Inquiries and Opinions

by Brander Matthews

So far as their outward appearance goes the great plays of Sophocles, of Shakspere, and of Molière are closely akin to the plays of their undistinguished contemporaries. It is in their content that they are immeasurably superior. They differ in degree only, never in kind. Shakspere early availed himself of the framework of the tragedy-of-blood that Kyd had made popular; and later he borrowed from Beaumont and Fletcher the flexible formula of the dramatic-romance. His genius towered above theirs, but he was content to appropriate their patterns. Molière modeled many of his earlier plays upon the loosely-knit comedy-of-masks of the Italian comedians, and the difference between his work and theirs is not external but internal; it is the difference between adroitness and cleverness on their part, and supreme comic genius on his. Probably it was this apparent similarity of Shakspere's work and Molière's to the uninspired efforts of their competitors which prevented their contemporaries from discovering their preëminence—the preëminence which is so obvious to us now that the plays of their fellow-craftsmen have fallen out of memory.

The blindness of the contemporary critic of Shakspere and of Molière, inexplicable as it may appear nowadays, has its parallel in the blindness of the contemporary critic in regard to 'Don Quixote' and 'Gil Blas,' 'Robinson Crusoe' and the 'Pilgrim's Progress.' He had not the insight to see in these comparatively commonplace narratives the essential truth of the enduring masterpiece. He was seeking an outward and visible sign; he saw nothing unusual, abnormal, eccentric, in these books, nothing novel, nothing that cried aloud for recognition; and so he past by on the other side. These books seemed to him in nowise raised above the common; they were to be enjoyed in some measure, but they evoked no high commendation; and the contemporary critic never suspected that these unpretending volumes, unlike the most of their competitors in public favor, contained the vital spark which alone bestows enduring life. He failed wholly to guess that these books had in them the elements of the universal and the permanent—just as he was unable to perceive that the more obviously literary, rhetorical, academic works he was ready enough to commend highly, lacked these elements and therefore were doomed soon to sink into deserved oblivion.

This is precisely the attitude of many a critic of our own time. He is looking for a literary drama which shall be different in kind from the popular play; and as he fails to find this to-day—as he would have failed to find it in every period of the theater's most splendid achievement—he asserts that the literary drama is nowadays nonexistent. He does not care to inquire into the genuine qualities of the plays that happen to be able to attain "the standard of material prosperity." He is quick to perceive the attempt to be literary in the plays of Mr. Stephen Phillips, because this promising dramatic poet has so far tended rather to construct his decoration than to decorate his construction: and, therefore, the literary merit in Mr. Phillips's acted pieces seems sometimes to be somewhat external, so to speak, or at least more ostentatiously paraded. He is forced to credit 'Quality Street' with a certain literary merit, because Mr. Barrie has published novels which have an undeniable literary flavor.

Considering literary merit as something applied on the outside, too obvious to be mistaken, the critic of this type disdains to give to certain of the plays of Mr. Pinero the discussion they deserve. In the 'Benefit of the Doubt,' in the 'Second Mrs. Tanqueray,' in 'Iris,' Mr. Pinero has used all his mastery of stage-craft, not for its own sake, but as the instrument of his searching analysis of life as he sees it. All three plays bring out the eternal truth of George Eliot's saying that "Consequences are unpitying." In all three plays the inevitable and inexorable catastrophe is brought about, not by "the long arm of coincidence," but rather by the finger of fate itself. In 'Iris' more particularly we have put before us the figure of a gentle and kindly creature of compelling personal charm, but weak of will and moving thru life along the line of least resistance—a feminine counterpart of the Tito Melema etched with such appalling veracity in 'Romola.' And Mr. Pinero has the same sincerity in his portrayal of the gradual disintegration of character under the stress of recurring temptation, until the woman is driven forth at last stript of all things that she held desirable, and bare of the last shred of self-respect. The play may be unpleasant, but it is profoundly moral. It is not spoon-meat for babes, but it is poignant and vital. The picture of human character betrayed by its own weakness is so true, so transparently sincere, that the spectator, however quick he may be to discuss the theme, remains unconscious of the art by which the wonder has been wrought; he gives scarcely a thought to the logic of the construction, and to the honesty with which character is presented—literary merits both of them, if literature is in fact a criticism of life.

The shrewd remark of M. Jules Lemaître must ever be borne in mind,—that criticism of our contemporaries is not criticism, it is only conversation. Yet there is sufficient self-revelation in the fact that those who have been ready enough to praise the 'Lady of Lyons,' with its tawdry rhetoric and its shabby morality, have not seen the superiority of Mr. Pinero over Lord Lytton even as a stylist, as a master of English, tense, nervous, and flexible, adjusting itself to the thought, never protruding itself on our vision, and yet withstanding verbal criticism when we take time afterward to subject it to that test also.

Just as the Elizabethan critics thought little of Shakespeare because he failed to follow in the footsteps of the great Greeks, so some modern critics care naught for the best work of the dramatists of our own time, because this is not cast in the Shakespearean mold. The Elizabethan critics could not know the difference between the theater of Dionysius in Athens and the bare cockpit of the Globe in London; and there are their kin to-day who cannot perceive the difference between the half-roofed playhouse for which Shakespeare wrote and the electric-lighted place of amusement to which we are now accustomed. These latter-day critics do not see why the haphazard structure which was good enough for Tudor times is not good enough for us; and they have so little sense of form that they are unaware how the change in the circumstances of performance has forced a more compact presentation of the theme than was necessary in the days of "Eliza and our James."

As Mr. John Morley has pointed out, "the prodigy of such amazing results from such glorious carelessness as Shakespeare's has plunged hundreds of men of talent into a carelessness most inglorious." The history of English literature is strewed with wrecked tragedies, lofty enough in aspiration, but pitifully lacking in inspiration. The same tragedies, slovenly as they might be in structure and empty of dramatic energy, were cased in the traditional trappings; they were divided into five acts and they were bedecked with blank verse; and contemporary critics made haste to credit them with the literary merit these same critics do not even look for in 'Iris' and in the 'Second Mrs. Tanqueray,' tragedies, both of them, of a purifying pathos that Aristotle would have understood. In fact, there would be no great difficulty in showing how near Aristotle came to an explicit assertion that in the drama "literary merit" is almost a by-product—valuable, no doubt, like many another by-product, but not the chief thing to be sought.

Mr. Pinero has discust Robert Louis Stevenson as a dramatist, and his lecture contained passages which every man of letters should ponder. He showed that Stevenson had in him the true dramatic stuff, but that he refused to serve the severe apprenticeship to play-making that he gladly gave to novel-writing. Mr. Pinero made plain the further fact that Stevenson, who was ever a sedulous ape of the masters he admired, had here set himself a bad pattern to copy. This was not the loose and rambling Elizabethan model which had led Tennyson and Browning astray; it was the model of the cheap melodrama of the early years of the nineteenth century. "Stevenson with all his genius failed to realize that the art of drama is not stationary, but progressive," said Mr. Pinero. "By this I do not mean that it is always improving; what I do mean is that its conditions are always changing and that every dramatist whose ambition it is to produce live plays is absolutely bound to study carefully ... the conditions that hold good for its own age and generation."

This is what every great dramatist has done; it is what Shakespeare did and Molière also; it is what Stevenson did not care to do, because he did not understand the necessity of it. He did not borrow the formula of the most successful of the plays which chanced to be pleasing the public just then. If he had done this, he could have put into this formula all the fine writing he so much enjoyed; he might have given to his plays the utmost polish of style. Instead of trying to write dramas externally like those popular in the theater of his own time, and making them internally whatsoever he chose, he went back half a century and tried to revive a poor formula already defunct. The game was lost before the cards were dealt. He had refused to consider the conditions of the problem he was handling—"the problem of how to tell a dramatic story truly, convincingly, and effectively, on the modern stage"; as Mr. Pinero described it, "the problem of disclosing the workings of the human heart by methods which shall not destroy the illusion which a modern audience expects to enjoy in the modern theater."

Stevenson was here making the mistake which so many men of letters make when they turn to the theater. He was going upon the theory that the drama is made literary, not from within, by observation and imagination and sincerity, but from without, by the application of fine speeches. His speeches were fine, no doubt, even tho they were not in keeping with that special kind of play when it had been alive. But as it happened, that kind of play was dead and gone, and no injection of oratory would bring it to life again. And here the Scotch story-teller failed to profit by the example of the French poet whose romances he had so sympathetically studied. Hugo had also a gift for oratory and a talent for fine speeches; but when he yearned for theatrical success he went to the most popular playhouses where the plain people gathered, and he adopted as his own the formula of play-making which was proving its value in these boulevard theaters. This was not in itself much better than the formula Stevenson borrowed and did not trouble to understand—indeed, the two are not unlike. But Hugo had made his choice half a century before Stevenson; and when he made it he was taking possession of the very latest fashion.