His great merit is that he is bringing good taste and sensible innovations to the Chinese theater, which had been stagnant—in a state of arrested development. The old Empress Dowager, showing her usual bad taste, had made fashionable in Peking a Mongolian style of music intended for open-air theaters on the wind-swept plains, which in a roofed theater is absolutely ear-splitting. Mei Lan-fang is returning to traditional Chinese music in which the soft notes of the flute prevail. Instead of the old hackneyed themes Mei has staged numerous new plays based on the famous romantic novel, “The Dream of the Red Chamber”, as well as many other plays written especially for him. Into his fanciful plays of the type of “Midsummer Night’s Dream” he has woven graceful dances, an absolute innovation on his part. New and often historically correct costumes appear in his plays, enlivening the otherwise rather drab Chinese stage. In contrast to the Chinese habit of presenting only the favorite acts of the well-known plays (as though our managers should stage only the balcony scene from “Romeo and Juliet”, or the husband-under-the-table scene from “Tartuffe”), he presents even the older plays in their entirety. When he plays in Japan or in the European theater in Peking, he removes the ill-clothed orchestra from the stage; but he cannot do this in the native theaters, where the strong tradition insists that the musicians must sit on the stage and destroy the illusion, for the foreigners at least.
In this ability of his to make innovations and at the same time to adapt himself to his audiences to a certain extent, lies the key of Mei Lan-fang’s success. Even the most hidebound theater devotees and connoisseurs must recognize the skill of his acting and the perfection of his enunciation, and therefore they are willing to accept the foreign elements which he introduces. Mei Lan-fang’s greatness lies in the fact that he is able to introduce bold reforms into the theater without cutting himself off from the tradition.
CHAPTER NINE
Analogies Between East and West
I have often met with people who ask: “Do the Chinese have the division of plays into tragedies and comedies?” and when they learn that there is no such division they feel this to be a great defect in the Chinese theater. But it might be well worth recalling that these Greek terms did not originally have their present-day connotations, and that their original meanings were perhaps not far removed from the divisions which the Chinese make in classifying their plays. Tragedy meant originally a “goat song”, and philologists are divided on the question as to whether the name is derived from the fact that the song was sung by revelers worshiping Dionysus, who, because of their appearance and licentious character were called “goats”, or whether it was sung at the sacrifice of a goat, or whether a goat was the prize which was awarded to the successful poet.[28] At any rate there is no doubt that tragedy was a musical term. The same is true of comedy, which is the song of the comus, or band of revelers, who marched along in procession carrying aloft the phallus and chanting songs to Dionysus which were called phallic songs. The scurrilous remarks interlarded in the intervals between songs by the leader of the comus gave rise to the form of light entertainment known as comedy in the theater of to-day. In the Middle Ages it had the meaning of a poetic work with a happy ending, for which reason Dante called his long poem a “comedy”, which later writers made “The Divine Comedy.” Thus we see the two words have deviated altogether from their original meanings. We know very little about Greek music of these earliest days, but we hear also of Doric music and Phrygian music employed in the theater. The Doric music was grave, dignified, and employed the harp as the chief musical instrument, while the Phrygian mode was emotional and was accompanied by the flute.
Now let us look for a moment at the Chinese classification of styles of drama. We generally hear of the divisions of kuan-ch’ü, p’i-huang (a telescoping of hsi-pi and er-huang) and thirdly of pang-tzu. These are all musical terms. Kuan-ch’ü is accompanied by the flute, and is said to be the most literary, the most graceful and soft; also because of its lack of vulgarity it is caviare to the general. It is rarely performed nowadays, but was quite popular in the Ming Dynasty. It was directly descended from the classical Yuan drama, whose authors were scholars ousted by the Mongols from their public offices. This name is derived from a geographical term, just as are the Greek Doric and Phrygian modes. The pang-tzu came to Peking from Shansi during the Ch’ing Dynasty. The chief instrument is a rude kind of fiddle with a round, flat sounding box, and the genre is considered to be exciting and vulgar. The er-huang or hsi-p’i (said to be very similar) are also styles adopted during the Manchu Dynasty. They employ as their chief instrument the well-known hu-ch’in. There is a great similarity between Greek and Chinese thought, in that both speak of the good moral effects of music if only there be the proper harmony; and likewise of the immoral effects of vulgar, exciting music. I believe one could find almost exact parallels in the writings of Plato and of many Chinese authors,[29] even so modern a one as Tsai Yuan-pei. We modern Europeans and Americans, on the other hand, seem to have given up the idea of music as a means for developing harmonious and moral souls.
In practice music was employed in the Greek theater not only by the chorus, but also by the actors in the midst of the spoken dialogue when a particularly emotional point was reached. When the passions rose to a high pitch the musical accompaniment commenced and the actor sang; such a passage was, for example, the recital of the forebodings of Cassandra in Æschylus’ “Agamemnon”, interrupted by the Argive elders who form the chorus. Exactly the same practice obtains in the Chinese theater, as any one can readily observe in almost any play. Some scholars have asserted that the whole of a Greek play was accompanied by music, but it is generally believed now that only the lyrical passages were sung, while the iambic dialogue was spoken. In this similarity of the Greek and the Chinese theaters we can find an aid in our efforts at reconstructing the past—perhaps worthy of consideration by régisseurs who attempt to put on the stage to-day some of the plays which stirred the imagination of the Athenians of old. Possibly it may also be a shock to some who have seen modern representations in which the actors, as well as the chorus, employ a solemn and stately, sometimes monotonous recitative, to learn that the ancients sang or chanted a great part of their plays; a shock such as we are likely to receive when we first learn that the ancients did not employ marble in their architecture in its austere virginal whiteness only, but that they frequently colored their buildings. But just as a traveler coming to China may see beautiful architectural results achieved by the bold use of color in architecture, so he may come closer to the real—not the pseudo-classical—art by reflecting on the effect of musical interruptions in Sophocles’ “Œdipus” or Euripides’ “Medea.”
In Greece the theater was an institution which gave performances at the time of certain religious festivals, and it was in this sense a folk theater. In Peking also there are certain plays given always at particular festivals, and dealing always with the supernatural, or if you prefer, with religion. On the first day of the New Year, for example, there is the “Ch’ing Shih Shan”, a play dealing with the gods’ conquest of the devils; on the fifth day of the New Year comes a play in honor of the god of wealth; on the fifth of the fifth month, a play describing the overcoming of the five dangerous poisons; and on the seventh of the seventh month the “Meeting on the Milky Way.” These plays persist in spite of the commercialization of the Peking theaters.