II

Such being in general the theme and the aspect of the modern social drama, we may next consider briefly how it came into being. Like a great deal else in contemporary art, it could not possibly have been engendered before that tumultuous upheaval of human thought which produced in history the French Revolution and in literature the resurgence of romance. During the eighteenth century, both in England and in France, society was considered paramount and the individual subservient. Each man was believed to exist for the sake of the social mechanism of which he formed a part: the chain was the thing,—not its weakest, nor even its strongest, link. But the French Revolution and the cognate romantic revival in the arts unsettled this conservative belief, and made men wonder whether society, after all, did not exist solely for the sake of the individual. Early eighteenth century literature is a polite and polished exaltation of society, and preaches that the majority is always right; early nineteenth century literature is a clamorous paean of individualism, and preaches that the majority is always wrong. Considering the modern social drama as a phase of history, we see at once that it is based upon the struggle between these two beliefs. It exhibits always a conflict between the individual revolutionist and the communal conservatives, and expresses the growing tendency of these opposing forces to adjust themselves to equilibrium.

Thus considered, the modern social drama is seen to be inherently and necessarily the product and the expression of the nineteenth century. Through no other type of drama could the present age reveal itself so fully; for the relation between the one and the many, in politics, in religion, in the daily round of life itself, has been, and still remains, the most important topic of our times. The paramount human problem of the last hundred years has been the great, as yet unanswered, question whether the strongest man on earth is he who stands most alone or he who subserves the greatest good of the greatest number. Upon the struggle implicit in this question the modern drama necessarily is based, since the dramatist, in any period when the theatre is really alive, is obliged to tell the people in the audience what they have themselves been thinking. Those critics, therefore, have no ground to stand on who belittle the importance of the modern social drama and regard it as an arbitrary phase of art devised, for business reasons merely, by a handful of clever playwrights.

Although the third and modern type of tragedy has grown to be almost exclusively the property of realistic writers, it is interesting to recall that it was first introduced into the theatre of the world by the king of the romantics. It was Victor Hugo's Hernani, produced in 1830, which first exhibited a dramatic struggle between an individual and society at large. The hero is a bandit and an outlaw, and he is doomed to failure because of the superior power of organised society arrayed against him. So many minor victories were won at that famous premiere of Hernani that even Hugo's followers were too excited to perceive that he had given the drama a new subject and the theatre a new theme; but this epoch-making fact may now be clearly recognised in retrospect. Hernani, and all of Victor Hugo's subsequent dramas, dealt, however, with distant times and lands; and it was left to another great romantic, Alexander Dumas pere, to be the first to give the modern theme a modern setting. In his best play, Antony, which exhibits the struggle of a bastard to establish himself in the so-called best society, Dumas brought the discussion home to his own country and his own period. In the hands of that extremely gifted dramatist, Emile Augier, the new type of serious drama passed over into the possession of the realists, and so downward to the latter-day realistic dramatists of France and England, Germany and Scandinavia. The supreme and the most typical creative figure of the entire period is, of course, the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen, who—such is the irony of progress—despised the romantics of 1830, and frequently expressed a bitter scorn for those predecessors who discovered and developed the type of tragedy which he perfected.

III

We are now prepared to inquire more closely into the specific sort of subject which the modern social drama imposes on the dramatist. The existence of any struggle between an individual and the conventions of society presupposes that the individual is unconventional. If the hero were in accord with society, there would be no conflict of contending forces: he must therefore be one of society's outlaws, or else there can be no play. In modern times, therefore, the serious drama has been forced to select as its leading figures men and women outcast and condemned by conventional society. It has dealt with courtesans (La Dame Aux Camelias), demi-mondaines (Le Demi-Monde), erring wives (Frou-Frou), women with a past (The Second Mrs. Tanqueray), free lovers (The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith), bastards (Antony; Le Fils Naturel), ex-convicts (John Gabriel Borkman), people with ideas in advance of their time (Ghosts), and a host of other characters that are usually considered dangerous to society. In order that the dramatic struggle might be tense, the dramatists have been forced to strengthen the cases of their characters so as to suggest that, perhaps, in the special situations cited, the outcasts were right and society was wrong. Of course it would be impossible to base a play upon the thesis that, in a given conflict between the individual and society, society was indisputably right and the individual indubitably wrong; because the essential element of struggle would be absent. Our modern dramatists, therefore, have been forced to deal with exceptional outcasts of society,—outcasts with whom the audience might justly sympathise in their conflict with convention. The task of finding such justifiable outcasts has of necessity narrowed the subject-matter of the modern drama. It would be hard, for instance, to make out a good case against society for the robber, the murderer, the anarchist. But it is comparatively easy to make out a good case for a man and a woman involved in some sexual relation which brings upon them the censure of society but which seems in itself its own excuse for being. Our modern serious dramatists have been driven, therefore, in the great majority of cases, to deal almost exclusively with problems of sex.

This necessity has pushed them upon dangerous ground. Man is, after all, a social animal. The necessity of maintaining the solidarity of the family—a necessity (as the late John Fiske luminously pointed out) due to the long period of infancy in man—has forced mankind to adopt certain social laws to regulate the interrelations of men and women. Any strong attempt to subvert these laws is dangerous not only to that tissue of convention called society but also to the development of the human race. And here we find our dramatists forced—first by the spirit of the times, which gives them their theme, and second by the nature of the dramatic art, which demands a special treatment of that theme—to hold a brief for certain men and women who have shuffled off the coil of those very social laws that man has devised, with his best wisdom, for the preservation of his race. And the question naturally follows: Is a drama that does this moral or immoral?

But the philosophical basis for this question is usually not understood at all by those critics who presume to answer the question off-hand in a spasm of polemics. It is interesting, as an evidence of the shallowness of most contemporary dramatic criticism, to read over, in the course of Mr. Shaw's nimble essay on The Quintessence of Ibsenism, the collection which the author has made of the adverse notices of Ghosts which appeared in the London newspapers on the occasion of the first performance of the play in England. Unanimously they commit the fallacy of condemning the piece as immoral because of the subject that it deals with. And, on the other hand, it must be recognised that most of the critical defenses of the same piece, and of other modern works of similar nature, have been based upon the identical fallacy,—that morality or immorality is a question of subject-matter. But either to condemn or to defend the morality of any work of art because of its material alone is merely a waste of words. There is no such thing, per se, as an immoral subject for a play: in the treatment of the subject, and only in the treatment, lies the basis for ethical judgment of the piece. Critics who condemn Ghosts because of its subject-matter might as well condemn Othello because the hero kills his wife—what a suggestion, look you, to carry into our homes! Macbeth is not immoral, though it makes night hideous with murder. The greatest of all Greek dramas, Oedipus King, is in itself sufficient proof that morality is a thing apart from subject-matter; and Shelley's The Cenci is another case in point. The only way in which a play may be immoral is for it to cloud, in the spectator, the consciousness of those invariable laws of life which say to man "Thou shalt not" or "Thou shalt"; and the one thing needful in order that a drama may be moral is that the author shall maintain throughout the piece a sane and truthful insight into the soundness or unsoundness of the relations between his characters. He must know when they are right and know when they are wrong, and must make clear to the audience the reasons for his judgments. He cannot be immoral unless he is untrue. To make us pity his characters when they are vile or love them when they are noxious, to invent excuses for them in situations where they cannot be excused—in a single word, to lie about his characters—this is for the dramatist the one unpardonable sin. Consequently, the only sane course for a critic who wishes to maintain the thesis that Ghosts, or any other modern play, is immoral, is not to hurl mud at it, but to prove by the sound processes of logic that the play tells lies about life; and the only sane way to defend such a piece is not to prate about the "moral lesson" the critic supposes that it teaches, but to prove logically that it tells the truth.

The same test of truthfulness by which we distinguish good workmanship from bad is the only test by which we may conclusively distinguish immoral art from moral. Yet many of the controversial critics never calm down sufficiently to apply this test. Instead of arguing whether or not Ibsen tells the truth about Hedda Gabler, they quarrel with him or defend him for talking about her at all. It is as if zooelogists who had assembled to determine the truth or falsity of some scientific theory concerning the anatomy of a reptile should waste all their time in contending whether or not the reptile was unclean.

And even when they do apply the test of truthfulness, many critics are troubled by a grave misconception that leads them into error. They make the mistake of applying generally to life certain ethical judgments that the dramatist means only to apply particularly to the special people in his play. The danger of this fallacy cannot be too strongly emphasised. It is not the business of the dramatist to formulate general laws of conduct; he leaves that to the social scientist, the ethical philosopher, the religious preacher. His business is merely to tell the truth about certain special characters involved in certain special situations. If the characters and the situations be abnormal, the dramatist must recognise that fact in judging them; and it is not just for the critic to apply to ordinary people in the ordinary situations of life a judgment thus conditioned. The question in La Dame Aux Camelias is not whether the class of women which Marguerite Gautier represents is generally estimable, but whether a particular woman of that class, set in certain special circumstances, was not worthy of sympathy. The question in A Doll's House is not whether any woman should forsake her husband and children when she happens to feel like it, but whether a particular woman, Nora, living under special conditions with a certain kind of husband, Torwald, really did deem herself justified in leaving her doll's home, perhaps forever. The ethics of any play should be determined, not externally, but within the limits of the play itself. And yet our modern social dramatists are persistently misjudged. We hear talk of the moral teaching of Ibsen,—as if, instead of being a maker of plays, he had been a maker of golden rules. But Mr. Shaw came nearer to the truth with his famous paradox that the only golden rule in Ibsen's dramas is that there is no golden rule.

It must, however, be admitted that the dramatists themselves are not entirely guiltless of this current critical misconception. Most of them happen to be realists, and in devising their situations they aim to be narrowly natural as well as broadly true. The result is that the circumstances of their plays have an ordinary look which makes them seem simple transcripts of everyday life instead of special studies of life under peculiar conditions. Consequently the audience, and even the critic, is tempted to judge life in terms of the play instead of judging the play in terms of life. Thus falsely judged, The Wild Duck (to take an emphatic instance) is outrageously immoral, although it must be judged moral by the philosophic critic who questions only whether or not Ibsen told the truth about the particular people involved in its depressing story. The deeper question remains: Was Ibsen justified in writing a play which was true and therefore moral, but which necessarily would have an immoral effect on nine spectators out of every ten, because they would instinctively make a hasty and false generalisation from the exceptional and very particular ethics implicit in the story?

For it must be bravely recognised that any statement of truth which is so framed as to be falsely understood conveys a lie. If the dramatist says quite truly, "This particular leaf is sere and yellow," and if the audience quite falsely understands him to say, "All leaves are sere and yellow," the gigantic lie has illogically been conveyed that the world is ever windy with autumn, that spring is but a lyric dream, and summer an illusion. The modern social drama, even when it is most truthful within its own limits, is by its very nature liable to just this sort of illogical conveyance of a lie. It sets forth a struggle between a radical exception and a conservative rule; and the audience is likely to forget that the exception is merely an exception, and to infer that it is greater than the rule. Such an inference, being untrue, is immoral; and in so far as a dramatist aids and abets it, he must be judged dangerous to the theatre-going public.

Whenever, then, it becomes important to determine whether a new play of the modern social type is moral or immoral, the critic should decide first whether the author tells lies specifically about any of the people in his story, and second, provided that the playwright passes the first test successfully, whether he allures the audience to generalise falsely in regard to life at large from the specific circumstances of his play. These two questions are the only ones that need to be decided. This is the crux of the whole matter. And it has been the purpose of the present chapter merely to establish this one point by historical and philosophic criticism, and thus to clear the ground for subsequent discussion.



OTHER PRINCIPLES OF DRAMATIC CRITICISM



I

THE PUBLIC AND THE DRAMATIST

No other artist is so little appreciated by the public that enjoys his work, or is granted so little studious consideration from the critically minded, as the dramatist. Other artists, like the novelist, the painter, the sculptor, or the actor, appeal directly to the public and the critics; nothing stands between their finished work and the minds that contemplate it. A person reading a novel by Mr. Howells, or looking at a statue by Saint-Gaudens or a picture by Mr. Sargent, may see exactly what the artist has done and what he has not, and may appreciate his work accordingly. But when the dramatist has completed his play, he does not deliver it directly to the public; he delivers it only indirectly, through the medial interpretation of many other artists,—the actor, the stage-director, the scene-painter, and still others of whom the public seldom hears. If any of these other and medial artists fails to convey the message that the dramatist intended, the dramatist will fail of his intention, though the fault is not his own. None of the general public, and few of the critics, will discern what the dramatist had in mind, so completely may his creative thought be clouded by inadequate interpretation.

The dramatist is obviously at the mercy of his actors. His most delicate love scene may be spoiled irrevocably by an actor incapable of profound emotion daintily expressed; his most imaginative creation of a hard and cruel character may be rendered unappreciable by an actor of too persuasive charm. And, on the other hand, the puppets of a dramatist with very little gift for characterisation may sometimes be lifted into life by gifted actors and produce upon the public a greater impression than the characters of a better dramatist less skilfully portrayed. It is, therefore, very difficult to determine whether the dramatist has imagined more or less than the particular semblance of humanity exhibited by the actor on the stage. Othello, as portrayed by Signor Novelli, is a man devoid of dignity and majesty, a creature intensely animal and nervously impulsive; and if we had never read the play, or seen other performances of it, we should probably deny to Shakespeare the credit due for one of his most grand conceptions. On the other hand, when we witness Mr. Warfield's beautiful and truthful performance of The Music Master, we are tempted not to notice that the play itself is faulty in structure, untrue in character, and obnoxiously sentimental in tone. Because Mr. Warfield, by the sheer power of his histrionic genius, has lifted sentimentality into sentiment and conventional theatricism into living truth, we are tempted to give to Mr. Charles Klein the credit for having written a very good play instead of a very bad one.

Only to a slightly less extent is the dramatist at the mercy of his stage-director. Mrs. Rida Johnson Young's silly play called Brown of Harvard was made worth seeing by the genius of Mr. Henry Miller as a producer. By sheer visual imagination in the setting and the handling of the stage, especially in the first act and the last, Mr. Miller contrived to endow the author's shallow fabric with the semblance of reality. On the other hand, Mr. Richard Walton Tully's play, The Rose of the Rancho, was spoiled by the cleverest stage-director of our day. Mr. Tully must, originally, have had a story in his mind; but what that story was could not be guessed from witnessing the play. It was utterly buried under an atmosphere of at least thirty pounds to the square inch, which Mr. Belasco chose to impose upon it. With the stage-director standing thus, for benefit or hindrance, between the author and the audience, how is the public to appreciate what the dramatist himself has, or has not, done?

An occasion is remembered in theatric circles when, at the tensest moment in the first-night presentation of a play, the leading actress, entering down a stairway, tripped and fell sprawling. Thus a moment which the dramatist intended to be hushed and breathless with suspense was made overwhelmingly ridiculous. A cat once caused the failure of a play by appearing unexpectedly upon the stage during the most important scene and walking foolishly about. A dramatist who has spent many months devising a melodrama which is dependent for its effect at certain moments on the way in which the stage is lighted may have his play sent suddenly to failure at any of those moments if the stage-electrician turns the lights incongruously high or low. These instances are merely trivial, but they serve to emphasise the point that so much stands between the dramatist and the audience that it is sometimes difficult even for a careful critic to appreciate exactly what the dramatist intended.

And the general public, at least in present-day America, never makes the effort to distinguish the intention of the dramatist from the interpretation it receives from the actors and (to a less extent) the stage-director. The people who support the theatre see and estimate the work of the interpretative artists only; they do not see in itself and estimate for its own sake the work of the creative artist whose imaginings are being represented well or badly. The public in America goes to see actors; it seldom goes to see a play. If the average theatre-goer has liked a leading actor in one piece, he will go to see that actor in the next piece in which he is advertised to appear. But very, very rarely will he go to see a new play by a certain author merely because he has liked the last play by the same author. Indeed, the chances are that he will not even know that the two plays have been written by the same dramatist. Bronson Howard once told me that he was very sure that not more than one person in ten out of all the people who had seen Shenandoah knew who wrote the play. And I hardly think that a larger proportion of the people who have seen both Mr. Willard in The Professor's Love Story and Miss Barrymore in Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire could tell you, if you should ask them, that the former play was written by the author of the latter. How many people who remember vividly Sir Henry Irving's performance of The Story of Waterloo could tell you who wrote the little piece? If you should ask them who wrote the Sherlock Holmes detective stories, they would answer you at once. Yet The Story of Waterloo was written by the author of those same detective stories.

The general public seldom knows, and almost never cares, who wrote a play. What it knows, and what it cares about primarily, is who is acting in it. Shakespearean dramas are the only plays that the public will go to see for the author's sake alone, regardless of the actors. It will go to see a bad performance of a play by Shakespeare, because, after all, it is seeing Shakespeare: it will not go to see a bad performance of a play by Sir Arthur Pinero, merely because, after all, it is seeing Pinero. The extraordinary success of The Master Builder, when it was presented in New York by Mme. Nazimova, is an evidence of this. The public that filled the coffers of the Bijou Theatre was paying its money not so much to see a play by the author of A Doll's House and Hedda Gabler as to see a performance by a clever and tricky actress of alluring personality, who was better advertised and, to the average theatre-goer, better known than Henrik Ibsen.

Since the public at large is much more interested in actors than it is in dramatists, and since the first-night critics of the daily newspapers write necessarily for the public at large, they usually devote most of their attention to criticising actors rather than to criticising dramatists. Hence the general theatre-goer is seldom aided, even by the professional interpreters of theatric art, to arrive at an understanding and appreciation, for its own sake, of that share in the entire artistic production which belongs to the dramatist and the dramatist alone.

For, in present-day America at least, production in the theatre is the dramatist's sole means of publication, his only medium for conveying to the public those truths of life he wishes to express. Very few plays are printed nowadays, and those few are rarely read: seldom, therefore, do they receive as careful critical consideration as even third-class novels. The late Clyde Fitch printed The Girl with the Green Eyes. The third act of that play exhibits a very wonderful and searching study of feminine jealousy. But who has bothered to read it, and what accredited book-reviewer has troubled himself to accord it the notice it deserves? It is safe to say that that remarkable third act is remembered only by people who saw it acted in the theatre. Since, therefore, speaking broadly, the dramatist can publish his work only through production, it is only through attending plays and studying what lies beneath the acting and behind the presentation that even the most well-intentioned critic of contemporary drama can discover what our dramatists are driving at.

The great misfortune of this condition of affairs is that the failure of a play as a business proposition cuts off suddenly and finally the dramatist's sole opportunity for publishing his thought, even though the failure may be due to any one of many causes other than incompetence on the part of the dramatist. A very good play may fail because of bad acting or crude production, or merely because it has been brought out at the wrong time of the year or has opened in the wrong sort of city. Sheridan's Rivals, as everybody knows, failed when it was first presented. But when once a play has failed at the present day, it is almost impossible for the dramatist to persuade any manager to undertake a second presentation of it. Whether good or bad, the play is killed, and the unfortunate dramatist is silenced until his next play is granted a hearing.



II

DRAMATIC ART AND THE THEATRE BUSINESS

Art makes things which need to be distributed; business distributes things which have been made: and each of the arts is therefore necessarily accompanied by a business, whose special purpose is to distribute the products of that art. Thus, a very necessary relation exists between the painter and the picture-dealer, or between the writer and the publisher of books. In either case, the business man earns his living by exploiting the products of the artist, and the artist earns his living by bringing his goods to the market which has been opened by the industry of the business man. The relation between the two is one of mutual assistance; yet the spheres of their labors are quite distinct, and each must work in accordance with a set of laws which have no immediate bearing upon the activities of the other. The artist must obey the laws of his art, as they are revealed by his own impulses and interpreted by constructive criticism; but of these laws the business man may, without prejudice to his efficiency, be largely ignorant. On the other hand, the business man must do his work in accordance with the laws of economics,—a science of which artists ordinarily know very little. Business is, of necessity, controlled by the great economic law of supply and demand. Of the practical workings of this law the business man is in a position to know much more than the artist; and the latter must always be greatly influenced by the former in deciding as to what he shall make and how he shall make it. This influence of the publisher, the dealer, the business manager, is nearly always beneficial, because it helps the artist to avoid a waste of work and to conserve and concentrate his energies; yet frequently the mind of the maker desires to escape from it, and there is scarcely an artist worth his salt who has not at some moments, with the zest of truant joy, made things which were not for sale. In nearly all the arts it is possible to secede at will from all allegiance to the business which is based upon them; and Raphael may write a century of sonnets, or Dante paint a picture of an angel, without considering the publisher or picture-dealer. But there is one of the arts—the art of the drama—which can never be disassociated from its concomitant business—the business of the theatre. It is impossible to imagine a man making anything which might justly be called a play merely to please himself and with no thought whatever of pleasing also an audience of others by presenting it before them with actors on a stage. But the mere existence of a theatre, a company of actors, an audience assembled, necessitates an economic organisation and presupposes a business manager; and this business manager, who sets the play before the public and attracts the public to the play, must necessarily exert a potent influence over the playwright. The only way in which a dramatist may free himself from this influence is by managing his own company, like Moliere, or by conducting his own theatre, like Shakespeare. Only by assuming himself the functions of the manager can the dramatist escape from him. In all ages, therefore, the dramatist has been forced to confront two sets of problems rather than one. He has been obliged to study and to follow not only the technical laws of the dramatic art but also the commercial laws of the theatre business. And whereas, in the case of the other arts, the student may consider the painter and ignore the picture-dealer, or analyse the mind of the novelist without analysing that of his publisher, the student of the drama in any age must always take account of the manager, and cannot avoid consideration of the economic organisation of the theatre in that age. Those who are most familiar with the dramatic and poetic art of Christopher Marlowe and the histrionic art of Edward Alleyn are the least likely to underestimate the important influence which was exerted on the early Elizabethan drama by the illiterate but crafty and enterprising manager of these great artists, Philip Henslowe. Students of the Queen Anne period may read the comedies of Congreve, but they must also read the autobiography of Colley Cibber, the actor-manager of the Theatre Royal. And the critic who considers the drama of to-day must often turn from problems of art to problems of economics, and seek for the root of certain evils not in the technical methods of the dramatists but in the business methods of the managers.

At the present time, for instance, the dramatic art in America is suffering from a very unusual economic condition, which is unsound from the business standpoint, and which is likely, in the long run, to weary and to alienate the more thoughtful class of theatre-goers. This condition may be indicated by the one word,—over-production. Some years ago, when the theatre trust was organised, its leaders perceived that the surest way to win a monopoly of the theatre business was to get control of the leading theatre-buildings throughout the country and then refuse to house in them the productions of any independent manager who opposed them. By this procedure on the part of the theatre trust, the few managers who maintained their independence were forced to build theatres in those cities where they wished their attractions to appear. When, a few years later, the organised opposition to the original theatre trust grew to such dimensions as to become in fact a second trust, it could carry on its campaign only by building a new chain of theatres to house its productions in those cities whose already existing theatres were in the hands of the original syndicate. As a result of this warfare between the two trusts, nearly all the chief cities of the country are now saddled with more theatre-buildings than they can naturally and easily support. Two theatres stand side by side in a town whose theatre-going population warrants only one; and there are three theatres in a city whose inhabitants desire only two. In New York itself this condition is even more exaggerated. Nearly every season some of the minor producing managers shift their allegiance from one trust to the other; and since they seldom seem to know very far in advance just where they will stand when they may wish to make their next production in New York, the only way in which they can assure themselves of a Broadway booking is to build and hold a theatre of their own. Hence, in the last few years, there has been an epidemic of theatre building in New York. And this, it should be carefully observed, has resulted from a false economic condition; for new theatres have been built, not in order to supply a natural demand from the theatre-going population, but in defiance of the limits imposed by that demand.

A theatre-building is a great expense to its owners. It always occupies land in one of the most costly sections of a city; and in New York this consideration is of especial importance. The building itself represents a large investment. These two items alone make it ruinous for the owners to let the building stand idle for any lengthy period. They must keep it open as many weeks as possible throughout the year; and if play after play fails upon its stage, they must still seek other entertainments to attract sufficient money to cover the otherwise dead loss of the rent. Hence there exists at present in America a false demand for plays,—a demand, that is to say, which is occasioned not by the natural need of the theatre-going population but by the frantic need on the part of warring managers to keep their theatres open. It is, of course, impossible to find enough first-class plays to meet this fictitious demand; and the managers are therefore obliged to buy up quantities of second-class plays, which they know to be inferior and which they hardly expect the public to approve, because it will cost them less to present these inferior attractions to a small business than it would cost them to shut down some of their superfluous theatres.

We are thus confronted with the anomalous condition of a business man offering for sale, at the regular price, goods which he knows to be inferior, because he thinks that there are just enough customers available who are sufficiently uncritical not to detect the cheat. Thereby he hopes to cover the rent of an edifice which he has built, in defiance of sound economic principles, in a community that is not prepared to support it throughout the year. No very deep knowledge of economics is necessary to perceive that this must become, in the long run, a ruinous business policy. Too many theatres showing too many plays too many months in the year cannot finally make money; and this falsity in the economic situation reacts against the dramatic art itself and against the public's appreciation of that art. Good work suffers by the constant accompaniment of bad work which is advertised in exactly the same phrases; and the public, which is forced to see five bad plays in order to find one good one, grows weary and loses faith. The way to improve our dramatic art is to reform the economics of our theatre business. We should produce fewer plays, and better ones. We should seek by scientific investigation to determine just how many theatres our cities can support, and how many weeks in the year they may legitimately be expected to support them. Having thus determined the real demand for plays that comes from the theatre-going population, the managers should then bestir themselves to secure sufficient good plays to satisfy that demand. That, surely, is the limit of sound and legitimate business. The arbitrary creation of a further, false demand, and the feverish grasping at a fictitious supply, are evidences of unsound economic methods, which are certain, in the long run, to fail.



III

THE HAPPY ENDING IN THE THEATRE

The question whether or not a given play should have a so-called happy ending is one that requires more thorough consideration than is usually accorded to it. It is nearly always discussed from one point of view, and one only,—that of the box-office; but the experience of ages goes to show that it cannot rightly be decided, even as a matter of business expediency, without being considered also from two other points of view,—that of art, and that of human interest. For in the long run, the plays that pay the best are those in which a self-respecting art is employed to satisfy the human longing of the audience.

When we look at the matter from the point of view of art, we notice first of all that in any question of an ending, whether happy or unhappy, art is doomed to satisfy itself and is denied the recourse of an appeal to nature. Life itself presents a continuous sequence of causation, stretching on; and nature abhors an ending as it abhors a vacuum. If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us that nothing in life is terminal, nothing is conclusive. Marriage is not an end, as we presume in books; but rather a beginning. Not even death is final. We find our graves not in the ground but in the hearts of our survivors, and our slightest actions vibrate in ever-widening circles through incalculable time. Any end, therefore, to a novel or a play, must be in the nature of an artifice; and an ending must be planned not in accordance with life, which is lawless and illogical, but in accordance with art, whose soul is harmony. It must be a strictly logical result of all that has preceded it. Having begun with a certain intention, the true artist must complete his pattern, in accordance with laws more rigid than those of life; and he must not disrupt his design by an illogical intervention of the long arm of coincidence. Stevenson has stated this point in a letter to Mr. Sidney Colvin: "Make another end to it? Ah, yes, but that's not the way I write; the whole tale is implied; I never use an effect when I can help it, unless it prepares the effects that are to follow; that's what a story consists in. To make another end, that is to make the beginning all wrong." In this passage the whole question is considered merely from the point of view of art. It is the only point of view which is valid for the novelist; for him the question is comparatively simple, and Stevenson's answer, emphatic as it is, may be accepted as final. But the dramatist has yet another factor to consider,—the factor of his audience.

The drama is a more popular art than the novel, in the sense that it makes its appeal not to the individual but to the populace. It sets a contest of human wills before a multitude gathered together for the purpose of witnessing the struggle; and it must rely for its interest largely upon the crowd's instinctive sense of partisanship. As Marlowe said, in Hero and Leander,—

When two are stripped, long e'er the course begin, We wish that one should lose, the other win.

The audience takes sides with certain characters against certain others; and in most cases it is better pleased if the play ends in a victory for the characters it favors. The question therefore arises whether the dramatist is not justified in cogging the dice of chance and intervening arbitrarily to insure a happy outcome to the action, even though that outcome violate the rigid logic of the art of narrative. This is a very important question; and it must not be answered dogmatically. It is safest, without arguing ex cathedra, to accept the answer of the very greatest dramatists. Their practice goes to show that such a violation of the strict logic of art is justifiable in comedy, but is not justifiable in what we may broadly call the serious drama. Moliere, for instance, nearly always gave an arbitrary happy ending to his comedies. Frequently, in the last act, he introduced a long lost uncle, who arrived upon the scene just in time to endow the hero and heroine with a fortune and to say "Bless you, my children!" as the curtain fell. Moliere evidently took the attitude that since any ending whatsoever must be in the nature of an artifice, and contrary to the laws of life, he might as well falsify upon the pleasant side and send his auditors happy to their homes. Shakespeare took the same attitude in many comedies, of which As You Like It may be chosen as an illustration. The sudden reform of Oliver and the tardy repentance of the usurping duke are both untrue to life and illogical as art; but Shakespeare decided to throw probability and logic to the winds in order to close his comedy with a general feeling of good-will. But this easy answer to the question cannot be accepted in the case of the serious drama; for—and this is a point that is very often missed—in proportion as the dramatic struggle becomes more vital and momentous, the audience demands more and more that it shall be fought out fairly, and that even the characters it favors shall receive no undeserved assistance from the dramatist. This instinct of the crowd—the instinct by which its demand for fairness is proportioned to the importance of the struggle—may be studied by any follower of professional base-ball. The spectators at a ball-game are violently partisan and always want the home team to win. In any unimportant game—if the opposing teams, for instance, have no chance to win the pennant—the crowd is glad of any questionable decision by the umpires that favors the home team. But in any game in which the pennant is at stake, a false or bad decision, even though it be rendered in favor of the home team, will be received with hoots of disapproval. The crowd feels, in such a case, that it cannot fully enjoy the sense of victory unless the victory be fairly won. For the same reason, when any important play which sets out to end unhappily is given a sudden twist which brings about an arbitrary happy ending, the audience is likely to be displeased. And there is yet another reason for this displeasure. An audience may enjoy both farce and comedy without believing them; but it cannot fully enjoy a serious play unless it believes the story. In the serious drama, an ending, to be enjoyable, must be credible; in other words, it must, for the sake of human interest, satisfy the strict logic of art. We arrive, therefore, at the paradox that although, in the final act, the comic dramatist may achieve popularity by renouncing the laws of art, the serious dramatist can achieve popularity only by adhering rigidly to a pattern of artistic truth.

This is a point that is rarely understood by people who look at the general question from the point of view of the box-office; they seldom appreciate the fact that a serious play which logically demands an unhappy ending will make more money if it is planned in accordance with the sternest laws of art than if it is given an arbitrary happy ending in which the audience cannot easily believe. The public wants to be pleased, but it wants even more to be satisfied. In the early eighteenth century both King Lear and Romeo and Juliet were played with fabricated happy endings; but the history of these plays, before and after, proves that the alteration, considered solely from the business standpoint, was an error. And yet, after all these centuries of experience, our modern managers still remain afraid of serious plays which lead logically to unhappy terminations, and, because of the power of their position, exercise an influence over writers for the stage which is detrimental to art and even contrary to the demands of human interest.



IV

THE BOUNDARIES OF APPROBATION

When Hamlet warned the strolling players against making the judicious grieve, and when he lamented that a certain play had proved caviare to the general, he fixed for the dramatic critic the lower and the upper bound for catholicity of approbation. But between these outer boundaries lie many different precincts of appeal. The Two Orphans of Dennery and The Misanthrope of Moliere aim to interest two different types of audience. To say that The Two Orphans is a bad play because its appeal is not so intellectual as that of The Misanthrope would be no less a solecism than to say that The Misanthrope is a bad play because its appeal is not so emotional as that of The Two Orphans. The truth is that both stand within the boundaries of approbation. The one makes a primitive appeal to the emotions, without, however, grieving the judicious; and the other makes a refined appeal to the intelligence, without, however, subtly bewildering the mind of the general spectator.

Since success is to a play the breath of life, it is necessary that the dramatist should please his public; but in admitting this, we must remember that in a city so vast and varied as New York there are many different publics, which are willing to be pleased in many different ways. The dramatist with a new theme in his head may, before he sets about the task of building and writing his play, determine imaginatively the degree of emotional and intellectual equipment necessary to the sort of audience best fitted to appreciate that theme. Thereafter, if he build and write for that audience and that alone, and if he do his work sufficiently well, he may be almost certain that his play will attract the sort of audience he has demanded; for any good play can create its own public by the natural process of selecting from the whole vast theatre-going population the kind of auditors it needs. That problem of the dramatist to please his public reduces itself, therefore, to two very simple phases: first, to choose the sort of public that he wants to please, and second, to direct his appeal to the mental make-up of the audience which he himself has chosen. This task, instead of hampering the dramatist, should serve really to assist him, because it requires a certain concentration of purpose and consistency of mood throughout his work.

This concentration and consistency of purpose and of mood may be symbolised by the figure of aiming straight at a predetermined target. In the years when firearms were less perfected than they are at present, it was necessary, in shooting with a rifle, to aim lower than the mark, in order to allow for an upward kick at the discharge; and, on the other hand, it was necessary, in shooting with heavy ordnance, to aim higher than the mark, in order to allow for a parabolic droop of the cannon-ball in transit. Many dramatists, in their endeavor to score a hit, still employ these compromising tricks of marksmanship: some aim lower than the judgment of their auditors, others aim higher than their taste. But, in view of the fact that under present metropolitan conditions the dramatist may pick his own auditors, this aiming below them or above them seems (to quote Sir Thomas Browne) "a vanity out of date and superannuated piece of folly." While granting the dramatist entire liberty to select the level of his mark, the critic may justly demand that he shall aim directly at it, without allowing his hand ever to droop down or flutter upward. That he should not aim below it is self-evident: there can be no possible excuse for making the judicious grieve. But that he should not aim above it is a proposition less likely to be accepted off-hand by the fastidious: Hamlet spoke with a regretful fondness of that particular play which had proved caviare to the general. It is, of course, nobler to shoot over the mark than to shoot under it; but it is nobler still to shoot directly at it. Surely there lies a simple truth beneath this paradox of words:—it is a higher aim to aim straight than to aim too high.

If a play be so constituted as to please its consciously selected auditors, neither grieving their judgment by striking lower than their level of appreciation, nor leaving them unsatisfied by snobbishly feeding them caviare when they have asked for bread, it must be judged a good play for its purpose. The one thing needful is that it shall neither insult their intelligence nor trifle with their taste. In view of the many different theatre-going publics and their various demands, the critic, in order to be just, must be endowed with a sympathetic versatility of approbation. He should take as his motto those judicious sentences with which the Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table prefaced his remarks upon the seashore and the mountains:—"No, I am not going to say which is best. The one where your place is is the best for you."



V

IMITATION AND SUGGESTION IN THE DRAMA

There is an old saying that it takes two to make a bargain or a quarrel; and, similarly, it takes two groups of people to make a play,—those whose minds are active behind the footlights, and those whose minds are active in the auditorium. We go to the theatre to enjoy ourselves, rather than to enjoy the actors or the author; and though we may be deluded into thinking that we are interested mainly by the ideas of the dramatist or the imagined emotions of the people on the stage, we really derive our chief enjoyment from such ideas and emotions of our own as are called into being by the observance of the mimic strife behind the footlights. The only thing in life that is really enjoyable is what takes place within ourselves; it is our own experience, of thought or of emotion, that constitutes for us the only fixed and memorable reality amid the shifting shadows of the years; and the experience of anybody else, either actual or imaginary, touches us as true and permanent only when it calls forth an answering imagination of our own. Each of us, in going to the theatre, carries with him, in his own mind, the real stage on which the two hours' traffic is to be enacted; and what passes behind the footlights is efficient only in so far as it calls into activity that immanent potential clash of feelings and ideas within our brain. It is the proof of a bad play that it permits us to regard it with no awakening of mind; we sit and stare over the footlights with a brain that remains blank and unpopulated; we do not create within our souls that real play for which the actual is only the occasion; and since we remain empty of imagination, we find it impossible to enjoy ourselves. Our feeling in regard to a bad play might be phrased in the familiar sentence,—"This is all very well; but what is it to me?" The piece leaves us unresponsive and aloof; we miss that answering and tallying of mind—to use Whitman's word—which is the soul of all experience of worthy art. But a good play helps us to enjoy ourselves by making us aware of ourselves; it forces us to think and feel. We may think differently from the dramatist, or feel emotions quite dissimilar from those of the imagined people of the story; but, at any rate, our minds are consciously aroused, and the period of our attendance at the play becomes for us a period of real experience. The only thing, then, that counts in theatre-going is not what the play can give us, but what we can give the play. The enjoyment of the drama is subjective, and the province of the dramatist is merely to appeal to the subtle sense of life that is latent in ourselves.

There are, in the main, two ways in which this appeal may be made effectively. The first is by imitation of what we have already seen around us; and the second is by suggestion of what we have already experienced within us. We have seen people who were like Hedda Gabler; we have been people who were like Hamlet. The drama of facts stimulates us like our daily intercourse with the environing world; the drama of ideas stimulates us like our mystic midnight hours of solitary musing. Of the drama of imitation we demand that it shall remain appreciably within the limits of our own actual observation; it must deal with our own country and our own time, and must remind us of our daily inference from the affairs we see busy all about us. The drama of facts cannot be transplanted; it cannot be made in France or Germany and remade in America; it is localised in place and time, and has no potency beyond the bounds of its locality. But the drama of suggestion is unlimited in its possibilities of appeal; ideas are without date, and burst the bonds of locality and language. Americans may see the ancient Greek drama of Oedipus King played in modern French by Mounet-Sully, and may experience thereby that inner overwhelming sense of the sublime which is more real than the recognition of any simulated actuality.

The distinction between the two sources of appeal in drama may be made a little more clear by an illustration from the analogous art of literature. When Whitman, in his poem on Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, writes, "Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes!", he reminds us of the environment of our daily existence, and may or may not call forth within us some recollection of experience. In the latter event, his utterance is a failure; in the former, he has succeeded in stimulating activity of mind by the process of setting before us a reminiscence of the actual. But when, in the Song of Myself, he writes, "We found our own, O my Soul, in the calm and cool of the daybreak," he sets before us no imitation of habituated externality, but in a flash reminds us by suggestion of so much, that to recount the full experience thereof would necessitate a volume. That second sentence may well keep us busy for an evening, alive in recollection of uncounted hours of calm wherein the soul has ascended to recognition of its universe; the first sentence we may dismiss at once, because it does not make anything important happen in our consciousness.

It must be confessed that the majority of the plays now shown in our theatres do not stimulate us to any responsive activity of mind, and therefore do not permit us, in any real sense, to enjoy ourselves. But those that, in a measure, do succeed in this prime endeavor of dramatic art may readily be grouped into two classes, according as their basis of appeal is imitation or suggestion.



VI

HOLDING THE MIRROR UP TO NATURE

Doubtless no one would dissent from Hamlet's dictum that the purpose of playing is "to hold, as 't were, the mirror up to nature"; but this statement is so exceedingly simple that it is rather difficult to understand. What special kind of mirror did that wise dramatic critic have in mind when he coined this memorable phrase? Surely he could not have intended the sort of flat and clear reflector by the aid of which we comb our hair; for a mirror such as this would represent life with such sedulous exactitude that we should gain no advantage from looking at the reflection rather than at the life itself which was reflected. If I wish to see the tobacco jar upon my writing table, I look at the tobacco jar: I do not set a mirror up behind it and look into the mirror. But suppose I had a magic mirror which would reflect that jar in such a way as to show me not only its outside but also the amount of tobacco shut within it. In this latter case, a glance at the represented image would spare me a more laborious examination of the actual object.

Now Hamlet must have had in mind some magic mirror such as this, which, by its manner of reflecting life, would render life more intelligible. Goethe once remarked that the sole excuse for the existence of works of art is that they are different from the works of nature. If the theatre showed us only what we see in life itself, there would be no sense at all in going to the theatre. Assuredly it must show us more than that; and it is an interesting paradox that in order to show us more it has to show us less. The magic mirror must refuse to reflect the irrelevant and non-essential, and must thereby concentrate attention on the pertinent and essential phases of nature. That mirror is the best that reflects the least which does not matter, and, as a consequence, reflects most clearly that which does. In actual life, truth is buried beneath a bewilderment of facts. Most of us seek it vainly, as we might seek a needle in a haystack. In this proverbial search we should derive no assistance from looking at a reflection of the haystack in an ordinary mirror. But imagine a glass so endowed with a selective magic that it would not reflect hay but would reflect steel. Then, assuredly, there would be a valid and practical reason for holding the mirror up to nature.

The only real triumph for an artist is not to show us a haystack, but to make us see the needle buried in it,—not to reflect the trappings and the suits of life, but to suggest a sense of that within which passeth show. To praise a play for its exactitude in representing facts would be a fallacy of criticism. The important question is not how nearly the play reflects the look of life, but how much it helps the audience to understand life's meaning. The sceneless stage of the Elizabethan As You Like It revealed more meanings than our modern scenic forests empty of Rosalind and Orlando. There is no virtue in reflection unless there be some magic in the mirror. Certain enterprising modern managers permit their press agents to pat them on the back because they have set, say, a locomotive on the stage; but why should we pay two dollars to see a locomotive in the theatre when we may see a dozen locomotives in the Grand Central Station without paying anything? Why, indeed!—unless the dramatist contrives to reveal an imaginable human mystery throbbing in the palpitant heart—no, not of the locomotive, but of the locomotive-engineer. That is something that we could not see at all in the Grand Central Station, unless we were endowed with eyes as penetrant as those of the dramatist himself.

But not only must the drama render life more comprehensible by discarding the irrelevant, and attracting attention to the essential; it must also render us the service of bringing to a focus that phase of life it represents. The mirror which the dramatist holds up to nature should be a concave mirror, which concentrates the rays impinging on it to a luminous focal image. Hamlet was too much a metaphysician to busy his mind about the simpler science of physics; but surely this figure of the concave mirror, with its phenomenon of concentration, represents most suggestively his belief concerning the purpose of playing and of plays. The trouble with most of our dramas is that they render scattered and incoherent images of life; they tell us many unimportant things, instead of telling us one important thing in many ways. They reveal but little, because they reproduce too much. But it is only by bringing all life to a focus in a single luminous idea that it is possible, in the two hours' traffic of the stage, "to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure."

An interesting instance of how a dramatist, by holding, as it were, a concave mirror up to nature, may concentrate all life to a focus in a single luminous idea is afforded by that justly celebrated drama entitled El Gran Galeoto, by Don Jose Echegaray. This play was first produced at the Teatro Espanol on March 19, 1881, and achieved a triumph that soon diffused the fame of its author, which till then had been but local, beyond the Pyrenees. It is now generally recognised as one of the standard monuments of the modern social drama. It owes its eminence mainly to the unflinching emphasis which it casts upon a single great idea. This idea is suggested in its title.

In the old French romance of Launcelot of the Lake, it was Gallehault who first prevailed on Queen Guinevere to give a kiss to Launcelot: he was thus the means of making actual their potential guilty love. His name thereafter, like that of Pandarus of Troy, became a symbol to designate a go-between, inciting to illicit love. In the fifth canto of the Inferno, Francesca da Rimini narrates to Dante how she and Paolo read one day, all unsuspecting, the romance of Launcelot; and after she tells how her lover, allured by the suggestion of the story, kissed her on the mouth all trembling, she adds,

Galeotto fu'l libro e chi lo scrisse,

which may be translated, "The book and the author of it performed for us the service of Gallehault." Now Echegaray, desiring to retell in modern terms the old familiar story of a man and a woman who, at first innocent in their relationship, are allured by unappreciable degrees to the sudden realisation of a great passion for each other, asked himself what force it was, in modern life, which would perform for them most tragically the sinful service of Gallehault. Then it struck him that the great Gallehault of modern life—El Gran Galeoto—was the impalpable power of gossip, the suggestive force of whispered opinion, the prurient allurement of evil tongues. Set all society to glancing slyly at a man and a woman whose relation to each other is really innocent, start the wicked tongues a-babbling, and you will stir up a whirlwind which will blow them giddily into each other's arms. Thus the old theme might be recast for the purposes of modern tragedy. Echegaray himself, in the critical prose prologue which he prefixed to his play, comments upon the fact that the chief character and main motive force of the entire drama can never appear upon the stage, except in hints and indirections; because the great Gallehault of his story is not any particular person, but rather all slanderous society at large. As he expresses it, the villain-hero of his drama is Todo el mundo,—everybody, or all the world.

This, obviously, is a great idea for a modern social drama, because it concentrates within itself many of the most important phases of the perennial struggle between the individual and society; and this great idea is embodied with direct, unwavering simplicity in the story of the play. Don Julian, a rich merchant about forty years of age, is ideally married to Teodora, a beautiful woman in her early twenties, who adores him. He is a generous and kindly man; and upon the death of an old and honored friend, to whose assistance in the past he owes his present fortune, he adopts into his household the son of this friend, Ernesto. Ernesto is twenty-six years old; he reads poems and writes plays, and is a thoroughly fine fellow. He feels an almost filial affection for Don Julian and a wholesome brotherly friendship for Teodora. They, in turn, are beautifully fond of him. Naturally, he accompanies them everywhere in the social world of Madrid; he sits in their box at the opera, acting as Teodora's escort when her husband is detained by business; and he goes walking with Teodora of an afternoon. Society, with sinister imagination, begins to look askance at the triangulated household; tongues begin to wag; and gossip grows. Tidings of the evil talk about town are brought to Don Julian by his brother, Don Severo, who advises that Ernesto had better be requested to live in quarters of his own. Don Julian nobly repels this suggestion as insulting; but Don Severo persists that only by such a course may the family name be rendered unimpeachable upon the public tongue.

Ernesto, himself, to still the evil rumors, goes to live in a studio alone. This simple move on his part suggests to everybody—todo el mundo—that he must have had a real motive for making it. Gossip increases, instead of diminishing; and the emotions of Teodora, Don Julian, and himself are stirred to the point of nervous tensity. Don Julian, in spite of his own sweet reasonableness, begins subtly to wonder if there could be, by any possibility, any basis for his brother's vehemence. Don Severo's wife, Dona Mercedes, repeats the talk of the town to Teodora, and turns her imagination inward, till it falters in self-questionings. Similarly the great Gallehault,—which is the word of all the world,—whispers unthinkable and tragic possibilities to the poetic and self-searching mind of Ernesto. He resolves to seek release in Argentina. But before he can sail away, he overhears, in a fashionable cafe, a remark which casts a slur on Teodora, and strikes the speaker of the insult in the face. A duel is forthwith arranged, to take place in a vacant studio adjacent to Ernesto's. When Don Julian learns about it, he is troubled by the idea that another man should be fighting for his wife, and rushes forthwith to wreak vengeance himself on the traducer. Teodora hears the news; and in order to prevent both her husband and Ernesto from endangering their lives, she rushes to Ernesto's rooms to urge him to forestall hostilities. Meanwhile her husband encounters the slanderer, and is severely wounded. He is carried to Ernesto's studio. Hearing people coming, Teodora hides herself in Ernesto's bedroom, where she is discovered by her husband's attendants. Don Julian, wounded and enfevered, now at last believes the worst.

Ernesto seeks and slays Don Julian's assailant. But now the whole world credits what the whole world has been whispering. In vain Ernesto and Teodora protest their innocence to Don Severo and to Dona Mercedes. In vain they plead with the kindly and noble man they both revere and love. Don Julian curses them, and dies believing in their guilt. Then at last, when they find themselves cast forth isolate by the entire world, their common tragic loneliness draws them to each other. They are given to each other by the world. The insidious purpose of the great Gallehault has been accomplished; and Ernesto takes Teodora for his own.



VII

BLANK VERSE ON THE CONTEMPORARY STAGE

It is amazing how many people seem to think that the subsidiary fact that a certain play is written in verse makes it of necessity dramatic literature. Whether or not a play is literature depends not upon the medium of utterance the characters may use, but on whether or not the play sets forth a truthful view of some momentous theme; and whether or not a play is drama depends not upon its trappings and its suits, but on whether or not it sets forth a tense and vital struggle between individual human wills. The Second Mrs. Tanqueray fulfils both of these conditions and is dramatic literature, while the poetic plays of Mr. Stephen Phillips stand upon a lower plane, both as drama and as literature, even though they are written in the most interesting blank verse that has been developed since Tennyson. Shore Acres, which was written in New England dialect, was, I think, dramatic literature. Mr. Percy Mackaye's Jeanne d'Arc, I think, was not, even though in merely literary merit it revealed many excellent qualities.

Jeanne d'Arc was not a play; it was a narrative in verse, with lyric interludes. It was a thing to be read rather than to be acted. It was a charming poetic story, but it was not an interesting contribution to the stage. Most people felt this, I am sure; but most people lacked the courage of their feeling, and feared to confess that they were wearied by the piece, lest they should be suspected of lack of taste. I believe thoroughly in the possibility of poetic drama at the present day; but it must be drama first and foremost, and poetry only secondarily. Mr. Mackaye, like a great many other aspirants, began at the wrong end: he made his piece poetry first and foremost, and drama only incidentally. And I think that the only way to prepare the public for true poetic drama is to educate the public's faith in its right to be bored in the theatre by poetry that is not dramatic. Performances of Pippa Passes and The Sunken Bell exert a very unpropitious influence upon the mood of the average theatre-goer. These poems are not plays; and the innocent spectator, being told that they are, is made to believe that poetic drama must be necessarily a soporific thing. And when this belief is once lodged in his uncritical mind, it is difficult to dispel it, even with a long course of Othello and Hamlet. Paolo and Francesca was a good poem, but a bad play; and its weakness as a play was not excusable by its beauty as a poem. Cyrano de Bergerac was a good play, first of all, and a good poem also; and even a public that fears to seem Philistine knew the difference instinctively.

Mme. Nazimova has been quoted as saying that she would never act a play in verse, because in speaking verse she could not be natural. But whether an actor may be natural or not depends entirely upon the kind of verse the author has given him to speak. Three kinds of blank verse are known in English literature,—lyric, narrative, and dramatic. By lyric blank verse I mean verse like that of Tennyson's Tears, Idle Tears; by narrative, verse like that of Mr. Stephen Phillips's Marpessa or Tennyson's Idylls of the King; by dramatic, verse like that of the murder scene in Macbeth. The Elizabethan playwrights wrote all three kinds of blank verse, because their drama was a platform drama and admitted narrative and lyric as well as dramatic elements. But because of the development in modern times of the physical conditions of the theatre, we have grown to exclude from the drama all non-dramatic elements. Narrative and lyric, for their own sakes, have no place upon the modern stage; they may be introduced only for a definite dramatic purpose. Only one of the three kinds of blank verse that the Elizabethan playwrights used is, therefore, serviceable on the modern stage. But our poets, because of inexperience in the theatre, insist on writing the other two. For this reason, and for this reason only, do modern actors like Mme. Nazimova complain of plays in verse.

Mr. Percy Mackaye's verse in Jeanne d'Arc, for example, was at certain moments lyric, at most moments narrative, and scarcely ever dramatic in technical mold and manner. It resembled the verse of Tennyson more nearly than it resembled that of any other master; and Tennyson was a narrative, not a dramatic, poet. It set a value on literary expression for its own sake rather than for the purpose of the play; it was replete with elaborately lovely phrases; and it admitted the inversions customary in verse intended for the printed page. But I am firm in the belief that verse written for the modern theatre should be absolutely simple. It should incorporate no words, however beautiful, that are not used in the daily conversation of the average theatre-goer; it should set these words only in their natural order, and admit no inversions whatever for the sake of the line; and it should set a value on expression, never for its own sake, but solely for the sake of the dramatic purpose to be accomplished in the scene. Verse such as this would permit of every rhythmical variation known in English prosody, and through the appeal of its rhythm would offer the dramatist opportunities for emotional effect that prose would not allow him; but at the same time it could be spoken with entire naturalness by actors as ultra-modern as Mme. Nazimova.

Mr. Stephen Phillips has not learned this lesson, and the verse that he has written in his plays is the same verse that he used in his narratives, Marpessa and Christ in Hades. It is great narrative blank verse, but for dramatic uses it is too elaborate. Mr. Mackaye has started out on the same mistaken road: in Jeanne d'Arc his prosody is that of closet-verse, not theatre-verse. The poetic drama will be doomed to extinction on the modern stage unless our poets learn the lesson of simplicity. I shall append some lines of Shakespeare's to illustrate the ideal of directness toward which our latter-day poetic dramatists should strive. When Lear holds the dead Cordelia in his arms, he says:

Her voice was ever soft, Gentle, and low,—an excellent thing in woman.

Could any actor be unnatural in speaking words so simple, so familiar, and so naturally set? Viola says to Orsino:

My father had a daughter loved a man, As it might be, perhaps, were I woman, I should your lordship.

Here again the words are all colloquial and are set in their accustomed order; but by sheer mastery of rhythm the poet contrives to express the tremulous hesitance of Viola's mood as it could not be expressed in prose. There is a need for verse upon the stage, if the verse be simple and colloquial; and there is a need for poetry in the drama, provided that the play remain the thing and the poetry contribute to the play.



VIII

DRAMATIC LITERATURE AND THEATRIC JOURNALISM

One reason why journalism is a lesser thing than literature is that it subserves the tyranny of timeliness. It narrates the events of the day and discusses the topics of the hour, for the sole reason that they happen for the moment to float uppermost upon the current of human experience. The flotsam of this current may occasionally have dived up from the depths and may give a glimpse of some underlying secret of the sea; but most often it merely drifts upon the surface, indicative of nothing except which way the wind lies. Whatever topic is the most timely to-day is doomed to be the most untimely to-morrow. Where are the journals of yester-year? Dig them out of dusty files, and all that they say will seem wearisomely old, for the very reason that when it was written it seemed spiritedly new. Whatever wears a date upon its forehead will soon be out of date. The main interest of news is newness; and nothing slips so soon behind the times as novelty.

With timeliness, as an incentive, literature has absolutely no concern. Its purpose is to reveal what was and is and evermore shall be. It can never grow old, for the reason that it has never attempted to be new. Early in the nineteenth century, the gentle Elia revolted from the tyranny of timeliness. "Hang the present age!", said he, "I'll write for antiquity." The timely utterances of his contemporaries have passed away with the times that called them forth: his essays live perennially new. In the dateless realm of revelation, antiquity joins hands with futurity. There can be nothing either new or old in any utterance which is really true or beautiful or right.

In considering a given subject, journalism seeks to discover what there is in it that belongs to the moment, and literature seeks to reveal what there is in it that belongs to eternity. To journalism facts are important because they are facts; to literature they are important only in so far as they are representative of recurrent truths. Literature speaks because it has something to say: journalism speaks because the public wants to be talked to. Literature is an emanation from an inward impulse: but the motive of journalism is external; it is fashioned to supply a demand outside itself. It is frequently said, and is sometimes believed, that the province of journalism is to mold public opinion; but a consideration of actual conditions indicates rather that its province is to find out what the opinion of some section of the public is, and then to formulate it and express it. The successful journalist tells his readers what they want to be told. He becomes their prophet by making clear to them what they themselves are thinking. He influences people by agreeing with them. In doing this he may be entirely sincere, for his readers may be right and may demand from him the statement of his own most serious convictions; but the fact remains that his motive for expression is centred in them instead of in himself. It is not thus that literature is motivated. Literature is not a formulation of public opinion, but an expression of personal and particular belief. For this reason it is more likely to be true. Public opinion is seldom so important as private opinion. Socrates was right and Athens wrong. Very frequently the multitude at the foot of the mountain are worshiping a golden calf, while the prophet, lonely and aloof upon the summit, is hearkening to the very voice of God.

The journalist is limited by the necessity of catering to majorities; he can never experience the felicity of Dr. Stockmann, who felt himself the strongest man on earth because he stood most alone. It may sometimes happen that the majority is right; but in that case the agreement of the journalist is an unnecessary utterance. The truth was known before he spoke, and his speaking is superfluous. What is popularly said about the educative force of journalism is, for the most part, baseless. Education occurs when a man is confronted with something true and beautiful and good which stimulates to active life that "bright effluence of bright essence increate" which dwells within him. The real ministers of education must be, in Emerson's phrase, "lonely, original, and pure." But journalism is popular instead of lonely, timely rather than original, and expedient instead of pure. Even at its best, journalism remains an enterprise; but literature at its best becomes no less than a religion.

These considerations are of service in studying what is written for the theatre. In all periods, certain contributions to the drama have been journalistic in motive and intention, while certain others have been literary. There is a good deal of journalism in the comedies of Aristophanes. He often chooses topics mainly for their timeliness, and gathers and says what happens to be in the air. Many of the Elizabethan dramatists, like Dekker and Heywood and Middleton for example, looked at life with the journalistic eye. They collected and disseminated news. They were, in their own time, much more "up to date" than Shakespeare, who chose for his material old stories that nearly every one had read. Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair is glorified journalism. It brims over with contemporary gossip and timely witticisms. Therefore it is out of date to-day, and is read only by people who wish to find out certain facts of London life in Jonson's time. Hamlet in 1602 was not a novelty; but it is still read and seen by people who wish to find out certain truths of life in general.

At the present day, a very large proportion of the contributions to the theatre must be classed and judged as journalism. Such plays, for instance, as The Lion and the Mouse and The Man of the Hour are nothing more or less than dramatised newspapers. A piece of this sort, however effective it may be at the moment, must soon suffer the fate of all things timely and slip behind the times. Whenever an author selects a subject because he thinks the public wants him to talk about it, instead of because he knows he wants to talk about it to the public, his motive is journalistic rather than literary. A timely topic may, however, be used to embody a truly literary intention. In The Witching Hour, for example, journalism was lifted into literature by the sincerity of Mr. Thomas's conviction that he had something real and significant to say. The play became important because there was a man behind it. Individual personality is perhaps the most dateless of all phenomena. The fact of any great individuality once accomplished and achieved becomes contemporary with the human race and sloughs off the usual limits of past and future.

Whatever Mr. J.M. Barrie writes is literature, because he dwells isolate amidst the world in a wise minority of one. The things that he says are of importance because nobody else could have said them. He has achieved individuality, and thereby passed out of hearing of the ticking of clocks into an ever-ever land where dates are not and consequently epitaphs can never be. What he utters is of interest to the public, because his motive for speaking is private and personal. Instead of telling people what they think that they are thinking, he tells them what they have always known but think they have forgotten. He performs, for this oblivious generation, the service of a great reminder. He lures us from the strident and factitious world of which we read daily in the first pages of the newspapers, back to the serene eternal world of little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love. He educates the many, not by any crass endeavor to formulate or even to mold the opinion of the public, but by setting simply before them thoughts which do often lie too deep for tears.

The distinguishing trait of Mr. Barrie's genius is that he looks upon life with the simplicity of a child and sees it with the wisdom of a woman. He has a woman's subtlety of insight, a child's concreteness of imagination. He is endowed (to reverse a famous phrase of Matthew Arnold's) with a sweet unreasonableness. He understands life not with his intellect but with his sensibilities. As a consequence, he is familiar with all the tremulous, delicate intimacies of human nature that every woman knows, but that most men glimpse only in moments of exalted sympathy with some wise woman whom they love. His insight has that absoluteness which is beyond the reach of intellect alone. He knows things for the unutterable woman's reason,—"because...."

But with this feminine, intuitive understanding of humanity, Mr. Barrie combines the distinctively masculine trait of being able to communicate the things that his emotions know. The greatest poets would, of course, be women, were it not for the fact that women are in general incapable of revealing through the medium of articulate art the very things they know most deeply. Most of the women who have written have said only the lesser phases of themselves; they have unwittingly withheld their deepest and most poignant wisdom because of a native reticence of speech. Many a time they reach a heaven of understanding shut to men; but when they come back, they cannot tell the world. The rare artists among women, like Sappho and Mrs. Browning and Christina Rossetti and Laurence Hope, in their several different ways, have gotten themselves expressed only through a sublime and glorious unashamedness. As Hawthorne once remarked very wisely, women have achieved art only when they have stood naked in the market-place. But men in general are not withheld by a similar hesitance from saying what they feel most deeply. No woman could have written Mr. Barrie's biography of his mother; but for a man like him there is a sort of sacredness in revealing emotion so private as to be expressible only in the purest speech. Mr. Barrie was apparently born into the world of men to tell us what our mothers and our wives would have told us if they could,—what in deep moments they have tried to tell us, trembling exquisitely upon the verge of the words. The theme of his best work has always been "what every woman knows." In expressing this, he has added to the permanent recorded knowledge of humanity; and he has thereby lifted his plays above the level of theatric journalism to the level of true dramatic literature.



IX

THE INTENTION OF PERMANENCE

At Coney Island and Atlantic City and many other seaside resorts whither the multitude drifts to drink oblivion of a day, an artist may be watched at work modeling images in the sand. These he fashions deftly, to entice the immediate pennies of the crowd; but when his wage is earned, he leaves his statues to be washed away by the next high surging of the tide. The sand-man is often a good artist; let us suppose he were a better one. Let us imagine him endowed with a brain and a hand on a par with those of Praxiteles. None the less we should set his seashore images upon a lower plane of art than the monuments Praxiteles himself hewed out of marble. This we should do instinctively, with no recourse to critical theory; and that man in the multitude who knew the least about art would express this judgment most emphatically. The simple reason would be that the art of the sand-man is lacking in the Intention of Permanence.

The Intention of Permanence, whether it be conscious or subconscious with the artist, is a necessary factor of the noblest art. Many of us remember the Court of Honor at the World's Columbian Exposition, at Chicago fifteen years ago. The sculpture was good and the architecture better. In chasteness and symmetry of general design, in spaciousness fittingly restrained, in simplicity more decorative than deliberate decoration, those white buildings blooming into gold and mirrored in a calm lagoon, dazzled the eye and delighted the aesthetic sense. And yet, merely because they lacked the Intention of Permanence, they failed to awaken that solemn happy heartache that we feel in looking upon the tumbled ruins of some ancient temple. We could never quite forget that the buildings of the Court of Honor were fabrics of frame and stucco sprayed with whitewash, and that the statues were kneaded out of plaster: they were set there for a year, not for all time. But there is at Paestum a crumbled Doric temple to Poseidon, built in ancient days to remind the reverent of that incalculable vastness that tosses men we know not whither. It stands forlorn in a malarious marsh, yet eternally within hearing of the unsubservient surge. Many of its massive stones have tottered to the earth; and irrelevant little birds sing in nests among the capitals and mock the solemn silence that the Greeks ordained. But the sacred Intention of Permanence that filled and thrilled the souls of those old builders stands triumphant over time; and if only a single devastated column stood to mark their meaning, it would yet be a greater thing than the entire Court of Honor, built only to commemorate the passing of a year.

In all the arts except the acted drama, it is easy even for the layman to distinguish work which is immediate and momentary from work which is permanent and real. It was the turbulent untutored crowd that clamored loudest in demanding that the Dewey Arch should be rendered permanent in marble: it was only the artists and the art-critics who were satisfied by the monument in its ephemeral state of frame and plaster. But in the drama, the layman often finds it difficult to distinguish between a piece intended merely for immediate entertainment and a piece that incorporates the Intention of Permanence. In particular he almost always fails to distinguish between what is really a character and what is merely an acting part. When a dramatist really creates a character, he imagines and projects a human being so truly conceived and so clearly presented that any average man would receive the impression of a living person if he were to read in manuscript the bare lines of the play. But when a playwright merely devises an acting part, he does nothing more than indicate to a capable actor the possibility of so comporting himself upon the stage as to convince his audience of humanity in his performance. From the standpoint of criticism, the main difficulty is that the actor's art may frequently obscure the dramatist's lack of art, and vice versa, so that a mere acting part may seem, in the hands of a capable actor, a real character, whereas a real character may seem, in the hands of an incapable actor, an indifferent acting part. Rip Van Winkle, for example, was a wonderful acting part for Joseph Jefferson; but it was, from the standpoint of the dramatist, not a character at all, as any one may see who takes the trouble to read the play. Beau Brummel, also, was an acting part rather than a character. And yet the layman, under the immediate spell of the actor's representative art, is tempted in such cases to ignore that the dramatist has merely modeled an image in the sand.

Likewise, on a larger scale, the layman habitually fails to distinguish between a mere theatric entertainment and a genuine drama. A genuine drama always reveals through its imagined struggle of contesting wills some eternal truth of human life, and illuminates some real phases of human character. But a theatric entertainment may present merely a deftly fabricated struggle between puppets, wherein the art of the actor is given momentary exercise. To return to our comparison, a genuine drama is carved out of marble, and incorporates, consciously or not, the Intention of Permanence; whereas a mere theatric entertainment may be likened to a group of figures sculptured in the sand.

Those of us who ask much of the contemporary theatre may be saddened to observe that most of the current dramatists seem more akin to the sand-man than to Praxiteles. They have built Courts of Honor for forty weeks, rather than temples to Poseidon for eternity. Yet it is futile to condemn an artist who does a lesser thing quite well because he has not attempted to do a greater thing which, very probably, he could not do at all. Criticism, in order to render any practical service, must be tuned in accordance with the intention of the artist. The important point for the critic of the sand-man at Coney Island is not to complain because he is not so enduring an artist as Praxiteles, but to determine why he is, or is not, as the case may be, a better artist than the sand-man at Atlantic City.



X

THE QUALITY OF NEW ENDEAVOR

Many critics seem to be of the opinion that the work of a new and unknown author deserves and requires less serious consideration than the work of an author of established reputation. There is, however, an important sense in which the very contrary is true. The function of the critic is to help the public to discern and to appreciate what is worthy. The fact of an established reputation affords evidence that the author who enjoys it has already achieved the appreciation of the public and no longer stands in need of the intermediary service of the critic. But every new author advances as an applicant for admission into the ranks of the recognised; and the critic must, whenever possible, assist the public to determine whether the newcomer seems destined by inherent right to enter among the good and faithful servants, or whether he is essentially an outsider seeking to creep or intrude or climb into the fold.

Since everybody knows already who Sir Arthur Wing Pinero is and what may be expected of him, the only question for the critic, in considering a new play from his practiced pen, is whether or not the author has succeeded in advancing or maintaining the standard of his earlier and remembered efforts. If, as in The Wife Without a Smile, he falls far below that standard, the critic may condemn the play, and let the matter go at that. Although the new piece may be discredited, the author's reputation will suffer no abiding injury from the deep damnation of its taking off; for the public will continue to remember the third act of The Gay Lord Quex, and will remain assured that Sir Arthur Pinero is worth while. But when a play by a new author comes up for consideration, the public needs to be told not only whether the work itself has been well or badly done, but also whether or not the unknown author seems to be inherently a person of importance, from whom more worthy works may be expected in the future. The critic must not only make clear the playwright's present actual accomplishment, but must also estimate his promise. An author's first or second play is important mainly—to use Whitman's phrase—as "an encloser of things to be." The question is not so much what the author has already done as what he is likely to do if he is given further hearings. It is in this sense that the work of an unknown playwright requires and deserves more serious consideration than the work of an acknowledged master. Accomplishment is comparatively easy to appraise, but to appreciate promise requires forward-looking and far-seeing eyes.

In the real sense, it matters very little whether an author's early plays succeed or fail. The one point that does matter is whether, in either case, the merits and defects are of such a nature as to indicate that the man behind the work is inherently a man worth while. In either failure or success, the sole significant thing is the quality of the endeavor. A young author may fail for the shallow reason that he is insincere; but he may fail even more decisively for the sublime reason that as yet his reach exceeds his grasp. He may succeed because through earnest effort he has done almost well something eminently worth the doing; or he may succeed merely because he has essayed an unimportant and an easy task. Often more hope for an author's future may be founded upon an initial failure than upon an initial success. It is better for a young man to fail in a large and noble effort than to succeed in an effort insignificant and mean. For in labor, as in life, Stevenson's maxim is very often pertinent:—to travel hopefully is frequently a better thing than to arrive.

And in estimating the work of new and unknown authors, it is not nearly so important for the critic to consider their present technical accomplishment as it is for him to consider the sincerity with which they have endeavored to tell the truth about some important phase of human life. Dramatic criticism of an academic cast is of little value either to those who write plays or to those who see them. The man who buys his ticket to the theatre knows little and cares less about the technique of play-making; and for the dramatist himself there are no ten commandments. I have been gradually growing to believe that there is only one commandment for the dramatist,—that he shall tell the truth; and only one fault of which a play is capable,—that, as a whole or in details, it tells a lie. A play is irretrievably bad only when the average theatre-goer—a man, I mean, with no special knowledge of dramatic art—viewing what is done upon the stage and hearing what is said, revolts instinctively against it with a feeling that I may best express in that famous sentence of Assessor Brack's, "People don't do such things." A play that is truthful at all points will never evoke this instinctive disapproval; a play that tells lies at certain points will lose attention by jangling those who know.

The test of truthfulness is the final test of excellence in drama. In saying this, of course, I do not mean that the best plays are realistic in method, naturalistic in setting, or close to actuality in subject-matter. The Tempest is just as true as The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Peter Pan is just as true as Ghosts. I mean merely that the people whom the dramatist has conceived must act and speak at all points consistently with the laws of their imagined existence, and that these laws must be in harmony with the laws of actual life. Whenever people on the stage fail of this consistency with law, a normal theatre-goer will feel instinctively, "Oh, no, he did not do that," or, "Those are not the words she said." It may safely be predicated that a play is really bad only when the audience does not believe it; for a dramatist is not capable of a single fault, either technical or otherwise, that may not be viewed as one phase or another of untruthfulness.



XI

THE EFFECT OF PLAYS UPON THE PUBLIC

In the course of his glorious Song of the Open Road, Walt Whitman said, "I and mine do not convince by arguments, similes, rhymes; we convince by our presence"; and it has always seemed to me that this remark is peculiarly applicable to dramatists and dramas. The primary purpose of a play is to give a gathered multitude a larger sense of life by evoking its emotions to a consciousness of terror and pity, laughter and love. Its purpose is not primarily to rouse the intellect to thought or call the will to action. In so far as the drama uplifts and edifies the audience, it does so, not by precept or by syllogism, but by emotional suggestion. It teaches not by what it says, but rather by what it deeply and mysteriously is. It convinces not by its arguments, but by its presence.

It follows that those who think about the drama in relation to society at large, and consider as a matter of serious importance the effect of the theatre on the ticket-buying public, should devote profound consideration to that subtle quality of plays which I may call their tone. Since the drama convinces less by its arguments than by its presence, less by its intellectual substance than by its emotional suggestion, we have a right to demand that it shall be not only moral but also sweet and healthful and inspiriting.

After witnessing the admirable performance of Mrs. Fiske and the members of her skilfully selected company in Henrik Ibsen's dreary and depressing Rosmersholm, I went home and sought solace from a reperusal of an old play, by the buoyant and healthy Thomas Heywood, which is sweetly named The Fair Maid of the West. Rosmersholm is of all the social plays of Ibsen the least interesting to witness on the stage, because the spectator is left entirely in the dark concerning the character and the motives of Rebecca West until her confession at the close of the third act, and can therefore understand the play only on a second seeing. But except for this important structural defect the drama is a masterpiece of art; and it is surely unnecessary to dwell upon its many merits. On the other hand, The Fair Maid of the West is very far from being masterly in art. In structure it is loose and careless; in characterisation it is inconsistent and frequently untrue; in style it is uneven and without distinction. Ibsen, in sheer mastery of dramaturgic means, stands fourth in rank among the world's great dramatists. Heywood was merely an actor with a gift for telling stories, who flung together upward of two hundred and twenty plays during the course of his casual career. And yet The Fair Maid of the West seemed to me that evening, and seems to me evermore in retrospect, a nobler work than Rosmersholm; for the Norwegian drama gives a doleful exhibition of unnecessary misery, while the Elizabethan play is fresh and wholesome, and fragrant with the breath of joy.

Of two plays equally true in content and in treatment, equally accomplished in structure, in characterisation, and in style, that one is finally the better which evokes from the audience the healthiest and hopefullest emotional response. This is the reason why Oedipus King is a better play than Ghosts. The two pieces are not dissimilar in subject and are strikingly alike in art. Each is a terrible presentment of a revolting theme; each, like an avalanche, crashes to foredoomed catastrophe. But the Greek tragedy is nobler in tone, because it leaves us a lofty reverence for the gods, whereas its modern counterpart disgusts us with the inexorable laws of life,—which are only the old gods divested of imagined personality.