Inquiries and Opinions

by Brander Matthews

long as the merits of a drama are judged by the standard of material prosperity. After all, to get your puppets on and off the stage is not the sole end of drama, and modesty might suggest that it is better to fail with Tennyson than to succeed with the gifted author who is at this moment engaged in whitewashing Julia.

Inexpensive in wit as this paragraph is, it serves the purpose of showing us that there are still those who believe the drama of our own time to be a thing of naught. Brief as this quotation is, it is long enough to reveal that the writer of it had the arrogance of ignorance, and that he was expressing what he conceived to be opinions, without taking the trouble to learn anything about the history of the theater or about the principles of the dramatic art.

The full measure of his ignorance it would be a waste of time to point out, but it can be estimated by his two remarks, that it was better to fail with Tennyson than to succeed with Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, and that there is likely to be no change for the better so long as the merits of a drama are judged by "the standard of material prosperity." Taking these assertions in turn, we may note, first, that Tennyson ardently longed to write a play which should please the playgoers of his own time; second, that he desired to be judged by these very standards of material prosperity,—just as Mr. Jones does. Mr. Jones has more than once succeeded in pleasing the playgoers of his own time, and Tennyson failed to achieve the particular kind of success he was aiming at. His failure may have been due to his lack of the native dramatic faculty; it may have been due to his following of outworn models no longer adjusted to the conditions of the modern theater; but whatever the reason, there is no doubt as to the fact itself. He did not attain the goal he was striving for any more than Browning was able to do so; and it is not for their eulogists now to say that their goal was unworthy. The test of "material prosperity" was the very test by which the poets wisht to be tried, and by this test they both failed—and Mr. Henry Arthur Jones more than once has succeeded. Tennyson and Mr. Jones were aiming at the same target—popular success in the theater. Even if Mr. Jones has not always made a bull's-eye, he has often put his bullet on the target—the very target which Tennyson mist completely, even if his ball happened to make a hit on another.

Tennyson desired to meet the conditions which all the great dramatists have ever been willing to meet. He did not follow their example and study carefully the circumstances of theatrical representation as they had done, nor did he make himself master of the secrets of the dramaturgic art. And this is a chief reason why he was unable to produce any impression upon the drama of his day; while the dramatic poets of the past, the masters whom he respected—Sophocles and Shakspere and Molière—each of them, accepting the formula of the theater as this had been elaborated by his immediate predecessors, enlarged this formula, modified it, made it over to suit his own ampler outlook on life, and thus stamped his own individuality upon the drama of succeeding generations.

Shakspere and Molière are accepted by us now as the greatest of dramatic poets; but to their own contemporaries they were known rather as ingenious playwrights up to every trick of the trade, finding their profit in every new device of their fellow-craftsmen, and emerging triumphant from a judgment by "the standard of material prosperity." And by this same standard, unworthy as it may seem to some, Lope de Vega and Calderon were judged in their own day. Corneille and Racine also, Beaumarchais and Sheridan, Hugo and Augier and Rostand. The standard of material prosperity is not the only test,—indeed, it is not the final test,—but it is the first and the most imperative, because a dramatist who fails to please the play-going public of his own time will never have another chance. There is no known instance of a poet unsuccessful on the stage in his own country and winning recognition in the theater after his death. Posterity never reverses the unfavorable verdict of an author's contemporaries; it has no time to waste on this, for it is too busy reversing the favorable verdicts which seem to it to be in disaccord with the real merits of the case.

It was Mark Twain who pithily summed up a prevailing opinion when he said that "the classics are the books everybody praises—and nobody reads." Let us hope that this is an overstatement and not the exact truth; but whatever the proportion of verity in Mark Twain's saying, there is no doubt that we are running no great risk if we reverse it and say that when they were first produced the classics were books that everybody read—and that nobody praised. Shakspere to-day is the prey of the commentators and of the criticasters, but in his own time Shakspere was the most popular of the Elizabethan playwrights—so popular that his name was tagged to plays he had not written, in order that the public might be tempted to take them into favor. Yet it was years before the discovery was made that this popular playwright was also the greatest poet and the profoundest psychologist of all time. Cervantes lived long enough to be pleased by the widespread enjoyment of his careless masterpiece; but it was a century at least before the first suspicion arose that 'Don Quixote' was more than a "funny book." Molière was very lucky in filling his theater when his own pieces were performed; but contemporary opinion held that his plays owed their attraction not so much to their literary merit as to the humorous force of his own acting. Molière was acknowledged to be the foremost of comic actors, but only Boileau was sure of his genius as a dramatist; and Boileau's colleagues in the French Academy never recognized Molière's superiority over all his immediate rivals.

The very fact that Molière and Shakspere were pleasing the plain people, that they were able to attract the main body of the unlearned populace, that they sought frankly to be judged by "the standard of material prosperity"—this very fact seems to have prevented their contemporaries from perceiving the literary merit of their plays. Indeed, it is not unfair to suggest that the cultivated critics of the past—like some cultivated critics of our own time—are predisposed to deny literary merit to anything which is broadly popular. They think of literary merit as something upon which they alone are competent to decide, as something to be tried by the touchstones they keep in their studies, under lock and key. The scholarly contemporaries of Shakspere saw that he did not conform to the classic traditions they revered, and they could not guess he was establishing a classic tradition of his own. They were so full of the past that they could not see the present right before their eyes. They mist in Shakspere's work what they had been trained to consider as the chief essential of dramatic art; and they were not acute enough to inquire whether there were not good reasons why he was so attractive to the vulgar mob whom they despised.

To most critics of the drama "literary merit" is something external, something added to the play, something adjusted to the structure. They blame modern playwrights for not putting it in. They take an attitude toward the drama of their own day like that of the New England farmer, when he was asked who had been the architect of his house. "Oh, I built that house myself," was the answer; "but there's a man coming down from Boston next week to put the architecture on." To this New England farmer, architecture was not in the planning and the proportion and the structure; to him it seemed to mean only some sort of jig-saw fretwork added as an afterthought. To most of those who amuse themselves by writing about the drama, "literary merit" is chiefly a matter of pretty speeches, of phrase-making, of simile and metaphor—in short, of rhetoric.

It seems absurd that at this late day it should be needful to repeat once more that literature is not a matter of rhetoric; that it is not external and detachable, but internal and essential. It has to do with motive and character, with form and philosophy; it is a criticism of life itself, or else it is mere vanity and vexation. If literature is no more than a stringing of flowers of speech, then is 'Lucile' a greater book than 'Robinson Crusoe,' or then is the 'Forest Lovers' a finer book than 'Huckleberry Finn'; then is Pater a better writer than Benjamin Franklin or Abraham Lincoln. Books are not made by style alone. Even lyric poetry is estimated by its fervor and by its sincerity rather than by the dulcet phrases in which the lyrist has voiced his emotion of the moment. If verbal felicity alone is all that the poet needs, if he is to be judged only by the compelling melody of the words he has chosen to set in array, then is Poe the foremost of lyrists. Even the essay, the most narrowly literary of all prose-forms, is valued for its wisdom rather than for its phrasing. The essays of Stevenson, for example, will survive not because of their style alone, polished as that is and unexpectedly happy in its phrasing, but because the man who wrote them, artist as he was in words, had something to say—something which was his own, the result of his own observation of life from his own angle of vision. Style is the great antiseptic, no doubt; but style cannot bestow life on the still-born.

Not only do such critics as the anonymous writer from whom quotation has been made, persist in thinking of the literary merit of the drama as "exquisite prose" and "splendid verse,"—in other words as an added grace, applied externally,—but they also seem to believe that all plays possessing what they would regard as "literary merit" stand in a class apart. They are looking for a literary drama which shall be different from the popular drama. Apparently they expect to be able to recognize a literary play at first sight—and probably by its excess of applied ornament. And this attitude is quite as absurd as the other. In no one of the greater periods of the poetic drama have the plays which we now revere as masterpieces differed in form from the mass of the other plays of that epoch. They were better, no doubt, excelling in power, in elevation, in insight, in skill. But they bore a striking resemblance in structure and in intent to the host of contemporary plays which we now perceive to be hopelessly inferior to them.