The Critic and the Drama

by George Jean Nathan

III. THE PLACE OF THE THEATRE

I

THE theatre stands in relation to drama much as the art gallery stands in relation to painting. Its aim is to set off drama in such surroundings and in such light as to bring it within the comfortable vision and agreeable scrutiny of the nomad public. To say that fine drama may produce an equal effect read as acted may be true or not as you choose, but so too a fine painting may produce an equal effect beheld in one’s library as in the Uffizi. Art thrives—art leads to art—on sympathy and a measure of general understanding. Otherwise, of what use criticism? To divorce the theatre from a consideration of drama as an art, to contend, as it has been contended from Aristotle’s day to Corneille’s, and from Dryden’s and Lamb’s to our own, that “the more lasting and noble design” of drama rests in a reading rather than a seeing, may be, strictly, a logical æsthetic manœuvre, but equally a logical æsthetic manœuvre would be a divorcement of canvas from painting as an art. The theatre is the canvas of drama. The printed drama is like a bubbling and sunlit spring, encountered only by wanderers into the hills and awaiting the bottling process of the theatre to carry its tonic waters far and wide among an expectant and emotionally ill people.

The criticism that nominates itself to hold drama and the theatre as things apart is a criticism which, for all its probable integrity and reason, suffers from an excessive aristocracy, like a duchess in a play by Mr. Sydney Grundy. Its æsthetic nose is elevated to such a degree that it may no longer serve as a practical organ of earthly smell, but merely as a quasi-wax feature to round out the symmetry of the face. It is criticism in a stiff corset, erect, immobile, lordly—like the Prussian lieutenant of yesterday, a striking figure, yet just a little absurd. It is sound, but like many things that are sound in æsthetics, it has its weak points, even its confounding points. For they say that propaganda can have no place in art, and along comes a Hauptmann and writes a “Weavers.” Or they say that art is form, and along comes a Richard Strauss and composes two songs for baritone and orchestra that set the critics to a mad chasing of their own tails. Or, opposing criticism as an art, they say that “criticism is art in form, but its content is judgment, which takes it out of the intuitional world into the conceptual world”—and along comes an H. G. Wells with his “The New Machiavelli” which, like criticism, is art in form and its content judgment. To hold that the drama as an art may achieve its highest end read by the individual and not acted in the theatre, is to hold that music as an art may achieve its highest end played by but one instrument and not by an orchestra. The theatre is the drama’s orchestra: upon the wood of its boards and the wind of its puppets is the melody of drama in all its full richness sounded. What if drama is art and the theatre not art? What if “Hamlet” is art and electric lights and cheese-cloth are not art? Schubert’s piano trio, op. 99, is art, and a pianoforte is a mere wooden box containing a number of little hammers that hit an equal number of steel and copper wires. What if I can read a full imagination into “Romeo and Juliet” and thus people it and make it live for me, without going to the theatre? So, too, can I read a full melody into the manuscript of a song by Hugo Wolf and thus make it sing for me, without going to a concert hall. But why? Is there only one way to appreciate and enjoy art—and since when? Wagner on a single violin is Wagner; Wagner on all the orchestra is super-Wagner. To read a great drama is to play “Parsifal” on a cornet and an oboe.

The object of the theatre is not, as is habitually maintained, a shrewd excitation of the imagination of a crowd, but rather a shrewd relaxation of that imagination. It is a faulty axiom that holds the greatest actor in the theatre to be an audience’s imagination, and the adroit cultivation of the latter to be ever productive of large financial return. As I have on more than one occasion pointed out from available and acutely relevant statistics, the more a dramatist relies upon the imagination, of an audience, the less the box-office reward that is his. An audience fills a theatre auditorium not so eager to perform with its imagination as to have its imagination performed upon. This is not the paradox it may superficially seem to be. The difference is the difference between a prompt commercial failure like Molnar’s “Der Gardeofficier” (“Where Ignorance Is Bliss”) which asks an audience to perform with its imagination and a great commercial success like Barrie’s “Peter Pan” which performs upon the audience’s imagination by supplying to it every detail of imagination, ready-made and persuasively labelled. The theatre is not a place to which one goes in search of the unexplored corners of one’s imagination; it is a place to which one goes in repeated search of the familiar corners of one’s imagination. The moment the dramatist works in the direction of unfamiliar corners, he is lost. This, contradictorily enough, is granted by the very critics who hold to the imagination fallacy which I have just described. They unanimously agree that a dramatist’s most successful cultivation of an audience lies in what they term, and nicely, the mood of recognition, and in the same breath paradoxically contend that sudden imaginative shock is a desideratum no less.

In this pleasant remission of the active imagination lies one of the secrets of the charm of the theatre. Nor is the theatre alone in this. On even the higher plane of the authentic arts a measure of the same phenomenon assists in what may perhaps not too far-fetchedly be termed the negative stimulation of the spectator’s fancy. For all the pretty and winning words to the contrary, no person capable of sound introspection will admit that a beautiful painting like Giorgione’s “The Concert” or a beautiful piece of sculpture like Pisano’s Perugian fountain actually and literally stirs his imagination, and sets it a-sail across hitherto uncharted æsthetic seas. What such a painting or piece of sculpture does is to reach out and, with its overpowering beauty, encompass and æsthetically fence in the antecedent wandering and uncertain imagination of its spectator. As in the instance of drama, it does not so much awaken a dormant imagination as soothe an imagination already awake. Of all the arts, music alone remains a telegrapher of unborn dreams.

The theatre brings to the art of drama concrete movement, concrete colour, and concrete final effectiveness: this, in all save a few minor particulars. The art of drama suffers, true enough, when the theatre, even at its finest, is challenged by it to produce the values intrinsic in its ghost of a dead king, or in its battle on Bosworth Field, or in its ship torn by the tempest, or in its fairy wood on midsummer night, or in its approaching tread of doom of the gods of the mountain. But for each such defeat it prospers doubly in the gifts that the theatre brings to it. Such gifts as the leader Craig has brought to the furtherance of the beauty of “Electra” and “Hamlet,” as Reinhardt and his aides have brought to “Ariadne” and “Julius Cæsar,” as Golovine and Appia and Bakst and Linnebach and half a dozen others have brought to the classics that have called to them, are not small ones. They have crystallized the glory of drama, have taken so many loose jewels and given them substantial and appropriate settings which have fittingly posed their radiance. To say that the reading imagination of the average cultured man is superior in power of suggestion and depiction to the imagination of the theatre is idiotically to say that the reading imagination of every average cultured man is superior in these powers to the combined theatrical imaginations of Gordon Craig, Max Reinhardt and Eleanora Duse operating jointly upon the same play. Even a commonplace imagination can successfully conjure up a landscape more beautiful than any painted by Poussin or Gainsborough, or jewels more opalescent than any painted by Rembrandt, or a woman’s dress more luminous than any painted by Fortuny, or nymphs more beguiling than any of Rubens’, yet who so foolish to say—as they are wont foolishly to say of reading imagination and the drama—that such an imagination is therefore superior to that of the artists? This, in essence, is none the less the serious contention of those who decline to reconcile themselves to the theatrically produced drama. This contention, reduced to its skeleton, is that, since the vice-president of the Corn Exchange Bank can picture the chamber in the outbuilding adjoining Gloster’s castle more greatly to his satisfaction than Adolphe Appia can picture it for him on the stage, the mental performance of the former is therefore a finer artistic achievement than the stage performance of the latter.

II

The word imagination leads critics to queer antics. It is, perhaps, the most manhandled word in our critical vocabulary. It is used almost invariably in its literal meaning: no shades and shadows are vouchsafed to it. Imagination, in good truth, is not the basis of art, but an overtone. Many an inferior artist has a greater imagination than many a superior artist. Maeterlinck’s imagination is much richer than Hauptmann’s, Erik Satie’s is much richer than César Franck’s, and I am not at all certain that Romain Rolland’s is not twice as opulent as Thomas Hardy’s. Imagination is the slave of the true artist, the master of the weak. The true artist beats imagination with the cat-o’-nine-tails of his individual technic until it cries out in pain, and this pain is the work of art which is born. The inferior craftsman comfortably confounds imagination with the finished work, and so pets and coddles it; and imagination’s resultant mincings and giggles he then vaingloriously sets forth as resolute art.