LEGITIMATE SCOPE OF DRAMATIC ART.
Waxworks May Deceive for a Moment,
But They Do Not Leave the Lasting
Impression of Michelangelo's Moses.
Otis Skinner, the actor, recently made a plea for the teaching of dramatic art in our public schools and colleges. In that way, he urged, public taste can be improved to the point where a better quality of plays and acting will be required to fill the theaters. He was speaking before the Ethical Culture Society, in New York. In beginning he explained at some length what he considered art, drawing his distinctions very carefully:
The purpose of the play is to hold a mirror up to nature, although such things as horror, meanness, lust, or crime must not be shown for their sake alone, merely to display accurate dramatic photographs. They must be utilized toward a definite end. The stage has many detractors, and among them are the ones that say the stage does not represent real life always. Nor should it. I will give you a definition of art which I got from Dr. Adler. It explains what I mean: "Art is the pattern, and not so many ells cut from the fabric of life."
Some years ago in London I went to Mme. Tussaud's waxworks. Curious to identify the figures, I turned to a lady and asked her where I might obtain a program. There was no answer. I became embarrassed and a little angry when I saw I was the subject of amusement for the crowd. I looked closer. The lady was made of wax. Well, I don't remember how she looked, but I do remember every line of the beauties of the Venus of Milo, which I saw in the Louvre, and of Michelangelo's Moses. I did not consider them figures or real persons, yet they live with me.
The charge that the theater gives too much attention to vice was discussed by Mr. Skinner. When used on the stage to heighten the dramatic effect, the simulation of drunkenness, he said, is ethically right. "Mrs. Warren's Profession," he declared flatly, was quite properly suppressed, since there was no reason for it except the exhibition of vice. False and namby-pamby melodrama, on the other hand, is fully as detrimental to dramatic art.
He outlined the plot of a play in which a poor young man, after rescuing the daughter of a multimillionaire by a feat of virtually impossible agility and strength, is promptly provided for by the thankful parent, and marries the girl.
The story, as he told it, was glaringly untrue to life—wherefore he denounced it as immoral. It represented the extreme of romantic falsity, just as "Mrs. Warren's Profession" represented the extreme of disgustingly literal reality.
In art no extreme is acceptable—a lesson which the Greeks, with their supreme intuition of artistic fitness, taught the world once and for all.