and place,--thereby
dividing their story roughly into acts. They then plan a stage-setting for
each act, employing whatever accessories may be necessary for the action.
If papers are to be burned, they introduce a fireplace; if somebody is to
throw a pistol through a window, they set the window in a convenient and
emphatic place; they determine how many chairs and tables and settees are
demanded for the narrative; if a piano or a bed is needed, they place it
here or there upon the floor-plan of their stage, according to the
prominence they wish to give it; and when all such points as these have
been determined, they draw a detailed map of the stage-setting for the act.
As their next step, most playwrights, with this map before them, and using
a set of chess-men or other convenient concrete objects to represent their
characters, move the pieces about upon the stage through the successive
scenes, determine in detail where every character is to stand or sit at
nearly every moment, and note down what he is to think and feel and talk
about at the time. Only after the entire play has been planned out thus
minutely does the average playwright turn back to the beginning and
commence to write his dialogue. He completes his primary task of
play-making before he begins his secondary task of play-writing. Many of
our established dramatists,--like the late Clyde Fitch, for example--sell
their plays when the scenario is finished, arrange for the production,
select the actors, and afterwards write the dialogue with the chosen actors
constantly in mind.

This summary statement of the usual process may seem, perhaps, to cast
excessive emphasis on the constructive phase of the playwright's problem;
and allowance must of course be made for the divergent mental habits of
individual authors. But almost any playwright will tell you that he feels
as if his task were practically finished when he arrives at the point when
he finds himself prepared to begin the writing of his dialogue. This
accounts for the otherwise unaccountable rapidity with which many of the
great plays of the world have been written. Dumas _fils_ retired to the
country and wrote _La Dame aux Camelias_--a four-act play--in eight
successive days. But he had previously told the same story in a novel; he
knew everything that was to happen in his play; and the mere writing could
be done in a single headlong dash. Voltaire's best tragedy, _Zaire_, was
written in three weeks. Victor Hugo composed _Marion Delorme_ between June
1 and June 24, 1829; and when the piece was interdicted by the censor, he
immediately turned to another subject and wrote _Hernani_ in the next three
weeks. The fourth act of _Marion Delorme_ was written in a single day. Here
apparently was a very fever of composition. But again we must remember that
both of these plays had been devised before the author began to write them;
and when he took his pen in hand he had already been working on them in
scenario for probably a year. To write ten acts in Alexandrines, with
feminine rhymes alternating with masculine, was still, to be sure, an
appalling task; but Hugo was a facile and prolific poet, and could write
very quickly after he had determined exactly what it was he had to write.

It was with all of the foregoing points in mind that, in the opening
sentence of this chapter, I defined a play as a story "devised," rather
than a story "written." We may now consider the significance of the next
phrase of that definition, which states that a play is devised to be
"presented," rather than to be "read."

The only way in which it is possible to study most of the great plays of
bygone ages is to read the record of their dialogue; and this necessity has
led to the academic fallacy of considering great plays primarily as
compositions to be read. In their own age, however, these very plays which
we now read in the closet were intended primarily to be presented on the
stage. Really to read a play requires a very special and difficult exercise
of visual imagination. It is necessary not only to appreciate the dialogue,
but also to project before the mind's eye a vivid imagined rendition of the
visual aspect of the action. This is the reason why most managers and
stage-directors are unable to judge conclusively the merits and defects of
a new play from reading it in manuscript. One of our most subtle artists
in stage-direction, Mr. Henry Miller, once confessed to the present writer
that he could never decide whether a prospective play was good or bad until
he had seen it rehearsed by actors on a stage. Mr. Augustus Thomas's
unusually successful farce entitled _Mrs. Leffingwell's Boots_ was
considered a failure by its producing managers until the very last
rehearsals, because it depended for its finished effect on many intricate
and rapid intermovements of the actors, which until the last moment were
understood and realised only in the mind of the playwright. The same
author's best and most successful play, _The Witching Hour_, was declined
by several managers before it was ultimately accepted for production; and
the reason was, presumably, that its extraordinary merits were not manifest
from a mere reading of the lines. If professional producers may go so far
astray in their judgment of the merits of a manuscript, how much harder
must it be for the layman to judge a play solely from a reading of the
dialogue!

This fact should lead the professors and the students in our colleges to
adopt a very tentative attitude toward judging the dramatic merits of the
plays of other ages. Shakespeare, considered as a poet, is so immeasurably
superior to Dryden, that it is difficult for the college student unfamiliar
with the theatre to realise that the former's _Antony and Cleopatra_ is,
considered solely as a play, far inferior to the latter's dramatisation of
the same story, entitled _All for Love, or The World Well Lost_.
Shakespeare's play upon this subject follows closely the chronology of
Plutarch's narrative, and is merely dramatised history; but Dryden's play
is reconstructed with a more practical sense of economy and emphasis, and
deserves to be regarded as historical drama. _Cymbeline_ is, in many
passages, so greatly written that it is hard for the closet-student to
realise that it is a bad play, even when considered from the standpoint of
the Elizabethan theatre,--whereas _Othello_ and _Macbeth_, for instance,
are great plays, not only of their age but for all time. _King Lear_ is
probably a more sublime poem than _Othello_; and it is only by seeing the
two pieces performed equally well in the theatre that we can appreciate by
what a wide margin _Othello_ is the better play.

This practical point has been felt emphatically by the very greatest
dramatists; and this fact offers, of course, an explanation of the
otherwise inexplicable negligence of such authors as Shakespeare and
Moliere in the matter of publishing their plays. These supreme playwrights
wanted people to see their pieces in the theatre rather than to read them
in the closet. In his own lifetime, Shakespeare, who was very scrupulous
about the publication of his sonnets and his narrative poems, printed a
carefully edited text of his plays only when he was forced, in
self-defense, to do so, by the prior appearance of corrupt and pirated
editions; and we owe our present knowledge of several of his dramas merely
to the business acumen of two actors who, seven years after his death,
conceived the practical idea that they might turn an easy penny by printing
and offering for sale the text of several popular plays which the public
had already seen performed. Sardou, who, like most French dramatists, began
by publishing his plays, carefully withheld from print the master-efforts
of his prime; and even such dramatists as habitually print their plays
prefer nearly always to have them seen first and read only afterwards.

In elucidation of what might otherwise seem perversity on the part of great
dramatic authors like Shakespeare, we must remember that the
master-dramatists have nearly always been men of the theatre rather than
men of letters, and therefore naturally more avid of immediate success with
a contemporary audience than of posthumous success with a posterity of
readers. Shakespeare and Moliere were actors and theatre-managers, and
devised their plays primarily for the patrons of the Globe and the Palais
Royal. Ibsen, who is often taken as a type of the literary dramatist,
derived his early training mainly from the profession of the theatre and
hardly at all from the profession of letters. For half a dozen years,
during the formative period of his twenties, he acted as producing manager
of the National Theatre in Bergen, and learned the tricks of his trade from
studying the masterpieces of contemporary drama, mainly of the French
school. In his own work, he began, in such pieces as _Lady Inger of
Ostrat_, by imitating and applying the formulas of Scribe and the earlier
Sardou; and it was only after many years that he marched forward to a
technique entirely his own. Both Sir Arthur Wing Pinero and Mr. Stephen
Phillips began their theatrical career as actors. On the other hand, men of
letters who have written works primarily to be read have almost never
succeeded as dramatists. In England, during the nineteenth century, the
following great poets all tried their hands at plays--Scott, Southey,
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Browning, Mrs. Browning,
Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, and Tennyson--and not one of them produced a
work of any considerable value from the standpoint of dramatic criticism.
Tennyson, in _Becket_, came nearer to the mark than any of the others; and
it is noteworthy that, in this work, he had the advantage of the advice
and, in a sense, collaboration of Sir Henry Irving.

The familiar phrase "closet-drama" is a contradiction of terms. The species
of literary composition in dialogue that is ordinarily so designated
occupies a thoroughly legitimate position in the realm of literature, but
no position whatsoever in the realm of dramaturgy. _Atalanta in Calydon_ is
a great poem; but from the standpoint of the theory of the theatre, it
cannot be considered as a play. Like the lyric poems of the same author, it
was written to be read; and it was not devised to be presented by actors on
a stage before an audience.

We may now consider the significance of the three concluding phrases of the
definition of a play which was offered at the outset of the present
chapter. These phrases indicate the immanence of three influences by which
the work of the playwright is constantly conditioned.

In the first place, by the fact that the dramatist is devising his story
for the use of actors, he is definitely limited both in respect to the kind
of characters he may create and in respect to the means he may employ in
order to delineate them. In actual life we meet characters of two different
classes, which (borrowing a pair of adjectives from the terminology of
physics) we may denominate dynamic characters and static characters. But
when an actor appears upon the stage, he wants to act; and the dramatist is
therefore obliged to confine his attention to dynamic characters, and to
exclude static characters almost entirely from the range of his creation.
The essential trait of all dynamic characters is the preponderance within
them of the element of will; and the persons of a play must therefore be
people with active wills and emphatic intentions. When such people are
brought into juxtaposition, there necessarily results a clash of contending
desires and purposes; and by this fact we are led logically to the
conclusion that the proper subject-matter of the drama is a struggle
between contrasted human wills. The same conclusion, as we shall notice in
the next chapter, may be reached logically by deduction from the natural
demands of an assembled audience; and the subject will be discussed more
fully during the course of our study of _The Psychology of Theatre
Audiences_. At present it is sufficient for us to note that every great
play that has ever been devised has presented some phase or other of this
single, necessary theme,--a contention of individual human wills. An actor,
moreover, is always more effective in scenes of emotion than in scenes of
cold logic and calm reason; and the dramatist, therefore, is obliged to
select as his leading figures people whose acts are motivated by emotion
rather than by intellect. Aristotle, for example, would make a totally
uninteresting figure if he were presented faithfully upon the stage. Who
could imagine Darwin as the hero of a drama? Othello, on the other hand, is
not at all a reasonable being; from first to last his intellect is
"perplexed in the extreme." His emotions are the motives for his acts; and
in this he may be taken as the type of a dramatic character.

In the means of delineating the characters he has imagined, the dramatist,
because he is writing for actors, is more narrowly restricted than the
novelist. His people must constantly be doing something, and must therefore
reveal themselves mainly through their acts. They may, of course, also be
delineated through their way of saying things; but in the theatre the
objective action is always more suggestive than the spoken word. We know
Sherlock Holmes, in Mr. William Gillette's admirable melodrama, solely
through the things that we have seen him do; and in this connection we
should remember that in the stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle from which
Mr. Gillette derived his narrative material, Holmes is delineated largely
by a very different method,--the method, namely, of expository comment
written from the point of view of Doctor Watson. A leading actor seldom
wants to sit in his dressing-room while he is being talked about by the
other actors on the stage; and therefore the method of drawing character by
comment, which is so useful for the novelist, is rarely employed by the
playwright except in the waste moments which precede the first entrance of
his leading figure. The Chorus Lady, in Mr. James Forbes's amusing study of
that name, is drawn chiefly through her way of saying things; but though
this method of delineation is sometimes very effective for an act or two,
it can seldom be sustained without a faltering of interest through a
full-grown four-act play. The novelist's expedient of delineating character
through mental analysis is of course denied the dramatist, especially in
this modern age when the soliloquy (for reasons which will be noted in a
subsequent chapter) is usually frowned upon. Sometimes, in the theatre, a
character may be exhibited chiefly through his personal effect upon the
other people on the stage, and thereby indirectly on the people in the
audience. It was in this way, of course, that Manson was delineated in Mr.
Charles Rann Kennedy's _The Servant in the House_. But the expedient is a
dangerous one for the dramatist to use; because it makes his work
immediately dependent on the actor chosen for the leading role, and may in
many cases render his play impossible of attaining its full effect except
at the hands of a single great performer. In recent years an expedient long
familiar in the novel has been transferred to the service of the
stage,--the expedient, namely, of suggesting the personality of a character
through a visual presentation of his habitual environment. After the
curtain had been raised upon the first act of _The Music Master_, and the
audience had been given time to look about the room which was represented
on the stage, the main traits of the leading character had already been
suggested before his first appearance on the scene. The pictures and
knickknacks on his mantelpiece told us, before we ever saw him, what manner
of man he was. But such subtle means as this can, after all, be used only
to reinforce the one standard method of conveying the sense of character in
drama; and this one method, owing to the conditions under which the
playwright does his work, must always be the exhibition of objective acts.

In all these general ways the work of the dramatist is affected by the fact
that he must devise his story to be presented by actors. The specific
influence exerted over the playwright by the individual performer is a
subject too extensive to be covered by a mere summary consideration in the
present context; and we shall therefore discuss it fully in a later
chapter, entitled _The Actor and the Dramatist_.

At present we must pass on to observe that, in the second place, the work
of the dramatist is conditioned by the fact that he must plan his plays to
fit the sort of theatre that stands ready to receive them. A fundamental
and necessary relation has always existed between theatre-building and
theatric art. The best plays of any period have been fashioned in
accordance with the physical conditions of the best theatres of that
period. Therefore, in order fully to appreciate such a play as _Oedipus
King_, it is necessary to imagine the theatre of Dionysus; and in order to
understand thoroughly the dramaturgy of Shakespeare and Moliere, it is
necessary to reconstruct in retrospect the altered inn-yard and the
converted tennis-court for which they planned their plays. It may seriously
be doubted that the works of these earlier masters gain more than they lose
from being produced with the elaborate scenic accessories of the modern
stage; and, on the other hand, a modern play by Ibsen or Pinero would lose
three-fourths of its effect if it were acted in the Elizabethan manner, or
produced without scenery (let us say) in the Roman theatre at Orange.

Since, in all ages, the size and shape and physical appointments of the
theatre have determined for the playwright the form and structure of his
plays, we may always explain the stock conventions of any period of the
drama by referring to the physical aspect of the theatre in that period.
Let us consider briefly, for purposes of illustration, certain obvious ways
in which the art of the great Greek tragic dramatists was affected by the
nature of the Attic stage. The theatre of Dionysus was an enormous edifice
carved out of a hillside. It was so large that the dramatists were obliged
to deal only with subjects that were traditional,--stories which had long
been familiar to the entire theatre-going public, including the poorer and
less educated spectators who sat farthest from the actors. Since most of
the audience was grouped above the stage and at a considerable distance,
the actors, in order not to appear dwarfed, were obliged to walk on stilted
boots. A performer so accoutred could not move impetuously or enact a scene
of violence; and this practical limitation is sufficient to account for the
measured and majestic movement of Greek tragedy, and the convention that
murders and other violent deeds must always be imagined off the stage and
be merely recounted to the audience by messengers. Facial expression could
not be seen in so large a theatre; and the actors therefore wore masks,
conventionalised to represent the dominant mood of a character during a
scene. This limitation forced the performer to depend for his effect mainly
on his voice; and Greek tragedy was therefore necessarily more lyrical than
later types of drama.

The few points which we have briefly touched upon are usually explained, by
academic critics, on literary grounds; but it is surely more sane to
explain them on grounds of common sense, in the light of what we know of
the conditions of the Attic stage. Similarly, it would be easy to show how
Terence and Calderon, Shakespeare and Moliere, adapted the form of their
plays to the form of their theatres; but enough has already been said to
indicate the principle which underlies this particular phase of the theory
of the theatre. The successive changes in the physical aspect of the
English theatre during the last three centuries have all tended toward
greater naturalness, intimacy, and subtlety, in the drama itself and in the
physical aids to its presentment. This progress, with its constant
illustration of the interdependence of the drama and the stage, may most
conveniently be studied in historical review; and to such a review we shall
devote a special chapter, entitled _Stage Conventions in Modern Times_.

We may now observe that, in the third place, the essential nature of the
drama is affected greatly by the fact that it is destined to be set before
an audience. The dramatist must appeal at once to a heterogeneous multitude
of people; and the full effect of this condition will be investigated in a
special chapter on _The Psychology of Theatre Audiences_. In an important
sense, the audience is a party to the play, and collaborates with the
actors in the presentation. This fact, which remains often unappreciated by
academic critics, is familiar to everyone who has had any practical
association with the theatre. It is almost never possible, even for trained
dramatic critics, to tell from a final dress-rehearsal in an empty house
which scenes of a new play are fully effective and which are not; and the
reason why, in America, new plays are tried out on the road is not so much
to give the actors practice in their parts, as to determine, from the
effect of the piece upon provincial audiences, whether it is worthy of a
metropolitan presentation. The point is, as we shall notice in the next
chapter, that since a play is devised for a crowd it cannot finally be
judged by individuals.

The dependence of the dramatist upon his audience may be illustrated by the
history of many important plays, which, though effective in their own age,
have become ineffective for later generations, solely because they were
founded on certain general principles of conduct in which the world has
subsequently ceased to believe. From the point of view of its own period,
_The Maid's Tragedy_ of Beaumont and Fletcher is undoubtedly one of the
very greatest of Elizabethan plays; but it would be ineffective in the
modern theatre, because it presupposes a principle which a contemporary
audience would not accept. It was devised for an audience of aristocrats in
the reign of James I, and the dramatic struggle is founded upon the
doctrine of the divine right of kings. Amintor, in the play, has suffered a
profound personal injury at the hands of his sovereign; but he cannot
avenge this individual disgrace, because he is a subject of the royal
malefactor. The crisis and turning-point of the entire drama is a scene in
which Amintor, with the king at his mercy, lowers his sword with the
words:--

                          But there is
    Divinity about you, that strikes dead
    My rising passions: as you are my king,
    I fall before you, and present my sword
    To cut mine own flesh, if it be your will.

We may imagine the applause of the courtiers of James Stuart, the
Presumptuous; but never since the Cromwellian revolution has that scene
been really effective on the English stage. In order fully to appreciate a
dramatic struggle, an audience must sympathise with the motives that
occasion it.

It should now be evident, as was suggested at the outset, that all the
leading principles of the theory of the theatre may be deduced logically
from the axiom which was stated in the first sentence of this chapter; and
that axiom should constantly be borne in mind as the basis of all our
subsequent discussions. But in view of several important points which have
already come up for consideration, it may be profitable, before
relinquishing our initial question, to redefine a play more fully in the
following terms:--

A play is a representation, by actors, on a stage, before an audience, of a
struggle between individual human wills, motivated by emotion rather than
by intellect, and expressed in terms of objective action.




II

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THEATRE AUDIENCES


I

The drama is the only art, excepting oratory and certain forms of music,
that is designed to appeal to a crowd instead of to an individual. The
lyric poet writes for himself, and for such selected persons here and there
throughout the world as may be wisely sympathetic enough to understand his
musings. The essayist and the novelist write for a reader sitting alone in
his library: whether ten such readers or a hundred thousand ultimately read
a book, the writer speaks to each of them apart from all the others. It is
the same with painting and with sculpture. Though a picture or a statue may
be seen by a limitless succession of observers, its appeal is made always
to the individual mind. But it is different with a play. Since a drama is,
in essence, a story devised to be presented by actors on a stage before an
audience, it must necessarily be designed to appeal at once to a multitude
of people. We have to be alone in order to appreciate the _Venus of Melos_
or the _Sistine Madonna_ or the _Ode to a Nightingale_ or the _Egoist_ or
the _Religio Medici_; but who could sit alone in a wide theatre and see
_Cyrano de Bergerac_ performed? The sympathetic presence of a multitude of
people would be as necessary to our appreciation of the play as solitude in
all the other cases. And because the drama must be written for a crowd, it
must be fashioned differently from the other, and less popular, forms of
art.

No writer is really a dramatist unless he recognises this distinction of
appeal; and if an author is not accustomed to writing for the crowd, he can
hardly hope to make a satisfying play. Tennyson, the perfect poet;
Browning, the master of the human mind; Stevenson, the teller of enchanting
tales:--each of them failed when he tried to make a drama, because the
conditions of his proper art had schooled him long in writing for the
individual instead of for the crowd. A literary artist who writes for the
individual may produce a great work of literature that is cast in the
dramatic form; but the work will not be, in the practical sense, a play.
_Samson Agonistes_, _Faust_, _Pippa Passes_, _Peer Gynt_, and the early
dream-dramas of Maurice Maeterlinck, are something else than plays. They
are not devised to be presented by actors on a stage before an audience. As
a work of literature, _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_ is immeasurably greater
than _The Two Orphans_; but as a play, it is immeasurably less. For even
though, in this particular piece, Browning did try to write for the theatre
(at the suggestion of Macready), he employed the same intricately
intellectual method of character analysis that has made many of his poems
the most solitude-compelling of modern literary works. Properly to
appreciate his piece, you must be alone, just as you must be alone to read
_A Woman's Last Word_. It is not written for a crowd; _The Two Orphans_,
less weighty in wisdom, is. The second is a play.

The mightiest masters of the drama--Sophocles, Shakespeare, and
Moliere--have recognised the popular character of its appeal and written
frankly for the multitude. The crowd, therefore, has exercised a potent
influence upon the dramatist in every era of the theatre. One person the
lyric poet has to please,--himself; to a single person only, or an
unlimited succession of single persons, does the novelist address himself,
and he may choose the sort of person he will write for; but the dramatist
must always please the many. His themes, his thoughts, his emotions, are
circumscribed by the limits of popular appreciation. He writes less freely
than any other author; for he cannot pick his auditors. Mr. Henry James
may, if he choose, write novels for the super-civilised; but a crowd is
never super-civilised, and therefore characters like those of Mr. James
could never be successfully presented in the theatre. _Treasure Island_ is
a book for boys, both young and old; but a modern theatre crowd is composed
largely of women, and the theme of such a story could scarcely be
successful on the stage.

In order, therefore, to understand the limitations of the drama as an art,
and clearly to define its scope, it is necessary to inquire into the
psychology of theatre audiences. This subject presents two phases to the
student. First, a theatre audience exhibits certain psychological traits
that are common to all crowds, of whatever kind,--a political convention,
the spectators at a ball-game, or a church congregation, for example.
Second, it exhibits certain other traits which distinguish it from other
kinds of crowds. These, in turn, will be considered in the present chapter.


II

By the word _crowd_, as it is used in this discussion, is meant a multitude
of people whose ideas and feelings have taken a set in a certain single
direction, and who, because of this, exhibit a tendency to lose their
individual self-consciousness in the general self-consciousness of the
multitude. Any gathering of people for a specific purpose--whether of
action or of worship or of amusement--tends to become, because of this
purpose, a _crowd_, in the scientific sense. Now, a crowd has a mind of
its own, apart from that of any of its individual members. The psychology
of the crowd was little understood until late in the nineteenth century,
when a great deal of attention was turned to it by a group of French
philosophers. The subject has been most fully studied by M. Gustave Le Bon,
who devoted some two hundred pages to his _Psychologie des Foules_.
According to M. Le Bon, a man, by the mere fact that he forms a factor of a
crowd, tends to lose consciousness of those mental qualities in which he
differs from his fellows, and becomes more keenly conscious than before of
those other mental qualities in which he is at one with them. The mental
qualities in which men differ from one another are the acquired qualities
of intellect and character; but the qualities in which they are at one are
the innate basic passions of the race. A crowd, therefore, is less
intellectual and more emotional than the individuals that compose it. It is
less reasonable, less judicious, less disinterested, more credulous, more
primitive, more partisan; and hence, as M. Le Bon cleverly puts it, a man,
by the mere fact that he forms a part of an organised crowd, is likely to
descend several rungs on the ladder of civilisation. Even the most cultured
and intellectual of men, when he forms an atom of a crowd, tends to lose
consciousness of his acquired mental qualities and to revert to his primal
simplicity and sensitiveness of mind.

The dramatist, therefore, because he writes for a crowd, writes for a
comparatively uncivilised and uncultivated mind, a mind richly human,
vehement in approbation, emphatic in disapproval, easily credulous, eagerly
enthusiastic, boyishly heroic, and somewhat carelessly unthinking. Now, it
has been found in practice that the only thing that will keenly interest a
crowd is a struggle of some sort or other. Speaking empirically, the late
Ferdinand Brunetiere, in 1893, stated that the drama has dealt always with
a struggle between human wills; and his statement, formulated in the
catch-phrase, "No struggle, no drama," has since become a commonplace of
dramatic criticism. But, so far as I know, no one has yet realised the main
reason for this, which is, simply, that characters are interesting to a
crowd only in those crises of emotion that bring them to the grapple. A
single individual, like the reader of an essay or a novel, may be
interested intellectually in those gentle influences beneath which a
character unfolds itself as mildly as a water-lily; but to what Thackeray
called "that savage child, the crowd," a character does not appeal except
in moments of contention. There never yet has been a time when the theatre
could compete successfully against the amphitheatre. Plautus and Terence
complained that the Roman public preferred a gladiatorial combat to their
plays; a bear-baiting or a cock-fight used to empty Shakespeare's theatre
on the Bankside; and there is not a matinee in town to-day that can hold
its own against a foot-ball game. Forty thousand people gather annually
from all quarters of the East to see Yale and Harvard meet upon the field,
while such a crowd could not be aggregated from New York alone to see the
greatest play the world has yet produced. For the crowd demands a fight;
and where the actual exists, it will scarcely be contented with the
semblance.

Hence the drama, to interest at all, must cater to this longing for
contention, which is one of the primordial instincts of the crowd. It must
present its characters in some struggle of the wills, whether it be
flippant, as in the case of Benedick and Beatrice; or delicate, as in that
of Viola and Orsino; or terrible, with Macbeth; or piteous, with Lear. The
crowd is more partisan than the individual; and therefore, in following
this struggle of the drama, it desires always to take sides. There is no
fun in seeing a foot-ball game unless you care about who wins; and there is
very little fun in seeing a play unless the dramatist allows you to throw
your sympathies on one side or the other of the struggle. Hence, although
in actual life both parties to a conflict are often partly right and partly
wrong, and it is hard to choose between them, the dramatist usually
simplifies the struggle in his plays by throwing the balance of right
strongly on one side. Hence, from the ethical standpoint, the simplicity
of theatre characters. Desdemona is all innocence, Iago all deviltry. Hence
also the conventional heroes and villains of melodrama,--these to be hissed
and those to be applauded. Since the crowd is comparatively lacking in the
judicial faculty and cannot look upon a play from a detached and
disinterested point of view, it is either all for or all against a
character; and in either case its judgment is frequently in defiance of the
rules of reason. It will hear no word against Camille, though an individual
would judge her to be wrong, and it has no sympathy with Pere Duval. It
idolizes Raffles, who is a liar and a thief; it shuts its ears to Marion
Allardyce, the defender of virtue in _Letty_. It wants its sympathetic
characters, to love; its antipathetic characters, to hate; and it hates and
loves them as unreasonably as a savage or a child. The trouble with _Hedda
Gabler_ as a play is that it contains not a single personage that the
audience can love. The crowd demands those so-called "sympathetic" parts
that every actor, for this reason, longs to represent. And since the crowd
is partisan, it wants its favored characters to win. Hence the convention
of the "happy ending," insisted on by managers who feel the pulse of the
public. The blind Louise, in _The Two Orphans_, will get her sight back,
never fear. Even the wicked Oliver, in _As You Like It_, must turn over a
new leaf and marry a pretty girl.

Next to this prime instinct of partisanship in watching a contention, one
of the most important traits in the psychology of crowds is their extreme
credulity. A crowd will nearly always believe anything that it sees and
almost anything that it is told. An audience composed entirely of
individuals who have no belief in ghosts will yet accept the Ghost in
_Hamlet_ as a fact. Bless you, they have _seen_ him! The crowd accepts the
disguise of Rosalind, and never wonders why Orlando does not recognise his
love. To this extreme credulity of the crowd is due the long line of plays
that are founded on mistaken identity,--farces like _The Comedy of Errors_
and melodramas like _The Lyons Mail_, for example. The crowd, too, will
accept without demur any condition precedent to the story of a play,
however impossible it might seem to the mind of the individual. Oedipus
King has been married to his mother many years before the play begins; but
the Greek crowd forbore to ask why, in so long a period, the enormity had
never been discovered. The central situation of _She Stoops to Conquer_
seems impossible to the individual mind, but is eagerly accepted by the
crowd. Individual critics find fault with Thomas Heywood's lovely old play,
_A Woman Killed with Kindness_, on the ground that though Frankford's noble
forgiveness of his erring wife is beautiful to contemplate, Mrs.
Frankford's infidelity is not sufficiently motivated, and the whole story,
therefore, is untrue. But Heywood, writing for the crowd, said frankly, "If
you will grant that Mrs. Frankford was unfaithful, I can tell you a lovely
story about her husband, who was a gentleman worth knowing: otherwise there
can't be any story"; and the Elizabethan crowd, eager for the story, was
willing to oblige the dramatist with the necessary credulity.

There is this to be said about the credulity of an audience, however,--that
it will believe what it sees much more readily than what it hears. It might
not believe in the ghost of Hamlet's father if the ghost were merely spoken
of and did not walk upon the stage. If a dramatist would convince his
audience of the generosity or the treachery of one character or another, he
should not waste words either praising or blaming the character, but should
present him to the eye in the performance of a generous or treacherous
action. The audience _hears_ wise words from Polonius when he gives his
parting admonition to his son; but the same audience _sees_ him made a fool
of by Prince Hamlet, and will not think him wise.

The fact that a crowd's eyes are more keenly receptive than its ears is the
psychologic basis for the maxim that in the theatre action speaks louder
than words. It also affords a reason why plays of which the audience does
not understand a single word are frequently successful. Mme. Sarah
Bernhardt's thrilling performance of _La Tosca_ has always aroused
enthusiasm in London and New York, where the crowd, as a crowd, could not
understand the language of the play.

Another primal characteristic of the mind of the crowd is its
susceptibility to emotional contagion. A cultivated individual reading _The
School for Scandal_ at home alone will be intelligently appreciative of its
delicious humor; but it is difficult to imagine him laughing over it aloud.
Yet the same individual, when submerged in a theatre crowd, will laugh
heartily over this very play, largely because other people near him are
laughing too. Laughter, tears, enthusiasm, all the basic human emotions,
thrill and tremble through an audience, because each member of the crowd
feels that he is surrounded by other people who are experiencing the same
emotion as his own. In the sad part of a play it is hard to keep from
weeping if the woman next to you is wiping her eyes; and still harder is it
to keep from laughing, even at a sorry jest, if the man on the other side
is roaring in vociferous cachinnation. Successful dramatists play upon the
susceptibility of a crowd by serving up raw morsels of crude humor and
pathos for the unthinking to wheeze and blubber over, knowing that these
members of the audience will excite their more phlegmatic neighbors by
contagion. The practical dictum that every laugh in the first act is worth
money in the box-office is founded on this psychologic truth. Even puns as
bad as Mr. Zangwill's are of value early in a play to set on some quantity
of barren spectators and get the house accustomed to a titter. Scenes like
the foot-ball episodes in _The College Widow_ and _Strongheart_, or the
battle in _The Round Up_, are nearly always sure to raise the roof; for it
is usually sufficient to set everybody on the stage a-cheering in order to
make the audience cheer too by sheer contagion. Another and more classical
example was the speechless triumph of Henry V's return victorious, in
Richard Mansfield's sumptuous production of the play. Here the audience
felt that he was every inch a king; for it had caught the fervor of the
crowd upon the stage.

This same emotional contagion is, of course, the psychologic basis for the
French system of the _claque_, or band of hired applauders seated in the
centre of the house. The leader of the _claque_ knows his cues as if he
were an actor in the piece, and at the psychologic moment the _claqueurs_
burst forth with their clatter and start the house applauding. Applause
begets applause in the theatre, as laughter begets laughter and tears beget
tears.

But not only is the crowd more emotional than the individual; it is also
more sensuous. It has the lust of the eye and of the ear,--the savage's
love of gaudy color, the child's love of soothing sound. It is fond of
flaring flags and blaring trumpets. Hence the rich-costumed processions of
the Elizabethan stage, many years before the use of scenery; and hence, in
our own day, the success of pieces like _The Darling of the Gods_ and _The
Rose of the Rancho_. Color, light, and music, artistically blended, will
hold the crowd better than the most absorbing story. This is the reason for
the vogue of musical comedy, with its pretty girls, and gaudy shifts of
scenery and lights, and tricksy, tripping melodies and dances.

Both in its sentiments and in its opinions, the crowd is comfortably
commonplace. It is, as a crowd, incapable of original thought and of any
but inherited emotion. It has no speculation in its eyes. What it feels was
felt before the flood; and what it thinks, its fathers thought before it.
The most effective moments in the theatre are those that appeal to basic
and commonplace emotions,--love of woman, love of home, love of country,
love of right, anger, jealousy, revenge, ambition, lust, and treachery. So
great for centuries has been the inherited influence of the Christian
religion that any adequate play whose motive is self-sacrifice is almost
certain to succeed. Even when the self-sacrifice is unwise and ignoble, as
in the first act of _Frou-Frou_, the crowd will give it vehement approval.
Countless plays have been made upon the man who unselfishly assumes
responsibility for another's guilt. The great tragedies have familiar
themes,--ambition in _Macbeth_, jealousy in _Othello_, filial ingratitude
in _Lear_; there is nothing in these motives that the most unthinking
audience could fail to understand. No crowd can resist the fervor of a
patriot who goes down scornful before many spears. Show the audience a flag
to die for, or a stalking ghost to be avenged, or a shred of honor to
maintain against agonizing odds, and it will thrill with an enthusiasm as
ancient as the human race. Few are the plays that can succeed without the
moving force of love, the most familiar of all emotions. These themes do
not require that the audience shall think.

But for the speculative, the original, the new, the crowd evinces little
favor. If the dramatist holds ideas of religion, or of politics, or of
social law, that are in advance of his time, he must keep them to himself
or else his plays will fail. Nimble wits, like Mr. Shaw, who scorn
tradition, can attain a popular success only through the crowd's inherent
love of fads; they cannot long succeed when they run counter to inherited
ideas. The great successful dramatists, like Moliere and Shakespeare, have
always thought with the crowd on all essential questions. Their views of
religion, of morality, of politics, of law, have been the views of the
populace, nothing more. They never raise questions that cannot quickly be
answered by the crowd, through the instinct of inherited experience. No
mind was ever, in the philosophic sense, more commonplace than that of
Shakespeare. He had no new ideas. He was never radical, and seldom even
progressive. He was a careful money-making business man, fond of food and
drink and out-of-doors and laughter, a patriot, a lover, and a gentleman.
Greatly did he know things about people; greatly, also, could he write. But
he accepted the religion, the politics, and the social ethics of his time,
without ever bothering to wonder if these things might be improved.

The great speculative spirits of the world, those who overturn tradition
and discover new ideas, have had minds far different from this. They have
not written plays. It is to these men,--the philosopher, the essayist, the
novelist, the lyric poet,--that each of us turns for what is new in
thought. But from the dramatist the crowd desires only the old, old
thought. It has no patience for consideration; it will listen only to what
it knows already. If, therefore, a great man has a new doctrine to expound,
let him set it forth in a book of essays; or, if he needs must sugar-coat
it with a story, let him expound it in a novel, whose appeal will be to the
individual mind. Not until a doctrine is old enough to have become
generally accepted is it ripe for exploitation in the theatre.

This point is admirably illustrated by two of the best and most successful
plays of recent seasons. _The Witching Hour_, by Mr. Augustus Thomas, and
_The Servant in the House_, by Mr. Charles Rann Kennedy, were both praised
by many critics for their "novelty"; but to me one of the most significant
and instructive facts about them is that neither of them was, in any real
respect, novel in the least. Consider for a moment the deliberate and
careful lack of novelty in the ideas which Mr. Thomas so skilfully set
forth. What Mr. Thomas really did was to gather and arrange as many as
possible of the popularly current thoughts concerning telepathy and cognate
subjects, and to tell the public what they themselves had been wondering
about and thinking during the last few years. The timeliness of the play
lay in the fact that it was produced late enough in the history of its
subject to be selectively resumptive, and not nearly so much in the fact
that it was produced early enough to forestall other dramatic presentations
of the same materials. Mr. Thomas has himself explained, in certain
semi-public conversations, that he postponed the composition of this
play--on which his mind had been set for many years--until the general
public had become sufficiently accustomed to the ideas which he intended to
set forth. Ten years before, this play would have been novel, and would
undoubtedly have failed. When it was produced, it was not novel, but
resumptive, in its thought; and therefore it succeeded. For one of the
surest ways of succeeding in the theatre is to sum up and present
dramatically all that the crowd has been thinking for some time concerning
any subject of importance. The dramatist should be the catholic collector
and wise interpreter of those ideas which the crowd, in its conservatism,
feels already to be safely true.

And if _The Servant In the House_ will--as I believe--outlive _The Witching
Hour_, it will be mainly because, in the author's theme and his ideas, it
is older by many, many centuries. The theme of Mr. Thomas's play--namely,
that thought is in itself a dynamic force and has the virtue and to some
extent the power of action--is, as I have just explained, not novel, but is
at least recent in the history of thinking. It is a theme which dates
itself as belonging to the present generation, and is likely to lose
interest for the next. But Mr. Kennedy's theme--namely, that when
discordant human beings ascend to meet each other in the spirit of
brotherly love, it may truly be said that God is resident among them--is at
least as old as the gentle-hearted Galilean, and, being dateless, belongs
to future generations as well as to the present. Mr. Thomas has been
skilfully resumptive of a passing period of popular thought; but Mr.
Kennedy has been resumptive on a larger scale, and has built his play upon
the wisdom of the centuries. Paradoxical as it may seem, the very reason
why _The Servant in the House_ struck so many critics as being strange and
new is that, in its thesis and its thought, it is as old as the world.

The truth of this point seems to me indisputable. I know that the best
European playwrights of the present day are striving to use the drama as a
vehicle for the expression of advanced ideas, especially in regard to
social ethics; but in doing this, I think, they are mistaking the scope of
the theatre. They are striving to say in the drama what might be said
better in the essay or the novel. As the exposition of a theory, Mr. Shaw's
_Man and Superman_ is not nearly so effective as the writings of
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, from whom the playwright borrowed his ideas.
The greatest works of Ibsen can be appreciated only by the cultured
individual and not by the uncultured crowd. That is why the breadth of his
appeal will never equal that of Shakespeare, in spite of his unfathomable
intellect and his perfect mastery of the technique of his art. Only his
more commonplace plays--_A Doll's House_, for example--have attained a wide
success. And a wide success is a thing to be desired for other than
material reasons. Surely it is a good thing for the public that _Hamlet_
never fails.

The conservatism of the greatest dramatists asserts itself not only in
their thoughts but even in the mere form of their plays. It is the lesser
men who invent new tricks of technique and startle the public with
innovations. Moliere merely perfected the type of Italian comedy that his
public long had known. Shakespeare quietly adopted the forms that lesser
men had made the crowd familiar with. He imitated Lyly in _Love's Labour's
Lost_, Greene in _As You Like It_, Marlowe in _Richard III_, Kyd in
_Hamlet_, and Fletcher in _The Tempest_. He did the old thing better than
the other men had done it,--that is all.

Yet this is greatly to Shakespeare's credit. He was wise enough to feel
that what the crowd wanted, both in matter and in form, was what was needed
in the greatest drama. In saying that Shakespeare's mind was commonplace, I
meant to tender him the highest praise. In his commonplaceness lies his
sanity. He is so greatly _usual_ that he can understand all men and
sympathise with them. He is above novelty. His wisdom is greater than the
wisdom of the few; he is the heir of all the ages, and draws his wisdom
from the general mind of man. And it is largely because of this that he
represents ever the ideal of the dramatist. He who would write for the
theatre must not despise the crowd.


III

All of the above-mentioned characteristics of theatre audiences, their
instinct for contention and for partisanship, their credulity, their
sensuousness, their susceptibility to emotional contagion, their incapacity
for original thought, their conservatism, and their love of the
commonplace, appear in every sort of crowd, as M. Le Bon has proved with
ample illustration. It remains for us to notice certain traits in which
theatre audiences differ from other kinds of crowds.

In the first place, a theatre audience is composed of individuals more
heterogeneous than those that make up a political, or social, or sporting,
or religious convocation. The crowd at a foot-ball game, at a church, at a
social or political convention, is by its very purpose selective of its
elements: it is made up entirely of college-folk, or Presbyterians, or
Prohibitionists, or Republicans, as the case may be. But a theatre audience
is composed of all sorts and conditions of men. The same theatre in New
York contains the rich and the poor, the literate and the illiterate, the
old and the young, the native and the naturalised. The same play,
therefore, must appeal to all of these. It follows that the dramatist must
be broader in his appeal than any other artist. He cannot confine his
message to any single caste of society. In the same single work of art he
must incorporate elements that will interest all classes of humankind.

Those promising dramatic movements that have confined their appeal to a
certain single stratum of society have failed ever, because of this, to
achieve the highest excellence. The trouble with Roman comedy is that it
was written for an audience composed chiefly of freedmen and slaves. The
patrician caste of Rome walked wide of the theatres. Only the dregs of
society gathered to applaud the comedies of Plautus and Terence. Hence the
oversimplicity of their prologues, and their tedious repetition of the
obvious. Hence, also, their vulgarity, their horse-play, their obscenity.
Here was fine dramatic genius led astray, because the time was out of
joint. Similarly, the trouble with French tragedy, in the classicist period
of Corneille and Racine, is that it was written only for the finest caste
of society,--the patrician coterie of a patrician cardinal. Hence its
over-niceness, and its appeal to the ear rather than to the eye. Terence
aimed too low and Racine aimed too high. Each of them, therefore, shot wide
of the mark; while Moliere, who wrote at once for patrician and plebeian,
scored a hit.

The really great dramatic movements of the world--that of Spain in the age
of Calderon and Lope, that of England in the spacious times of great
Elizabeth, that of France from 1830 to the present hour--have broadened
their appeal to every class. The queen and the orange-girl joyed together
in the healthiness of Rosalind; the king and the gamin laughed together at
the rogueries of Scapin. The breadth of Shakespeare's appeal remains one of
the most significant facts in the history of the drama. Tell a filthy-faced
urchin of the gutter that you know about a play that shows a ghost that
stalks and talks at midnight underneath a castle-tower, and a man that
makes believe he is out of his head so that he can get the better of a
wicked king, and a girl that goes mad and drowns herself, and a play within
the play, and a funeral in a churchyard, and a duel with poisoned swords,
and a great scene at the end in which nearly every one gets killed: tell
him this, and watch his eyes grow wide! I have been to a thirty-cent
performance of _Othello_ in a middle-western town, and have felt the
audience thrill with the headlong hurry of the action. Yet these are the
plays that cloistered students study for their wisdom and their style!

And let us not forget, in this connection, that a similar breadth of appeal
is neither necessary nor greatly to be desired in those forms of literature
that, unlike the drama, are not written for the crowd. The greatest
non-dramatic poet and the greatest novelist in English are appreciated
only by the few; but this is not in the least to the discredit of Milton
and of Meredith. One indication of the greatness of Mr. Kipling's story,
_They_, is that very few have learned to read it.

Victor Hugo, in his preface to _Ruy Blas_, has discussed this entire
principle from a slightly different point of view. He divides the theatre
audience into three classes--the thinkers, who demand characterisation; the
women, who demand passion; and the mob, who demand action--and insists that
every great play must appeal to all three classes at once. Certainly _Ruy
Blas_ itself fulfils this desideratum, and is great in the breadth of its
appeal. Yet although all three of the necessary elements appear in the
play, it has more action than passion and more passion than
characterisation. And this fact leads us to the theory, omitted by Victor
Hugo from his preface, that the mob is more important than the women and
the women more important than the thinkers, in the average theatre
audience. Indeed, a deeper consideration of the subject almost leads us to
discard the thinkers as a psychologic force and to obliterate the
distinction between the women and the mob. It is to an unthinking and
feminine-minded mob that the dramatist must first of all appeal; and this
leads us to believe that action with passion for its motive is the prime
essential for a play.

For, nowadays at least, it is most essential that the drama should appeal
to a crowd of women. Practically speaking, our matinee audiences are
composed entirely of women, and our evening audiences are composed chiefly
of women and the men that they have brought with them. Very few men go to
the theatre unattached; and these few are not important enough, from the
theoretic standpoint, to alter the psychologic aspect of the audience. And
it is this that constitutes one of the most important differences between a
modern theatre audience and other kinds of crowds.

The influence of this fact upon the dramatist is very potent. First of all,
as I have said, it forces him to deal chiefly in action with passion for
its motive. And this necessity accounts for the preponderance of female
characters over male in the large majority of the greatest modern plays.
Notice Nora Helmer, Mrs. Alving, Hedda Gabler; notice Magda and Camille;
notice Mrs. Tanqueray, Mrs. Ebbsmith, Iris, and Letty,--to cite only a few
examples. Furthermore, since women are by nature comparatively inattentive,
the femininity of the modern theatre audience forces the dramatist to
employ the elementary technical tricks of repetition and parallelism, in
order to keep his play clear, though much of it be unattended to. Eugene
Scribe, who knew the theatre, used to say that every important statement in
the exposition of a play must be made at least three times. This, of
course, is seldom necessary in a novel, where things may be said once for
all.

The prevailing inattentiveness of a theatre audience at the present day is
due also to the fact that it is peculiarly conscious of itself, apart from
the play that it has come to see. Many people "go to the theatre," as the
phrase is, without caring much whether they see one play or another; what
they want chiefly is to immerse themselves in a theatre audience. This is
especially true, in New York, of the large percentage of people from out of
town who "go to the theatre" merely as one phase of their metropolitan
experience. It is true, also, of the many women in the boxes and the
orchestra who go less to see than to be seen. It is one of the great
difficulties of the dramatist that he must capture and enchain the
attention of an audience thus composed. A man does not pick up a novel
unless he cares to read it; but many people go to the theatre chiefly for
the sense of being there. Certainly, therefore, the problem of the
dramatist is, in this respect, more difficult than that of the novelist,
for he must make his audience lose consciousness of itself in the
consciousness of his play.

One of the most essential differences between a theatre audience and other
kinds of crowds lies in the purpose for which it is convened. This purpose
is always recreation. A theatre audience is therefore less serious than a
church congregation or a political or social convention. It does not come
to be edified or educated; it has no desire to be taught: what it wants is
to have its emotions played upon. It seeks amusement--in the widest sense
of the word--amusement through laughter, sympathy, terror, and tears. And
it is amusement of this sort that the great dramatists have ever given it.

The trouble with most of the dreamers who league themselves for the
uplifting of the stage is that they consider the theatre with an illogical
solemnity. They base their efforts on the proposition that a theatre
audience ought to want to be edified. As a matter of fact, no audience ever
does. Moliere and Shakespeare, who knew the limits of their art, never said
a word about uplifting the stage. They wrote plays to please the crowd; and
if, through their inherent greatness, they became teachers as well as
entertainers, they did so without any tall talk about the solemnity of
their mission. Their audiences learned largely, but they did so
unawares,--God being with them when they knew it not. The demand for an
endowed theatre in America comes chiefly from those who believe that a
great play cannot earn its own living. Yet _Hamlet_ has made more money
than any other play in English; _The School for Scandal_ never fails to
draw; and in our own day we have seen _Cyrano de Bergerac_ coining money
all around the world. There were not any endowed theatres in Elizabethan
London. Give the crowd the sort of plays it wants, and you will not have to
seek beneficence to keep your theatre floating. But, on the other hand, no
endowed theatre will ever lure the crowd to listen to the sort of plays it
does not want. There is a wise maxim appended to one of Mr. George Ade's
_Fables in Slang_: "In uplifting, get underneath." If the theatre in
America is weak, what it needs is not endowment: it needs great and popular
plays. Why should we waste our money and our energy trying to make the
crowd come to see _The Master Builder_, or _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_, or
_The Hour Glass_, or _Pelleas and Melisande_? It is willing enough to come
without urging to see _Othello_ and _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_. Give us
one great dramatist who understands the crowd, and we shall not have to
form societies to propagate his art. Let us cease our prattle of the
theatre for the few. Any play that is really great as drama will interest
the many.


IV

One point remains to be considered. In any theatre audience there are
certain individuals who do not belong to the crowd. They are in it, but not
of it; for they fail to merge their individual self-consciousness in the
general self-consciousness of the multitude. Such are the professional
critics, and other confirmed frequenters of the theatre. It is not for them
primarily that plays are written; and any one who has grown individualised
through the theatre-going habit cannot help looking back regretfully upon
those fresher days when he belonged, unthinking, to the crowd. A
first-night audience is anomalous, in that it is composed largely of
individuals opposed to self-surrender; and for this reason, a first-night
judgment of the merits of a play is rarely final. The dramatist has written
for a crowd, and he is judged by individuals. Most dramatic critics will
tell you that they long to lose themselves in the crowd, and regret the
aloofness from the play that comes of their profession. It is because of
this aloofness of the critic that most dramatic criticism fails.

Throughout the present discussion, I have insisted on the point that the
great dramatists have always written primarily for the many. Yet now I must
add that when once they have fulfilled this prime necessity, they may also
write secondarily for the few. And the very greatest have always done so.
In so far as he was a dramatist, Shakespeare wrote for the crowd; in so far
as he was a lyric poet, he wrote for himself; and in so far as he was a
sage and a stylist, he wrote for the individual. In making sure of his
appeal to the many, he earned the right to appeal to the few. At the
thirty-cent performance of _Othello_ that I spoke of, I was probably the
only person present who failed to submerge his individuality beneath the
common consciousness of the audience. Shakespeare made a play that could
appeal to the rabble of that middle-western town; but he wrote it in a
verse that none of them could hear:--

                     Not poppy, nor mandragora,
    Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,
    Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
    Which thou ow'dst yesterday.

The greatest dramatist of all, in writing for the crowd, did not neglect
the individual.




III

THE ACTOR AND THE DRAMATIST


We have already agreed that the dramatist works ever under the sway of
three influences which are not felt by exclusively literary artists like
the poet and the novelist. The physical conditions of the theatre in any
age affect to a great extent the form and structure of the drama; the
conscious or unconscious demands of the audience, as we have observed in
the preceding chapter, determine for the dramatist the themes he shall
portray; and the range or restrictions of his actors have an immediate
effect upon the dramatist's great task of character-creation. In fact, so
potent is the influence of the actor upon the dramatist that the latter, in
creating character, goes to work very differently from his literary
fellow-artists,--the novelist, the story-writer, or the poet. Great
characters in non-dramatic fiction have often resulted from abstract
imagining, without direct reference to any actual person: Don Quixote, Tito
Melema, Leatherstocking, sprang full-grown from their creators' minds and
struck the world as strange and new. But the greatest characters in the
drama have almost always taken on the physical, and to a great extent the
mental, characteristics of certain great actors for whom they have been
fashioned. Cyrano is not merely Cyrano, but also Coquelin; Mascarille is
not merely Mascarille, but also Moliere; Hamlet is not merely Hamlet, but
also Richard Burbage. Closet-students of the plays of Sophocles may miss a
point or two if they fail to consider that the dramatist prepared the part
of Oedipus in three successive dramas for a certain star-performer on the
stage of Dionysus. The greatest dramatists have built their plays not so
much for reading in the closet as for immediate presentation on the stage;
they have grown to greatness only after having achieved an initial success
that has given them the freedom of the theatre; and their conceptions of
character have therefore crystallised around the actors that they have
found waiting to present their parts. A novelist may conceive his heroine
freely as being tall or short, frail or firmly built; but if a dramatist is
making a play for an actress like Maude Adams, an airy, slight physique is
imposed upon his heroine in advance.

Shakespeare was, among other things, the director of the Lord Chamberlain's
men, who performed in the Globe, upon the Bankside; and his plays are
replete with evidences of the influence upon him of the actors whom he had
in charge. It is patent, for example, that the same comedian must have
created Launce in _Two Gentlemen of Verona_ and Launcelot Gobbo in the
_Merchant of Venice_; the low comic hit of one production was bodily
repeated in the next. It is almost as obvious that the parts of Mercutio
and Gratiano must have been intrusted to the same performer; both
characters seem made to fit the same histrionic temperament. If Hamlet were
the hero of a novel, we should all, I think, conceive of him as slender,
and the author would agree with us; yet, in the last scene of the play, the
Queen expressly says, "He's fat, and scant of breath." This line has
puzzled many commentators, as seeming out of character; but it merely
indicates that Richard Burbage was fleshy during the season of 1602.

The Elizabethan expedient of disguising the heroine as a boy, which was
invented by John Lyly, made popular by Robert Greene, and eagerly adopted
by Shakespeare and Fletcher, seems unconvincing on the modern stage. It is
hard for us to imagine how Orlando can fail to recognise his love when he
meets her clad as Ganymede in the forest of Arden, or how Bassanio can be
blinded to the figure of his wife when she enters the court-room in the
almost feminine robes of a doctor of laws. Clothes cannot make a man out of
an actress; we recognize Ada Rehan or Julia Marlowe beneath the trappings
and the suits of their disguises; and it might seem that Shakespeare was
depending over-much upon the proverbial credulity of theatre audiences. But
a glance at histrionic conditions in Shakespeare's day will show us
immediately why he used this expedient of disguise not only for Portia and
Rosalind, but for Viola and Imogen as well. Shakespeare wrote these parts
to be played not by women but by boys. Now, when a boy playing a woman
disguised himself as a woman playing a boy, the disguise must have seemed
baffling, not only to Orlando and Bassanio on the stage, but also to the
audience. It was Shakespeare's boy actors, rather than his narrative
imagination, that made him recur repeatedly in this case to a dramatic
expedient which he would certainly discard if he were writing for actresses
to-day.

If we turn from the work of Shakespeare to that of Moliere, we shall find
many more evidences of the influence of the actor on the dramatist. In
fact, Moliere's entire scheme of character-creation cannot be understood
without direct reference to the histrionic capabilities of the various
members of the _Troupe de Monsieur_. Moliere's immediate and practical
concern was not so much to create comic characters for all time as to make
effective parts for La Grange and Du Croisy and Magdeleine Bejart, for his
wife and for himself. La Grange seems to have been the Charles Wyndham of
his day,--every inch a gentleman; his part in any of the plays may be
distinguished by its elegant urbanity. In _Les Precieuses Ridicules_ the
gentlemanly characters are actually named La Grange and Du Croisy; the
actors walked on and played themselves; it is as if Augustus Thomas had
called the hero of his best play, not Jack Brookfield, but John Mason. In
the early period of Moliere's art, before he broadened as an actor, the
parts that he wrote for himself were often so much alike from play to play
that he called them by the same conventional theatric name of Mascarille or
Sganarelle, and played them, doubtless, with the same costume and make-up.
Later on, when he became more versatile as an actor, he wrote for himself a
wider range of parts and individualised them in name as well as in nature.
His growth in depicting the characters of young women is curiously
coincident with the growth of his wife as an actress for whom to devise
such characters. Moliere's best woman--Celimene, in _Le Misanthrope_--was
created for Mlle. Moliere at the height of her career, and is endowed with
all her physical and mental traits.

The reason why so many of the Queen Anne dramatists in England wrote
comedies setting forth a dandified and foppish gentleman is that Colley
Cibber, the foremost actor of the time, could play the fop better than he
could play anything else. The reason why there is no love scene between
Charles Surface and Maria in _The School for Scandal_ is that Sheridan knew
that the actor and the actress who were cast for these respective roles
were incapable of making love gracefully upon the stage. The reason why
Victor Hugo's _Cromwell_ overleaped itself in composition and became
impossible for purposes of stage production is that Talma, for whom the
character of Cromwell was designed, died before the piece was finished, and
Hugo, despairing of having the part adequately acted, completed the play
for the closet instead of for the stage. But it is unnecessary to cull from
the past further instances of the direct dependence of the dramatist upon
his actors. We have only to look about us at the present day to see the
same influence at work.

For example, the career of one of the very best endowed theatrical
composers of the nineteenth century, the late Victorien Sardou, has been
molded and restricted for all time by the talents of a single star
performer, Mme. Sarah Bernhardt. Under the influence of Eugene Scribe,
Sardou began his career at the Theatre Francais with a wide range of
well-made plays, varying in scope from the social satire of _Nos Intimes_
and the farcical intrigue of _Les Pattes de Mouche_ (known to us in English
as _The Scrap of Paper_) to the tremendous historic panorama of _Patrie_.
When Sarah Bernhardt left the Comedie Francaise, Sardou followed in her
footsteps, and afterwards devoted most of his energy to preparing a series
of melodramas to serve successively as vehicles for her. Now, Sarah
Bernhardt is an actress of marked abilities, and limitations likewise
marked. In sheer perfection of technique she surpasses all performers of
her time. She is the acme of histrionic dexterity; all that she does upon
the stage is, in sheer effectiveness, superb. But in her work she has no
soul; she lacks the sensitive sweet lure of Duse, the serene and starlit
poetry of Modjeska. Three things she does supremely well. She can be
seductive, with a cooing voice; she can be vindictive, with a cawing voice;
and, voiceless, she can die. Hence the formula of Sardou's melodramas.

His heroines are almost always Sarah Bernhardts,--luring, tremendous,
doomed to die. Fedora, Gismonda, La Tosca, Zoraya, are but a single woman
who transmigrates from play to play. We find her in different countries and
in different times; but she always lures and fascinates a man, storms
against insuperable circumstance, coos and caws, and in the outcome dies.
One of Sardou's latest efforts, _La Sorciere_, presents the dry bones of
the formula without the flesh and blood of life. Zoraya appears first
shimmering in moonlight upon the hills of Spain,--dovelike in voice,
serpentining in seductiveness. Next, she is allowed to hypnotise the
audience while she is hypnotising the daughter of the governor. She is
loved and she is lost. She curses the high tribunal of the Inquisition,--a
dove no longer now. And she dies upon cathedral steps, to organ music. _The
Sorceress_ is but a lifeless piece of mechanism; and when it was performed
in English by Mrs. Patrick Campbell, it failed to lure or to thrill. But
Sarah Bernhardt, because as an actress she _is_ Zoraya, contrived to lift
it into life. Justly we may say that, in a certain sense, this is Sarah
Bernhardt's drama instead of Victorien Sardou's. With her, it is a play;
without her, it is nothing but a formula. The young author of _Patrie_
promised better things than this. Had he chosen, he might have climbed to
nobler heights. But he chose instead to write, year after year, a vehicle
for the Muse of Melodrama, and sold his laurel crown for gate-receipts.

If Sardou suffered through playing the sedulous ape to a histrionic artist,
it is no less true that the same practice has been advantageous to M.
Edmond Rostand. M. Rostand has shrewdly written for the greatest comedian
of the recent generation; and Constant Coquelin was the making of him as a
dramatist. The poet's early pieces, like _Les Romanesques_, disclosed him
as a master of preciosity, exquisitely lyrical, but lacking in the sterner
stuff of drama. He seemed a new de Banville--dainty, dallying, and deft--a
writer of witty and pretty verses--nothing more. Then it fell to his lot to
devise an acting part for Coquelin, which in the compass of a single play
should allow that great performer to sweep through the whole wide range of
his varied and versatile accomplishment. With the figure of Coquelin before
him, M. Rostand set earnestly to work. The result of his endeavor was the
character of Cyrano de Bergerac, which is considered by many critics the
richest acting part, save Hamlet, in the history of the theatre.

_L'Aiglon_ was also devised under the immediate influence of the same
actor. The genesis of this latter play is, I think, of peculiar interest to
students of the drama; and I shall therefore relate it at some length. The
facts were told by M. Coquelin himself to his friend Professor Brander
Matthews, who has kindly permitted me to state them in this place. One
evening, after the extraordinary success of _Cyrano_, M. Rostand met
Coquelin at the Porte St. Martin and said, "You know, Coq, this is not the
last part I want to write for you. Can't you give me an idea to get me
started--an idea for another character?" The actor thought for a moment,
and then answered, "I've always wanted to play a _vieux grognard du premier
empire--un grenadier a grandes moustaches_."... A grumpy grenadier of
Napoleon's army--a grenadier with sweeping moustaches--with this cue the
dramatist set to work and gradually imagined the character of Flambeau. He
soon saw that if the great Napoleon were to appear in the play he would
dominate the action and steal the centre of the stage from the
soldier-hero. He therefore decided to set the story after the Emperor's
death, in the time of the weak and vacillating Duc de Reichstadt. Flambeau,
who had served the eagle, could now transfer his allegiance to the eaglet,
and stand dominant with the memory of battles that had been. But after the
dramatist had been at work upon the play for some time, he encountered the
old difficulty in a new guise. At last he came in despair to Coquelin and
said, "It isn't your play, Coq; it can't be; the young duke is running away
with it, and I can't stop him; Flambeau is but a secondary figure after
all. What shall I do?" And Coquelin, who understood him, answered, "Take it
to Sarah; she has just played Hamlet, and wants to do another boy." So M.
Rostand "took it to Sarah," and finished up the duke with her in view,
while in the background the figure of Flambeau scowled upon him over
_grandes moustaches_--a true _grognard_ indeed! Thus it happened that
Coquelin never played the part of Flambeau until he came to New York with
Mme. Sarah Bernhardt in the fall of 1900; and the grenadier conceived in
the Porte St. Martin first saw the footlights in the Garden Theatre.

But the contemporary English-speaking stage furnishes examples just as
striking of the influence of the actor on the dramatist. Sir Arthur Wing
Pinero's greatest heroine, Paula Tanqueray, wore from her inception the
physical aspect of Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Many of the most effective dramas
of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones have been built around the personality of Sir
Charles Wyndham. The Wyndham part in Mr. Jones's plays is always a
gentleman of the world, who understands life because he has lived it, and
is "wise with the quiet memory of old pain." He is moral because he knows
the futility of immorality. He is lonely, lovable, dignified, reliable, and
sound. By serene and unobtrusive understanding he straightens out the
difficulties in which the other people of the play have wilfully become
entangled. He shows them the error of their follies, preaches a
worldly-wise little sermon to each one, and sends them back to their true
places in life, sadder and wiser men and women. In order to give Sir
Charles Wyndham an opportunity to display all phases of his experienced
gentility in such a character as this, Mr. Jones has repeated the part in
drama after drama. Many of the greatest characters of the theatre have been
so essentially imbued with the physical and mental personality of the
actors who created them that they have died with their performers and been
lost forever after from the world of art. In this regard we think at once
of Rip Van Winkle. The little play that Mr. Jefferson, with the aid of Dion
Boucicault, fashioned out of Washington Irving's story is scarcely worth
the reading; and if, a hundred years from now, any student of the drama
happens to look it over, he may wonder in vain why it was so beloved, for
many, many years, by all America; and there will come no answer, since the
actor's art will then be only a tale that is told. So Beau Brummel died
with Mr. Mansfield; and if our children, who never saw his superb
performance, chance in future years to read the lines of Mr. Fitch's play,
they will hardly believe us when we tell them that the character of Brummel
once was great. With such current instances before us, it ought not to be
so difficult as many university professors find it to understand the vogue
of certain plays of the Elizabethan and Restoration eras which seem to us
now, in the reading, lifeless things. When we study the mad dramas of Nat
Lee, we should remember Betterton; and properly to appreciate Thomas Otway,
we must imagine the aspect and the voice of Elizabeth Barry.

It may truthfully be said that Mrs. Barry created Otway, both as dramatist
and poet; for _The Orphan_ and _Venice Preserved_, the two most pathetic
plays in English, would never have been written but for her. It is often
thus within the power of an actor to create a dramatist; and his surest
means of immortality is to inspire the composition of plays which may
survive his own demise. After Duse is dead, poets may read _La Citta
Morta_, and imagine her. The memory of Coquelin is, in this way, likely to
live longer than that of Talma. We can merely guess at Talma's art, because
the plays in which he acted are unreadable to-day. But if M. Rostand's
_Cyrano_ is read a hundred years from now, it will be possible for students
of it to imagine in detail the salient features of the art of Coquelin. It
will be evident to them that the actor made love luringly and died
effectively, that he was capable of lyric reading and staccato gasconade,
that he had a burly humor and that touch of sentiment that trembles into
tears. Similarly we know to-day, from the fact that Shakespeare played the
Ghost in _Hamlet_, that he must have had a voice that was full and resonant
and deep. So from reading the plays of Moliere we can imagine the robust
figure of Magdeleine Bejart, the grace of La Grange, the pretty petulance
of the flighty fair Armande.

Some sense of this must have been in the mind of Sir Henry Irving when he
strove industriously to create a dramatist who might survive him and
immortalise his memory. The facile, uncreative Wills was granted many
chances, and in _Charles I_ lost an opportunity to make a lasting drama.
Lord Tennyson came near the mark in _Becket_; but this play, like those of
Wills, has not proved sturdy enough to survive the actor who inspired it.
For all his striving, Sir Henry left no dramatist as a monument to his art.




IV

STAGE CONVENTIONS IN MODERN TIMES


I

In 1581 Sir Philip Sidney praised the tragedy of _Gorboduc_, which he had
seen acted by the gentlemen of the Inner Temple, because it was "full of
stately speeches and well-sounding phrases." A few years later the young
poet, Christopher Marlowe, promised the audience of his initial tragedy
that they should "hear the Scythian Tamburlaine threatening the world with
high astounding terms." These two statements are indicative of the tenor of
Elizabethan plays. _Gorboduc_, to be sure, was a ponderous piece, made
according to the pseudo-classical fashion that soon went out of favor;
while _Tamburlaine the Great_ was triumphant with the drums and tramplings
of romance. The two plays were diametrically opposed in method; but they
had this in common: each was full of stately speeches and of high
astounding terms.

Nearly a century later, in 1670, John Dryden added to the second part of
his _Conquest of Granada_ an epilogue in which he criticised adversely the
dramatists of the elder age. Speaking of Ben Jonson and his contemporaries,
he said:

    But were they now to write, when critics weigh
    Each line, and every word, throughout a play,
    None of them, no, not Jonson in his height,
    Could pass without allowing grains for weight.

           *       *       *       *       *

    Wit's now arrived to a more high degree;
    Our native language more refined and free:
    Our ladies and our men now speak more wit
    In conversation than those poets writ.

This criticism was characteristic of a new era that was dawning in the
English drama, during which a playwright could hope for no greater glory
than to be praised for the brilliancy of his dialogue or the smartness of
his repartee.

At the present day, if you ask the average theatre-goer about the merits of
the play that he has lately witnessed, he will praise it not for its
stately speeches nor its clever repartee, but because its presentation was
"so natural." He will tell you that _A Woman's Way_ gave an apt and
admirable reproduction of contemporary manners in New York; he will mention
the make of the automobile that went chug-chugging off the stage at the
second curtain-fall of _Man and Superman_, or he will assure you that
_Lincoln_ made him feel the very presence of the martyred President his
father actually saw.

These different classes of comments give evidence of three distinct steps
in the evolution of the English drama. During the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries it was essentially a Drama of Rhetoric; throughout the eighteenth
century it was mainly a Drama of Conversation; and during the nineteenth
century it has grown to be a Drama of Illusion. During the first period it
aimed at poetic power, during the second at brilliancy of dialogue, and
during the third at naturalness of representment. Throughout the last three
centuries, the gradual perfecting of the physical conditions of the theatre
has made possible the Drama of Illusion; the conventions of the actor's art
have undergone a similar progression; and at the same time the change in
the taste of the theatre-going public has made a well-sustained illusion a
condition precedent to success upon the modern stage.


II

Mr. Ben Greet, in his sceneless performances of Shakespeare during recent
seasons, has reminded us of some of the main physical features of the
Elizabethan theatre; and the others are so generally known that we need
review them only briefly. A typical Elizabethan play-house, like the Globe
or the Blackfriars, stood roofless in the air. The stage was a projecting
platform surrounded on three sides by the groundlings who had paid
threepence for the privilege of standing in the pit; and around this pit,
or yard, were built boxes for the city madams and the gentlemen of means.
Often the side edges of the stage itself were lined with young gallants
perched on three-legged stools, who twitted the actors when they pleased or
disturbed the play by boisterous interruptions. At the back of the platform
was hung an arras through which the players entered, and which could be
drawn aside to discover a set piece of stage furnishing, like a bed or a
banqueting board. Above the arras was built an upper room, which might
serve as Juliet's balcony or as the speaking-place of a commandant supposed
to stand upon a city's walls. No scenery was employed, except some
elaborate properties that might be drawn on and off before the eyes of the
spectators, like the trellised arbor in _The Spanish Tragedy_ on which the
young Horatio was hanged. Since there was no curtain, the actors could
never be "discovered" on the stage and were forced to make an exit at the
end of every scene. Plays were produced by daylight, under the sun of
afternoon; and the stage could not be darkened, even when it was necessary
for Macbeth to perpetrate a midnight murder.

In order to succeed in a theatre such as this, the drama was necessarily
forced to be a Drama of Rhetoric. From 1576, when James Burbage built the
first play-house in London, until 1642, when the theatres were formally
closed by act of Parliament, the drama dealt with stately speeches and with
high astounding terms. It was played upon a platform, and had to appeal
more to the ears of the audience than to their eyes. Spectacular elements
it had to some extent,--gaudy, though inappropriate, costumes, and stately
processions across the stage; but no careful imitation of the actual facts
of life, no illusion of reality in the representment, could possibly be
effected.

The absence of scenery forced the dramatists of the time to introduce
poetic passages to suggest the atmosphere of their scenes. Lorenzo and
Jessica opened the last act of _The Merchant of Venice_ with a pretty
dialogue descriptive of a moonlit evening, and the banished duke in _As You
Like It_ discoursed at length upon the pleasures of life in the forest. The
stage could not be darkened in _Macbeth_; but the hero was made to say,
"Light thickens, and the crew makes wing to the rooky wood." Sometimes,
when the scene was supposed to change from one country to another, a chorus
was sent forth, as in _Henry V_, to ask the audience frankly to transfer
their imaginations overseas.

The fact that the stage was surrounded on three sides by standing
spectators forced the actor to emulate the platform orator. Set speeches
were introduced bodily into the text of a play, although they impeded the
progress of the action. Jacques reined a comedy to a standstill while he
discoursed at length upon the seven ages of man. Soliloquies were common,
and formal dialogues prevailed. By convention, all characters, regardless
of their education or station in life, were considered capable of talking
not only verse, but poetry. The untutored sea-captain in _Twelfth Night_
spoke of "Arion on the dolphin's back," and in another play the sapheads
Salanio and Salarino discoursed most eloquent music.

In New York at the present day a singular similarity to Elizabethan
conventions may be noted in the Chinese theatre in Doyer Street. Here we
have a platform drama in all its nakedness. There is no curtain, and the
stage is bare of scenery. The musicians sit upon the stage, and the actors
enter through an arras at the right or at the left of the rear wall. The
costumes are elaborate, and the players frequently parade around the stage.
Long speeches and set colloquies are common. Only the crudest properties
are used. Two candlesticks and a small image on a table are taken to
represent a temple; a man seated upon an overturned chair is supposed to be
a general on a charger; and when a character is obliged to cross a river,
he walks the length of the stage trailing an oar behind him. The audience
does not seem to notice that these conventions are unnatural,--any more
than did the 'prentices in the pit, when Burbage, with the sun shining full
upon his face, announced that it was then the very witching time of night.

The Drama of Rhetoric which was demanded by the physical conditions of the
Elizabethan stage survived the Restoration and did not die until the day of
Addison's _Cato_. Imitations of it have even struggled on the stage within
the nineteenth century. The _Virginius_ of Sheridan Knowles and the
_Richelieu_ of Bulwer-Lytton were both framed upon the Elizabethan model,
and carried the platform drama down to recent times. But though traces of
the platform drama still exist, the period of its pristine vigor terminated
with the closing of the theatres in 1642.

When the drama was resumed in 1660, the physical conditions of the theatre
underwent a material change. At this time two great play-houses were
chartered,--the King's Theatre in Drury Lane, and the Duke of York's
Theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Thomas Killigrew, the manager of the
Theatre Royal, was the first to introduce women actors on the stage; and
parts which formerly had been played by boys were soon performed by
actresses as moving as the great Elizabeth Barry. To William Davenant, the
manager of the Duke's Theatre, belongs the credit for a still more
important innovation. During the eighteen years when public dramatic
performances had been prohibited, he had secured permission now and then to
produce an opera upon a private stage. For these musical entertainments he
took as a model the masques, or court celebrations, which had been the most
popular form of private theatricals in the days of Elizabeth and James. It
is well known that masques had been produced with elaborate scenic
appointments even at a time when the professional stage was bare of
scenery. While the theatres had been closed, Davenant had used scenery in
his operas, to keep them out of the forbidden pale of professional plays;
and now in 1660, when he came forth as a regular theatre manager, he
continued to use scenery, and introduced it into the production of comedies
and tragedies.

But the use of scenery was not the only innovation that carried the
Restoration theatre far beyond its Elizabethan prototype. Play-houses were
now regularly roofed; and the stage was artificially lighted by lamps. The
shifting of scenery demanded the use of a curtain; and it became possible
for the first time to disclose actors upon the stage and to leave them
grouped before the audience at the end of an act.

All of these improvements rendered possible a closer approach to
naturalness of representment than had ever been made before. Palaces and
flowered meads, drawing-rooms and city streets, could now be suggested by
actual scenery instead of by descriptive passages in the text. Costumes
became appropriate, and properties were more nicely chosen to give a flavor
of actuality to the scene. At the same time the platform receded, and the
groundlings no longer stood about it on the sides. The gallants were
banished from the stage, and the greater part of the audience was gathered
directly in front of the actors. Some traces of the former platform system,
however, still remained. In front of the curtain, the stage projected into
a wide "apron," as it was called, lined on either side by boxes filled with
spectators; and the house was so inadequately lighted that almost all the
acting had to be done within the focus of the footlights. After the curtain
rose, the actors advanced into this projecting "apron" and performed the
main business of the act beyond the range of scenery and furniture.

With the "apron" stage arose a more natural form of play than had been
produced upon the Elizabethan platform. The Drama of Rhetoric was soon
supplanted by the Drama of Conversation. Oratory gradually disappeared, set
speeches were abolished, and poetic lines gave place to rapid repartee.
The comedy of conversation that began with Sir George Etherege in 1664
reached its culmination with Sheridan in a little more than a hundred
years; and during this century the drama became more and more natural as
the years progressed. Even in the days of Sheridan, however, the
conventions of the theatre were still essentially unreal. An actor entered
a room by walking through the walls; stage furniture was formally arranged;
and each act terminated with the players grouped in a semicircle and bowing
obeisance to applause. The lines in Sheridan's comedies were
indiscriminately witty. Every character, regardless of his birth or
education, had his clever things to say; and the servant bandied epigrams
with the lord.

It was not until the nineteenth century was well under way that a decided
improvement was made in the physical conditions of the theatre. When Madame
Vestris assumed the management of the Olympic Theatre in London in 1831 she
inaugurated a new era in stage conventions. Her husband, Charles James
Mathews, says in his autobiography, "There was introduced that reform in
all theatrical matters which has since been adopted in every theatre in the
kingdom. Drawing-rooms were fitted up like drawing-rooms and furnished with
care and taste. Two chairs no longer indicated that two persons were to be
seated, the two chairs being removed indicating that the two persons were
_not_ to be seated." At the first performance of Boucicault's _London
Assurance_, in 1841, a further innovation was marked by the introduction of
the "box set," as it is called. Instead of representing an interior scene
by a series of wings set one behind the other, the scene-shifters now built
the side walls of a room solidly from front to rear; and the actors were
made to enter, not by walking through the wings, but by opening real doors
that turned upon their hinges. At the same time, instead of the formal
stage furniture of former years, appointments were introduced that were
carefully designed to suit the actual conditions of the room to be
portrayed. From this time stage-settings advanced rapidly to greater and
greater degrees of naturalness. Acting, however, was still largely
conventional; for the "apron" stage survived, with its semicircle of
footlights, and every important piece of stage business had to be done
within their focus.

The greatest revolution of modern times in stage conventions owes its
origin directly to the invention of the electric light. Now that it is
possible to make every corner of the stage clearly visible from all parts
of the house, it is no longer necessary for an actor to hold the centre of
the scene. The introduction of electric lights abolished the necessity of
the "apron" stage and made possible the picture-frame proscenium; and the
removal of the "apron" struck the death-blow to the Drama of Conversation
and led directly to the Drama of Illusion. As soon as the picture-frame
proscenium was adopted, the audience demanded a picture to be placed within
the frame. The stage became essentially pictorial, and began to be used to
represent faithfully the actual facts of life. Now for the first time was
realised the graphic value of the curtain-fall. It became customary to ring
the curtain down upon a picture that summed up in itself the entire
dramatic accomplishment of the scene, instead of terminating an act with a
general exodus of the performers or with a semicircle of bows.

The most extraordinary advances in natural stage-settings have been made
within the memory of the present generation of theatre-goers. Sunsets and
starlit skies, moonlight rippling over moving waves, fires that really
burn, windows of actual glass, fountains plashing with real water,--all of
the naturalistic devices of the latter-day Drama of Illusion have been
developed in the last few decades.


III

Acting in Elizabethan days was a presentative, rather than a
representative, art. The actor was always an actor, and absorbed his part
in himself rather than submerging himself in his part. Magnificence rather
than appropriateness of costume was desired by the platform actor of the
Drama of Rhetoric. He wished all eyes to be directed to himself, and never
desired to be considered merely as a component part of a great stage
picture. Actors at that time were often robustious, periwig-pated fellows
who sawed the air with their hands and tore a passion to tatters.

With the rapid development of the theatre after the Restoration, came a
movement toward greater naturalness in the conventions of acting. The
player in the "apron" of a Queen Anne stage resembled a drawing-room
entertainer rather than a platform orator. Fine gentlemen and ladies in the
boxes that lined the "apron" applauded the witticisms of Sir Courtly Nice
or Sir Fopling Flutter, as if they themselves were partakers in the
conversation. Actors like Colley Cibber acquired a great reputation for
their natural representment of the manners of polite society.

The Drama of Conversation, therefore, was acted with more natural
conventions than the Drama of Rhetoric that had preceded it. And yet we
find that Charles Lamb, in criticising the old actors of the eighteenth
century, praises them for the essential unreality of their presentations.
They carried the spectator far away from the actual world to a region where
society was more splendid and careless and brilliant and lax. They did not
aim to produce an illusion of naturalness as our actors do to-day. If we
compare the old-style acting of _The School for Scandal_, that is described
in the essays of Lamb, with the modern performance of _Sweet Kitty
Bellairs_, which dealt with the same period, we shall see at once how
modern acting has grown less presentative and more representative than it
was in the days of Bensley and Bannister.

The Drama of Rhetoric and the Drama of Conversation both struggled on in
sporadic survivals throughout the first half of the nineteenth century; and
during this period the methods of the platform actor and the parlor actor
were consistently maintained. The actor of the "old school," as we are now
fond of calling him, was compelled by the physical conditions of the
theatre to keep within the focus of the footlights, and therefore in close
proximity to the spectators. He could take the audience into his confidence
more readily than can the player of the present. Sometimes even now an
actor steps out of the picture in order to talk intimately with the
audience; but usually at the present day it is customary for actors to seem
totally oblivious of the spectators and remain always within the picture on
the stage. The actor of the "old school" was fond of the long speeches of
the Drama of Rhetoric and the brilliant lines of the Drama of
Conversation. It may be remembered that the old actor in _Trelawny of the
Wells_ condemned a new-style play because it didn't contain "what you could
really call a speech." He wanted what the French term a _tirade_ to
exercise his lungs and split the ears of the groundlings.

But with the growth of the Drama of Illusion, produced within a
picture-frame proscenium, actors have come to recognise and apply the
maxim, "Actions speak louder than words." What an actor _does_ is now
considered more important than what he _says_. The most powerful moment in
Mrs. Fiske's performance of _Hedda Gabler_ was the minute or more in the
last act when she remained absolutely silent. This moment was worth a dozen
of the "real speeches" that were sighed for by the old actor in _Trelawny_.
Few of those who saw James A. Herne in _Shore Acres_ will forget the
impressive close of the play. The stage represented the living-room of a
homely country-house, with a large open fireplace at one side. The night
grew late; and one by one the characters retired, until at last old
Nathaniel Berry was left alone upon the stage. Slowly he locked the doors
and closed the windows and put all things in order for the night. Then he
took a candle and went upstairs to bed, leaving the room empty and dark
except for the flaming of the fire on the hearth.

Great progress toward naturalness in contemporary acting has been
occasioned by the disappearance of the soliloquy and the aside. The
relinquishment of these two time-honored expedients has been accomplished
only in most recent times. Sir Arthur Pinero's early farces abounded with
asides and even lengthy soliloquies; but his later plays are made entirely
without them. The present prevalence of objection to both is due largely to
the strong influence of Ibsen's rigid dramaturgic structure. Dramatists
have become convinced that the soliloquy and the aside are lazy expedients,
and that with a little extra labor the most complicated plot may be
developed without resort to either. The passing of the aside has had an
important effect on naturalness of acting. In speaking a line audible to
the audience but supposed to be unheard by the other characters on the
stage, an actor was forced by the very nature of the speech to violate the
illusion of the stage picture by stepping out of the frame, as it were, in
order to take the audience into his confidence. Not until the aside was
abolished did it become possible for an actor to follow the modern rule of
seeming totally oblivious of his audience.

There is less logical objection to the soliloquy, however; and I am
inclined to think that the present avoidance of it is overstrained. Stage
soliloquies are of two kinds, which we may call for convenience the
constructive and the reflective. By a constructive soliloquy we mean one
introduced arbitrarily to explain the progress of the plot, like that at
the beginning of the last act of _Lady Windermere's Fan_, in which the
heroine frankly tells the audience what she has been thinking and doing
between the acts. By a reflective soliloquy we mean one like those of
_Hamlet_, in which the audience is given merely a revelation of a train of
personal thought or emotion, and in which the dramatist makes no
utilitarian reference to the structure of the plot. The constructive
soliloquy is as undesirable as the aside, because it forces the actor out
of the stage picture in exactly the same way; but a good actor may easily
read a reflective soliloquy without seeming in the least unnatural.

Modern methods of lighting, as we have seen, have carried the actor away
from the centre of the stage, so that now important business is often done
far from the footlights. This tendency has led to further innovations.
Actors now frequently turn their backs to the audience,--a thing unheard of
before the advent of the Drama of Illusion; and frequently, also, they do
their most effective work at moments when they have no lines to speak.

But the present tendency toward naturalness of representment has, to some
extent, exaggerated the importance of stage-management even at the expense
of acting. A successful play by Clyde Fitch usually owed its popularity,
not so much to the excellence of the acting as to the careful attention of
the author to the most minute details of the stage picture. Fitch could
make an act out of a wedding or a funeral, a Cook's tour or a steamer deck,
a bed or an automobile. The extraordinary cleverness and accuracy of his
observation of those petty details that make life a thing of shreds and
patches were all that distinguished his method from that of the
melodramatist who makes a scene out of a buzz-saw or a waterfall, a
locomotive or a ferryboat. Oftentimes the contemporary playwright follows
the method suggested by Mr. Crummles to Nicholas Nickleby, and builds his
piece around "a real pump and two washing-tubs." At a certain moment in the
second act of _The Girl of the Golden West_ the wind-storm was the real
actor in the scene, and the hero and the heroine were but mutes or audience
to the act.

This emphasis of stage illusion is fraught with certain dangers to the art
of acting. In the modern picture-play the lines themselves are often of
such minor importance that the success or failure of the piece depends
little on the reading of the words. Many young actors, therefore, cannot
get that rigid training in the art of reading which could be secured in the
stock companies of the generation past. Poor reading is the one great
weakness of contemporary acting. I can think of only one actor on the
American stage to-day whose reading of both prose and verse is always
faultless. I mean Mr. Otis Skinner, who secured his early training playing
minor parts with actors of the "old school." It has become possible, under
present conditions, for young actresses ignorant of elocution and unskilled
in the first principles of impersonation to be exploited as stars merely
because of their personal charm. A beautiful young woman, whether she can
act or not, may easily appear "natural" in a society play, especially
written around her; and the public, lured by a pair of eyes or a head of
hair, is made as blind as love to the absence of histrionic art. When the
great Madame Modjeska last appeared at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, presenting
some of the most wonderful plays that the world has ever seen, she played
to empty houses, while the New York public was flocking to see some new
slip of a girl seem "natural" on the stage and appear pretty behind the
picture-frame proscenium.


IV

A comparison of an Elizabethan audience with a theatre-full of people at
the present day is, in many ways, disadvantageous to the latter. With our
forefathers, theatre-going was an exercise in the lovely art of
"making-believe." They were told that it was night and they forgot the
sunlight; their imaginations swept around England to the trampling of
armored kings, or were whisked away at a word to that Bohemia which is a
desert country by the sea; and while they looked upon a platform of bare
boards, they breathed the sweet air of the Forest of Arden. They needed no
scenery by Alma-Tadema to make them think themselves in Rome. "What
country, friends, is this?", asked Viola. "This is Illyria, lady." And the
boys in the pit scented the keen, salt air and heard the surges crashing on
the rocky shore.

Nowadays elaborateness of stage illusion has made spoiled children of us
all. We must have a doll with real hair, or else we cannot play at being
mothers. We have been pampered with mechanical toys until we have lost the
art of playing without them. Where have our imaginations gone, that we must
have real rain upon the stage? Shall we clamor for real snow before long,
that must be kept in cold storage against the spring season? A longing for
concreteness has befogged our fantasy. Even so excellent an actor as Mr.
Forbes-Robertson cannot read the great speech beginning, "Look here, upon
this picture and on this," in which Hamlet obviously refers to two
imaginary portraits in his mind's eye, without pointing successively to two
absurd caricatures that are daubed upon the scenery.

The theatre has grown older since the days when Burbage recited that same
speech upon a bare platform; but I am not entirely sure that it has grown
wiser. We theatre-goers have come to manhood and have put away childish
things; but there was a sweetness about the naivete of childhood that we
can never quite regain. No longer do we dream ourselves in a garden of
springtide blossoms; we can only look upon canvas trees and paper flowers.
No longer are we charmed away to that imagined spot where journeys end in
lovers' meeting; we can only look upon love in a parlor and notice that the
furniture is natural. No longer do we harken to the rich resonance of the
Drama of Rhetoric; no longer do our minds kindle with the brilliant
epigrams of the Drama of Conversation. Good reading is disappearing from
the stage; and in its place we are left the devices of the stage-carpenter.

It would be absurd to deny that modern stagecraft has made possible in the
theatre many excellent effects that were not dreamt of in the philosophy of
Shakespeare. Sir Arthur Pinero's plays are better made than those of the
Elizabethans, and in a narrow sense hold the mirror up to nature more
successfully than theirs. But our latter-day fondness for natural
representment has afflicted us with one tendency that the Elizabethans were
luckily without. In our desire to imitate the actual facts of life, we
sometimes become near-sighted and forget the larger truths that underlie
them. We give our plays a definite date by founding them on passing
fashions; we make them of an age, not for all time. We discuss contemporary
social problems on the stage instead of the eternal verities lodged deep in
the general heart of man. We have outgrown our pristine simplicity, but we
have not yet arrived at the age of wisdom. Perhaps when playgoers have
progressed for another century or two, they may discard some of the
trappings and the suits of our present drama, and become again like little
children.




V

ECONOMY OF ATTENTION IN THEATRICAL PERFORMANCES


I

According to the late Herbert Spencer, the sole source of force in writing
is an ability to economise the attention of the reader. The word should be
a window to the thought and should transmit it as transparently as
possible. He says, toward the beginning of his _Philosophy of Style_:

      A reader or listener has at each moment but a limited amount of
      mental power available. To recognise and interpret the symbols
      presented to him requires a part of this power; to arrange and
      combine the images suggested requires a further part; and only
      that part which remains can be used for realising the thought
      conveyed. Hence, the more time and attention it takes to receive
      and understand each sentence, the less time and attention can be
      given to the contained idea; and the less vividly will that idea
      be conveyed.

Spencer drew his illustrations of this principle mainly from the literature
of the library; but its application is even more important in the
literature of the stage. So many and so diverse are the elements of a
theatrical performance that, unless the attention of the spectator is
attracted at every moment to the main dramatic purpose of the scene, he
will sit wide-eyed, like a child at a three-ring circus, with his mind
fluttering from point to point and his interest dispersed and scattered. A
perfect theat