The Theory of the Theatre, and Other Principles of Dramatic Criticism Part 9

These details must be so selected as to represent at every point some phase of the central and informing truth, and no incidents or characters must be shown which are not directly or indirectly representative of the one thing which, in that particular piece, the author has to say. The great plays of the world have all grown endogenously from a single, central idea; or, to vary the figure, they have been spun like spider-webs, filament after filament, out of a central living source. But most of our native playwrights seem seldom to experience this necessary process of the imagination which creates. Instead of working from the inside out, they work from the outside in. They gather up a haphazard handful of theatric situations and try to string them together into a story; they congregate an ill-a.s.sorted company of characters and try to achieve a play by letting them talk to each other. Many of our playwrights are endowed with a sense of situation; several of them have a gift for characterisation, or at least for caricature; and most of them can write easy and natural dialogue, especially in slang. But very few of them start out with something to say, as Mr. Moody started out in _The Great Divide_ and Mr. Thomas in _The Witching Hour_.

When a play is really about something, it is always possible for the critic to state the theme of it in a single sentence. Thus, the theme of _The Witching Hour_ is that every thought is in itself an act, and that therefore thinking has the virtue, and to some extent the power, of action.

Every character in the piece was invented to embody some phase of this central proposition, and every incident was devised to represent this abstract truth concretely. Similarly, it would be easy to state in a single sentence the theme of _Le Tartufe_, or of _Oth.e.l.lo_, or of _Ghosts_. But who, after seeing four out of five of the American plays that are produced upon Broadway, could possibly tell in a single sentence what they were about? What, for instance--to mention only plays which did not fail--was _Via Wireless_ about, or _The Fighting Hope_, or even _The Man from Home_?

Each of these was in some ways an interesting entertainment; but each was valueless as drama, because none of them conveyed to its auditors a theme which they might remember and weave into the texture of their lives.

For the only sort of play that permits itself to be remembered is a play that presents a distinct theme to the mind of the observer. It is ten years since I have seen _Le Tartufe_ and six years since last I read it; and yet, since the theme is unforgetable, I could at any moment easily reconstruct the piece by retrospective imagination and summarise the action clearly in a paragraph. But on the other hand, I should at any time find it impossible to recall with sufficient clearness to summarise them, any of a dozen American plays of the usual type which I had seen within the preceding six months. Details of incident or of character or of dialogue slip the mind and melt away like smoke into the air. To have seen a play without a theme is the same, a month or two later, as not to have seen a play at all. But a piece like _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, once seen, can never be forgotten; because the mind clings to the central proposition which the play was built in order to reveal, and from this ineradicable recollection may at any moment proceed by psychologic a.s.sociation to recall the salient concrete features of the action. To develop a play from a central theme is therefore the sole means by which a dramatist may insure his work against the iniquity of oblivion. In order that people may afterward remember what he has said, it is necessary for him to show them clearly and emphatically at the outset why he has undertaken to talk and precisely what he means to talk about.

Most of our American playwrights, like Juliet in the balcony scene, speak, yet they say nothing. They represent facts, but fail to reveal truths. What they lack is purpose. They collect, instead of meditating; they invent, instead of wondering; they are clever, instead of being real. They are avid of details: they regard the part as greater than the whole. They deal with outsides and surfaces, not with centralities and profundities. They value acts more than they value the meanings of acts; they forget that it is in the motive rather than in the deed that Life is to be looked for. For Life is a matter of thinking and of feeling; all act is merely Living, and is significant only in so far as it reveals the Life that prompted it. Give us less of Living, more of Life, must ever be the cry of earnest criticism.

Enough of these mut.i.tudinous, multifarious facts: tell us single, simple truths. Give us more themes, and fewer fabrics of shreds and patches.

XIV

THE FUNCTION OF IMAGINATION

Whenever the spring comes round and everything beneath the sun looks wonderful and new, the habitual theatre-goer, who has attended every legitimate performance throughout the winter season in New York, is moved to lament that there is nothing new behind the footlights. Week after week he has seen the same old puppets pulled mechanically through the same old situations, doing conventional deeds and repeating conventional lines, until at last, as he watches the performance of yet another play, he feels like saying to the author, "But, my dear sir, I have seen and heard all this so many, many times already!" For this spring-weariness of the frequenter of the theatre, the common run of our contemporary playwrights must be held responsible. The main trouble seems to be that, instead of telling us what they think life is like, they tell us what they think a play is like. Their fault is not--to use Hamlet's phrase--that they "imitate humanity so abominably": it is, rather, that they do not imitate humanity at all. Most of our playwrights, especially the newcomers to the craft, imitate each other. They make plays for the sake of making plays, instead of for the sake of representing life. They draw their inspiration from the little mimic world behind the footlights, rather than from the roaring and tremendous world which takes no thought of the theatre. Their art fails to interpret life, because they care less about life than they care about their art. They are interested in what they are doing, instead of being interested in why they are doing it. "Go to!", they say to themselves, "I will write a play"; and the weary auditor is tempted to murmur the sentence of the cynic Frenchman, "_Je n'en vois pas la necessite_."

But now, lest we be led into misapprehension, let us understand clearly that what we desire in the theatre is not new material, but rather a fresh and vital treatment of such material as the playwright finds made to his hand. After a certain philosophic critic had announced the startling thesis that only some thirty odd distinct dramatic situations were conceivable, Goethe and Schiller set themselves the task of tabulation, and ended by deciding that the largest conceivable number was less than twenty. It is a curious paradox of criticism that for new plays old material is best. This statement is supported historically by the fact that all the great Greek dramatists, nearly all of the Elizabethans, Corneille, Racine, Moliere, and, to a great extent, the leaders of the drama in the nineteenth century, made their plays deliberately out of narrative materials already familiar to the theatre-going public of their times. The drama, by its very nature, is an art traditional in form and resumptive in its subject-matter. It would be futile, therefore, for us to ask contemporary playwrights to invent new narrative materials. Their fault is not that they deal with what is old, but that they fail to make out of it anything which is new. If, in the long run, they weary us, the reason is not that they are lacking in invention, but that they are lacking in imagination.

That invention and imagination are two very different faculties, that the second is much higher than the first, that invention has seldom been displayed by the very greatest authors, whereas imagination has always been an indispensable characteristic of their work,--these points have all been made clear in a very suggestive essay by Professor Brander Matthews, which is included in his volume ent.i.tled _Inquiries and Opinions_. It remains for us to consider somewhat closely what the nature of imagination is.

Imagination is nothing more or less than the faculty for _realisation_,--the faculty by which the mind makes real unto itself such materials as are presented to it. The full significance of this definition may be made clear by a simple ill.u.s.tration.

Suppose that some morning at breakfast you pick up a newspaper and read that a great earthquake has overwhelmed Messina, killing countless thousands and rendering an entire province desolate. You say, "How very terrible!"--after which you go blithely about your business, untroubled, undisturbed. But suppose that your little girl's pet p.u.s.s.y-cat happens to fall out of the fourth-story window. If you chance to be an author and have an article to write that morning, you will find the task of composition heavy. Now, the reason why the death of a single p.u.s.s.y-cat affects you more than the death of a hundred thousand human beings is merely that you realise the one and do not realise the other. You do not, by the action of imagination, make real unto yourself the disaster at Messina; but when you see your little daughter's face, you at once and easily imagine woe.

Similarly, on the largest scale, we go through life realising only a very little part of all that is presented to our minds. Yet, finally, we know of life only so much as we have realised. To use the other word for the same idea,--we know of life only so much as we have imagined. Now, whatever of life we make real unto ourselves by the action of imagination is for us fresh and instant and, in a deep sense, new,--even though the same materials have been realised by millions of human beings before us. It is new because we have made it, and we are different from all our predecessors. Landor imagined Italy, realised it, made it instant and afresh. In the subjective sense, he created Italy, an Italy that had never existed before,--Landor's Italy. Later Browning came, with a new imagination, a new realisation, a new creation,--Browning's Italy. The materials had existed through immemorable centuries; Landor, by imagination, made of them something real; Browning imagined them again and made of them something new. But a Cook's tourist hurrying through Italy is likely, through deficiency of imagination, not to realise an Italy at all.

He reviews the same materials that were presented to Landor and to Browning, but he makes nothing out of them. Italy for him is tedious, like a twice-told tale. The trouble is not that the materials are old, but that he lacks the faculty for realising them and thereby making of them something new.

A great many of our contemporary playwrights travel like Cook's tourists through the traditional subject-matter of the theatre. They stop off here and there, at this or that eternal situation; but they do not, by imagination, make it real. Thereby they miss the proper function of the dramatist, which is to imagine some aspect of the perennial struggle between human wills so forcibly as to make us realise it, in the full sense of the word,--realise it as we daily fail to realise the countless struggles we ourselves engage in. The theatre, rightly considered, is not a place in which to escape from the realities of life, but a place in which to seek refuge from the unrealities of actual living in the contemplation of life realised,--life made real by imagination.

The trouble with most ineffective plays is that the fabricated life they set before us is less real than such similar phases of actual life as we have previously realised for ourselves. We are wearied because we have already unconsciously imagined more than the playwright professionally imagines for us. With a great play our experience is the reverse of this.

Incidents, characters, motives which we ourselves have never made completely real by imagination are realised for us by the dramatist.

Intimations of humanity which in our own minds have lain jumbled fragmentary, like the mult.i.tudinous pieces of a shuffled picture-puzzle, are there set orderly before us, so that we see at last the perfect picture. We escape out of chaos into life.

This is the secret of originality: this it is that we desire in the theatre:--not new material, for the old is still the best; but familiar material rendered new by an imagination that informs it with significance and makes it real.

By GEORGE MIDDLETON

THE ROAD TOGETHER

A powerful four-act drama of American life.

POSSESSION

With THE GROOVE, THE BLACK TIE, A GOOD WOMAN, CIRCLES, and THE UNBORN.

One-act American Plays.

_New York Times_: "... Mr. Middleton's outlook on life, his conceptions of the relations of men and women to each other and to society is a fine one, generous and tolerant, but not sentimental.... No one else is doing his kind of work and his books should not be missed by readers looking for a striking presentation of the stuff that life is made of."

EMBERS

With THE FAILURES, THE GARGOYLE, IN HIS HOUSE, MADONNA and THE MAN MASTERFUL. One-act American Plays.

PROF. WILLIAM LYON PHELPS, _of Yale_: "The plays are admirable; the conversations have the true style of human speech, and show first-rate economy of words, every syllable advancing the plot.

The little dramas are full of cerebration, and I shall recommend them in my public lectures."

TRADITION

With ON BAIL, MOTHERS, WAITING, THEIR WIFE, and THE CHEAT OF PITY. One-act American Plays.

CLAYTON HAMILTON, in _The Bookman_: "Admirable in technique; soundly constructed and written in natural and lucid dialogue.

He reveals at every point the aptness of the practiced playwright. It is most impressive that Mr. Middleton has successfully broken ground, as a pioneer among us, in the general cause of the composition of the one-act play."

NOWADAYS

A three-act comedy of American life.

_The Nation_: "Without a shock or a thrill in it, but steadily interesting and entirely human. All the characters are depicted with fidelity and consistency; the dialogue is good and the plot logical."

SIXTH EDITION, ENLARGED AND WITH PORTRAITS

HALE'S DRAMATISTS OF TO-DAY

ROSTAND, HAUPTMANN, SUDERMANN, PINERO, SHAW, PHILLIPS, MAETERLINCK

By PROF. EDWARD EVERETT HALE, JR.

Since this work first appeared in 1905, Maeterlinck's SISTER BEATRICE, THE BLUE BIRD and MARY MAGDALENE, Rostand's CHANTECLER and Pinero's MID-CHANNEL and THE THUNDERBOLT--among the notable plays by some of Dr. Hale's dramatists--have been acted here. Discussions of them are added to this new edition, as are considerations of Bernard Shaw's and Stephen Phillips'

latest plays. The author's papers on Hauptmann and Sudermann, with slight additions, with his "Note on Standards of Criticism," "Our Idea of Tragedy," and an appendix of all the plays of each author, with dates of their first performance or publication, complete the volume.

_Bookman_: "He writes in a pleasant, free-and-easy way.... He accepts things chiefly at their face value, but he describes them so accurately and agreeably that he recalls vividly to mind the plays we have seen and the pleasure we have found in them."