Playwrights on playmaking : and other studies of the stage

By Brander Matthews

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Title: Playwrights on playmaking
and other studies of the stage

Author: Brander Matthews

Release date: January 8, 2024 [eBook #72661]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923

Credits: Charlene Taylor, John Campbell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PLAYWRIGHTS ON PLAYMAKING ***

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.

Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.

_Books by Brander Matthews_

These Many Years, Recollections of a New Yorker

BIOGRAPHIES

Shakspere as a Playwright
Molière, His Life and His Works

ESSAYS AND CRITICISMS

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

Vignettes of Manhattan; Outlines in Local Color

PLAYWRIGHTS ON PLAYMAKING

AND OTHER

STUDIES OF THE STAGE

PLAYWRIGHTS ON
PLAYMAKING

AND OTHER STUDIES OF THE STAGE

BY
BRANDER MATTHEWS

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

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
NEW YORK · LONDON
1923

Printed in the United States of America

Published September, 1923

[Illustration: (colophon)]

TO THE MEMORY OF

E. L. BURLINGAME

My Friend for more than Forty Years

PREFATORY NOTE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

B. M.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK

CONTENTS

PAGE

I _Playwrights on Playmaking_ 1

II _Undramatic Criticism_ 17

III _Old Plays and New Playgoers_ 37

IV _Tragedies with Happy Endings_ 57

V _On the Advantage of Having a Pattern_ 79

VI _Did Shakspere Write Plays to Fit His Actors?_ 97

VII _Strange Shaksperian Performances_ 119

VIII _Thackeray and the Theater_ 137

IX _Mark Twain and the Theater_ 159

X _Henry James and the Theater_ 185

XI _Stage Humor_ 205

XII _The “Old Comedies”_ 227

XIII _The Organization of the Theater_ 245

XIV _Memories of Actors_ 281

PLAYWRIGHTS ON PLAYMAKING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

Sir Arthur Pinero agrees with Dumas in holding that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(1920)

UNDRAMATIC CRITICISM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(1921)

III

OLD PLAYS AND NEW PLAYGOERS

III

OLD PLAYS AND NEW PLAYGOERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(1921)

TRAGEDIES WITH HAPPY ENDINGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thus put, the question is not easy to answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(1919)

ON THE ADVANTAGE OF HAVING A PATTERN

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

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

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

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

Then Professor Van Dyke appends this significant comment:

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

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

In truth the prison into which we doom
Ourselves no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be),
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace here, as I have found.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

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

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

(1921)

DID SHAKSPERE WRITE PLAYS TO FIT HIS ACTORS?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(1920)

VII

STRANGE SHAKSPERIAN PERFORMANCES

VII

STRANGE SHAKSPERIAN PERFORMANCES

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

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

If he were permitted to wander from the library where the immense
mass of Shaksperiana fills shelf after shelf, and to enter any of
our comfortable playhouses to witness a performance of one of his
own plays, as set on the stage by an enterprizing and artistic
producer, such as Sir Henry Irving, he would again be astonished.
The theater itself would be strange to him, for it would be roofed
and lighted, whereas the playhouse he knew was open to the sky and
dependent on the uncertain sun for its illumination. The stage would
be equally novel, for it would have sumptuous scenery, whereas the
platform of his day had had no scenery and only a few properties, a
throne or a pulpit, a bed or a wellhead. The actors would be unlike
his fellow-players at the Globe since they would be attired with
a strenuous effort for historical accuracy, whereas Burbage and
Kempe, Condell and Heming were accustomed to costume themselves in
the elaborate and sumptuous garb of the Elizabethan gallants, glad
when they could don the discarded attire of a wealthy courtier. And
perhaps what would surprize him as much as anything would be to
behold his very feminine heroines impersonated by women instead of
being undertaken by shaven lads, as was the habit in his day.

As he was an artist in construction, an expert in stage-craft as this
had been conditioned by the circumstances of the Tudor playhouse,
he could not very well fail to be annoyed by the curtailing of his
plays to adjust themselves to the circumstances of our superbly
equipt theaters; and he would resent the chopping and the changing,
the modification and the mangling to which his plays are subjected
so that their swift succession of situations could each of them
be localized by appropriate and complicated scenery. But because
he was a modest man and because he had composed his tragedies and
his comedies to please his audiences, he would probably soon be
reconciled to all these transmogrifications when he saw that his
pieces had none the less retained their power to attract spectators
and to delight their ears and their eyes. If the house was crowded
night after night, then he would feel that he had no call to protest,
since other times bring other manners.

If Shakspere would be surprized to see Ophelia performed by a girl,
he would be still more surprized, not to say shocked, to see Hamlet
performed by a woman. And yet this is a spectacle that he might have
beheld again and again in the nineteenth century, if he had been
permitted to visit the theaters of New York at irregular intervals.
In that hundred years he could have seen not one female Hamlet or two
or three but at least a score of them. The complete list is given in
Laurence Hutton’s ‘Curiosities of the American Stage’; it begins with
Mrs. Bartley; it includes Clara Fisher, Charlotte Cushman and Anne
Dickinson; and it was drawn up too early to include Sarah Bernhardt,
whose unfortunate experiment belongs to the very last year of the
last century.

George Henry Lewes asserted that ‘Hamlet’ itself is so broad in
its appeal, so interesting in its story, so moving in its episodes,
that no actor had ever made a total failure in the part. It might be
asserted with equal truth that no actress had ever succeeded in it,
because Hamlet is essentially masculine and therefore impossible to a
woman, however lofty her ambition or however abundant her histrionic
faculty. It is not a disparagement of the versatility and dexterity
of Sarah Bernhardt to record that the details of her impersonation
of the melancholy Prince have wholly faded from the memory of one
spectator who yet retains an unforgettable impression of Coquelin’s
beautifully humorous embodiment of the First Gravedigger.

It was perhaps because Charlotte Cushman was more or less lacking in
womanly charm and because she was possessed of more or less masculine
characteristics, that her Hamlet seems to have been more successful,
or, at least, less unsuccessful than that of any other woman. Nor was
Hamlet the only one of Shakspere’s male characters that she undertook
in the course of her long and honorable career in the United States
and in Great Britain. Altho she was an incomparable Katherine in
‘Henry VIII,’ dowering the discarded Queen with poignant pathos, she
undertook more than once the part of Cardinal Wolsey, which does not
present itself as the kind of a character likely to be attractive to
a woman. From all the accounts that have come down to us, she appears
to have impersonated Romeo more satisfactorily than either Wolsey or
Hamlet. In fact, one competent critic, who had seen her in all her
greatest parts, including Lady Macbeth and Meg Merrilies, selected as
her highest peak of achievement the moment when Romeo inflamed by the
death of Mercutio provokes Tybalt in a fiery outburst:

Now, Tybalt, take the villain back,
That late thou gav’st me!

Shakspere would not in all probability be long displeased to see
Ophelia and Queen Katherine and Juliet impersonated by women, however
much he might be annoyed by the vain efforts of any woman to assume
the masculinity of Hamlet and Wolsey and Romeo. His tragedies are of
imagination all compact, and he might very well wish to have them
treated with all possible respect. But perhaps he would not insist
on taking his comedies quite so seriously; and therefore he might
have been amused rather than aggrieved if he could have seen the
performance of ‘As You Like It’ given by the Professional Woman’s
League at Palmer’s Theater in November, 1893, when every part in the
piece was entrusted to a woman.

III

Here was a complete turning of the tables, a triumphant assertion of
woman’s right to do all that becomes a man. When the comedy had been
originally produced at the Globe Theater in London (probably in 1600
but possibly a year or two earlier) no actresses had ever been seen
on the English stage; and therefore Rosalind and Celia and Audrey had
to be entrusted to three shaven lads whom the older actors had taken
as apprentices. When the comedy was performed at Palmer’s Theater in
New York in 1893, almost three centuries later, Orlando and Adam,
Touchstone and Jaques were undertaken by actresses of a maturer age
and of a richer experience than the Elizabethan boys could ever have
acquired.

As one of those who had the pleasure of beholding this unprecedented
performance I am glad to bear testimony that I really enjoyed my
afternoon and that ‘As You Like It’ lost little of its charm when men
were banished from its cast. Jaques was undertaken by Janauschek,
aging and enfeebled, yet still vigorous of mind and still in command
of all her artistic resources. The Orlando was Maude Banks, a brave
figure in her attempt at masculine attire. The Touchstone was Kate
Davis; and Charles, the Duke’s wrestler, was Marion Abbott.

There is a delightful unreality about ‘As You Like It,’ an element
of “make-believe,” an aroma of Once upon a Time, a flavor of “old
familiar far-off things”; and it was this quality which was plainly
prominent in the performance by the Professional Woman’s League.
Consider for a moment the fascinating complexity of Rosalind’s
conduct when she was impersonated by a shaven lad. The Elizabethan
spectators beheld a boy playing the part of a girl, who disguises
herself as a boy and who then asks her lover to pretend that she is a
girl. Set down in black and white this intricacy may appear a little
puzzling; but seen on the stage it causes no confusion nowadays and
it is transparently piquant. Yet there was far more verisimilitude
in the performance in the Tudor playhouse than there can be in our
modern theaters, because it was easy enough for the youth who was
playing Rosalind to look like a lad, after he had once donned doublet
and hose, because he _was_ a lad and not a lass; whereas the woman
who now impersonates Rosalind finds it difficult (if not impossible)
to make her male disguise impenetrable.

The fact is, however, that our latter-day leading lady is not
inclined to take seriously Rosalind’s attempt to pass herself off
as a man. She is likely to be a little too well satisfied with her
feminine charms to be insistently anxious to conceal them; she does
not want the audience ever to forget that she is a woman to be wooed,
even if she is willing to pretend that she is a youth. ‘As You Like
It’ is my favorite among all Shakspere’s plays and in the course of
more than half-a-century of playgoing I must have seen almost a score
of Rosalinds; but I cannot now recall a single one who made an honest
effort to deceive Orlando, as Shakspere meant him to be deceived,
if the story is to be accepted. As a result of this persistent
femininity of Rosalind when she is masquerading as Ganymede, most
of the Orlandos whom I can call up one after another let themselves
flirt with Ganymede as if they had penetrated Rosalind’s disguise. It
was a striking merit of John Drew’s Orlando that he always treated
Ganymede as the lad Rosalind was pretending to be, making it clear to
the audience that no doubt as to Ganymede’s sex had ever crossed his
mind.

I am inclined to guess that if the author of ‘As You Like It’ had
accepted an invitation from the Professional Woman’s League, he would
have sat out the performance at Palmer’s Theater, gazing at it with
tolerant eye and courteously complimenting the Lady President or the
Lady Vice-President who had been deputed to escort him to his box.
But I make no doubt that his glance would have been less favorable
had he been a spectator of a performance of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ given
in May, 1877, at Booth’s Theater for the benefit of George Rignold,
who appeared as Romeo supported by seven different Juliets, the part
changing impersonators with every reappearance of the character.
Grace d’Urfy danced in the masquerade, Adelaide Neilson leaned down
from the balcony, Ada Dyas was married in the cell of Friar Lawrence,
Maude Granger shrank from bloodshed, Marie Wainwright parted from
Romeo, Fanny Davenport drank the potion, and Minnie Cummings awakened
in the tomb.

It cannot be denied that Romeo was the greatest lover in all
literature; but he was not a Don Juan deserting one mistress after
another, and still less was he a Bluebeard married to half-a-dozen
wives. The diversity of actresses, one replacing another as the
sad tale rolled forward to its foredoomed end, may have served to
attract a larger audience than Rignold could allure by his unaided
ability; but it was destructive of the integrity of the tragedy.
The unavoidable result of this freakish experiment was to take the
mind of the audience off from the play itself and to focus it on
a succession of histrionic stunts,—the single scenes in which the
Juliets, one after another, exhibited themselves in rivalry with
one another. The continuity of the tragedy of young love in the
springtime of life was basely broken, its poetry was sadly defiled,
and its dignity was indisputably desecrated. The actresses who lent
themselves to this catchpenny show were ill-advised; they were false
to their art; and they took no profit from their sacrifice of their
standing in the profession. While the performance was discreditable
to all who were concerned in it, the major part of the disgrace must
be assumed by the actor who lowered himself to make money by it.

The obvious objections which must be urged against the splitting up
of a single part among half-a-dozen performers do not lie against
the appearance of a single actor in two or more characters. In
fact, the doubling of parts, as it is called, is one of the oldest
of theatrical expedients; and it was the custom in the ceremonial
performances of the Greek drama at Athens, when there were only
three actors, who might have to impersonate in turn seven or eight
characters. It sprang up again in Tudor times, when a strolling
company like that to which Hamlet addressed his advice numbered only
a scant half-dozen members, and in which there might be only one boy
to bear the burden of two or three or even four female characters.

When several actresses come forward in swift succession to speak the
lovely lines of Juliet our interest is interrupted by every change;
and the attention we are forced to pay to the appearance and the
personality of each of the successive performers is necessarily
subtracted from that which we ought to be giving to the character
these actresses are pretending to impersonate. But when an actress
appears in the beginning of the play as a mother, to reappear at the
end of the piece as a daughter, there is only a single adjustment
of our attention to be made; and this is easily achieved. In some
cases, or at least with some spectators, there would be no need of
any adjustment, since these spectators might not become aware that
the same performer had been entrusted with the part of the daughter
as well as that of the mother.

When she revived ‘A Winter’s Tale,’ Mary Anderson so arranged the
play that she could appear as Hermione in the earlier acts and as
Perdita in the later acts, resuming the character of the mother only
at the very end when the supposed statue of Hermione starts to life
and descends from the pedestal. Of course, there had to be a few
excisions from the text of the fifth act so that the actress could be
seen first as the lovely maiden and second as the stately matron,
beautiful mother of a more beautiful daughter. The lines cut out were
only a slight loss to the play, whereas the doubling up which these
omissions made possible was a great gain for the spectators. I feel
assured that if Shakspere could have been one of these spectators he
would have been as delighted and as fascinated as I was. He would
have pardoned without a word of protest the violence done to the
construction of his story.

Nor am I any the less convinced that if Shakspere had been present
at one of the memorable representations of his greatest tragedy
when Salvini was Othello and Edwin Booth Iago, he would have smiled
reproachfully at those who were harsh in denouncing the performance
as a profanation of his play on the pretext that Salvini spoke
Italian while Booth and the rest of the cast spoke English. It would
so greatly gratify a playwright to have two of his superbest parts
sustained by the two foremost tragedians of the time that he would
be willing enough to overlook the apparent incongruity of their
using two different tongues. Perhaps the author might have been
inspired to point out to the cavillers that Salvini’s retention of
his mother-tongue resulted in restoring to Othello the language which
the Moor of Venice would actually have spoken. It is, of course,
a flagrant falsification of the fact for Othello and Iago, Hamlet
and Ophelia, Brutus and Cassius to speak English instead of Italian
or Danish or Latin. But this is necessary if an English-speaking
audience is to enjoy ‘Othello’ and ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Julius Cæsar’; and
as it is necessary, the spectators are rarely conscious that it is,
strictly speaking, “unnatural.”

The bilingual performance of ‘Othello’ in which Salvini and Booth
nobly supported one another was not the first of those in which Booth
had been engaged. When Emil Devrient came on a professional visit to
the United States in the early sixties of the last century, Booth was
producing a succession of Shaksperian tragedies at the Winter Garden
theater; and he courteously invited the German actor to play Othello
to his Iago. At these performances Devrient spoke German, Booth spoke
English, and so did the rest of the supporting company, excepting
only the Emilia, a part cast to Madam Methua-Schiller, a German
actress who had migrated to America and learnt to speak English with
only a slight trace of foreign accent. As she had not lost the use of
her mother-tongue, she was allowed to alternate English and German,
employing the former always, except in conversing with Devrient, when
she dropt into the latter. Perhaps her chopping and changing from
English to German and back again to English may have been somewhat
disconcerting and distracting to the audience, who would more readily
adjust themselves to Devrient’s constant use of his own tongue.

And the moral of all this is? Well, you can find it very pleasantly
expressed in a quotation from a letter which was written by the
foremost of American Shaksperian scholars to Edith Wynne Matthison
and which is preserved in the introduction to Theodora Ursula
Irvine’s excellent ‘How to pronounce the Names in Shakspere.’
Apparently Mrs. Kennedy had consulted Dr. Furness as to the
pronunciation of a heroine’s name:

Continue to call her Rŏsalĭnd, altho I am much afraid that
Shakspere pronounced it Rōsalīnd. Of all men I would take liberties
with Shakspere sooner than anyone else. Was he so small-minded that
he would care about trifles? Take my word for it, he would smile
with exquisite benignity and say, “Pronounce the name, my child,
exactly as you think it sounds the sweetest.”

(1919)

VIII

THACKERAY AND THE THEATER

VIII

THACKERAY AND THE THEATER

In the never-ending comparisons and contrasts between Thackeray and
Dickens, which show no sign of abating even now, when the younger of
the two has been dead for half-a-century, one striking difference
between them has often been dwelt upon—Dickens was incessantly
theatrical, in his dress, in his novels, in his readings, whereas
Thackeray shrank from all theatricality, in his own apparel, in
his fiction and in his lecturing. Dickens delighted in reading the
most dramatic passages from his novels, actually impersonating
the characters, and adjusting the lighting of his reading-desk so
as to enable his hearers to see his swiftly changing expression.
Thackeray’s lectures were narratives enhanced in interest by anecdote
and by criticism; he read them simply, seeking no surcharged effects;
and he disliked his task. As he wrote to an American friend, “I shall
go on my way like an old mountebank; I get more and more ashamed of
my nostrums daily.”

The author of ‘Vanity Fair’ might in his preface feign that he was
only a showman in a booth, and he might talk of “putting the puppets
away”; but as Austin Dobson phrased it aptly in his centenary tribute:

These are no puppets, smartly dressed,
But jerked by strings too manifest;
No dummies wearing surface skin
Without organic frame within;
Nor do they deal in words and looks
Found only in the story-books.
No! For these beings use their brains,
Have pulse and vigor in their veins;
They move, they act; they take and give
E’en as the master wills; they _live_—
Live to the limit of their scope,
Their anger, pleasure, terror, hope.

His stories are never puppet-plays and they never have the
concentrated color which the theater demands. Nor was this because
he was not a constant playgoer, enjoying the drama in all its
manifestations. Altho he had no close intimacy with actor-folk, such
as Dickens had with Macready and later with Fechter, he was for years
meeting at the weekly _Punch_ dinners, Douglas Jerrold, Mark Lemon
and Tom Taylor, all of them playwrights by profession.

Nor were his novels influenced in any marked degree by the
dramatists, since it was not the plays of Cervantes and Fielding
and Balzac that attracted him but their richer and more varied
works of fiction. On the other hand, the novels of Dickens reveal
the impress made upon him by the melodramas and by the farces which
had a fleeting vogue in his early manhood; he relished the boldly
melodramatic and he revelled in the broadly farcical. More especially
was Dickens under the domination of Ben Jonson, whose plays were
still occasionally seen on the stage when Dickens was young and
impressionable. It might almost be said that Dickens transferred the
method of the comedy-of-humors from the play to the novel; and it
is significant that when he made his first appearance as an amateur
actor it was to assume the superbly caricatural character of Captain
Bobadil. It is perhaps because of Dickens’ theatricality that he
exerted a deep and wide influence upon the British playwrights from
1840 to 1870, whereas it was not until Robertson began in 1865 to
deal more simply with life than the immediately preceding playwrights
of Great Britain, that any of the English writers of comedy allowed
himself to profit by Thackeray’s less highly colored portrayals of
men and manners.

Yet Thackeray’s enjoyment of the theater was not less than Dickens’.
His biographer, Lewis Melville, has recorded that Thackeray once
asked a friend if he loved the play, and when he received the
qualified answer, “Ye-es, I like a good play,” he retorted, “Oh,
get out! You don’t even understand what I mean!” Almost his first
published effort as a draftsman was a series of sketches of a ballet,
‘Flore et Zephyr’; and toward the end of his life, in 1858, he
presided at the annual dinner of the Royal General Theatrical Fund.

In his days of arduous hack-work he wrote half-a-dozen papers on the
French stage. One of these essays was entitled ‘Dickens in France’;
and in this he described with abundant gusto the gross absurdities
of a Parisian perversion of ‘Nicholas Nickleby,’ produced at the
Ambigu. Another is called ‘English History and Character on the
French Stage’; and in this he has an easy task to show up the wilful
disregard of veracity which taints the ingenious ‘Verre d’Eau’ of
Scribe. A third paper is devoted to ‘French Dramas and Melodramas’;
and in this he begins by an unfortunate prediction, that French
tragedy, the classic plays of Corneille and Racine, “in which
half-a-dozen characters appear and spout sonorous alexandrines” was
dead or dying, and that Rachel was trying in vain to revive tragedy
and

to untomb Racine; but do not be alarmed, Racine will never come to
life again, and cause audiences to weep as of yore. Madam Rachel
can only galvanize the corpse, not revivify it. Ancient French
tragedy, red-heeled, patched and be-periwigged, lies in its grave;
and it is only the ghost of it that we see, which the fair Jewess
has raised.

Here Thackeray revealed his insularity, his inability to “penetrate
French literature by an interior line.” Red-heeled, patched and
be-periwigged as French tragedy may be, and as it undoubtedly
is in some of its aspects, it is not dead even now, more than
three-quarters of a century since Thackeray preached this funeral
sermon, nor is it dying. After the fiery fervor of the Romanticist
revolt it may have needed the genius of Rachel to bring it back to
favor; but to-day it is kept alive by the more modest talent of her
successors.

Before he was of age Dickens had thought seriously of becoming an
actor; and he even went so far as to apply to a manager for an
engagement. Not long after he wrote a farce or two; and he was
responsible for the book of a little ballad-opera. Late in his career
he collaborated with Wilkie Collins in writing ‘No Thoroughfare,’ an
effective melodrama, compounded specifically for Charles Fechter,
who acted it successfully, first in London in English and then in
Paris in French (under the title of ‘L’Abîme’). In Dickens’ letters
we are told of the trouble he took in getting all the details of
stage-management arranged to his satisfaction. It is evident that he
found these labors congenial and that he did not doubt his possession
of the intuitive qualities of the play-producer, so distinct from
those of the artist in pure narrative.

Thackeray also made one or two juvenile attempts at the dramatic
form. Perhaps it is safer to say that these early efforts were
dramatic only in form, in their being wholly in dialog; and there is
little reason to suppose that he endeavored to have them acted. In
1840, the year in which the ‘Paris Sketch-Book’ was published, there
was produced in Paris a melodrama, called the ‘Abbaye de Penmarque’
and founded upon Southey’s ‘Mary, the Maid of the Inn.’ Its authors
were announced as MM. Tournemine and Thackeray; and an American
translator fearlessly ascribed it to the author of the ‘Paris
Sketch Book,’ finding possible justification in the catalog of the
British Museum and in the early edition of Shepard’s bibliography.
The ascription was erroneous; and the “nautical melodrama” (as the
translator termed it) seems to have been written by a distant kinsman
of the novelist otherwise unknown to fame. The explanation recalls
that given by an Irish critic, who solved his doubts as to another
case of disputed authorship by the opinion that “Shakspere’s plays
were not written by Shakspere himself, but by another man of the same
name.”

Once and once only did Thackeray make a serious effort to appear
before the public as a playwright. In 1854 after he had established
his fame by ‘Vanity Fair’ and consolidated it by ‘Pendennis’ and
the ‘Newcomes,’ he composed a comedy in two acts, the ‘Wolves and
the Lamb.’ He proffered the play to two managers in turn, first to
Buckstone of the Haymarket Theater, and then to Alfred Wigan of
the Olympic. They declined it, one after the other; and apparently
Thackeray made no further effort to have it produced. In 1860 he
utilized the plot of his play in a story, ‘Lovel the Widower,’ which
was never one of his attractive novels, perhaps because it was more
or less deprived of spontaneity by its enforced reliance upon a plot
put together for another purpose.

When he moved into his own home in Kensington in 1862, only a few
months before his untimely death, he arranged an amateur performance
of the ‘Wolves and the Lamb’ as a special attraction for his
house-warming. He did not undertake any part in his own play; but he
appeared in the character of Bonnington just before the final fall of
the curtain, and spoke a rhymed epilog, by way of salutation to his
guests:

Our drama ends;
Our Landlord gives a greeting to his friends;
Some rich, some poor, some doubtful, some sincere,
Some tried and loved for many a faithful year.
He looks around and bids all welcome here.
And as we players unanimously say
A little speech should end a little play;
Through me he tells the friendliest of pits
He built this story with his little wits;
These built the house from garret down to hall;
These paid the bills,—at least, paid nearly all.

* * * * *

And though it seems quite large enough already,
I here declare the Landlord’s purpose steady
Before the novel-writing days are o’er
To raise in this very house one or two stories more.

As we recall the pitiful penury of the English drama in the midyears
of the nineteenth century, when the stage relied largely upon
misleading adaptations of French plays, we may wonder why Buckstone
and Wigan were inhospitable to the ‘Wolves and the Lamb.’ It is true
that Thackeray’s little piece was slight in story, devoid of novel
situation, obvious in its humor, simple in its character-delineation,
and traditional in its methods. But at that time both Buckstone and
Wigan were willing enough to risk their money on other plays by
authors of less authority, plays which were quite as superficial and
quite as artificial as this. Perhaps the two managers were moved to
decline it partly because they were disappointed in that it had none
of the captivating characteristics of Thackeray’s major fictions.
So few of these qualities did the play possess that if it had been
published anonymously it might have been attributed to some unknown
imitator of Thackeray rather than to Thackeray himself. It revealed
more of his mannerisms than of his merits.

Obviously he did not take his little comedy very seriously; he did
not put his back into his work; he was content to write no better
than his contemporary competitors in comedy and without their
experience and their knack. It is difficult to deny that in the
‘Wolves and the Lamb’ most of the characters are only puppets; and
that therefore Thackeray was for once well advised to put them away.
The real hero of the play, it may be amusing to remark, is John,
the butler, who has a soul above his station, and who is a sketchy
anticipation of Barrie’s Admirable Crichton.

Setting aside his single venture into playmaking and attempting
to estimate Thackeray’s potentiality as a playwright, we cannot
help feeling that he lacked the swift concision, the immitigable
compression, imposed on the dramatist by the limitation of the
traffic of the stage to two hours. Also he rarely reveals his
possession of the architectonic quality, the logical and inevitable
structure, which is requisite in the compacting of a plot and in the
co-ordination of effective incidents. Not often in his novels does
he rise to the handling of the great passionate crises of existence,
which, so Stevenson has told us, are the stuff out of which the
serious drama is made. He is so little theatrical that he is only
infrequently dramatic, in the ordinary sense of the word. He prefers
the sympathetic portrayal of our common humanity in its moments of
leisurely self-revelation.

Finally, if Thackeray had made himself a dramatist, by dint of
determination, he would have lost as an artist more than he gained
since he would have had perforce to forego the interpretive comment
in which his narrative is perpetually bathed. In his unfolding of
plot and his presentation of character, Thackeray could act as his
own chorus, his own expositor, his own _raisonneur_ (to borrow the
French term for the character introduced into a play not for its own
sake but to serve as the mouthpiece of its author). “Thackeray,” so
W. C. Brownell has asserted in his sympathetic study,

enwraps and embroiders his story with his personal philosophy,
charges it with his personal feeling, draws out with inexhaustible
personal zest its typical suggestiveness, and deals with his
material directly instead of dispassionately and disinterestedly.

This is a privilege implacably denied to the playwright, even if he
has abundant compensation in other ways. As Brownell also reminded
us, the novel is

a picture of life, but a picture that not only portrays but
shows the significance of its subject; its form is particularly,
uniquely elastic, and it possesses epic advantages which it would
fruitlessly forego in conforming itself to purely dramatic canons.

III

Dickens’s novels were both theatrical and dramatic; they were
influenced by the melodramas and farces of his youth, as has already
been noted; and it was natural that they should tempt adapters to
dramatize them. They abounded in robustly drawn character, often
verging into caricature; and therefore they appealed to the actor.
They had episodes of violence certain to prove attractive to the
public which liked to be powerfully moved and which had little
delicacy as to the passions portrayed. Dickens’s sprawling serials
were too straggling in story ever to make it possible to compress
them into a solidly built framework of plot; but it was not difficult
to disentangle a succession of situations sufficient to make an
effective panorama of action, peopled with familiar figures. And of
these there have been an unnumbered host.

If Thackeray’s novels lend themselves less temptingly to the
paste-and-scissors method of the dramatizer, they had an immediate
vogue and an enduring reputation, which have allured a host of
playwrights, most of whom have confined their exertion to the
singling out of a salient character and to the presentation in a
play of the more important situations in which this personality is
involved, utilizing the other figures and the other episodes only
in so far as these might be necessary to set off the chosen hero or
heroine. Naturally enough it is upon ‘Vanity Fair’ that they have
laid hands most frequently. The final monthly part of the original
publication had scarcely been issued when John Brougham ventured upon
a stage-version of it, which he produced at Burton’s theater in New
York in 1849.

This was an attempt to dramatize the novel as a whole, although
necessarily Becky Sharp held the center of the stage. There was
a revival of Brougham’s adaptation a few years later; there was
another attempt by George Fawcett Rowe; and then in 1893 Sir James
Barrie made a one-act playlet out of the last glimpse of Becky that
Thackeray affords us, when she and Jos. Sedley, Amelia and Dobbin
find themselves together in the little German watering-place and when
Amelia learns the truth about her dead husband’s advances to Becky.
Sir James has kindly informed me that he thinks that every word
spoken in his little piece was Thackeray’s, “but some of them were
probably taken from different chapters.”

A few years later two other Becky Sharp pieces were produced, one on
either side of the Atlantic. The American play was adroitly prepared
by Langdon Mitchell; it was called ‘Becky Sharp’; it was produced
in 1899 and it has been revived at least once since; Mrs. Fiske was
the Becky. The British play was by Robert Hichens and Cosmo Gordon
Lennox; it was originally performed in London, with Marie Tempest as
Becky; and she came over to the United States to present it a few
times at the New Theater in New York in 1910.

A similar method—the method of focussing the attention of the
audience on a single dominating personality and of excluding all
the episodes in which this personality was not supreme—was followed
in more recent plays cut out of the ‘Newcomes’ and ‘Pendennis.’ No
doubt this was the only possible way of dramatizing novels of such
complexity of episode. Brownell has declared that the range of the
‘Newcomes’ is extraordinary for the thread of a single story to
follow:

Yet all its parts are as interdependent as they are numerous and
varied. It is Thackeray’s largest canvas, and it is filled with the
greatest ease and to the borders.... It illustrates manners with
an unexampled crowd of characters, the handling of which, without
repetition or confusion, without digression or discord, exhibits
the control of the artist equally with the imaginative and creative
faculty of the poet.

A story as vast as the ‘Newcomes’ simply defies the dramatizer; and
all he can do is to build his play about a single group or, better
still, around a single character, relentlessly excluding all the
other allied groups of personages not less interesting in themselves.
This has been the method, it may be recorded, chosen by the several
French playwrights who have been moved to make dramas out of one or
another of the almost equally complex novels of Balzac.

So it was that Michael Morton made a ‘Colonel Newcome’ piece for
Beerbohm Tree in 1906 and that Langdon Mitchell made a ‘Major
Pendennis’ piece for John Drew in 1916. So it was that Francis
Burnand made a ‘Jeames’ piece for Edward Terry in 1878 out of the
‘Diary of C. Jeames de la Pluche.’ Altho Edward Terry was an amusing
Jeames and altho Nelly Farren was an amusing Mary Ann Hoggins,
the “New and Original Comedy” (as its adapter styled it) did not
strike me as amusing in itself; it was three-quarters Burnand and
barely one quarter Thackeray—and the blending was not to my taste.
As I sat through the performance patiently I came to understand the
provocation which had led a gallery boy to shout down to Burnand as
he took the author’s curtain call on the first night,—“I say, Frank,
it’s a good thing Thackeray is dead, isn’t it?”

As the author had provided the ‘History of Henry Esmond’ with a
unifying figure, the dramatizers have only too abundant material for
a chronicle-play showing him at different periods in his long and
honorable career. To make a compact play, a true drama, out of the
protracted story, would be plainly impossible, yet it might not be so
difficult to select salient episodes which would serve as a succinct
summary of the story. But altho the attempt has been made several
times—once for Henry Irving—no one of the versions has ever been put
up for a run in any of the principal playhouses of either New York
or London. In any dramatization one scene would impose itself, the
scene in which Esmond breaks his sword before the prince whom he has
loyally served, the scene in which Thackeray is most truly dramatic
in the noblest sense of the word. If this had been put on the stage
it would have been only a rendering unto the theater of a thing that
belonged to the theater, since perhaps Thackeray had it suggested to
him by the corresponding scene in the opera of ‘The Favorite’—altho
the suggestion may also have come from the ‘Vicomte de Bragelonne’ or
from the later play which Dumas made out of his own story.

There remains to be mentioned only one other dramatization, that
of the ‘Rose and the Ring,’ made by H. Savile Clark in 1890. From
all accounts the performance of this little play, with its music by
Walter Slaughter, provided a charming spectacle for children, one to
which we may be sure that Thackeray would have had no objection and
which indeed might have delighted his heart.

It is testimony to Thackeray’s own liking for the theater that he is
continually telling us that this or that character went to the play.
He also informs us that Henry Esmond was the author of the ‘Faithful
Fool,’ a comedy performed by Her Majesty’s Servants and published
anonymously, attaining a sale of nine copies, whereupon Esmond
had the whole impression destroyed. And the first of the George
Warringtons wrote two plays, ‘Carpezan’ and Pocahontas,’ both of
them tragedies, the first of which caught the public taste, whereas
the second failed to prove attractive. We are all aware that Becky
Sharp took part in the private theatricals at Gaunt House, making a
most impressive Clytemnestra; but we are less likely to recall the
hesitating suggestion that she may have been the Madame Rebecque who
failed to please when she appeared in the ‘Dame Blanche’ at Strasburg
in 1830. It was natural enough that Becky should go on the stage,
since her mother had been a ballet-dancer.

Altho neither Thackeray nor Dickens ever attempted to write a
novel of theatrical life, each of them gave us an inside view of
a provincial stock-company in the earlier years of the nineteenth
century. In ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ we are introduced to the actors and
actresses under the management of Mr. Crummles; and in Pendennis’
we have a less elaborate study of the actors and actresses under
the management of Mr. Bingley. The group that Dickens portrays
is more boldly drawn and more richly colored than the group that
Thackeray sketches in with a few illuminating strokes. “What a light
of benevolence it is that plays round Crummles and the Phenomenon
and all those poor theatrical people in that charming book,” said
Thackeray in his lecture on ‘Charity and Humor.’ “What a humor! And
what a good humor!”

Altho in these episodes neither Dickens nor Thackeray aimed at the
penetrating inquisition into the histrionic temperament that we find
in Henry James’s ‘Tragic Muse’ and in Howells’s ‘Story of a Play,’
there is both validity and originality in Thackeray’s portrait
of Miss Fotheringay. In all the dozens and scores of theatrical
novels that I have read, I do not recall any other attempt to show
the actress who is only an instrument in the hands of a superior
intelligence, a woman who has the divine gift and who can display
it only when she is taught, perhaps by one himself deficient in the
mimetic faculty but possessed of interpretative imagination. Possibly
Thackeray bestows overmuch stupidity on the Fotheringay; but she was
not too stupid to profit by the instruction of the devoted Bows. She
had beauty, voice, manner, the command of emotion, without which the
tragic actor is naught; and all she lacked was the intelligence which
would enable her to make the most of her native endowment.

Except when she was on the stage Mrs. Siddons was an eminently
uninspired woman; and not a little of her inspiration in the theater
has been credited to the superior intellect of her brother, John
Philip Kemble. Rachel was intelligent, so intelligent that she was
always eager to be aided by the intelligence of others. Legouvé
recorded that if he gave her a suggestion, she seized on it and
transmuted his copper into silver. She used to confess the immensity
of her debt to Samson, a little dried up actor of “old men”; and she
said once that she did not play a part half as well as she could
play it, unless she had had the counsel of Samson. Even if she was a
genius, she was rather a marvellous executant than a great composer;
and there has been many another actress, even in our own time, who
has owed a large part of her talent to the unsuspected guidance given
by some one unknown to the public which pressed to applaud her.

Miss Fotheringay was not intelligent like Rachel and she was far
duller than Mrs. Siddons, but she had in her the essential quality.
She was teachable and Little Bows taught her.

He shrieked out in his cracked voice the parts, and his pupil
learned them from him by rote. He indicated the attitudes, and set
and moved those beautiful arms of hers.... With what indomitable
patience and dulness she followed him. She knew that he made
her; and she let herself be made.... She was not grateful, or
ungrateful, or unkind, or ill-humored.

She might not be grateful, but she knew very well who had made her;
she said so simply enough, explaining why she had not earlier played
the more important parts, “I didn’t take the leading business then; I
wasn’t fit for it till Bows taught me.”

So it was that Adrienne Lecouvreur, in the play which Scribe and
Legouvé wrote for Rachel, thanked the little old prompter, Michonnet,
who had taught her, “I was ungrateful in saying I had never had
a teacher. There is a kind-hearted man, a sincere friend, whose
counsels have always sustained me.” And Legouvé has told us that at
one of the rehearsals Rachel suddenly turned from Regnier, who was
the Michonnet, and knelt before Samson, who was the Duc de Bouillon,
and addressed this speech directly to him.

It would be interesting to know whether Thackeray ever saw ‘Adrienne
Lecouvreur,’ which was produced in Paris in April, 1849, six months
before ‘Pendennis’ began to appear in monthly parts.

(1920)

MARK TWAIN AND THE THEATER

Mark Twain was a born story-teller; he was a born actor; he was not
affrighted by the idea of facing an audience; he was fond of the
theater; he lived in a time when the drama was regaining its proud
position in our literature and when men of letters who had begun as
novelists were turning dramatists. Why is it that he did not leave
us even one play worthy to be set by the side of the ‘Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn’? Why is it that the only piece of his which was
successful on the stage, is a poor thing, not wholly his own? Why
is it that he did not persevere in playwriting as did his fellow
humorists, George Bernard Shaw and George Ade, and his fellow
story-tellers, Barrie and Tarkington?

These are questions which must have occurred to not a few of his
admirers; and they are questions to which it is not easy to find
an immediate answer. Yet there must be an explanation of some sort
for this puzzling fact; and there may be profit in trying to
discover it. Even if the answer shall prove to be incomplete and
unsatisfactory, the inquiry is worth while for its own sake.

That Mark Twain was a born story-teller needs no argument; and that
he was a born actor was equally evident not only to his few intimates
but to all the many who heard him talk on his feet. If any witness
must be called, the best would be Howells, his friend for forty
years; and Howells’s testimony is emphatic and decisive. He tells us
Mark

held that an actor doubled the value of the author’s words; and
he was a great actor as well as a great author. He was a most
consummate actor, with this difference from other actors, that he
was the first to know the thoughts and invent the fancies to which
his voice and action gave the color of life. Representation is the
art of other actors; his art was creative as well as representative.

This quotation is from Howells’s introduction to the collection of
Mark’s speeches; and I take another from ‘My Mark Twain’:

He was the most consummate public performer I ever saw, and it
was an incomparable pleasure to hear him lecture; on the platform
he was the great and finished actor he probably would not have
been on the stage.... When he read his manuscript to you, it was
with a thorough, however involuntary, recognition of its dramatic
qualities.... He was realistic, but he was essentially histrionic;
and rightly so. What we have strongly conceived we ought to make
others strongly imagine, and we ought to use every art to that end.

As a born actor, he understood the necessity of preparation and
rehearsal. He left nothing to chance. He knew how his effects
ought to be made; and he knew how to make them. Even his seemingly
spontaneous after-dinner speeches were thought out and worked out,
in every minutest detail of inflection and hesitation. In his
‘How to Tell a Story’ he insisted that the total impression of
his hair-raising ghost-story, the ‘Golden Arm,’ depended upon the
exact calculation of a certain pause; and I can testify that on the
only occasion I had the pleasure of hearing him tell the gruesome
tale—one summer evening in 1890 at Onteora, in a cabin dimly lit
by a flickering wood fire—the pause was long enough to be almost
unbearable.

He stood in no fear of an audience, because he had an imperturbable
self-confidence, rooted in a knowledge of his certain power of
impressing all who came within sound of his voice. Moreover, he
possessed to the end of his life the boyish delight in being
conspicuous that he ascribed to Tom Sawyer. It is true that he was
diffident before he had proved himself as a lecturer; and in a
little speech he made after a musical recital given by his daughter
in 1906, he described his trepidation when he was about to make his
first appearance before an audience:

I had stage-fright then for the first and last time.... After the
first agonizing five minutes, my stage-fright left me, never to
return. I know if I was going to be hanged I could get up and make
a good showing—and I intend to.

When he was living in Hartford he often took part in private
theatricals, the other performers being members of his own household.
After a performance of a dramatization of the ‘Prince and the Pauper’
by the children of the Educational Alliance in 1907, he was called
upon for a speech and he told the thousand little spectators that
he had himself acted the part of Miles Hendon twenty-two years
earlier. One of his daughters had been the Prince and the daughter
of a neighbor was the Pauper. Mrs. Clemens was the dramatist and
stage-manager. “Our coachman was the assistant stage-manager, second
in command.”

He had many friends among stage-folk, authors, actors and managers.
He accepted the invitation to make the opening address at the
Actors’ Fund Fair in 1907. He lent William Gillette the money which
enabled that veracious actor to start his career. He once gave a
characteristically amusing account of his success in passing through
the sternly defended stage-entrance to Daly’s Theater. At a dinner to
Henry Irving in London in June, 1900, he declared that

the greatest of all arts is to write a drama. It is a most
difficult thing. It requires the highest talents possible and the
rarest gifts. No, there is another talent that ranks with it—for
anybody can write a drama—I have written about four hundred—but to
get one accepted requires real ability. And I have never had that
felicity yet.

He was a persistent playgoer, altho his visits to the theater were
less frequent in later life than they had been earlier. He took the
drama seriously, as he took the other facts of life; and he thought
that the American theater was not doing its duty by the American
people. In an illuminating article “About Play-Acting,” published in
a magazine in 1898 (and most unaccountably not included in any of
the volumes of his complete works) he described a tragedy which he
had seen at the Burg Theater in Vienna. Then he listed the shows on
exhibition in New York in a single week; and he drew a moral from the
contrast:

It is right and wholesome to have these light comedies and
entertaining shows; and I shouldn’t wish to see them diminished.
But none of us is _always_ in the comedy spirit; we have our graver
moods; they come to us all; the lightest of us cannot escape
them. These moods have their appetites,—healthy and legitimate
appetites—and there ought to be some way of satisfying them.
It seems to me that New York ought to have one theater devoted
to tragedy. With her three millions of population, and seventy
outside millions to draw upon, she can afford it, she can support
it. America devotes more time, labor, money and attention to
distributing literary and musical culture among the general
public than does any other nation, perhaps; yet here you find her
neglecting what is possibly the most effective of all the breeders
and nurses and disseminators of high literary taste and lofty
emotion—the tragic stage. To leave that powerful agency out is to
haul the culture-wagon with a crippled team. Nowadays when a mood
comes which only Shakspere can set to music, what must we do? Read
Shakspere ourselves? Isn’t it pitiful? It is playing an organ solo
on a jews-harp. _We_ can’t read. None but the Booths can do it....

Comedy keeps the heart sweet; but we all know that there is
wholesome refreshment for both mind and heart in an occasional
climb among the solemn pomps of the intellectual snow-summits built
upon by Shakspere. Do I seem to be preaching? It is out of my
line; I only do it because the rest of the clergy seem to be on a
vacation.

III

Altho I have quoted Mark’s assertion that he had never had the
felicity of having a play accepted, he did have two pieces produced
by managers; and a third, written in collaboration with Howells,
had a brief and inglorious career at the expense of its authors. His
first play, made out of one of his novels, drew delighted audiences
for several seasons; the second, written in partnership with Bret
Harte, and the third, written in partnership with Howells, met
with so little success that they sank at once beneath the wave of
oblivion, being almost unknown except in the hazy memories of the few
surviving spectators who chanced to see one or the other during its
brief stay on the stage. No one of the three has ever been published.

After Mark had settled in Hartford he formed a close friendship with
his near neighbor Charles Dudley Warner; and in 1873 they joined
forces in a novel, the ‘Gilded Age.’ They wrote it not so much in
collaboration as in conjunction,—that is to say, each of the writers
was responsible for the chapters he prepared himself; and there was
no integrating co-ordination of their respective contributions. Mark
was the author of more than half of the chapters; and he was the
creator of the one outstanding character, Colonel Mulberry Sellers,
an imaginative reproduction of a man he had known since boyhood,
James Lampton. Mark began by writing the first eleven chapters, then
Warner wrote two, Mark followed with two more; and thus they worked
alternately. They labored, so Mark declared, “in the superstition
that we were writing one coherent yarn, when I suppose, as a matter
of fact, we were writing two incoherent yarns.”

It was not long after the publication of their conjoint work
that they were informed of the performance in San Francisco of a
dramatization by one Gilbert S. Densmore, otherwise unknown to fame,
the character of Colonel Sellers being impersonated by John T.
Raymond. Action was at once taken to put a stop to this infringement
on the copyright of the story. In the end a satisfactory arrangement
was arrived at. Densmore was bought out; Warner, discovering that
his share in the story had been but little drawn upon, relinquished
any claim he might have; Mark made the piece over; and Raymond
continued to play Colonel Sellers, under a contract which divided
the profits between the author and the actor. For a season or two
Mark’s agent travelled with the company and reported on a postal card
every night the author’s share; and Howells has related how these
welcome missives would come about dinnertime and how Mark would read
them aloud in triumph. “One hundred and fifty dollars—two hundred
dollars—three hundred dollars, were the gay figures which they bore
and which he flaunted in the air before he sat down at table.”

It is difficult now to determine how much of the dramatic skeleton
Densmore had put together to enable Colonel Sellers to exhibit the
facets of his lovable character, survived in the play which drew
crowded houses one long winter in New York. Here Mark himself is the
best witness in his own behalf; and his biographer has quoted from an
unpublished letter a clear-cut statement:

I entirely rewrote the play three separate and distinct times. I
had expected to use little of [Densmore’s] language and but little
of his plot. I do not think that there are now twenty sentences of
Mr. Densmore’s in the play, but I used so much of his plot that I
wrote and told him I should pay him about as much more as I had
already paid him, in case the play proved a success.

Paine has printed Densmore’s acknowledgment for this second payment,
thanking Mark “for the very handsome manner in which you have acted
in this matter.”

During the run of the play in New York in the winter of 1874-5 I saw
it twice, the second time on the hundredth performance, when Mark
appeared before the curtain to tell the audience the tale of the
man who tried to ride the Mexican plug and to explain that he was
like this man after his fiery steed had thrown him, in that he was
“speechless.” I recall the play as a rickety contrivance; it creaked
in its joints; its plot was arbitrary and violent and unconvincing.
Perhaps it was no worse than the earlier ‘Solon Shingle’ or the
later ‘Mighty Dollar’; but it was little, if any, better. Yet it
served its purpose, which was to be a frame for the humorously
veracious character of Colonel Sellers, the imperturbable visionary
admirably acted by John T. Raymond. Mark himself liked Raymond’s
impersonation,—at least he did at first. Later he and Raymond fell
out; and he put into his autobiography the assertion that Raymond was
lacking in the ability to express the finer qualities of Sellers.

But playgoers could see in the part only what Raymond has expressed
with the keenest appreciation of its histrionic possibilities; and
they were satisfied, even if the author was not. To us Americans the
character had a special appeal, because he represented at once our
ingenious inventiveness and our incurable optimism. We had never met
James Lampton, but we were all ready to accept Colonel Sellers as an
old friend. Raymond told me once that in town after town he would be
accosted by some man, who would say to him, “I saw you to-night—and I
recognized myself. Didn’t Mark ever tell you? Well, he took Sellers
from _me_! Why, all my friends knew me the first time they saw you!”

The plot of the play was melodramatic on the verge of burlesque;
it called for the wholly unnecessary explosion of a steamboat; it
culminated in the trial of the injured heroine for the murder of
the villain who had wronged her and insulted her. For the most part
Colonel Sellers had little to do with the main story; and it was only
when the sympathetic heroine was on trial for her life that Colonel
Sellers was integrally related to the main action. I have revived my
own fading memory of the bubbling humor of this final act by reading
again what Howells wrote about it at the time:

But the greatest scenes are in the last act, where Colonel Sellers
appears as a witness for the defence of Laura Hawkins. As he mounts
the stand he affably recognizes and shakes hands with several
acquaintances among the jury; he delivers his testimony in the
form of a stump speech; he helplessly overrides all the protests,
exceptions, and interruptions of the prosecution; from time to
time he irresistibly turns and addresses the jury and can scarcely
be silenced; while the attorneys are wrangling together he has
seized a juryman by the coat-lapel and is earnestly exhorting him
in whisper. The effect is irresistibly ludicrous. It is farce and
not farce, for, however extravagantly impossible the situation is,
the man in it is deliciously true to himself. There is one bit of
pathos, where Sellers tells how he knew Laura as a little girl, and
implies that, though she might have killed a man, she could _not_
have done _murder_.

The extravagantly impossible situation may have been taken over from
the Densmore perversion; but the handling of it, the expressing out
of it of all the humor it might be made to contain, that, we may be
sure, was the doing of Mark himself. No one else could have done it.

Forty years ago and more I pointed out, in an article on the
‘American on the Stage’ that in so far as Colonel Sellers was
a schemer, with an incessant activity in devising new methods
for making money, he had been anticipated by a character in Ben
Jonson’s the ‘Devil is an Ass’—added evidence of the kinship of the
descendants of the Puritans with the daring Elizabethan adventurers.
Where the American proposed a liniment for the sore eyes so
multitudinous in the Orient and saw “millions in it!” the Elizabethan
had advocated a device for making wine of raisins:

What hast thou there?
O, “Making wine of Raisins”; this is in hand now.
Yes, and as true a wine as the wines of France,
Or Spain or Italy: look of what grape
My raisin is, that wine I’ll render perfect,
As of the Muscatel grape, I’ll render Muscatel;
Of the Canary, his; the claret, his;
So of all kinds; and bate you of the prices
Of wine throughout the kingdom half in half.

When it is objected that this enterprise may put up the price of
raisins, the answer comes pat:

Why then I’ll make it out of blackberries,
And it shall do the same. ’Tis but more art,
And the charge less.

There is a significant kinship between Ben Jonson and Mark Twain in
the superb impossibility of their towering fantasies. But there is
no true likeness between Meercraft, whose very name libels him as an
unscrupulous exploiter of the eternal gullibility of mankind, and
Colonel Sellers, who may have deceived others but who did so only
because he had first deceived himself. Colonel Sellers was a man
without guile; he was as sincere as he was frank; and he made no
more profit out of his swift succession of vain imaginings than did
those who were carried away by his magnificent self-confidence. The
similarity between Ben Jonson’s crook and Mark’s enthusiast is only
superficial; yet it may be worth noting that frenzied speculation was
as characteristic of the golden age of England after the dispersal
of the Armada as it was in the gilded age of America which was the
aftermath of the Civil War. Moreover Ben Jonson and Mark Twain have
this in common also, that they were both of them humorists of soaring
exuberance and both of them realists of immitigable veracity.

In the dramatization of the ‘Gilded Age’ Mark had a silent partner,
the otherwise unknown Densmore. In the two other plays of his he was
working in collaboration with associates of an assured fame, Howells
and Bret Harte. In neither case was he fortunate in the alliance, for
they were not experts in stage-craft, altho each of them had already
ventured himself in the drama. What Mark needed, if he was to trot
in double harness with a running mate, was an experienced playwright
with an instinctive knowledge of the theater. When Mark yoked himself
with Howells or with Harte, it was the blind leading the blind. The
author of ‘Out of the Question’ and the author of ‘Two Men of Sandy
Bar’ lacked just what the author of the ‘Gilded Age’ lacked,—practice
in the application of the principles of playmaking.

The play written in collaboration with Bret Harte was called ‘Ah
Sin,’ the name of the Heathen Chinee in ‘Plain Language from Truthful
Jones.’ It was undertaken to enable Charles Parsloe, an actor now
forgotten, to profit by the skill he had displayed in the small part
of a Chinaman in Bret Harte’s earlier play, ‘Two Men of Sandy Bar,’
written for Stuart Robson, brought out in 1876 and withdrawn after
a brief and inglorious career on the stage. Bret Harte did not know
enough about playmaking to perceive that its failure had been due
to its deficiency in that supporting skeleton of plot which is as
necessary to a drama as the equally invisible steel-frame is to a
skyscraper. But he was eager to try again, and he persuaded Mark
to join him. Probably he had no need to be persuasive, since Mark
had found his experience with the ‘Gilded Age’ exhilarating and
profitable. Mark invited Harte to Hartford and they set to work. As I
have always been curious about the secrets of collaboration, I asked
Mark many years afterward, how they had gone about it. “Well,” he
said, with his customary drawl, “Bret came to me at Hartford and we
talked the whole thing out. Then Bret wrote the piece while I played
billiards. Of course, I had to go over it and get the dialect right.
Bret never did know anything about dialect.”

Mr. Paine, to whom I transmitted this information, thinks that it
is “scarcely a fair statement of the case,” since “both authors
worked on the play and worked hard.” But while what Mark said to me
may have been an over-statement, I doubt if it was a misstatement.
The original suggestion had come from Harte; and the probability is
that the major part of the story was his also. The two partners may
have worked hard but I doubt if they worked as seriously at their
playmaking as they were wont to do at their story-telling. The man
of letters who is not primarily a man of theater, is prone to be
somewhat contemptuous in his condescending to the drama.

The play was produced in Washington in May, 1877, with Parsloe as Ah
Sin. I saw it when it was brought to New York in the fall of 1877.
From two of the foremost writers in America much was expected; and
the result of their combined efforts was lamentably disappointing. It
was unworthy of either of them, still more unworthy of both. All I
can replevin from my dim recollections is a trial before Judge Lynch,
which lit up the last act, and which I now recall as having more than
a little of the energy and the vigor which I found afterward in the
episode of the attempted lynching in ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ Mr. Paine
tells me that the manuscript is still extant. Sooner or later it
ought to be published, since nothing written by either Mark Twain or
Bret Harte is negligible.

Yet this flat failure of ‘Ah Sin’ did not quench Mark’s dramatic
ardor. Even before the ‘Gilded Age’ had been dramatized he had begun
on ‘Tom Sawyer’; and his first intention was to write it as a play.
Fortunately for us he soon perceived that Tom would have more
freedom if his adventures were narrated. After Mark had published
‘Tom Sawyer’ he was fired with another dramatic idea; and he wrote
Howells in the first flush of his enthusiasm, that he was deep in a
comedy with an old detective as the principal character:

I skeletoned the first act, and _wrote_ the second to-day, and am
dog-tired now. Fifty-four pages of ms. in seven hours.

A few days later he wrote again, telling his friend that he had

piled up one hundred and fifty-one pages. The first, second and
fourth acts are done, and done to my satisfaction too. Never had
so much fun over anything in my life—such consuming interest and
delight.

This piece was intended for Sol Smith Russell. But the theatrical
experts to whom it was submitted did not share its author’s consuming
interest. Dion Boucicault said that it was better than ‘Ah Sin’;
but to say this was saying little. John Brougham wrote that it
was “altogether too diffuse for dramatic representation.” In time
Mark’s own opinion of his play seems to have cooled, and he put
his manuscript aside. Possibly he utilized it more or less many
years later when he wrote ‘Tom Sawyer, Detective’; but this is mere
conjecture.

Then, after a longer interval he asked Howells to collaborate with
him in a sequel to Colonel Sellers; and in ‘My Mark Twain’ Howells
has given a detailed account of their conjoint misadventure. Mark had
a host of suggestions but no story, so Howells supplied one as best
he could; and the two friends spent a hilarious fortnight in writing
the play. Mark had quarrelled with Raymond and did not want to let
him reincarnate Sellers; and yet he had ultimately to recognize
that Raymond was the only actor the public would accept in the
character. So the piece was sent to Raymond, who accepted it, asking
for certain alterations; and then most unexpectedly he returned the
manuscript, refusing to have anything to do with it. After hawking
their play about, the authors arranged to produce it themselves with
Burbank (who was not an actor but an elocutionist-entertainer) as
Sellers,—Burbank playing the part in imitation of Raymond. At last
they had lost confidence in it so completely that they paid a forfeit
rather than undertake the risk of a production in New York. So it was
that the ‘American Claimant, or Mulberry Sellers Ten Years Later’ was
made visible in New York only at a special matinee in the fall of
1887. It had a few performances in unimportant out of town theaters;
and then it disappeared from the stage. Still, it had not lived in
vain since it supplied material for several chapters in Mark’s later
novel, to which he gave the same title, without the subtitle.

After this play had been withdrawn from the boards Mark’s ambition
to establish himself as a dramatist did not again manifest itself.
However, it is pleasant to believe that the pain of his own failure
may have been more or less assuaged by the better fortune of
dramatizations of two of his novels.

I have already noted that not long after the publication of the
‘Prince and the Pauper’ Mrs. Clemens had arranged scenes from it to
be acted by members of the family and by their young friends, and
that Mark himself had undertaken the part of Miles Hendon. A little
later a dramatization of the whole story was made by Abby Sage
Richardson; and this was produced in New York in January, 1890. It
achieved instant popularity, as well it might, since the story is
indisputably dramatic and since it has a more direct action than any
other of Mark’s novels. This version, revised by Amélie Rives, was
revived in 1920 by William Faversham, who appeared as Miles Hendon.
The revival met with a reception as warm as that which had greeted
the original production.

In one respect this professional dramatization was inferior to Mrs.
Clemens’s amateur arrangement; it was so devised that one performer
should assume two characters, the little Prince and the little
Pauper; and this necessitated the omission of the culminating moment
in the tale when the Prince and the Pauper stand face to face. And
in both the amateur and the professional performances these two lads
were impersonated by girls. This may have been necessary, since it is
almost impossible to find competent boy actors, while there are girl
actors aplenty; but none the less was it unfortunate, since a girl
is never entirely satisfactory in boy’s clothes. Very rarely can she
conceal from us the fact that she is a girl, doing her best to be a
boy. Curiously enough, boys can act girls’ parts and make us forget
for the moment that they are not what they seem.

Five years after Mrs. Richardson had dramatized the ‘Prince and the
Pauper,’ Frank Mayo made a most effective play out of ‘Pudd’nhead
Wilson.’ He arranged the title-part for his own vigorous and
impressive acting. He simplified Mark’s story and he amplified it;
he condensed it and he heightened it; he preserved the ingenious
incidents and the veracious characters; he made his profit out of the
telling dialog; and he was skilful in disentangling the essentially
dramatic elements of Mark’s rather rambling story. He produced it in
New York in the spring of 1895. Mark was then in Europe; but when
he returned he made haste to see the piece. He was discovered by the
audience and called upon for a speech, in which he congratulated
the player-playwright on a “delightful play.” He ended by saying,
“Confidentially I have always had an idea that I was well equipt to
write plays, but I have never encountered a manager who has agreed
with me”—which was not strictly accurate since two different managers
had accepted the ‘Gilded Age’ and ‘Ah Sin.’

When the ‘Gilded Age’ was brought out in New York in the fall of
1874, Mark climbed the eighty steps which led to the editorial
offices of the New York _World_, then in the control of Manton
Marble. He asked for the city editor and he was shown into the
cubicle occupied by William C. Brownell. He explained that he had
come to ask the editor to puff his play; whereupon Brownell inquired
if it was a good play. “No,” was Mark’s drawling answer, “it isn’t
a good play. It’s a bad play, a damned bad play. I couldn’t write
a good play. But it has a good character. I can write character;
and that character is the best I can do. If it was a good play, I
shouldn’t have had to climb up here to ask you to puff it.”

Here Mark was unconsciously revealing his agreement with Aristotle,
the master of all who know. Aristotle declared that in a tragedy—and
the remark is even more applicable to comedy—plot is more important
than character, since you can have an appealing drama without
character but you cannot have it without plot. Lowell said the same
thing in more detail, in one of his lectures on the ‘Old English
Dramatists.’

In a play we not only expect a succession of scenes, but that
each scene should lead by a logic more or less stringent, if not
to the next, at any rate to something that is to follow and that
all should contribute their fraction of impulse to the inevitable
catastrophe. That is to say, the structure should be organic, with
a necessary and harmonious connection and relation of parts, and
not merely mechanical with an arbitrary or haphazard joining of one
part to another.

It was this constructive skill that Mark lacked. He could create
characters; he could make them reveal themselves in appropriate
situations; he could carry on a story which in the library would
delight all of us, but which was without the compact directness
demanded by us when we are in the theater. He possessed all the
qualifications of the dramatist except the one thing needful, without
which the rest are unavailing; he could not organize a structure
with the necessary and harmonious connection and relation of its
parts. In other words he was devoid of the engineering draftsmanship
which plans the steel-frame, four-square to all the winds that blow.

He may have had—indeed, he did have—dramatic genius; but he never
acquired the theatrical talent which would make his genius available.
He could not cut and polish and set his own diamonds.

(1921)

HENRY JAMES AND THE THEATER

The publication of Henry James’s Letters must have drawn the
attention of many readers to the fact that James took an interest
in the drama as an art second only to his interest in the novel. It
has also informed these readers as to his long-nursed ambition to
make money by writing plays,—an ambition always frustrated by malign
fate. Probably only a few of those who first became aware of his
dramatic aspirations by the disclosures in this correspondence will
recall the evidence in his published works which testifies to his
always apt appreciation of the art of acting and his ever persistent
inquisitiveness as to the principles of playmaking. He came forward
as a dramatic critic more often than is generally remembered; and his
dramatic criticism is more intelligent, that is to say, it shows a
better understanding of the theater, than we had a right to expect
from one who gave himself up to another art, that of prose-fiction,
closely akin to the art of the drama and yet widely divergent from
it.

So many were Henry James’s excursions into the field of dramatic
criticism that there are enough of them to fill a volume; and
perhaps the task of making the collection will yet be undertaken by
one of his staunch admirers. The book will be more welcome since
James rescued only a few of these papers from magazines for which
they were originally written. It may be well to list here the major
part of the contents of this future gathering, certain to have a
cordial reception from all students of the stage. In 1874 Henry
James anonymously contributed to the _Atlantic_ a discriminating
(but somewhat chilly) consideration of the revival of the ‘School
for Scandal’ by the competent company of comedians who were then
making brilliant the stage of the Boston Museum. In 1875 he gave
to the _Galaxy_ an illuminating review of Tennyson’s ‘Queen Mary,’
effectively contrasting it with Victor Hugo’s more melodramatic
treatment of the same enigmatic heroine in ‘Marie Tudor.’ In 1875
again he included in his ‘Transatlantic Sketches’ an earlier letter
on the ‘Parisian Stage.’ In 1876 he wrote, again for the _Galaxy_,
his enthusiastic appreciation of the actors and actresses of the
Comédie-Française, which he reprinted in 1878 in his volume of essays
on the ‘French Poets and Novelists.’ In these early days he prepared
for one periodical or another articles on Ristori and on Salvini, on
Henry Irving as Macbeth and on Macready’s Diary (all duly catalogued
in Phillips’s exhaustive bibliography).

For the _Galaxy_ again in 1877 he wrote a review of the ‘London
Stage,’ and in 1887 he contributed to the _Century_ his glowing
tribute to that most consummate comedian, Coquelin. He seems to have
overlooked both of these papers when he was selecting material for
his successive volumes of essays in criticism; and it is not easy
to understand why it was that he forgot the study of Coquelin. It
is one of the most luminous of histrionic portraits, worthy to hang
beside the best of Colley Cibber’s and Charles Lamb’s. He was never
more cordially enthusiastic about any artist than he was about the
incomparable Coquelin, the most gifted and the most versatile comic
actor of the last three decades of the nineteenth century. I recall
that when I drew Coquelin’s attention to this superb testimony to
his talent, the actor smiled with pleasure. “Henry James,” he said.
“Yes, it appears that I have the privilege of throwing him into an
ecstasy!” In 1915 Henry James was kind enough to revise this essay,
so that it might serve as an introduction to Coquelin’s own analysis
of ‘Art and the Actor’ when that was reprinted in the second series
of the publications of the Dramatic Museum of Columbia University.

It remains to be recorded only that Henry James included among
his ‘Essays in London and Elsewhere’ two papers on Ibsen’s plays,
originally written in 1891 and 1893: and that in his ‘Notes on
Novelists’ he preserved a paper on Alexandre Dumas fils, written
in 1895. Quite probably there may be other articles on theatrical
themes contributed to one or another of the newspapers for which he
served now and again as correspondent from Paris or from London.
And not to be omitted from this record is the long story called the
‘Tragic Muse,’ one of the most veracious of theatrical novels; it was
published in 1890.

From one or another of his dramatic criticisms I could borrow not a
few pregnant passages, revelations of his penetrating insight into
the inexorable conditions under which the playwright must do his
work. Here is an early remark, culled from a letter on the Parisian
stage, written in 1872:

An acted play is a novel, intensified; it realizes what the
novel suggests, and by paying a liberal tribute to the senses,
anticipates your possible complaint that your entertainment is of
the meager sort styled intellectual.

This does not pierce to the marrow of the matter; it does not detail
all the difference between the acted play and the novel; but it
has its significance, none the less. In the same letter Henry James
ventures to speak of the “colossal flimsiness” of the ‘Dame aux
Camélias.’ Now Dumas’s pathetic play may be more or less false, but
it is not flimsy; it must have had a solidity of its own, and even a
certain sincerity of a kind, since it kept the stage for three score
years and ten.

Here, however, is a long paragraph from the paper on Tennyson’s
‘Queen Mary’ (written in 1875), which discloses an indisputable
insight into the difficulties of the dramatist’s art:

The fine thing in a real drama, generally speaking, is that, more
than any other work of literary art, it needs a masterly structure.
It needs to be shaped and fashioned and laid together, and this
process makes a demand upon an artist’s rarest gifts. He must
combine and arrange, interpolate and eliminate, play the joiner
with the most attentive skill; and yet at the end effectually
bury his tools and his sawdust, and invest his elaborate skeleton
with the smoothest and most polished integument. The five-act
drama—serious or humorous, poetic or prosaic—is like a box of fixt
dimensions and inelastic material, into which a mass of precious
things are to be packed away. The precious things in question seem
out of all proportion to the compass of the receptacle; but the
artist has an assurance that with patience and skill a place may
be made for each, and that nothing need be clipped or crumpled,
squeezed or damaged. The false dramatist either knocks out the
sides of his box or plays the deuce with the contents; the real one
gets down on his knees, disposes of his goods tentatively, this,
that, and the other way, loses his temper but keeps his ideal,
and at last rises in triumph, having packed his coffer in the one
way that is mathematically right. It closes perfectly, and the
lock turns with a click; between one object and another you cannot
insert the point of a penknife.

It will be enough to risk only one more quotation,—this time from the
paper evoked by the first performance of Ibsen’s ‘Hedda Gabler’ in
London in 1891:

The stage is to the prose drama (and Ibsen’s later manner is the
very prose of prose) what the tune is to the song or the concrete
case to the general law. It immediately becomes apparent that he
needs the test to show his strength and the frame to show his
picture. An extraordinary process of vivification takes place;
the conditions seem essentially enlarged. Those of the stage in
general strike us for the most part as small enough, so that the
game played in them is often not more inspiring than a successful
sack-race. But Ibsen reminds us that if they did not in themselves
confer life, they can at least receive it when the infusion is
artfully administered. Yet how much of it they were doomed to
receive from ‘Hedda Gabler’ was not to be divined till we had
seen ‘Hedda Gabler’ in the frame. The play, on perusal, left us
comparatively muddled and mystified, fascinated but—in one’s
intellectual sympathy—snubbed. Acted, it leads that sympathy over
the straightest of roads with all the exhilaration of a superior
pace.

Nothing could be better than that, nothing could make clearer the
immitigable fact that the full measure of the essential power of
any drama can be gauged only in the actual theater, to the special
conditions of which it has been scientifically adjusted.

In default as yet of a circumstantial biography which shall set
before us the successive but perpetually unsuccessful efforts which
Henry James made to establish himself as a dramatist, we must find
what materials we may in his correspondence and in the explanatory
prefaces which their editor prefixt to the several chronological
sections into which he chose to distribute the letters. First and
last, Henry James seems to have composed eight plays, three of which
underwent the ordeal by fire before the footlights.

His earliest attempt was an amplification of ‘Daisy Miller,’ a
short-story which had attained an immediate vogue. This dramatization
was made in 1882 on commission from the managers of the Madison
Square Theater in New York. But it was not found acceptable to them;
and the author took it over to London and read it to the managers
of the St. James’s Theater, but without winning a more favorable
opinion. Unable to arrange for performance, he resigned himself to
publication; and it appeared as a book in 1883.

Half-a-dozen years later he became discouraged at his inability to
maintain the popularity which he had tasted earlier in his career
as a novelist; and he persuaded himself that he might win a wider
audience as a writer of plays than as a writer of novels. He asserted
more than once that he was persuaded to playmaking by the patent fact
that it was more immediately remunerative than story-telling; but
this assertion seems to be the result of a certain self-deception,
as one of his letters, written to his brother in 1891, proves that
he was convinced of his richer endowment for the drama than for
prose-fiction:

The strange thing is that I have always known this (the drama) was
my more characteristic form.... As for the form itself its honor
and inspiration are its difficulty. If it were easy to write a
good play I couldn’t and wouldn’t think of it; but it is in fact
damnably hard.

A little later, in a letter to Stevenson, he wrote that he was
finding that the dramatic form opened out before him “as if there
were a kingdom to conquer.... I feel as if I had at last found my
form—my real one—that for which pale fiction is an ineffectual
substitute.”

When he turned to the theater he was not exploring an unknown
country. He had been a constant playgoer, ever inquisitive about all
manifestations of the twin arts of the stage, the histrionic and
the dramaturgic. Whenever he was in Paris he sat night after night
absorbing the best that the Comédie-Française could give him; and
Sunday he profited by the sane solidity of the dramatic criticisms
of Francisque Sarcey, from whom few of the secrets of the art of the
stage were hidden. As early as 1878 he had written to his brother:
“My inspection of the French theater will fructify. I have thoroly
mastered Dumas, Augier and Sardou; and I know all they know and a
great deal more besides.” And in another letter (also to his brother)
in 1895, he dwelt on the double difficulty of the novelist who turns
dramatist, the question of method and the question of subject:

If he is really in earnest, as I have been, he surmounts the former
difficulty before he surmounts the latter. I have worked like a
horse—far harder than any one will ever know—over the whole stiff
mystery of technic. I have run it to earth, and I don’t in the
least hesitate to say that, for the comparatively poor and meager,
the piteously simplified, purposes of the English stage, I have
made it absolutely my own, put it in my pocket.

That this was not empty vaunting, and that his keen and cool critical
insight had led him to grasp the chief of the essential qualities
of the drama, as distinguished from prose-fiction, is proved by a
passage in a letter written in 1909 to a friend who had sent him a
published piece of hers, which seemed to him undramatic in that it
lacked “an action, a progression,” whereby it was deprived of the
needful tenseness:

A play appears to me of necessity to involve a struggle, a question
of whether and how, will it or won’t it happen? And if so, or not
so, how and why?—which we have the suspense, the curiosity, the
anxiety, the _tension_, in a word of seeing; and which means that
the whole thing shows an attack upon _oppositions_—with the victory
or the failure on one side or the other, and each wavering and
shifting from point to point.

Here Henry James is at one with Ferdinand Brunetière, when the French
critic laid down what he called the Law of the Drama,—that if a play
is to arouse and retain the interest of audiences it must present a
struggle, a clash of contending desires; it must exhibit the stark
assertion of the human will.

Henry James’s second play was like his first, a dramatization of one
of his own stories, a stage-version of the ‘American.’ It was more
fortunate than the stage-version of ‘Daisy Miller,’ in that it did
thrust itself into the theater, where it lived only a brief life.
It was produced in 1891 by Edward Compton in England, at first in
the provinces and then for a few performances in London. When he
commenced playwriting Henry James did not appreciate that it is a
more difficult task to dramatize a novel than to compose an original
play, since the author is necessarily unable to deal with his
material as freely as he could if it were still molten and had not
already been run into the mold of a narrative. Seemingly he made this
discovery in due course; and he did not again attempt to turn any of
his stories into plays.

His third effort was an original piece, ‘Guy Domville,’ brought out
by Sir George Alexander at the St. James’s Theater in 1895. That it
failed to be favorably received and that it had to be withdrawn at
the end of a month, was a grievous disappointment to the author,—a
disappointment made more poignant by the gross discourtesy, not to
call it wanton brutality, with which he was received by a portion
of the audience when he was called before the curtain at the end of
the first performance. It was perhaps due to this indignity that
he did not publish the play which had failed on the stage in the
natural expectation that it might please in the study, appealing from
the noisy verdict of its spectators to the quieter judgment of its
possible readers.

He had already, the year before, printed in two volumes, entitled
‘Theatricals,’ four other comedies which he had vainly proffered
to the managers,—‘Tenants,’ ‘Disengaged,’ the ‘Album,’ and the
‘Reprobate.’ One other play he turned into a tale, called ‘Covering
End,’ published in 1898. Here he was not contending with any
insuperable difficulty in transposition, since the novel may very
well be dramatic, whereas the play shrinks in abhorrence from any
tincture of the epic.

The drama never lost its attraction for Henry James, but he was
repelled, as well as repulsed, by the theater, wherein it has its
domicile. In 1893 he wrote to his brother:

The whole odiousness of the thing lies in the connection between
the drama and the theater; the one is admirable in its interest
and its difficulty, the other loathsome in its conditions. If the
drama could only be theoretically or hypothetically acted, the
fascination resident in its all but unconquerable form would be
unimpaired, and one would be able to have the exquisite exercise
without the horrid sacrifice.

This was a suggestion natural enough in a retiring and fastidious
artist in letters, but inconceivable in the mouth of any born
playwright, Shakspere or Molière, Sheridan or Beaumarchais, in whom
the pain was physicked by the labor they delighted in.

Notwithstanding his distaste for any other than a theoretic or
hypothetic playhouse, Henry James in 1908, ten years after the
publication of ‘Covering End,’ did not hesitate to disinter the
one-act play upon which it had been founded and to authorize its
performance. He even permitted it to be cut into three acts,—just
as Scribe four-score years earlier had made a three-act comedy,
‘Valérie,’ out of a one-act comédie-vaudeville, by the simple
expedient of excising the songs and of dropping the curtain twice
during the course of the action. The new-old three-act piece was
entitled the ‘High Bid’; it was performed a few times in the
provinces and a few times more in London by the Forbes-Robertsons.
But it did not make any definite impression on the playgoing public.
It was not a disheartening failure like ‘Guy Domville,’ yet it could
not be called a success. Still, its milder reception encouraged its
author to resume work on two more plays, the ‘Other House’ and the
‘Outcry.’ There were even negotiations for the production of these
pieces,—negotiations which came to nothing, chiefly because prolonged
illness forced him to give up work on them.

III

In the deprecatory note which he prefixt to the second volume of
‘Theatricals,’ Henry James declared that

the man who pretends to the drama has more to learn, in fine, than
any other pretender; and his dog’s eared grammar comes at last to
have the remarkable peculiarity of seeming a revelation he himself
shall have made.

Plainly enough he had the conviction that to him the revelation was
complete and that he had his self-made grammar by heart. Why then
did he fail after efforts so persistent and so strenuous? Why did
disaster follow fast and follow faster? It was plainly not from any
lapse in painstaking or any easy ignoring of the difficulties of the
dangerous task. It was not because his primary motive was pecuniary,
since he was soon seized with ardor in his adventures into a new art.
What then was it?

I think that we can find a key to the secret in his letters wherein
he more than once exhibits his detestation of the audience he was
aiming to amuse. He wrote to his brother in 1895:

The thing fills me with horror for the abysmal vulgarity and
brutality of the theater and its regular public, which God knows
I have had intensely, even when working (from motives as pure as
pecuniary motives can be) against it.

What right had any man to hope that he might gain the suffrages of
spectators he so totally detested and despised? Henry James here
takes an attitude, he discloses a frame of mind, as dissimilar as
may be from the mighty masters of the drama,—from Corneille’s or
Molière’s, for example.

In 1911 he wrote to a friend that

the conditions—the theater-question generally—in this country
(England) are horrific and unspeakable. Utter, and as far as I can
see, irreclaimable barbarism reigns. The anomalous fact is that the
theater, so called, can flourish in barbarism, but that any drama
worth speaking of can develop but in the air of civilization.

That assertion implies a belief that England was less civilized in
the opening years of the twentieth century than it had been in the
opening years of the seventeenth. Many things may be said against the
present age, but hardly that it is less civilized than that of James
I.

We may dismiss these two opinions as the petulances of a man of
delicate sensibilities abraded to exacerbation by gross contacts with
the vulgar herd. None the less are contacts with the herd inherent in
the playwright’s trade. He cannot retire into any ivory tower; he
must come down to the market place; only at his peril can he shrink
from meeting his fellow man. He is disqualified for the drama which
appeals, has always appealed and always will appeal, to the mass, to
the common herd, if he holds himself aloof, if his sympathy is not
sufficient to make him for the moment one of the throng, to feel as
the mass feels, even if he feels more acutely, to think as the plain
people think, even if he thinks more wisely. At bottom the drama must
be fundamentally democratic, since it depends upon the majority.

The great dramatists did not succeed by writing down to the mob,
but by writing broad to humanity. They did not have to deliberate
and to quest about for the things to which the many-headed public
would respond; they knew, for they themselves thrilled with the same
passions, the same desires and the same ideals. They had an assured
solidarity with their fellow-citizens, whom they faced on the plane
of equality and whom they did not look down on from any altitude of
conscious superiority. They never condescended; they were never even
tempted to condescension. They gave to the throng, made up of all
manner of men, literate and illiterate, the best they had in them,
the very best. Nor did they feel that in so doing they were making
any sacrifice. They were stout of heart and strong of stomach, with
no drooping tendrils of exquisite delicacy.

Perhaps it would be unfair to suggest that when he was engaged in
playwriting Henry James was unconsciously condescending; but it is
not unfair to assert that he had no solidarity with the spectators he
was hoping to attract and delight. What he gave them—the note prefixt
to ‘Theatricals’ proves it amply—was as good as he thought they
deserved or could understand; it was not his best. And even if he had
designed to give them his best, he could not have done it, because a
miniaturist cannot make himself over into a scene-painter. The two
arts may demand an equal ability but the hand that works in either,
soon subdued to what it works in, is incapacitated for the other. The
supersubtleties in which Henry James excelled were impossible in the
theater; they demand time to be taken in, an allowance impossible to
the swiftness of the stage; they would not get across the footlights;
and they might puzzle even the most enlightened spectators. It takes
an immense experience and a marvelous skill “to paint in broad
strokes, but so artfully that at a distance it appears as if we had
painted in miniature,”—which, so the Spanish dramatist Benavente
tells us, “is at once the problem and the art of the drama.”

In his review of the ‘School for Scandal,’ Henry James confessed that
he saw

no reason to believe that the mass of mankind will ever be more
artistic than is strikingly convenient, and we suspect that acute
pleasure or pain, on this line, will remain the privilege of an
initiated minority.

The supreme leaders of the drama, Sophocles, Shakspere and Molière,
were satisfied to rely on the “mass of mankind,” of whose sympathies
they had an intuitive understanding. Henry James, all unwittingly
it may be, was addressing himself only to the “initiated minority.”
Where the leaders possessed robust straightforwardness and direct
brevity, he was solitary, isolated, acutely fastidious. He must have
read but he did not take to heart Joubert’s warning that we ought,
“in writing, to remember that men of culture are present, but it is
not to them that we should speak.” Henry James’s novels would have
been more widely enjoyed if he had profited by this precept; and
because he did not profit by it his plays are “all silent and all
damned.”

(1921)

STAGE HUMOR

When we consider the antics indulged in by actors of the custard-pie
comedies which make many of us guffaw violently as they succeed one
another on the screen and when we analyze the witticisms which make
many of us smile appreciatively as they cascade down the dialog of
Sheridan’s ‘School for Scandal,’ we disclose that our laughter,
gentle as it may be or boisterous as it is more often, can be aroused
by two distinct factors, by the shock of surprize and by the reaction
of an awakened sense of superiority. Wit delights us by its exploding
unexpectedness; and humor awakens pity for its victims and also pride
that we are not as weak as they are, not as short-sighted or as
muddle-headed, not as prone to make fools of ourselves.

As the simplest and easiest form of wit is a play on words and as the
simplest and easiest form of humor is a practical joke, we need not
be surprized that the comedies and farces of ’prentice playwrights
are likely to crackle with an arbitrary collocation of vocables so
put together as to create at least the semblance of wit and also that
these firstlings of the comic muse are likely to contain episodes of
arbitrarily built up practical joking. These two characteristics are
infallible witnesses to the juvenility of the author of any play in
which they are abundant. Marlowe died young; and this may account for
the dreary emptiness of the would-be comic scenes in ‘Doctor Faustus’
with their perverse practical jokery. If we needed internal evidence
to corroborate the external proof that ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost’ is one
of Shakspere’s earliest comedies we could find it in his obviously
painstaking effort to achieve verbal brilliance and in the palpably
artificial play-within-the-play lugged into the final act so that one
group of characters can laugh at another group, created solely to
serve as butts for the merriment of their associates.

As Shakspere was an Elizabethan Englishman he outgrew his relish
for puns very slowly; and he retained his willingness to rely on
the practical joke as a basis for comic situations even as late as
the middle of his career, when he wrote the last and tenderest of
his romantic comedies, ‘Twelfth Night.’ It is only fair to admit
that the trick which Maria and Sir Toby play upon Malvolio is not
an empty mechanism; it is just what those two delightful companions
would devise to get even with the cross-gartered Puritan and to
punish him for his paraded self-sufficiency. So the trick which
Prince Hal and Poins play upon Falstaff and which prompts him to the
noble narrative of his combat with the men in buckram,—this also is
completely in accordance with the character of the fat knight and
of the future king; and moreover it serves most admirably to reveal
Falstaff’s superb imperturbability and his infinite resourcefulness
in extricating himself from a morass wherein a slow-witted man would
have sunk helpless.

With the mad Prince and Poins we laugh at Falstaff, no doubt; but we
are ready also to laugh with him, because he is so humorously human.
We like him even if we cannot have any respect for him; in fact, we
like him so much that we are a little inclined to resent the way in
which his creator has chosen to treat him in more than one episode of
the ‘Merry Wives,’ especially his concealment in the buckbasket of
foul linen and his subsequent upsetting into foul water. Shakspere,
even tho his masterpieces may survive for all time, was himself a
man of his own time; and at the end of the sixteenth century people
were more callous than they are at the beginning of the twentieth,
thicker of skin and stouter of stomach, more tolerant of needless
pain and even of purposeless brutality. We cannot doubt that
Shakspere must have been a spectator at “the whipping of the blind
bear”; and to him as to other Elizabethans madness was comic rather
than tragic. To-day we have for Malvolio, and even for Shylock, a
sympathy which is born of a better understanding and which assuredly
would astonish no one more than it would Shakspere.

George Eliot, with her shrewd insight into the recesses of human
nature, declared that “a difference of taste in jests is a great
strain on the affections”; and there is no doubt that our affection
for Shakspere is now and again not a little strained by his eager
pursuit of the obvious pun and by his persistent employment of the
obvious practical joke. Our taste in jests is more restricted than
his; and we labor in vain to excuse him by the plea that he descended
to the pun and the practical joke only to gratify the ruder likings
of the groundlings who stood restless in the unroofed yard of the
Globe Theater. It is simpler, and it is honester, to admit frankly,
first of all, that Shakspere was a right Elizabethan Englishman
who shared the tastes of his contemporaries and his countrymen;
and second, that the false glitter of dialog and the artificial
practical joking are simply testimony to the immaturity of his genius
at the time when he composed the comic dramas in which we discover
these defects. Not only has our taste in jests changed in more than
three centuries, but Shakspere’s own taste in jests changed in less
than twenty years. In his later masterpieces, in the best plays of
his best period, the wit is intellectual rather than verbal and the
humor is sympathetically human.

George Eliot, to quote her again, makes one of her philosophic
characters declare that a liking for Bellini’s music “indicates a
puerile state of culture.” Certainly the liking for practical jokes
is an even more certain indication of this condition. And “puerile”
is an aptly chosen adjective, since the practical joke is boyish;
and boys are pitiably uncivilized. Until they tame their native
energy they are callous to the sufferings of others and they even
enjoy cruelties they inflict in the spontaneous expression of their
thereby demonstrated superiority. Just as the Clown in the pantomime
butters the slide so that the Pantaloon shall slip and tumble
down tumultuously, so the boy in real life delights in disguising
the frozen pavement with scattered snow so that the unsuspecting
gentleman in spectacles will make a violent and vain struggle
to keep his balance. This evokes joyful shouts from the youthful
perpetrators of the unkindly act. If a grown-up happens to witness
the mishap he is not moved to laughter; his immediate impulse is to
go to the aid of the elderly victim.

Yet this same grown-up when he is one of the audience at a pantomime
reverts to the puerile stage of culture and becomes a child again;
for the two hours’ traffic of the stage he is subdued to what he
gazes at; and he may be moved to loud merriment by deeds which, seen
in the street, would cause him instantly to summon the police. He
laughingly approves of the unprovoked assassinations of Punch.

We are assured by scientific investigators that civilization is
only a thin veneer at best and that beneath the courtesy of the
most civilized society there lie dormant the archaic instincts
of primitive man. However remote we may think ourselves from our
probably arboreal ancestor, the beast within us is never dead; and he
is ever ready to rouse himself from his long slumber and to put us to
shame sometimes by his blood-lust and sometimes by his monkey-tricks.

The scientists also assert that every one of us, from his conception
to his coming of age, passes through the successive stages of the
evolution of mankind, slowly rising year by year from savagery to
barbarism and from barbarism to civilization (supposing that he is
lucky enough to progress so far). If this must be admitted, then
we need not be surprized that the audiences in our theaters can be
interested by wit which is juvenile and by humor which is primitive.
These audiences are made up of all sorts and conditions of men, in
every stage of development. Even if we assume that most of these
spectators are civilized (perhaps a precarious assumption), we
cannot doubt that only a few of them have attained to a high level
of culture; and by this very attainment these more advanced members
of the audience are separated from the main body, which has not
progressed in its preferences so far away from its ruder and cruder
progenitors.

The larger the theater itself, the more closely compacted the
spectators, the more primitive is the comic effect which will
provoke the swiftest and the most uproarious response; and the
refined and delicate-minded minority finds itself conforming to
the primitive tastes of the less particular majority, even if it
does so only for the moment. While the curtain is up the high-brow
has a fellow-feeling with his low-brow companions; and he is
therefore willing not merely to smile deprecatingly but even to
laugh heartily at mechanical dislocations of the vocabulary and at
equally mechanical practical jokes. When he is a spectator of the
passing show, the self-conscious Pharisee of culture will consent to
fellowship with publicans and with sinners.

In one of his earlier philosophical inquiries, that in which he
analyzed the sources of laughter, Bergson recalled the old story
of the man in church who remained dry-eyed when the rest of the
congregation were dissolved in tears by the pathos of the sermon
and who explained his failure to be moved as due to the fact that
he did not “belong to that parish.” And Bergson asserted that
this explanation, absurd as it may seem, is not unsatisfactory or
illogical, if applied to laughter rather than to tears. “However
hearty a laugh may be,” the French philosopher declared, “it always
conceals an afterthought of complicity with other laughters, real or
imaginary.”

So it is that when the spectators refuse to become accomplices
before the fact, there is no certainty that they will respond to
the wit or to the humor of the play they are witnessing. Only when
they have yielded themselves to a communal intimacy, so to call
it, can the dramatist find an immediate appreciation of his merry
jests. Shakspere spoke out of abundant experience as player and as
playwright when he declared that “a jest’s prosperity lies in the
ear of him that hears it.” And Goethe was no less shrewd when he
asserted that “nothing is more significant of men’s character than
what they find laughable.”

III

The French, who have an armory of critical terms both more exact and
more abundant than ours, distinguish between three different kinds of
stage humor. There is, first of all, the mere witticism, the sentence
laughable in itself, the so-called epigram; and this they term the
_mot d’esprit_. Second, there is the phrase which derives its comic
effect not from itself but from its utterance at a given moment in
the movement of the story; and this they speak of as the _mot de
situation_. Thirdly, there is the word or the sentence whereby a
character expresses himself unexpectedly, unconsciously turning the
flashlight on the unexplored recesses of his own soul; and they are
wont to call this the _mot de caractère_.

It is the first of these, the witticism existing for its own sake and
sufficient with itself, detachable from the dialog, not integrated
with either character or situation, merely a merry jest at large, it
is verbal glitter of this sort which is essentially juvenile, which
we may expect in the piece of ’prentice playwrights and which we
find in the early comedies of Shakspere; more especially in ‘Love’s
Labor’s Lost.’

Thomas Moore, in his brilliant biography of Richard Brinsley
Sheridan, called attention to the fact that English comedy, from
the ‘Way of the World’ to the ‘School for Scandal,’ was the work of
young men, who either died before they attained intellectual maturity
or abandoned the theater; and in the juvenility of these comic
playwrights, from Congreve to Sheridan, we can see the explanation
and the excuse for the verbal fireworks which explode all down
their dialog. So the younger Dumas was under thirty when he wrote
the ‘Demi-Monde’ with its elaborately paraded epigram; and he was
over fifty when he composed ‘Françillon’ with its dialog bathed in
wit and yet devoid of detachable dewdrops. So Oscar Wilde left us
only the comedies composed when he was comparatively youthful; and
he had perforce to give up playwriting before he had attained to
artistic sincerity. His epigrams, often amusing in themselves, are
half of them taken out of his note-book to be tacked arbitrarily into
his dialog. They may glitter like spangles but they are only sewed
on. The built up repartees and the manufactured retorts of Wilde’s
characters are sometimes too rude to be probable in the polite
society which the author took a snobbish pride in putting into his
plays; but at least they lacked the bare brutality of the rejoinders
we find in Congreve’s comedies and more particularly in Wycherly’s,
rejoinders which recall Goldsmith’s criticism of Johnson as a
conversationalist, that “whenever the doctor’s pistol misses fire, he
knocks you down with the butt.”

Even Sir Arthur Pinero in his juvenile pieces fell victim to a
prevailing epidemic of epigram. At least, I can adduce one specimen
of his youthful effort in his very youthful play, ‘Imprudence.’ As it
was unsuccessful it has remained unpublished, and I must therefore
rely on my memory. The lovers have quarreled and parted forever. This
is at an afternoon tea; and when the time comes for the young lady
to go home, the young gentleman approaches her with the courteously
formal query, “Shall I call you a hansom?” To which she retorts, “You
are mean enough to call me anything!” Many things, no doubt, must be
pardoned to a young lady who is desperately in love and who has just
broken with her devoted lover; but this impossible repartee is not
one of them. Sir Arthur Pinero’s dialog in his later social dramas
is nervous, tense, highly individual, and totally devoid of these
outgrown artificialities; and in them he evokes laughter by the clash
of character on character. His piercing sayings are the product of
essential wisdom and not of external wit.

It is evidence of Molière’s early maturity that there are no _mots
d’esprit_ even in his most brilliant comedies. He eschewed the
empty witticism; and in his ‘Criticism of the School for Wives’ he
explained with conscious pride that the jokes in his dialog were not
put there for their own sake; they were meant to illustrate situation
and character. Molière has his clever sayings, his epigrams and his
aphorisms, but they are always germane; they are _mots de situation_
and _mots de caractère_, and never merely _mots d’esprit_. More
than any other comic dramatist does Molière deserve the praise that
William Archer once bestowed on Bronson Howard, that his good things
grow out of his story, “like blossoms on a laburnum,” and are not
“stuck on like candles on a Christmas tree.”

The same commendation may be given to Sir James Barrie, who has now
come into his own and has conquered his juvenile tendency to get
his laugh by whimsicalities lugged in by main strength,—like the
husband’s amputation of the excrescences of his wife’s hat, in the
‘Professor’s Love Story.’ In the later ‘Dear Brutus’ the whole fabric
of the story is whimsical and fantastic, fanciful and delightful. To
a play like this we may apply Goethe’s characterization of Claude
Lorraine’s faery palaces, that it was “absolute truth—without a sign
of reality.” At its performance little ripples of intimate laughter
ran around the audience, never breaking into a unanimous guffaw.
The humor of the dialog may be, as indeed it must be, the humor of
Barrie himself; but it seems to us the spontaneous utterance of the
character from whose mouth it comes.

The _mot de caractère_, the word or the sentence whereby a character
expresses himself unconsciously, “giving himself away,” as the
American phrase is, this is not to be confounded with that ancient
stage-trick, the catch-word, repeated again and again with the hope
and expectation that it will become more laughable the more often it
is heard. The catch-word may be effective when it is used with artful
discretion; but it is a dangerous device likely at last to annoy a
large part of the audience. Since Corporal Nym companions Falstaff
in the ‘Merry Wives’ as well as in ‘Henry IV’ we may infer that he
had found favor in the eyes of the spectators at the Globe, or else
Shakspere would not have carried him over from play to play; and yet
modern audiences soon weary of Nym’s inability to open his mouth
without letting fall the word _humor_. “That’s the humor of it” is
not at all humorous to-day.

But even the catch-word, said once and said again, and then said
yet once more, may be made to serve as a _mot de caractère_, as
a revelation of character. In Molière’s ‘Fourberies de Scapin,’
when the befooled father is told that his beloved son has rashly
adventured himself on board a Turkish galley and has been seized and
held for ransom, his reiterated query,—“But what the devil was he
doing on that galley?”—is increasingly mirth-provoking because it is
exactly the futile protest which that foolish parent would put forth
again and again in that particular predicament.

In itself the question,—“What the devil was he doing on that
galley?”—is not at all funny; it becomes funny only because of its
utterance at a given moment by a given person. It is not quotable by
itself, since it is meaningless when detached from its context. Nor
is there anything funny in the remark, “It is at least as long since
I was in a bank!” or in the query, “Why don’t you?” None the less
have I heard the remark and the query arouse abundant laughter.

When David Warfield played the part of a stage-Jew in one of the
Weber and Fields nondescript spectacles, cleverly compounded of
glitter and gaiety, he had a brief dialog with a subordinate
stage-Jew. This feeder explained in detail how he had taken out a
fire insurance policy on his store and on his stock in trade for at
least twice their value. When Warfield heard this, he looked puzzled
for a moment and then he asked, “Vel, vy don’t you?”

The elder Sothern took an unsuccessful comedy of H. J. Byron’s, the
‘Prompter’s Box,’ renamed it the ‘Crushed Tragedian’ and rewrote it
so that he might himself appear as a broken-down old actor, fallen
upon evil days but forever puffed with pride in his own histrionic
achievements. He comes in contact with a banker, who, when he learns
that Sothern is an actor, makes the remark that “It must be ten years
since I was in a theater.” Whereupon the crushed tragedian, drawing
himself up and draping himself in imaginary robes, delivers the
annihilating retort, “It must be at least as long since I was in a
bank!”

It is a little difficult to decide whether these two examples
illustrate the _mot de caractère_ or the _mot de situation_, since
they illuminate both character and situation. But the _mot de
situation_ can exist independently, relying for its effect solely
upon the moment in the action when it is spoken. In a forgotten
farce called ‘French Flats,’ Stuart Robson was warned to keep out of
the way of a certain tenor, who was fiercely and fierily jealous.
A little later we saw him venture into a room wherein we knew the
operatic Othello to be concealed; and when he reappeared with his
clothes torn from him and with a woe-begone expression, we waited
expectantly for him to explain,—“The tenor was behind the door.”
This sentence, innocent of all humor when taken by itself apart from
the situation, was only the eagerly looked for explosion of a bomb
fired by the long fuse which has been sputtering in full sight of the
spectators.

Much ingenuity has been expended in trying to draw a hard and fast
line between qualities which are closely akin, between talent and
genius, for example. We are told that “talent does what it can and
genius does what it must”; and this sounds impressive, no doubt, but
it does not get us any forwarder. It implies a distinction in kind
which is difficult to prove. So it is with the corresponding attempts
to distinguish sharply between wit and humor. We can see clearly
enough that many of Sheridan’s clever things are wit, beyond all
question; and we can also see that most of Molière’s clever things
are humor; but there remain not a few laughter-provoking effects
which it is almost impossible to classify. Perhaps some of them
cannot fairly be entitled either witty or humorous; they are just
funny.

In one of Charles Hoyt’s unpretending farcical comedies, all of
them unhesitatingly American, new births of our new soil, there was
a droll creature who found it amusing to purloin a succession of
articles from a certain house, crossing the stage again and again at
intervals bearing out the objects he was appropriating, the last of
these being nothing less than a red-hot stove. On one of his earlier
marauding expeditions he came before the audience with a huge ostrich
egg in one hand and with a tiny bantam chicken in the other. He came
down to the footlights and stood for a moment looking first at the
egg and then at the hen, with growing amazement. Finally he said,
“Well, I don’t believe it!”

Now, I cannot call the remark witty in itself, and I am not at all
sure that it is humorous; but it is funny,—at least this was the
unanimous opinion of the joyful audience. Equally funny was a brief
scene in another of the nondescript spectacles of Weber and Fields.
There was on one side of the stage, not too near the footlights,
the portico of a house, over which was a ground glass globe with
an electric bulb inside it. Weber and Fields came on together; and
Weber remarked, as they faced the audience: “This is his house. I
know it because he told me it had a white light over the door.”
(For the benefit of my readers I shall spare them the dialect which
intensified the flavor of the ensuing dialog.)

“A white light?” said Fields. “I didn’t see a white light.” At that
moment the globe became red just as Fields turned to look at it.
“That isn’t a white light,” he asserted when he again faced the
audience. “It’s a red light!”

“I tell you it’s a white light. I saw it,” said Weber; and when he
twisted his head to steal a glimpse of the globe it had again changed
its color. “I bet you five dollars it is a white light!”

“Five dollars?” cried Fields looking over his shoulder at the light,
which had then become red. “I bet you ten dollars it is a red light!”

“Ten dollars?” shouted Weber, “I—I—” Then he cautiously stole a look
at the globe, which was once more innocent of any color. “I bet you
fifty dollars it is a white light!”

When Fields, in his turn, looked back the globe was red, and he
instantly raised his bet to a hundred dollars.

I forget how high the wager mounted at last, each of the pair feeling
assured that he was betting on a certainty; but at last they had
wagered all they possessed and with the stakes in their hands,
they slowly revolved to gaze at the light together. But to their
astonished dismay, and to the vociferous delight of the spectators,
the light over the door was green!

“What can we do?” asked the saddened Weber. “We have both of us lost!”

And the saddened Fields answered, “We must throw the money away!”

What helps to make this pleasant scene even more pleasing is that the
audience was never supplied with any explanation as to the cause of
the changes of the color of the lights. That remains to this day a
dark mystery.

This may not be witty, and it may even not be humorous, but it was
funny. It provoked incessant laughter in its progress to its apex,
which was greeted with uncontrollable roars. And laughter, like
that, clean and simple and honest, is a thing to be thankful for.
It is what Artemus Ward called “a sweet, sweet boon.” It needs no
apology and no explanation; it is its own excuse for being,—even if
it resists classification. It is wholesome and hygienic; and as Henry
Ward Beecher declared, “Whoever and wherever and however situated a
man is, he must watch three things,—sleeping, digestion and laughing.
They are three indispensable necessities.”

(1919)

XII

THE “OLD COMEDIES”

XII

THE “OLD COMEDIES”

It was in 1861 that Wallack’s Theater moved uptown from Broadway and
Broome Street to Broadway and 13th Street and that the management
passed from the hand of James W. Wallack to that of his son, Lester
Wallack. In 1882 Wallack’s Theater made another migration, from
Broadway and 13th Street to Broadway and 30th Street; and in this
third and final home the company failed to find itself as attractive
as it had been when it was lower downtown. Lester Wallack had to
relinquish its control; and he was glad to accept as a provision
for his declining years the proceeds of an all-star performance of
‘Hamlet’ given for his benefit with Edwin Booth as Hamlet and with
Joseph Jefferson as the First Gravedigger.

It was in 1879 while the company was still in its second home, at
Broadway and 13th Street, that Lester Wallack made a remark to me
which helped to explain why his enterprize came to grief not long
after it was transplanted to Broadway and 30th Street. He declared
rather plaintively that the management of a theater in New York was
in 1879 far more difficult than it had been in his father’s time.
“We used to bring out the latest London success,” he told me, “and
to revive the Old Comedies, and with a play now and then from Dion
[Boucicault] or from John [Brougham], we got through the season very
well. But I don’t really know now what people want.”

It was because he did not know what the people of New York wanted
that he had to give up the management of his theater and to accept a
benefit performance arranged for him by his friendly rivals, Augustin
Daly and A. M. Palmer. Altho he had been born in New York Lester
Wallack was always proud to consider himself an Englishman. So it was
that he remained an alien in the city of his birth, unresponsive to
the shifting currents of American life and unaware that the playgoers
of New York were slowly surrendering their former habit of colonial
dependence upon London. Wallack was so insistently English that he
never found himself at home in an American part in an American play;
and perhaps he may have felt that he was not really qualified to
pass on the merits of a drama dealing with the life of this country.
Brougham and Boucicault, Irishmen both, had each of them a far
better understanding of American likes and dislikes than Wallack had,
altho such an understanding is, of course, absolutely necessary to
the manager of a New York theater.

His more energetic rivals in management, Daly and Palmer, often
outbid him for the acquisition of the “latest London success,” and
they also made direct arrangements to acquire the latest Paris
success, whereas Wallack waited until this French piece had been
transmogrified into a British piece, almost as foreign to the
traditions of the American people as the French original had been. In
time Dion and John ceased to supply him with occasional new plays.
So it was that he was reduced to the third of his three sources of
supply, the Old Comedies. In so doing he was for a while secure from
rivalry, altho Daly was soon to become a vigorous and dangerous
competitor in this field, which Wallack had long thought to be his
exclusive property.

What were these Old Comedies that Wallack mentioned airily and with
assurance that his hearer would know exactly what he meant? I can
see how the youthful playgoer of to-day might be completely puzzled
if called upon to explain this term, perfectly familiar to playgoers
who were youthful two score years ago. I can hear this youthful
playgoer of to-day asking for a catalog of these Old Comedies and
for a list of their authors. And I can imagine him wondering also
why it is that he has rarely had a chance to see these Old Comedies
which delighted the lovers of the acted drama in the days of his
grandfather.

The Old Comedies, so called, were a selected group of successful
plays which had been produced in the eighteenth century, most of them
(altho a few first saw the light of the lamps in the first half of
the nineteenth century) and which had survived on the stage, being
acted at irregular intervals at the Haymarket Theater in London,
at Wallack’s and later at Daly’s Theater in New York, and at the
Boston Museum. Curiously enough, no one of Shakspere’s humorous
pieces, lovely comedies and lively farces, was included in the
catalog of the Old Comedies, altho they were a century older than
the youngest of these Old Comedies; and no one of the comic plays of
Shakspere’s contemporaries, no comedy-of-humors by Ben Jonson, no
dramatic-romance by Beaumont and Fletcher, was regularly enrolled in
this special repertory. And, what is even more curious, no one of
the comedies of the Restoration, no brilliant and brutal satire by
Congreve or Wycherly, no ingenious intrigue by Vanbrugh or Farquhar,
had been able to keep the stage and to demand inclusion in this
rigorous selection from out the comic masterpieces of the English
drama. It may be noted, in a parenthesis, that Daly did revive
two of Farquhar’s amusing plays, the ‘Recruiting Officer’ and the
‘Inconstant’; but these revivals were due to Daly’s own taste and
neither of these bold and brisk pieces could claim admission to the
recognized group of Old Comedies.

Now, if this group did not include any of the humorous pieces of the
Elizabethan, Jacobean and Restoration dramatists, what plays did it
contain? And no two students of stage-history would agree on the
answer to this question. No council was ever empowered to regulate
the canon and to prepare a final list of the comic dramas demanding
inclusion. The repertory of the Haymarket was not exactly the same as
that of Wallack’s, which in its turn did not coincide absolutely with
that of the Boston Museum. Yet it is safe to say that every student
of stage-history would be likely to put on his list most of the
plays which I now venture to include in mine. I find fifteen pieces
produced in the eighteenth century which I feel compelled to catalog
as truly Old Comedies:

Cibber’s ‘She Would and She Would Not’ (1703).
Mrs. Centlivre’s ‘Busybody’ (1709).
Mrs. Centlivre’s ‘Wonder’ (1717).
Garrick’s ‘High Life Below Stairs’ (1759).
Colman’s ‘Jealous Wife’ (1761).
Foote’s ‘Liar’ (1762).
Garrick and Colman’s ‘Clandestine Marriage’ (1766).
Goldsmith’s ‘She Stoops to Conquer’ (1773).
Sheridan’s ‘Rivals’ (1775).
Sheridan’s ‘School for Scandal’ (1777).
Sheridan’s ‘Critic’ (1779).
Mrs. Cowley’s ‘Belle’s Stratagem’ (1780).
Holcroft’s ‘Road to Ruin’ (1792).
O’Keefe’s ‘Wild Oats’ (1794).
Colman the Younger’s ‘Heir at Law’ (1797).

This list calls for two immediate comments. First, only two of these
plays have been acted in any New York theater in the past score
of years, that is to say, in the twentieth century; and therefore
playgoers under forty have not had the opportunity of seeing any of
the others performed by a professional company. Second, every one
of these plays was acted in New York during the final forty years
of the nineteenth century, some of them being produced at different
times by different companies in different theaters. For example, I
have had the pleasure in the course of a half-century of playgoing of
attending performances of the ‘School for Scandal’ at Wallack’s, at
Niblo’s, at the Union Square and at three different Daly’s theaters.

Perhaps a third comment is warranted, to the effect that my catalog
of Old Comedies includes specimens of almost every subdivision of
the comic drama. The ‘School for Scandal’ is the foremost example
in English of what has been called high-comedy, the humorous play
in which character is more important than story and of which the
plot is caused by the clash of character on character. ‘She Would
and She Would Not’ is a vivacious comedy-of-intrigue; and so is the
‘Belle’s Stratagem.’ The ‘Jealous Wife’ in some of its situations,
and the ‘Road to Ruin’ also, are almost too serious to be classed as
comic dramas. The ‘Critic’ and ‘High Life Below Stairs’ are frankly
farces, bustling with business and charged with high spirits. Even
the ‘Rivals’ and ‘She Stoops to Conquer’ reveal themselves as closely
akin to farce, in so far as their respective actions are not caused
spontaneously by the volition of the characters but are arbitrarily
brought about by the author himself, visibly pulling the wires which
control the movements of his puppets. Probably it was the excessive
laudation bestowed on these two more or less farcical pieces of
Sheridan and Goldsmith which led Sir Arthur Pinero to formulate his
satiric definition: “A comedy is a farce by a deceased author.”

Possibly a fourth comment may be appended altho it must be apologized
for as a doubtful digression. In my list the ‘Liar’ is credited
to Samuel Foote, because it could not very well be credited to
any other author. But when it was last acted in New York, the text
used was a revision by Lester Wallack of an earlier condensation by
Charles James Mathews. Moreover Foote’s own play was an adaptation
of Corneille’s ‘Menteur,’—an adaptation more or less influenced by
an earlier version of the French piece, Steele’s ‘Lying Lover.’ To
go still further back, Corneille had taken his story from a Spanish
original, the ‘Verdad Sospiciosa’ of Alarcon. And we may bring to
an end this summary record of the strange adventures of a plot by
setting down the fact that Alarcon, altho a Spaniard, had been born
in Mexico. So we can, if we so choose, claim the ‘Liar’ in all its
many transformations as the earliest play to be written by a native
American.

To these fifteen comedies originally produced in the eighteenth
century, we may add seven plays produced in the first three score
years of the nineteenth century:

Tobin’s ‘Honeymoon’ (1805).
Knowles’ ‘Hunchback’ (1832).
Knowles’ ‘Love Chase’ (1837).
Bulwer-Lytton’s ‘Money’ (1840).
Boucicault’s ‘London Assurance’ (1841).
Boucicault’s ‘Old Heads and Young Hearts’ (1844).
Reade and Taylor’s ‘Masks and Faces’ (often called ‘Peg Woffington’)
(1852).

To the best of my recollection no one of these nineteenth century
pieces has been seen on the New York stage since the twentieth
century began.

I have no right to assume that any other theater-goer of fifty years
of experience would select exactly these twenty-two plays as being
the Old Comedies; but I make bold to believe that my selection
includes all the pieces which demand to be so grouped together.

III

A lover of the theater whose playgoing has been done in the past
score of years may be moved to ask why it is that these plays, which
evoked the loyal laughter of his father and his grandfather, have
been utterly banished from the twentieth century stage, and why they
are as unknown in the playhouses of London as they are in those of
New York and of Boston. To this question it is possible to give three
answers.

In the first place these Old Comedies show the signs of age, even
when we read them. They seem to most moderns more or less arbitrary
in plot, more or less artificial in dialog, and more or less archaic
in method. To assert this is to admit that they are hopelessly out
of date both in their content and in their form. They abound, for
example, in asides and in soliloquies, addressed directly to the
audience; and they are decorated with frequent bravura passages,
devised to exhibit the virtuosity of the performer, just as the solos
of the earlier Italian operas were introduced merely to allow the
soprano to execute her variations or the tenor to attain his high
C. The tone of these humorous plays is too highly colored for our
subdued taste, and many of their characters strike us as caricatures
of humanity, almost fantastic in their wilful eccentricity. In
short, these pieces one and all belong to a type of drama hopelessly
out of fashion, unfamiliar in many of its aspects. In the theater
what is unfamiliar is frequently ludicrous, merely because of its
unfamiliarity; and we are inclined to laugh at it, as we do at the
wearing apparel of a decade ago. In playmaking, as in dressmaking,
styles change with disconcerting swiftness.

This brings us to the second reason for the disappearance of these
Old Comedies from the twentieth century theater. Their departure was
coincident with the breaking up of the stock-company, kept together
year after year with only occasional changes in its membership. Forty
years ago the company at Wallack’s, like that at the Boston Museum,
was a homogeneous body, with customs of its own, imparted to the
newcomers it enrolled and accepted reverently by these recruits.
It was in the habit of appearing in one or more of the Old Comedies
every winter; its elder members knew the traditional business and the
traditional effects in each of these comic dramas; and they were glad
to pass on this knowledge to the younger members. As a result of this
an Old Comedy could always be used as a stop-gap when a new play had
failed to please the public; and it could be brought out at a week’s
notice. In other words, the stock-company was a repertory company,
ready to revive on demand any one of a dozen or more Old Comedies and
assured in advance that this revival would be welcome to a majority
of the playgoers, many of whom would be glad of the chance to compare
it with the performances of two or three seasons before.

Altho these companies at Wallack’s in New York and later at Daly’s
also, as well as that at the Museum in Boston, utilized the Old
Comedies mainly as life-preservers, to be put on whenever new plays
sank under them, they relied upon these new plays for the major part
of their season, reserving their revivals for sudden contingencies.
But these new plays of half-a-century ago were not widely unlike
the Old Comedies in their external characteristics; they also had
their soliloquies, their asides, and their bravura passages; they
were also more or less arbitrary in plot, more or less artificial in
dialog and more or less archaic in method, or at least they would so
appear to us of the twentieth century if they could be galvanized
into life again for our inspection.

The pleasant comedies of T. W. Robertson, ‘Caste’ for one and ‘Ours’
for another, which were hailed on their first appearance as “natural”
and even as “realistic,” have revealed themselves at their most
recent resuscitations to be almost as mannered and as mechanical
as were the Old Comedies. In fact, the more closely we study the
English drama between 1860 and 1870 the more clearly we perceive the
influence of the English drama between 1770 and 1780. In the century
which stretches from 1770 to 1870 we can observe no violent break in
the continuity of the development of the drama.

But between 1870 and 1920 there was a startling change; the drama
made a new departure; and this is the third reason why the Old
Comedies have been cast out of our twentieth century theaters.
The new departure was the result of two influences, working
simultaneously. One of these influences was internal; it was the
rapid advance of the so-called realistic movement, of which Balzac
was the pioneer in the novel and of which the younger Dumas was the
pioneer in the play. It is easy for us to see now that Balzac and
Dumas were both of them on occasion ultra-romanticist; but none the
less were they more realistic than their immediate predecessors
had been. They tried to present life as they saw it with their own
eyes, animated by an unquenchable desire to deal with it frankly
and honestly. Balzac spent himself in the effort to be exact and to
relate all his myriad characters to the background before which each
of them had posed for him; and Dumas was almost as strenuous in his
demand for veracity.

The other influence was external; it was the gradual modification of
the ground-plan of the playhouse, a modification which resulted at
last in the picture-frame stage to which we are now accustomed and to
which all the plays of this century are necessarily adjusted. In size
and in shape the theater for which Reade and Taylor composed ‘Masks
and Faces’ was very like the theater for which Sheridan had composed
the ‘School for Scandal,’ three-quarters of a century earlier; and
it was very unlike the theater for which Sir Arthur Pinero composed
‘Mid-Channel,’ nearly three-quarters of a century after.

The theater of Reade and Taylor, and of Sheridan also, was a large
building with a stage which projected in a curve into the auditorium,
so that the proscenium boxes were in the rear of the footlights.
This stage was only dimly lighted,—in Sheridan’s time with oil-lamps
and in Reade and Taylor’s with gas-jets. The curve into the
orchestra, far beyond the curtain, was known as the apron; and the
most significant episodes of the play had to be acted out on this
apron, remote from the scenery, because it was only when he was close
to the footlights that the changing expression on the performer’s
face could be seen by the spectators. As the actor on the stage was
in intimate association with the audience, the playwrights did not
hesitate to give him confidential asides and explanatory soliloquies
to be delivered directly at the neighborly spectators; and they also
provided him with the lofty rhetoric and the artfully articulated set
speeches not inappropriate to a platform orator.

But in the course of the past half-century the scenic investiture of
a play has become more elaborate, more precise, more characteristic
and more realistic. The electric light has come to illuminate all
parts of the scene with equal brilliancy, so that it is no longer
necessary for the performer to advance to the front of the apron
in order that his expression may be seen; and therefore the apron,
being useless, was abolished. The curtain now rises only a foot or
two behind the footlights; and the proscenium-arch is now made to
serve as a picture-frame, through which the spectator gazes at the
performers, who are carefully trained to “keep in the picture.” The
playwrights, no less then the players, have been compelled to modify
their methods; and they soon discovered that soliloquies and bravura
passages were incongruous with the realistic set and with acting
carefully restrained until it was afraid to get “outside the picture.”

This change in the conditions of performance was brought about
gradually, unintentionally and by the logic of events. None the
less is it one of the most momentous in all the long history of the
drama; and we may doubt whether its remoter results have even yet
made themselves manifest. It is perhaps the chief cause why the Old
Comedies have gone out of favor. They were composed for a different
theater, to be performed by actors with a different training, before
audiences with different expectations. The companies who were
accustomed to act the Old Comedies and who were conversant with their
traditions have been dispersed; and the actors of to-day would be ill
at ease in these robust and florid comic dramas, but perhaps not more
ill at ease than would be the spectators of to-day.

It is not that our actors are individually any less gifted than
their predecessors of half-a-century ago, or that the art of acting
has declined in the past fifty years; and we may venture the
suggestion that the old time performers might be almost as awkward
and as constrained in our modern problem-plays composed for the
picture-frame stage as the contemporary performers would be in the
Old Comedies composed for the apron-stage.

It may very well come to pass in the final quarter of this twentieth
century, when the conditions of the theater have been still further
modified (in ways we cannot foresee), that the best and most
representative of the plays popular in the first quarter of this
century will reveal themselves as archaic in method as are now the
Old Comedies of the eighteenth century. If that should come to pass,
some writer of 1970 may be moved to inquire into the reasons why the
problem-play of 1920 has been banished from the boards.

(1919)

XIII

THE ORGANIZATION OF THE THEATER

XIII

THE ORGANIZATION OF THE THEATER

The drama is now, and always has been, dependent upon the theater.
It is only in the playhouse itself that a play reveals its full
force. For the complete disclosure of its power, a drama demands not
only the theater itself, with the actors and all the accessories,
it requires also the presence of the spectators, that we may feel
the contagion of communal emotion aroused by its passionate appeal.
It has to be born on the stage and to prove thereon its right to
live, before it can hope for survival in the study. It must perforce
please the playgoers of its own time and of its own country for whom
it was specially composed, because only after it has gained their
approval is there any chance of its winning the favor of succeeding
generations.

The theater can exist without the drama, as it did in imperial Rome
when the stage was given over to dancers and acrobats and animal
trainers. But the drama can never exist without the theater; and thus
it is that those of us who love the drama of our own tongue and who
want to see it flourish luxuriantly both to-day and to-morrow, cannot
but take a keen interest in the organization of the theater. We would
like to see it organized on a sound basis, for we are well aware that
any defect in its organization will necessarily react injuriously
upon the development of the drama.

It need not surprise us that the organization of the theater in the
United States in the opening decades of the twentieth century has
been the subject of attacks as violent as they are vociferous. I say
that it need not surprise us, because all students of the history of
the stage are aware that the organization of the theater has never
been satisfactory in any country or at any period—except possibly in
Greece in the glorious days when Æschylus and Sophocles and Euripides
brought forth their rival masterpieces in the spacious Theater of
Dionysus just below the towering Parthenon. And we cannot tell
whether or not the organization of the Athenian theater was really
as satisfactory as it seems to have been, since there may have been
many an adverse criticism which has not come down to us after twenty
centuries. We do know that the organization of the theater in Rome in
the period of Plautus and Terence was most unsatisfactory, with its
actors who were slaves and who might be scourged if they failed to
receive the plaudits they begged for piteously at the end of the play
and with its audiences made up of a mob of freedmen often imperfectly
familiar with the Latin tongue.

The organization of the theater in England under Elizabeth and in
France under Louis the Fourteenth was not approved by many of the
subjects of these monarchs; and the better we know it, the less it
approves itself to us, since it imposed harsh restriction upon actors
and authors alike. The organization of the French theater under
Louis the Sixteenth was bitterly attacked by Beaumarchais; and every
reader of the ‘Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber’ will recall
his diatribes against the conditions which obtained in England in
his time. So every reader of Joseph Jefferson’s ‘Autobiography’ will
recall his account of the squalid life led by the wandering companies
of actors here in the United States in the second quarter of the
nineteenth century. Within the past few years Henry Arthur Jones and
William Poel have declaimed against the organization of the theater
in England at the present time; and the latter has gone so far as
to demand drastic legislation to remedy a situation which he deems
intolerable.

This being the state of affairs in other lands and in other
centuries, we need not be surprised by the vehement protests against
the existing organization of the theater here in America. Nor need
we assume that these present protests have as little foundation as
had many of those which were raised in the past.

The first thing we find when we undertake investigation is that the
organization of the theater here and now is unlike any other which
has ever existed anywhere else. In Greece the annual performances
were in the hands of the state. In Rome performances were given
gratuitously, more often than not, the cost being borne by an
aspiring politician wishing to win the suffrages of the mob. In the
Middle Ages the performances were at first in the churches under the
complete control of the priests; and later they were out-of-doors on
church festivals, and in charge of the gilds. In Shakspere’s time
and in Molière’s a number of the more important actors associated
themselves together, arranged for a theater, hired the subordinate
performers, and divided the takings at the door, share and share
alike. In these companies one of the actors undertook the function
of manager, representing his comrades and more or less guiding their
fortunes. But these managers had only so much authority as might be
delegated to them by their fellow-sharers; they were not autocrats,
engaging and discharging the members of the company according to
their own caprice; their risk or their profit was not larger than
that of their associates.

In the company at the Globe theater, Burbage seems to have been the
dominant personality; yet from all we have been able to gather, we
may venture a guess that Shakspere, with his gift for friendship, his
solidity of character and his shrewdness in business, was probably
the second in command, so to speak. In the company at the Palais
Royal Molière was the honored chief, to whom his fellow-players were
loyally devoted; but the associated actors managed their affairs in
town-meeting and as an actor Molière shared equally with the others,
altho he received extra allowances from time to time to reward his
special service as the stock-playwright of the theater. This type
of organization is still seen now and again in the United States,
when a company, deserted by its manager, continues its existence as
a commonwealth; and it is the type which has been preserved by the
Comédie-Française in Paris ever since this company was established by
Molière.

The French government provides the theater and also an annual
subvention, in return for which it designates a manager, who has
a stated salary, and also his equal share of the profits. But
this appointed manager is not supreme; he can make no important
decision without the advice and consent of the committee chosen by
the associated actors. He is in fact an executive only; and his
relations with the company depend on his tact, his ability and his
powers of persuasion. If he has these qualifications, and if he is
successful in rolling up the profits which are annually divided by
the associated actors (and which are in addition to their modest
salaries) he may be allowed more or less to have his own way. If,
on the other hand, he is fussy and feeble, and especially if the
receipts fall off, then the associated actors make his life a burden
and the last state of that manager is worse than the first.

Altho this type of organization has many evident advantages, and
altho it was once almost universal in France, in England, and in
Italy, it has been generally abandoned in favor of a simpler type,
whereby the power and the profit are concentrated in the hands of a
manager who is solely responsible for the recruiting of the company,
for the choice of the plays and for the debts of the concern. The
change seems to have taken place slowly; and Colley Cibber was one
of three actors who directed the destiny of the theater to which
he was attached. Yet at that very time the rival theater was most
autocratically managed by an illiterate speculator named Rich.

The reason for the change is not far to seek. The management of a
theater is, after all, a complicated business enterprize, exceedingly
difficult to conduct successfully; and a business enterprize is
always one man’s job. A commonwealth is impossible unless there is
the cordiality which makes for co-operation; and actors are often
super-abundantly endowed with the artistic temperament which makes
them kittle cattle to drive. Even in Paris, it would probably be
impossible to start a rival company to the Comédie-Française,
organized on the same basis. Indeed, the Comédie-Française itself
has more than once been on the edge of shipwreck; its most popular
actors and actresses have deserted it from time to time, Rachel and
Sarah Bernhardt, Coquelin and Lebargy; and its continued existence is
due to the cohesive force of its inherited traditions, some of which
go back to Molière, while others are codified in the famous decree
signed at Moscow by Napoleon.

In the eighteenth century the two rival theaters in London, Covent
Garden and Drury Lane, were managed for long periods by George Colman
the elder and by David Garrick; they had secured as members of their
respective companies almost every actor and actress in Great Britain
who had achieved eminence; and the companies they collected remained
almost unchanged from year to year, new recruits being drafted from
the provinces only as the veterans ceased to lag superfluous on the
stage. As the result of this continuity of association the tragedians
and the comedians knew each other intimately and they were accustomed
to the team-play which is essential to an effective performance.

In the nineteenth century, Montigny made the Gymnase the most
attractive playhouse in Paris, excepting only the Théâtre Français.
Madame Vestris gave a temporary vogue to Covent Garden; and Buckstone
held the reins for a longer period at the Haymarket. In New York
there were stock-companies of a similar permanence, altho of a less
even excellence, first at the Park Theater, next at Burton’s and
finally at Wallack’s and at Daly’s. In Boston, R. M. Field at the
Museum was able to keep together, for a term of years, in fact, for
more than a quarter of a century, a strong and coherent company
of comedians headed by William Warren; and in San Francisco for
a briefer period John McCullough and Lawrence Barrett surrounded
themselves with actors and actresses of undeniable ability.

It was only in the last third of the nineteenth century that
this type of theatrical organization slowly disappeared. When
the Bancrofts had firmly established themselves in London in the
little Prince of Wales’s Theater, they began to engage actors not
for the whole of a single theatrical season, but only for the run
of the piece. It is true that half-a-dozen of the more important
performers remained with them and were provided with parts in play
after play; but there was no longer any permanence in the membership
of the company. The example of the Bancrofts was followed by the
Kendals, by Wyndham and by Hare, and even by Henry Irving. These
managers all engaged special performers to suit the characters of
the successive plays that they produced; and they were thus relieved
of the increasing expense of maintaining a stock-company capable
of presenting any kind of play, comedy or tragedy or melodrama. As
England is only a comparatively small island and as the multiplying
railroads made it easily accessible from all parts of the kingdom,
people from the provinces flocked to the capital and the plays
presented in London ran for constantly increasing periods, from a
hundred to even a thousand nights. And during these runs the manager
was not paying salaries to actors whose names were absent from the
program. So it came about that the stock-companies ceased to be and
that the leading performers became part-time workers, appearing now
in one playhouse and now in another, and yet fairly familiar with the
methods of the other performers likely to be engaged with them for
any new play or for any revival of an old play.

III

The abandonment of the permanent stock-companies and the practice of
engagements only for the run of the piece, was brought about in Great
Britain by economic pressure due in part to geographic conditions.
And it was brought about in the United States almost simultaneously
by a similar economic pressure due to widely different geographic
conditions. The organization of the American theater prior to 1870
was very much what the organization of the British theater had been a
century earlier. In every town of any importance there was at least
one theater, occasionally owned by the manager but more generally
leased by him. It was his private enterprize; he engaged the actors
and the actresses, who were likely to remain with him season after
season; he accumulated his own scenery, his own costumes and his own
properties; he stood ready always and at forty-eight hours’ notice
to put up ‘Hamlet’ or the ‘School for Scandal,’ the ‘Lady of Lyons’
or ‘Camille,’ ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ or ‘Ten Nights in a Bar-room,’
‘Mazeppa’ or the ‘Naiad Queen,’ without invoking any outside
assistance.

If wandering stars came along, Forrest or Booth, “Jim Crow” Rice or
Lotta, they were supported by his company clothed from his wardrobe,
with properties from his own storehouse and with the primitive
stock-scenery which had been seen in a hundred other plays. The
manners and customs of those distant days are preserved for us in
the autobiographies of Anna Cora Mowatt, of Joseph Jefferson, and of
Clara Morris. More often than not, the manager was himself an actor,
Burton or Wallack appearing now and again on his own stage; and his
wife was not infrequently the leading lady. Sometimes the manager was
a playwright, William Dunlap or Augustin Daly; and then he found his
profit in presenting his own pieces. Sometimes he had been recruited
from some other calling, R. M. Field or A. M. Palmer; but always was
he devoted to the drama, thoroughly familiar with the traditions of
the stage, and thoroughly enjoying his association with the theater.
He was a local institution; and sometimes, Caldwell in New Orleans or
Rice in Chicago, he was one of the leading citizens of the town.

When a popular minstrel-company wanted the theater for a week or two,
the manager was sometimes obliging enough to send his company to
play in a smaller city if its “opera-house” chanced to be unoccupied.
He did this more willingly when a glittering spectacle, the ‘Black
Crook’ or the ‘Twelve Temptations’ asked him to turn out; but this
complaisance hastened his downfall, since his well-worn scenery had
a pallid look after the effulgent splendor of the interloper. Then,
after a while, one and another of the more prominent stars (Joseph
Jefferson, first of all, as he confesses in his autobiography),
dissatisfied with the inadequacy of the mounting of their plays
and disgusted by the carelessness and incompetence with which they
were only too often supported by the stock-actors, began to engage
companies of their own, with all the performers specially chosen
for the characters they were to impersonate; they arranged to carry
with them the special scenery required by the plays they intended to
present that season. Soon there were so many of these, that at least
one theater in each of the larger cities gave up its own company
and relied exclusively upon these combinations, as the travelling
companies were then called.

For a few years the managers of the stock-company houses made a
valiant fight; but in the end they had to retire from the field,
defeated. It had been a severe blow to them, when they were
deprived of the potent attraction of the stars. Without these stars,
and in fact in opposition to them, the performances given by the
stock-companies were found to be inferior. The local scenery, the
local costumes and the local properties were discovered to be mere
make-shifts, unworthy at their best, and often worse than unworthy,
especially when they were compared with the stricter propriety of
the scenic equipment provided for the elaborate productions sent
out from New York. The local offerings appeared to be provincial,
whereas those which were brought from afar had on them the stamp of
metropolitan approval.

So it was that sooner or later the managers of stock-companies had
to withdraw from a lost battle. Some of them kept their theaters and
sank to the humble position of janitors. Some moved to New York and
became producers on their own account and managers of travelling
companies. Some retired to obscurity; and some died in time to escape
bankruptcy. Whether the vanquishing of the local stock-companies by
the travelling companies was advantageous or not, it was inevitable
since it was the result of inexorable economic conditions, in
conjunction with equally inexorable geographic conditions. It was a
swift and startling change in the methods of conducting the business
of the theater, a change brought about by forces wholly beyond the
control of those engaged in that business.

Before the end of the nineteenth century the organization of the
theater in the United States became what it is now. In New York, in
all the larger cities and in most of the smaller, the playhouses
are controlled by one or the other of the two rival syndicates.
The resident managers of these playhouses are scarcely more than
caretakers, since they can exercise little or no choice as to the
attractions which play engagements in their theaters. The producing
managers choose plays, engage actors and are responsible for all the
accessories. Most of these producing managers are in partnership
with one or the other of the syndicates, because these syndicates
control all the important theaters in all the important towns. Thus
it is that the artistic guidance of the drama is in the hands of the
producing managers, and the financial government is in the hands of
the syndicates.

Many of the producing managers are akin in type to the managers of
the resident stock-companies, that is to say, they are sometimes
actors, sometimes playwrights and sometimes men drawn from
other callings by the lure of the theater. Most of the members
of the syndicates are men of affairs, who have gone into the
theater-business as they would go into any other business, mainly
for their own profit; and their interest in the drama as an art is
intermittent, whereas their interest in the theater as a business
is incessant. Their attitude and their actions have called for
sharply hostile criticism, summed up in the accusation that they
have commercialized the theater. Now, all students of stage-history
know that there has always been a commercial side to the theater,
excepting in ancient Greece and in the Middle Ages, when the drama
was more or less religious in its associations. In modern times we
have ascertained that the drama cannot flourish as an art unless the
theater prospers as a business. No art can survive unless it affords
a fairly satisfactory living to those who devote themselves to it;
and as the appeal of the drama is to the people as a whole it can
never be independent of the takings at the door. Even in the few
subsidized theaters of Europe, national or municipal, the grant in
aid made by the government is never enough to support the enterprize.

Commercialism in the theater is often bitterly denounced by young
persons who conceive of art as ethereally detached from all financial
considerations. The real question is not whether the theater is
commercial, but whether it is unduly commercial, whether it has
money-making for its chief aim, whether it is willing to sacrifice
its artistic aspirations to the single purpose of making money. The
theater was commercial, to a certain extent, in the time of Shakspere
and Molière, of Sheridan and Beaumarchais; but it was not then unduly
commercial. Is it unduly commercial now and here, to-day in the
United States? Is its organization exclusively in the control of men
who are thinking only of the profits to be made, and who know nothing
and care less about the drama as an art?

Here again it is necessary to distinguish and to point out the
yawning gulf between the playhouses which are truly homes of the
drama and the playhouses which have been surrendered outright to
mere spectacles. There are in our theaters to-day a heterogeny of
so-called musical comedies, summer song-shows, Follies and Passing
Shows, sometimes beautifully mounted but often empty of anything
but glitter and violent movement, far-fetched fun, and unnecessary
noise. These exhibitions occupy the stages of theaters where we might
hope to see something better; they are money-making speculations, no
more and no less; they supply nothing but vacuous entertainment for
those who go to a show warranted to demand no mental effort from the
spectators; they are examples of naked commercialism. As far as the
drama is concerned, they are utterly negligible, as negligible as is
the circus which now invades the theater only at very rare intervals.

There remain to be considered the large proportion of our theaters
the stage-doors of which remain open to the drama in all its various
manifestations, tragedy, comedy, farce, problem-play, or what not.
Now, nobody familiar with the facts can deny or doubt that the
theater here and now is hospitable to the drama. No really noteworthy
European play, no matter where it was originally brought out, fails
to be presented sooner or later in New York. It may be gay, the
latest Parisian farce, for example; and then its chance comes sooner.
It may be somber or even gloomy, the ‘Weavers’ of Hauptmann, for
instance, the ‘John Ferguson’ of St. John Ervine or the ‘Jest’ of
Sem Benelli; and then its chance may be late in coming. And side by
side with these more or less important importations there are a host
of native pieces of every degree of merit, reflecting almost every
aspect of American life and character, from the ‘Salvation Nell’ of
Edward Sheldon to the ‘Why Marry?’ of Jesse Lynch Williams, from the
‘Mrs. Leffingwell’s Boots’ of Augustus Thomas to the ‘Get Rich Quick
Wallingford’ of George M. Cohan.

Nor is the drama of the past without its opportunity also. Sothern
and Marlowe draw audiences limited only to the capacity of the
houses in which they appear; Robert Mantell carries with him a
varied repertory; and Walter Hampden is enabled to present ‘Hamlet’
for an unexpected series of performances. It must be confessed that
Shakspere is more fortunate than Sheridan and that we have not now
the privilege of beholding the ‘Rivals’ or the ‘School for Scandal’
or any of the Old Comedies as frequently as we used to have it in the
days when Burton and Wallack and Daly managed their own theaters and
had permanent companies accustomed to present these specimens of a
form of the drama now demoded.

It is a lamentable fact, the full significance of which is grasped
only by a few, that New York, perhaps the most populous city in the
world, is entirely dependent on road-shows. It has now no theater
managed with an eye single to its appeal to the population of
Manhattan. It has to rely absolutely upon travelling combinations. It
is true, of course, that many of these combinations do not travel;
they begin and end their careers here in New York; but they were
all of them intended to travel, if they had first succeeded in New
York. The stars open their season where it is most convenient and
they come into New York when they can; but the immense majority of
new plays, American and British and translated from foreign tongues,
are produced in New York, altho some of them may have a trial week
in Washington or Atlantic City, a week of dress-rehearsals before a
relatively unimportant audience. If these new plays please Broadway,
they stay as long as they can and then they pack up and begin their
wanderings to other cities. Experience has shown that this is the
only profitable way to conduct the theatrical business; and economic
conditions are as inexorable in the theatrical as in any other
business.

The geographic conditions reinforce the economic; and in the United
States the geographic conditions differ widely from those in any
other country, more especially from those in Great Britain. As London
is an easily accessible capital of a small country, the heaviest
receipts are to be expected from the performances there; the London
companies are engaged for the run of the piece; and they do not go
on the road, the provinces being visited only by inferior touring
companies. As New York is a far longer distance from most of the
other large cities of the United States and as there are many of
these large cities, as well as many smaller towns, equally eager to
welcome any play which has won metropolitan approval, the heaviest
receipts are often not in New York itself but in the multitude of
these other cities and towns. Therefore New York is, in the eyes
of the producing managers, often only a starting point; and their
ultimate goal lies in the vast territory which stretches from the
Atlantic to the Pacific. The outside market, so to speak, is so wide
and the demand so insatiable, that the producing managers are hard
put to supply it. And when they happen to hit on an attractive piece
their profits may be enormous.

One reason why the American theater seems to many to be unduly
commercialized is that it has been at times amazingly profitable.
Until toward the end of the nineteenth century the theatrical was
the most precarious of businesses, extra-hazardous for the managers,
the actors and the authors. When they died Shakspere and Molière
were able to leave to their families only a modest competence. David
Garrick is almost the only manager in all the long history of the
theater in Great Britain and the United States who was able to retire
with a fortune. Benefits had to be arranged for Lester Wallack and
for A. M. Palmer. The playwrights were in no better case than the
players or the managers; and in the nineteenth century more than one
potential dramatist turned novelist simply because novel-writing was
easier and more profitable than playwriting.

But in the final third of the last century the right of a foreign
author to control his own work was internationally recognized, thus
relieving the playwrights of our language from competition with
pieces purloined from alien authors. The right of a British author to
control his work in the United States was also established, relieving
the American playwright from competition with pieces imported from
England without payment. The far-flung British Commonwealth continued
to expand; and the remoter regions of the United States became more
densely populated. And the most successful pieces of British and
American authorship were discovered to be exportable to France and
Germany and Italy.

In consequence of all these causes the possible profits of a lucky
playwright are now as abundant as those of the lucky novelist, and
on occasion even more so. One play in every score draws a prize; and
one in every hundred draws a grand prize of several hundred thousand
dollars. In addition to the ordinary business profit there is now
the possibility of holding one of these superlatively lucky numbers
in the lottery; and two or three of these may come out of the wheel
of fortune in the same season. This possibility is encouraging to
those possessed by the spirit of speculation and rather discouraging
to those who are more inclined to honor the drama as an art. At best
the presentation of a play is a gamble, since no one, not even the
most expert, can do more than guess at the impression it will make
on the public. What every one can see is that the broader and bolder
its topic and its treatment the more likely is a drama to prove
attractive to the largest body of playgoers, while the comedy of
lighter fabric and of more delicate texture will probably please only
a smaller group of the more refined and the more intelligent.

Of course, this has always been the case; and the managers of the
past have always been tempted to enlarge their audiences by indulging
in sensation and in spectacle. But to-day the temptation is greater
than ever before; and perhaps it is more often yielded to. And here
we feel the unfortunate power of the purely commercial syndicates
who are ready always to smooth the path of the overwhelming success
by opening all their theaters to it, while they are inhospitable to
plays of a less emphatic allurement. This is perhaps the most obvious
defect of the present organization of the theater in America—that it
puts great power in the hands of a small group of men, most of whom
take little or no interest in the drama as an art, regarding a play
as a manufactured article out of which they expect to make all that
the traffic will bear.

Yet as this present organization is the result of economic and
geographic causes it is idle to declaim against it; and it is foolish
to indulge in offensive personalities. What is, is; and what will
be, will be. We can find comfort in the fact that the best plays of
this burgeoning dramatic epoch do get acted and have their chance,
here and now. And we can hope that some device will be discovered
to make easier the production of plays of the highest class. There
are managers now, and not a few of them, who have aspirations and
ambitions, and who would be contented with a modest profit on a fair
business risk without seeking always for wealth beyond the dreams of
avarice through a long-shot gamble.

Perhaps it may be well to remark that the present organization of
the theater is not responsible for the fact that the average play
presented to-day is often seen to be a pretty poor thing. In this
respect the present is no worse than the past. The average play has
always been a pretty poor thing; and playhouses of other times and
other lands have presented a host of plays below the average. The
‘Titus Andronicus,’ which is more or less Shakspere’s, is a barbarous
and brutal piece; and ‘Measure for Measure’ is only a little better
in its blatant crudity of motive and method. The contemporaries of
Corneille and Molière and Racine are deservedly forgotten. So are the
contemporaries of Æschylus and Sophocles and Euripides. Only devoted
explorers of the annals of the drama are aware of the ineptness and
imbecility to be found in the pieces of the inferior playwrights even
in the most glorious epochs of the theater. Certainly the average
play of to-day is a better play, it is better acted, and it is better
mounted than the average play of fifty or a hundred years ago.

That the drama of our language has been born again in the last three
or four decades is proof positive that the organization of the
theater has not been wholly inefficient. It cannot be as defective
as has been shrilly proclaimed by juvenile enthusiasts who are in a
hurry for the millennium and who are disappointed that it does not
arrive over night. It is to be put to its credit that in one city
at least, in the city of New York, the persistent playgoer has a
very wide range of opportunity—probably unrivaled anywhere else in
the world. He has his choice of a hundred new American plays every
season, plays good, bad and indifferent. He has a chance to see
the most important plays by contemporary foreign dramatists. He is
likely to have occasion in the course of a single season to renew
his acquaintance with half-a-dozen or half-a-score of Shakspere’s
comedies or tragedies. He may wander at will to playhouses where
the performances are given in French or in German, in Chinese or in
Yiddish. He can feast his eyes on the puppet-shows of the Italians
and on the ballet-pantomimes of the Russians. He can adventure
himself in any one of half-a-dozen Little Theaters devoted to the
very latest effusions of the most idealistic idealists and the most
realistic realists, native and foreign. In short, he will find on the
annual bill of fare a heterogeny of tempting dishes, lacking, it is
true, more than one delicacy which he may desire to taste.

The other side of the ledger, however, tells another story. While New
York has a plethora and while a few of the largest cities may find a
sufficiency, the smaller cities suffer from painful penury, and the
less important towns are starving to death. Many an interesting play
lacks breadth of popular appeal; and the managers shrink from taking
it on the road; and if they are bold enough to run this risk it is
only to a few of the larger centers of population that they dare to
go. In the smaller cities possessing only one important playhouse,
this may be occupied week after week by mere shows. It is true that
in not a few of the smaller towns there are stock-companies making
a brave struggle, putting on the more successful pieces as soon as
these are released for stock but producing them in haste as best they
can with a small company, the members of which are sadly overworked,
playing in one piece six nights, and four, five or six matinees while
they are scrambling through rehearsals and learning their parts in
the play in preparation for the following week.

In the towns which are still smaller, the drama is to be seen only
sporadically, intermittently, casually; and there are college
communities with a thousand students or more who do not have the
privilege of seeing a play of Shakspere’s properly acted and
adequately produced from one year’s end to another. The only reliance
of these communities is on the happy accident of a travelling company
filling out a week with one-night stands or the establishment by
themselves of a Little Theatre supported by local talent. These
Little Theaters are helpful in keeping alive an understanding
of the drama; but their scope is strictly limited and their
continued existence depends upon the fortunate accident of their
control by some one who has a native gift for management and for
stage-management.

The existing organization is not unsatisfactory as far as New York
is concerned. It is less satisfactory even in the largest of the
other cities. It is entirely unsatisfactory in the smaller cities and
the larger towns.

How then shall this unfortunate condition be remedied? Professor
W. L. Phelps has no doubt that he has discovered the cure; and he
tells us with all the emphasis of italics that “there must be a
stock-company in every city.” He explains that by this he does not
mean the kind of stock-company which exists to-day but the older
type of stock-company such as existed forty years ago in New York
at Wallack’s and Daly’s and in Boston at the Museum. What Professor
Phelps is proposing is a return to the system which flourished a
century ago, and two centuries ago, and which is entirely unfamiliar
to the present. As it happens I am old enough to be able to
supplement with my own recollection the ample information easily
accessible in actors’ autobiographies and in stage histories.
Memory is treacherous, so I cannot be certain, but I believe that I
was present in 1869 at the opening of the Fifth Avenue Theater by
Augustin Daly and in 1872 at the opening of the Union Square Theater
by A. M. Palmer. I know that I was able to follow the shorter careers
of the companies at the Madison Square directed by Steele Mackaye and
the Mallorys, at the Park Theater by Abbey, at the Empire by Charles
Frohman and at the Lyceum by Daniel Frohman.

In all these theaters there was a permanent company, which changed
its membership slowly and which contained at least half-a-dozen
actors and actresses of distinction. In all of them the manager was
an autocrat, selecting the performers and choosing the plays. Now
and again he engaged a travelling star, Edwin Booth or Mrs. Scott
Siddons at Daly’s and Charles James Matthews or Dion Boucicault
at Wallack’s; and then all the other parts in the repertory of
these stars were assumed by the actors of the stock-company. But
these star-engagements were infrequent; and for the most part the
burden fell upon the stock-company, which had to be large enough to
undertake any kind of piece, comedy or farce, tragedy or melodrama,
or even burlesque or extravaganza. The manager distributed the parts
subject always to the unwritten law that no performer should be
called upon to appear in a character which was not in his or her
“line of business.” The hero had to be given to the “leading man” and
the heroine to the “leading woman.” The villain—and in the dramas of
those distant days there was likely to be a villain of the deepest
dye—was assigned to the heavy man; while the brisk young fellows
fell to the lot of the juvenile lead or of the light comedian. The
broadly comic parts were assigned to the low comedian; and there
were frequently two of him, the first low comedy and the second low
comedy. Strongly marked characters went to the character-actor,
who had to be a master of make-up. The elderly characters were in
the hands of the old man and the old woman; there was sometimes
also a second old man, altho if the character-actor was both
versatile and obliging he could be prevailed upon to play one of
the more aged characters. The serving maids were attributed to the
singing chambermaid, who would have her best chance when a farce or
extravaganza was in the bill.

VII

The stock-company system had its advantages and its disadvantages,
both artistic and economic. The actor—sometimes under contract for
several years—could settle down and have a home where he could bring
up his children; he was not a tramp, ever on the go and not knowing
where he might be one week from another. He was informed as to
approximate length of the theatrical season, and he was not in dread
of being thrown out of an engagement in the middle of the winter or
of being stranded on the road with his salary unpaid for a month.
There was a certain stability and security in his position, altho
there was also always the possibility that the manager might exhaust
his often meager resources and so find himself unable to keep the
theater open or to meet his obligations to his company.

With its incessant changes of bill and with the unending variety
of the plays presented, the actors had far more practise in their
art than the performers of to-day. With the frequent production of
Shakspere’s comedies and tragedies, even the minor members of the
company had at least an opportunity to learn how to read blank verse.
The permanence of the organization enabled the inexpert young people
to become familiar with the methods of their more skilful elders;
and it also tended toward the development of that harmony of effort,
that team-play, which is of prime importance. On the other hand, the
haste with which the constant succession of pieces had to be prepared
interfered with thoroughness and with delicacy of interpretation.
When a drama was pitchforked on the stage, so to speak, for only
half-a-dozen performances, as was often the case, the actors had
neither time nor energy to do their best; and they were tempted to
fall into the habit of happy-go-lucky slovenliness.

Then the symmetry of the performance was not infrequently blemished
by the fact that there was often in the company no performer really
capable of acting a salient part in the play about to be produced;
and yet this part had to be undertaken by somebody, however ill at
ease he might be. There were round pegs in square holes; and this was
unavoidable since it was impossible, more often than not, to engage
outside performers, even if the manager had desired to do so,—which
he rarely did.

If I may be allowed to call myself as a witness I can depose that
I have seen not a few performances of the well chosen company at
Wallack’s Theater forty-odd years ago which were far less effective
than they might have been because one or two prominent characters
had to be assigned to performers who were good actors in their own
lines but who were hopelessly unsuited to the parts forced upon
them because they alone were available. In the ‘Shaughraun’ of Dion
Boucicault, for instance, by the side of Boucicault himself and
Harry Beckett, Ada Dyas and H. J. Montague, John Gilbert and Madam
Ponisi, who were all admirably adapted to the characters Boucicault
had composed for them, there were also Joseph Polk and Ione Burke,
who were entirely unsuited to the parts they were forced to play.
And there were two equally unfortunate miscastings in ‘Diplomacy.’
If this was the case not infrequently at Wallack’s with its long
prestige, how much more frequent and more flagrant must have been the
misfits in the performances in theaters of inferior grade?

Professor Phelps tells us that all would go well if there could
be established a stock-company in every city and even in every
large town; but Professor Phelps—fortunately for him—was not born
long enough ago to have seen the artistic inadequacy which is
inevitable in the stock-company, inadequacy in the acting, in the
stage-management and in the mounting. The productions of the managers
of traveling companies have set a standard to which no resident
stock-company can hope to attain. And the cost of an ambitious
attempt to satisfy the expectations of the playgoing public would be
prohibitive to any intending manager of a stock-company. He would not
dare to undertake the task unless he was supported by an endowment,
by a subsidy, or by a large body of subscribers, who being sharers
in the enterprize might be more tolerant of relatively unimportant
deficiencies in acting and in mounting.

There is no doubt that a repertory theater is highly desirable.
It might be of inestimable service both to the author and to the
actor. The actor is very unfortunate if, in the malleable years of
his youth, he finds himself appearing in the same part for two or
three hundred nights; and the author is unfortunate when his play
has had its two or three hundred nights and then drops out of sight
forevermore. A repertory theater would provide varied experience for
the performers and afford them opportunity to acquire versatility;
and it could do a great service to the reputation of the playwrights
by reviving and keeping on hand, so to speak, the plays which deserve
to be seen again and again.

But under present conditions a repertory theater is economically
impossible. The rent of a building and the salaries of actors are
now prohibitive. A repertory theater in New York, even if it did not
aspire to be a rival of the Théâtre Français, must be described as a
luxury,—and like all luxuries it would be expensive. It can come into
existence, and it can have a chance to continue to exist, only when a
group of lovers of the arts of the drama shall combine to provide the
theater itself and to make the path easy for its manager.

(1920)

XIV

MEMORIES OF ACTORS

XIV

MEMORIES OF ACTORS

A playgoer from my youth up, a playgoer in Paris and London as
well as in New York, I have had the good fortune to be on terms of
friendly intimacy with not a few of the leading actors of the past
half-century, French and British and American. I have elsewhere set
down my memories of Edwin Booth and Henry Irving, Joseph Jefferson
and Constant Coquelin, four of the foremost figures in the theater
at the end of the nineteenth century. There are a dozen or a score
of other players with whom I foregathered at one time or another,
less prominent in their profession but not for that reason any less
attractive in their several ways and not less companionable.

Most of the actors with whom I have had relation were good company;
they had seen many men and many places; and their journeyings had
worn off any abrading angularities their personalities may have
possessed. They had mixed with all sorts and conditions of men; and
they thereby gained the shrewd knowledge of human nature which they
needed in their art. They had acquired polish even if they did not
always possess culture. They were no more likely to be bookish in
their tastes, or even to be widely read, than are the practitioners
of the other professions, painters and musicians, most of whom are
probably too alertly interested in the immediate present to be
tempted into dusty exploration of the past. They were often apt in
anecdote and quick of wit, with a wide command over words, the result
of their acquisition of the sharp and swift dialog of the stage. In
no other calling have I found men swifter to make a joke or to take
one, even if it happened to be pointed against themselves.

It is sometimes asserted that actors as a class are inclined
to be unduly aware of their own excellence in the quality they
profess and even unduly inclined to communicate to others their
own opinion of their own achievements. My experience, such as it
is, does not support this assertion. I have found the men of the
stage at least as modest as the men of the studio and the men of
the study. Over-swollen vanity is not the exclusive property of any
one profession, and I doubt if it is more frequent in actors than
in authors or artists. Where I comb out my memories the two most
exuberant examples of ingrowing and outflowering self-appreciation
that I ever had occasion to observe were both of them physicians,
who were also authors and who were wholly unable to resist the ever
present temptation to dilate upon their own triumphs and to confide
to all listeners the frequent compliments they had gluttonously
accepted.

There was nothing of this sort in Booth or Irving, in Jefferson or
Coquelin; they were far above it; they were free from self-assertion
and even from self-consciousness,—altho of course they could not
but be aware of their own outstanding position. In fact, I cannot
recall any successful actor of my acquaintance who was abnormally
self-centered, or who took himself too seriously. Sometimes, it is
true, I have found an actor who had not yet established his position
and who now and again seized a chance to let me know that he had
played this or that important part not unsuccessfully. But this was
not boastful self-praise, even if it might so seem to the uninformed
listener; it was only a supplying of information not otherwise
available. A writer or a painter has no need to call attention to his
book or his picture, because these survive to speak for themselves,
even if there are only a few who have them in mind. But the work of
the actor has no permanence; it perishes as it comes into being; it
instantly ceases to be, except as a memory; and it is as a memory
that the actor feels himself called upon to revive it. The difference
is that whereas the book of the author, the picture of the artist may
be only overlooked, the performance of the actor might be actually
unknown to us if he himself did not tell us about it.

The first actor whom I came to know was one of the most
companionable, the genial John Brougham. In 1869, as a boy I had
been present at the opening and at the closing nights of his brief
management of the little playhouse in Twenty-fourth Street, behind
the Fifth Avenue hotel—a playhouse which not long after became the
Fifth Avenue Theater of Augustin Daly and which was rebuilt as the
Madison Square Theater by Steele Mackaye. At Brougham’s I had seen
his ever-delightful burlesque, ‘Pocahontas,’ in which he himself
was the rollicking King Powhatan; and I saw also a later burlesque
of his, ‘Much Ado about a Merchant of Venice,’ in which he was
an amusing but rather Hibernian Shylock. So it was that when I
was elected to the Lotos Club, in the spring of 1871 (while I was
still an undergraduate at Columbia College) I seized the earliest
opportunity to make Brougham’s acquaintance.

He was not a great actor, that I knew already, altho he was a
competent performer; but he had a charming personality, and when
he chanced to be cast for a character with which his personality
coincided, he was entirely satisfactory. Of course he appeared
to best advantage in Irish parts, The O’Grady in Boucicault’s
‘Arrah-na-Pogue’ and Off-lan-aghan in Lester Wallack’s ‘Veteran,’ and
above all Sir Lucius O’Trigger in Sheridan’s ‘Rivals.’ I doubt if Sir
Lucius has been more sympathetically impersonated by any performer of
the second half of the nineteenth century than it was by Brougham.
I have seen the character undertaken by W. J. Florence and by Nat
Goodwin, actors of a far more opulent equipment than Brougham, yet
neither of them succeeded so well in bringing out the gentlemanly
simplicity of this lovable character. Goodwin was too completely an
American of the nineteenth century to be able to assume the part of
an Irish gentleman of the eighteenth century; and Florence, excellent
as he was in Irish characters of another kind, bestowed on Sir Lucius
a rather finicky affectation, quite out of keeping with the part.

In those distant days the dramatist was sadly underpaid. Brougham
told me once that his price for writing a play for a star was three
thousand dollars, payable on delivery of the manuscript, a sum
smaller than a month’s royalty on a successful play of to-day. And
yet more than one of the vehicles Brougham put together for this
modest price, ran like the One Hoss Shay. The stage-version of the
‘Old Curiosity Shop,’ in which Lotta doubled Little Nell and the
Marchioness, must have been performed several hundred times; and only
less successful were other of the made-to-order pieces he composed
for Mr. and Mrs. Barney Williams and for Mr. and Mrs. Florence.
These last were congenial labor, since they dealt with Irish themes,
more or less in imitation of Boucicault’s more solidly built
‘Arrah-na-Pogue’ and ‘Colleen Bawn.’

Where Boucicault was dominating, not to say domineering, Brougham
was yielding and unambitious. Their early disagreement over the
authorship of ‘London Assurance’ did not prevent their professional
association in later years. When ‘Arrah-na-Pogue’ was revived in
1873 at Booth’s Theater, Brougham played The O’Grady, supporting
Boucicault as Shaun the Post and Mrs. Boucicault as Arrah. And when
Boucicault in 1879 was strangely ill-advised to undertake ‘Louis XI,’
in his own adaptation of the play which Casimir Delavigne had made
out of ‘Quentin Durward,’ Brougham was Coitier; and I can testify
that on this occasion the honors were divided, or at least the
laughs, for I never listened to any dialog more ludicrous than that
between a French king with a pronounced Irish accent and a French
physician with an equally persistent brogue. These, as Beau Brummel’s
valet explained, “these are our failures.”

Brougham had his full share of Irish wit, more spontaneous than
Boucicault’s and less likely to be borrowed. He had also the more
English delight in punning. In ‘Pocahontas,’ after the opening song
Powhatan thanks his attendant braves:

Well roared, my jolly Tuscadoras!
Most loyal corps, your king encores your chorus.

And in the same burlesque when John Smith is tied down and about to
be put to death, Pocahontas rushes in, crying, “For my husband I
scream!” Whereupon the endangered hero raises his head and inquires
“Lemon or vanilla?”

These be but airy trifles floating like bubbles atop the dark wave
of forgetfulness, which has engulfed many things far more precious.
An airy trifle also is Brougham’s remark when Pat Hearn (a once
notorious gambler) drove past the Ocean House at Newport one summer
afternoon with a very pretty woman by his side. “Isn’t that Pat
Hearn and his wife?” somebody asked; and Brougham replied at once,
“That’s Hearn, I know; but I can’t say whether or not she is his’n.”

III

It was also at the Lotos that I got to know John T. Raymond. This
was probably in the fall of 1874, when he was appearing as Colonel
Sellers in Mark Twain’s ‘Gilded Age.’ The actor and the author
quarreled after a while, quarreled bitterly and never made up their
quarrel. No doubt, Mark knew his own creature better than any one
else and certainly better than the rather shallow Raymond. But
Raymond gave us at least all the external characteristics of the
inspired visionary with his inexpugnable optimism, always about to
acquire wealth beyond the dreams of avarice and yet for the moment
reduced to a frugal dinner of turnips and water, with only a candle
to light up his modest store. I have an impression that the cause
of the breach with Mark was Raymond’s unwillingness to forego two
or three easy effects which were always rewarded with thoughtless
laughter but which were not really in keeping with the character.
Raymond was unduly inclined to skylark even on the stage; I have seen
him, in the last act of the ‘Gilded Age,’ match silver dollars with
a friend he had recognized in the audience. Of course, he chose a
moment for the flip of his coin when the attention of the spectators
was bestowed upon some other performer, and only a few of them
detected his inexcusable pantomime. These lapses from the standard
of propriety may not have been frequent, but they occurred far too
often; and they could not but be offensive to the author of the play
in which the actor was appearing.

When Raymond indulged in tricks of this sort he displayed a lack of
respect alike for his audience and for his art. The art had to suffer
in silence; but the audience might at any time be moved to protest. I
recall that when Raymond was playing Ichabod Crane in 1879 he sent me
a box, to which my wife invited three or four of her young friends.
In the last act Ichabod comes out into the garden to ask Katrina into
the house, where there was merrymaking. To the startled astonishment
of our party, Raymond said “Come on in, Katrina! There’s lots of
fun! Brander Matthews has brought a whole boxful of pretty girls!”—a
speech which nobody in the house—except the boxful—seemed to hear or
at least to apprehend, probably because it had no relation to the
story being acted on the stage.

None the less was Raymond an accomplished comedian, brisk, lively,
laughter-compelling and authoritative. Like many another comic
actor, he longed to play pathetic parts; and unlike most of those
who have this ambition, he did possess the power of drawing tears. I
had first seen him as Asa Trenchard in Paris during the Exposition
of 1867, when Sothern had ventured across the Channel to disclose
Lord Dundreary to the unresponsive French; and I have never forgotten
the simple and manly pathos of the scene in which Asa burns the will
leaving him the fortune which would otherwise go to the girl he is in
love with. Audiences are always ready to appreciate a brief pathetic
episode when the comic character unexpectedly turns his serious side
to the spectators. But they are resentful when the funny man whom
they have gone to laugh with, and even to laugh at, is presented in a
play wherein he is persistently pathetic and not even intermittently
humorous. Raymond lost money for himself and for his managers when he
impersonated a dreary sobseeker in a dull domestic drama, ‘My Son,’
derived from a tearful Teutonic tale of woe.

In collaboration with H. C. Bunner I put together a rather boisterous
farce called ‘Touch and Go,’ which Raymond liked enough to contract
to produce but not enough for him ever to set about its production.
In its place he had brought out in succession two plays in which
the fun was less acrobatic—‘In Paradise’ and ‘For Congress.’ After
these pieces had run their course, G. H. Jessop (who was a part
author of ‘In Paradise’) came to me with an idea for a comic drama
for Raymond and asked me to join him in working it out. It was to be
called ‘A Gold Mine’; and having in mind Raymond’s Asa Trenchard in
the ‘American Cousin,’ I suggested that we lay the scene in London,
so as to repeat the contrast of an American with the British. We also
decided to develop our plot so that at the end of the second of our
three acts Raymond should have a chance to be pathetic if only for a
brief moment.

When our play was read to Raymond he was delighted with it; the
character suited him and he rejoiced that he was to have an
opportunity to show that he could be serious when the situation
required it. During his annual tour he tried out our comedy in one of
the smaller Western cities on a Friday night. He sent us a glowing
report of the reception of our play and of his own triumph at the end
of the second act. And in less than a fortnight thereafter we read in
the morning paper that he had had a sudden seizure which had carried
him off within twenty-four hours.

Fortunately for the authors, thus unexpectedly bereft of the actor
for whom the piece had been composed and to whose personality it
had been adjusted, Helen Tracy, who had played the heroine in the
single performance which Raymond had given, wrote at once to Nat
Goodwin, advising him to secure our play, as it had made a hit and
as the star-part would just suit him. Goodwin asked us to let him
read the piece; he liked it and we soon came to terms with him, both
Jessop and I believing that he was an actor of promise, altho up to
that time he had never undertaken a part demanding any subtlety of
treatment or any veracity of characterization.

When he was a very young man, Goodwin had made his first appearance
in a variety-show, giving imitations of the actors then prominent.
It is a curious fact that even the most adroit mimics are rarely
able to become accomplished actors, competent to sustain a character
consistently throughout a play. Goodwin was one of the few exceptions
to this rule. He soon gave up mimicry for burlesque, succeeding
that fine comedian William H. Crane, in the chief comic part of the
perennially popular ‘Evangeline’ and playing it in careful imitation
of his predecessor. As Joseph Jefferson—who had often appeared in
burlesque early in his career, notably in a parody of ‘Mazeppa’—once
said to me, “burlesque is a very good school for a young comedian, as
it tends to give him breadth of effect and certainty of execution.”

From burlesque Goodwin progressed to farce; and when he came to us
for ‘A Gold Mine,’ he was playing the part of a drunken undertaker
in ‘Turned Up,’ a robustious piece of British manufacture. As the
attraction of this whirlwind farcicality was not exhausted, Goodwin
arranged with us to postpone our play for a year; and he utilized
the delay to prepare the public to accept him in a comedy of a more
refined type. He added to his bill the ingenious and whimsical piece
called ‘Lend Me Five Shillings’ which Jefferson was still acting
occasionally. As he said to me, “I’d sooner finish third to Jefferson
than run a dead heat with Dixey!”—Dixey having just made a great hit
in ‘Adonis.’

Goodwin also appealed to us to modify the entrance of Silas K.
Woolcott, the American who had gone to England to sell a gold mine.
“That entrance is all right in itself,” he explained; “and it was
all right for Raymond, because he had played parts of that kind
before. But I haven’t; and it’s too quiet for me, since they’ll be
disappointed if I don’t make them laugh with my first half-dozen
speeches.” So we brought Woolcott in through the conservatory,
instead of through the front door, and we contrived a very brief
episode of equivoke in which Goodwin mistook the butler for a certain
Sir Thomas Butler whom Woolcott had been invited to meet.

‘A Gold Mine’ was a more or less artificial comedy with a complicated
plot and with dialog as brilliant as the combined wits of the two
collaborators could compass. For the part of the fascinating widow
with whom Woolcott was to pair off at the end of the play Goodwin
engaged Kate Forsythe; and the rest of the cast was at least
adequate if not entirely satisfactory. McCarty of the Boston Theater
produced the play most judiciously, making a valuable suggestion
for heightening the effect of the pathetic speech at the end of the
second act. When we asked Goodwin if he was certain that he could
play this serious bit and carry the audience with him, the actor
answered modestly, “Yes—at least I think so. You see, I’m going to do
it in imitation of Charley Thorne.”

This was shrewd, as Charles R. Thorne, Jr., was an actor of
straightforward force with a rich and well-modulated voice. It is
profitable always for the novice in any calling to take pattern
by its experts. As the painter studies in the studio of another
craftsman and as the writer “plays the sedulous ape to many
masters,” so the actor can find his profit in imitating and emulating
the performances of an earlier generation, not making himself a slave
to any one of them but gaining variety and flexibility by capturing
and combining the methods of half-a-dozen. John Drew, for example,
played one of his earliest parts at Daly’s as he imagined it would
have been played by Charles Wyndham; and Wyndham had modelled himself
more or less on Lester Wallack as Wallack had earlier sought to
achieve the airy lightness of Charles James Matthews. I make this
assertion without misgiving as my information came directly from
these four comedians; and I may add that Coquelin, the most varied
and versatile actor of the end of the nineteenth century, once told
me that while he was a pupil of Regnier, he learnt almost as much by
incessant observation of Samson, an older artist with a method wholly
different from Regnier’s.

It was by his performance in ‘A Gold Mine’ that Goodwin first
established his position as an actor of indisputable promise; and
in the remaining thirty years of his life he gained in power and in
authority. ‘In Mizzoura’ was written for him by Augustus Thomas, on
purpose to display the more serious quality the actor had exhibited
in ‘A Gold Mine’; and it was this more serious quality, strengthened
by exercise, which enabled him to rise to the noble dignity of the
final episode in Clyde Fitch’s ‘Nathan Hale,’ a tragic character
which Goodwin portrayed with beautiful fidelity. He became one of
the foremost figures on our stage; he even adventured himself in
two Shaksperian parts, Shylock and Bottom, in neither of which was
he considered to have been entirely successful; and yet despite
his prosperity in the theater he never attained to the commanding
position his native endowment would have entitled him to, if only it
had been sagely administered.

In fact, Goodwin, so it seems to me, threw away a golden opportunity.
After the retirement of Edwin Booth, Lawrence Barrett and John
McCullough there was an opening for an ambitious actor to win
recognition as their worthy successor; and this was an altitude to
which Goodwin could have aspired, if he had not been deficient in
that intangible and indefinable quality which we call character and
which for success in life is really more important than ability.
Ability he had in abundance but he did not husband it. He did not
take life seriously enough; and therefore his art suffered and
failed to mature as it might have done. He dissipated his ardor and
wasted his strength in default of the implacable ambition which
compels self-control. Nature had bestowed on him a richer gift
than on Lawrence Barrett, who had made himself what he was by stern
determination, whereby he overcame his disadvantages. Goodwin had
more intensity, more power, more resources; and he might have carved
a name for himself as Shylock, Richard III and Iago.

But it was not to be; and he made shipwreck of his career. I failed
to see him when he attempted Shylock, for which he ought to have had
the fire and the passion, but for which he lacked the training he
might easily have attained, if he had forced himself to acquire it. I
did see him in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’; and altho my memories
of George L. Fox and of James Lewis as Bottom are still vivid, they
are not as gratifying as my recollection of Goodwin in the same part.
This revival of Shakspere’s most fanciful and most humorous comedy
failed to attract the public, and the blame was currently laid upon
Goodwin. To my mind this was unjust, since his rendering of the
part seemed to me excellent, firmer in outline and richer in color
than that of either Fox or Lewis. I can never forget the delicious
self-sufficiency of his performance in ‘Pyramus and Thisbe,’ his
exuberant vanity, his adroit suggestion of the eternal complacency of
the self-satisfied amateur.

I may be wrong, of course; I may be crediting Goodwin with more than
he possessed, as I am certainly ascribing to him more than he ever
displayed. But I think he had it in him to do finer and stronger
things than he ever aimed at. “The pity of it, Iago, the pity of it!”

It would be difficult to find two careers in sharper contrast than
those of Nat Goodwin in the United States and of Beerbohm Tree in
Great Britain. As there was a vacancy at the head of the procession
in America after the withdrawal of Booth and Barrett and McCullough,
so there was one in England after the decline and disappearance of
Henry Irving. Goodwin was unable to seize the occasion, even if he
saw it; Tree saw it and seized it. Altho nature had been niggardly
to Tree where she had been bountiful to Goodwin, Tree had the
inestimable advantage of a resolute will and of the innate power
which impels a man to master the many difficulties besetting our
paths in life. It was by sheer force of ambition rather than by
assured skill as an actor that Tree forged to the front and took his
place as the leader of the profession in the British Isles, catching
the mantle of Irving as it fell and wearing it as best he could.

When I first knew Tree he had recently graduated from comic opera
to farce, making his earliest hit in the ‘Private Secretary’ and
replacing Arthur Cecil in the ‘Magistrate.’ From farce he turned to
melodrama and advanced his reputation as an actor by the versatility
he displayed in ‘Called Back’ and in the ‘Red Lamp.’ For two reasons
this versatility was more apparent than real; in the first place
because the methods of farce and of melodrama are closely akin, and
in the second place because the differentiation of the parts Tree was
then playing was largely external, being mainly a matter of make-up,
which incompletely disguised his own rather thin and brittle manner.

In time he assumed the management of the Haymarket theater; and
still later he was able to build the spacious and sumptuous His
Majesty’s. At the Haymarket he produced more than one interesting
modern comedy and he made more than one interesting revival, notably
of W. S. Gilbert’s ever-delightful ‘Engaged.’ At His Majesty’s he
was soon forced—somewhat to his surprise, so his half-brother, Max
Beerbohm once told me—to abandon the more refined types of comedy
and farce, simply because the house was too large for any form of
drama demanding delicacy. He found himself compelled to rely on more
strenuous plays, which permitted elaborate spectacular adornment.
He brought out the ‘Herod’ of Stephen Phillips and he imported the
‘Darling of the Gods’ of Belasco and Long. Thus it was that both this
necessity and his lofty ambition led him to a series of elaborately
pictorial revivals of Shakspere’s tragedies, histories and comedies.

As a producer he continued the tradition of Irving, bestowing upon
Shakspere’s plays superb settings, rivaling Irving’s in their
splendor, their expensiveness and their taste. For ‘Twelfth Night,’
for example, he designed an Italian garden, rising terrace upon
terrace to the very back of the stage, a scene so exquisitely
beautiful in itself, so completely satisfying to the eye, that—so Sir
Martin Conway told me—some spectators felt it to be an intrusion when
the actors entered and distracted attention from the lovely vision.
Tree displayed his scenic dexterity and his artistic invention in
a dozen or a score of other Shaksperian plays, notably ‘Antony and
Cleopatra,’ produced while Queen Victoria was still upon the throne.
There is an anecdote which is doubtless familiar to many, but which I
feel I have no right to omit here, to the effect that as the amorous
adventures of the serpent of old Nile were unrolled before the
entranced audience, one British matron whispered to another British
matron, “How different to the happy home life of our dear Queen!”

Of course, Tree reserved for himself all the great Shaksperian
characters, tragic and comic, Mark Antony, Macbeth and Hamlet,
Falstaff and Malvolio. For the loftier tragic parts he lacked the
physique and the temperament. He had not the beauty of person,
the grace of gesture, the princely bearing, the appealing voice,
which the performer of Hamlet ought to possess. He had not the
power, the passion, the largeness needed for Macbeth. He had not
the elocutionary skill required for the proper impersonation of
Mark Antony in ‘Julius Cæsar.’ But he was intelligent, untiring,
strong-willed and self-willed; and he was able to get the British
public to accept him in these unsuitable parts, perhaps in some
measure because there was then no actor on the British stage who
could contest its chieftainship with him.

It is reported that Gilbert said to him after seeing his Hamlet,
“Very good, Tree, very good indeed. You were funny without being
vulgar.” And when Gilbert went around to Tree’s dressing room
after his exhausting performance of another of Shakspere’s tragic
characters, a performance which had left the actor weakened and
perspiring, the pitiless wit remarked, “Tree, how well your skin
acts.” Altho Tree took himself seriously he had a keen sense of
humor; and even if he winced under the satiric lash of Gilbert, he
could take the joke without offense.

In fact, his sense of humor often came to his rescue, as another
anecdote testifies. He was once acting Hamlet in the provinces when
his friend, John Hare, happened to be in the same town. He sent Hare
a box; and the unwilling Hare felt that as a fellow-manager he could
not refuse this unwelcome invitation. Hare sat in the box in solitary
state; and after the curtain fell, he was about to escape when Tree’s
secretary caught him at the door with the request that he should
come to supper. Again the kindly Hare felt that courtesy demanded
his acceptance. At table Hare did not mention ‘Hamlet’ nor did Tree.
As soon as he could, Hare bade Tree good night. Tree saw him to the
door, and they parted without a word about the performance. Before
Hare had gone half-a-dozen paces, Tree called him back. As Hare
returned sadly, Tree said with a smile, “I say, Johnny, it is a good
_play_, isn’t it?”

We may be sure that Tree appreciated the merry jest of his
half-brother when at last he attained the honor of knighthood,
the final reward of every British actor-manager. As usual the
announcement preceded by several days the actual ceremony; and in the
interval a friend asked Max Beerbohm as to the actor’s exact status
during this awkward intermission: “Is your brother a knight now, or
isn’t he?” And Max answered that he supposed his brother in the eye
of the law was still Mr. Tree,—“but he is Sir Herbert in the sight of
God!”

Tree’s disqualifications for the mighty characters in Shakspere’s
tragic plays were obvious, but his histrionic limitations were
less apparent in the chief characters of the comedies. I did not
see him in ‘Twelfth Night’ but I should conjecture that he gave a
not unsatisfactory interpretation of Malvolio, altho it probably
lacked the gentle dignity and the melancholy humor which Irving
bestowed upon the part. I did see his Falstaff in the ‘Merry Wives of
Windsor’ and it seemed to me altogether the best of his Shaksperian
experiments. After all, the ‘Merry Wives’ is only farce, brisk and
bustling; and Tree was experienced and skillful in farce, with no
objection to getting all the laughs that the lively situations might
authorize. Yet, as I watched his dextrous efforts, I was conscious
always that Tree’s Falstaff was not really fat; he might be padded
out to his proper proportions, but he did not move like a creature
of portly figure; and his humor was devoid of unction. He disclosed
himself as a clever thin man trying to pass himself off as a humorous
fat man.

And in his latter performances of Falstaff he yielded more and
more to his besetting temptation to overdecorate a character with
petty ingenuities and with finicky details, which came in time to
detract from its broad outlines. He had an inventive mind and he was
continually in search of novelties of gesture and of business. Even
in his tragic parts he was prone to obtrusive pettinesses. Often at
the end of the run of a play, and sometimes even at the beginning, he
seemed to act outside the character rather than inside it.

Yet, when all is said, it remains that Tree deserved well of the
playgoing public of London; and this public could not well help being
grateful for the many opportunities he had provided for it to behold
Shakspere’s plays, always beautifully and tastefully mounted. It had
become accustomed to his mannerisms and it knew what to expect when
it flocked to His Majesty’s Theater. But in the United States, Tree
was never able to establish a position comparable with that which
he held in Great Britain. On our side of the Atlantic he was only a
wandering star; he was not the manager of the foremost theater with
the credit of a score of Shaksperian revivals; and we Americans had
not become habituated to his defects, and therefore we could not be
expected to be as tolerant of them as were his British followers. He
was well aware of this atmosphere of indifference, so to speak, in
America, an atmosphere he could never dispel. When I saw him last in
London, ten or fifteen years ago, he told me that he was thinking of
crossing over again. “But you don’t like my acting in New York,” he
added sadly; and I could not honestly contradict him, as perhaps he
hoped that I should.

Where the performances of Shakspere’s plays at His Majesty’s were
sometimes insufficient was in the acting; and this was not Tree’s
fault, for he was always eager to strengthen his cast by the
engagement of the best actors available. At more than one of his
revivals of the ‘Merry Wives’ he persuaded Ellen Terry and Mrs.
Kendal to emerge from retirement to disport themselves as the joyous
dames who delight in befooling Falstaff. The fault lay in the fact
that fine performers were not to be had. Actors who were good in
Shaksperian parts have always been scarce, and they are now steadily
becoming scarcer.

Even fifty years ago, when Edwin Booth opened the stately theater
he had built for himself, there arose a loud outcry against the
mediocrity of his company, an outcry which rankled in Booth’s memory
and which led him a score of years later to explain to me that he
thought the complaint, even if justified, was unjust to him, since
he had secured as well equipt a company as it was then possible to
collect, with Edwin Adams and Mark Smith at the head of it. This
came back to my memory when Henry Irving a little later spoke to me
about the difficulty he had had in getting fit performers for Laertes
and Mercutio and the other important parts of youthful buoyancy. “I
engaged Forbes-Robertson and George Alexander and William Terriss,
one after another, and I tried to tempt them to stay with me,” so
Irving said to me. “But they preferred to set up for themselves. I
don’t blame them, of course; but it is now almost impossible for me
to find anybody whom I can trust with these important parts.”

It was sometimes meanly suggested that Booth and Irving were each of
them unwilling, and perhaps even afraid, to surround themselves with
first class actors. The suggestion is as absurd as it is unworthy;
and it is plainly contradicted by the record. In the sixties of
the last century, when Booth was consolidating his reputation by
the earliest hundred night run of ‘Hamlet’ that any actor had ever
achieved, Bogumil Davison came to New York; and the young American
promptly invited the German tragedian to play Othello to his own
Iago. More than a score of years later Booth again appeared as Iago
to the Othello of Salvini. At one time or another he joined forces
with Charlotte Cushman and with Modjeska. Henry Irving was equally
free from petty jealousy; he always treated Ellen Terry as a co-star;
and when he engaged Mrs. Sterling for the Nurse in ‘Romeo and Juliet’
he advertized her name as prominently as his own. No actor ever
displayed more generosity to a friendly rival than Irving did when he
invited Booth to come for a fortnight to the Lyceum to alternate Iago
and Othello.

It was never difficult for Jefferson to find competent actors to
support him as Rip Van Winkle; and he always rehearsed the piece
carefully to make sure of the needful unity of tone. But it was
very hard indeed to find performers of presence, of authority and
of the sweep of style required by the boldly contrasted and highly
colored characters of a rich old comedy like the ‘Rivals.’ At one
time or another Jefferson secured the companionship of Mrs. Drew,
of John Gilbert, and of W. J. Florence, gladly sharing his glory
with them. He was delighted with the brief tour of the ‘Rivals,’
when a galaxy of stars deserted their orbits to twinkle by the side
of his Bob Acres. Mrs. Drew was Mrs. Malaprop, Julia Marlowe was
Lydia Languish, Robert Taber was Captain Absolute, Nat Goodwin was
Sir Lucius O’Trigger, Francis Wilson was Fag and William H. Crane
was Sir Anthony Absolute. Here was truly an all-star cast; and
the combination was triumphantly prosperous. I saw it at the sole
performance in New York, a matinee at that; and it was perhaps the
best all around rendering of the ‘Rivals’ that I have ever seen,
altho several of those who took part in it, accustomed to the more
modern methods of our latter-day dramatists, were not quite at ease
in their efforts to catch the tone of artificial comedy.

It is true, alas! that there are actors, and some of them are expert
and accomplished performers, who when they rise to be stars not only
seek to grasp all the good things for themselves and to monopolize
the spot-light, but who even go so far as to begrudge any laughter or
any applause which may be evoked by the members of their companies.
Forty years ago one of the most prominent comedians on our stage
had this pitiable characteristic. At the first performance of a
play specially written for him, this star was standing in the wings
waiting his turn to go on. Suddenly there was a roar of laughter
and a round of applause. “Who’s that?” cried the star, “What did he
say?” And at the second performance the line which had been so well
received was cut out. And twenty years ago there was an American
comic actress of robust force and wide popularity who slowly lost
the favor of the public because she insisted on producing plays in
which she never left the stage and for which she engaged actors and
actresses who were feeble and colorless.

It is not only natural, it is also wise, for a star to see to it that
his part is interesting and that it holds its interest from the first
act to the last. He cannot help knowing that he is the lodestone
which attracts the audiences. They pay their money to see him; and
they are not getting their money’s worth if they do not see enough
of him. But the spectators are best pleased with the star himself,
they are most likely to hold him in delighted remembrance and to
want to see him when next he comes to town, if he has given them a
well-balanced play, in which every part is filled by a performer
who can get out of it all it is worth. There are some stars who
are almost self-effacing, and who do not even care whether or not
they have their full share of the emphatic situations upon which
the curtain falls. It was pointed out by not a few of those who saw
‘Leah Kleschna,’ when Mrs. Fiske produced it with a brilliant and
well-balanced cast,—John Mason, George Arliss, Charles Cartwright,
William B. Mack,—that the star let Mack have the curtain of the third
act.

VII

If it was difficult for Booth fifty years ago and for Irving thirty
years ago to find well-graced and well-trained actors to sustain the
secondary characters in Shakspere’s comedies and tragedies, it is
far more difficult to-day, when our dramatists, even when they are
poets, are rarely tempted to write plays in five acts and in blank
verse. Our modern drama is composed in pedestrian prose; and the men
and women of our theaters have little or no occasion to speak the
language of the gods. They are used to a dialog which aims at an
apparent reproduction of the speech of everyday life; and therefore
they have not been called upon to acquire the art of delivering
the rhythmic utterance of tragic heroes and heroines. They are all
striving to be “natural,” as befits a stage whereon the scenery and
the furnishings are as far as may be those of real life. They are
likely to have a distaste for blank verse, which cannot but seem to
them artificial, stilted, “unnatural.”

Of course, no stage-dialog can be natural, strictly speaking. It must
be compact and significant; it must flow unbroken in the shortest
distance between two points. But to-day actors and audiences alike
are so accustomed to the picked and polished prose of Barrie and
Pinero, of Clyde Fitch and Augustus Thomas, that this appears
“natural” to them, because they do not note its divergence from the
average talk that falls on their ears outside the theater, whereas
they cannot help feeling that the steady march of ten-syllabled
iambics is a violent departure from our habitual manner of
communicating information and of expressing emotion. In other words,
even if our stage-dialog to-day is “unnatural,” as stage-dialog
always has been and always will be, it is far less obviously
“unnatural” than blank verse. A long and severe self-training is
necessary before a performer can feel at home in blank verse, and
before he can impart colloquial ease to it.

Yet it is a fact that we who speak English have a tendency toward the
iambic rhythm when we seek to move an audience. This rhythm may be
unconscious and it may be irregular; but it is unmistakable in the
death-bed scenes of Dickens, for example, where he was insisting on
the pathetic, and in the orations of Ingersoll, where he was making
his most powerful appeal. The Kembles were so subdued to what they
worked in on the stage that they were prone to drop into blank verse
on occasions when it was not appropriate. Mrs. Siddons is said to
have startled the salesman who was showing her a piece of goods by
asking, “And will it wash?” The first time she met Washington Irving
after he had published the ‘Sketch-Book,’ she said to him, “Young
man, you’ve made me weep”; and when she next met him after he had
published another book, she said “Young man, you’ve made me weep
again!”

Her brother, John Philip Kemble, was a great friend of Sir Walter
Scott; and once when they were crossing a field together, they
were chased by a bull. “Sheriff,” said the actor to the author,
“methinks I’ll get me up into a tree.” Fanny Kemble, whose reading of
Shakspere’s plays Longfellow commemorated in a noble sonnet, was the
daughter of Charles, another brother of Mrs. Siddons. Once when she
went on the platform to read, she found that a cane-bottomed chair
had been provided for her. She turned majestically to the gentleman
who was escorting her and inquired, “And would you give my velvet
gown the small-pox?” When her remote kinswoman, the fragile amateur,
who called herself Mrs. Scott-Siddons, came to Fanny Kemble for
professional guidance, she begged for advice about making points; and
she was not a little frightened by the force of the swift retort:
“Points, girl? I never was a point actress!”

This, all this, was long, long ago; and a great deal of water has
gone under the bridge since those distant days. I have to confess
that I never caught Edwin Booth or Henry Irving lapsing into blank
verse off the stage.

(1920)

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been
corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within
the text and consultation of external sources.

Some hyphens in words have been silently removed, some added,
when a predominant preference was found in the original book.

Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text,
and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained.

Pg 46: ‘were also accusaable’ replaced by ‘were also accusable’.
Pg 59: ‘Racine, immitagably’ replaced by ‘Racine, immitigably’.
Pg 78: ‘had helpt to’ replaced by ‘had helped to’.
Pg 133: ‘two diferent tongues’ replaced by ‘two different tongues’.
Pg 141: ‘first apparance as’ replaced by ‘first appearance as’.
Pg 142: “Flore et Zephyr” replaced by ‘Flore et Zephyr’.
Pg 144: ‘qualties of the’ replaced by ‘qualities of the’.
Pg 152: ‘if may be recorded’ replaced by ‘it may be recorded’.
Pg 217: ‘unpublisht, and I’ replaced by ‘unpublished, and I’.
Pg 269: ‘or less Shakespere’ replaced by ‘or less Shakspere’.

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