The theatre offers to supplement, embroider and enrich the imagination of the reader of drama with the imaginations of the actor, the scene designer, the musician, the costumer and the producing director. Each of these, before he sets himself to his concrete task, has—like the lay reader—sought the fruits of his own reading imagination. The fruits of these five reading imaginations are then assembled, carefully assorted, and the most worthy of them deftly burbanked. The final staging of the drama is merely a staging of these best fruits of the various reading imaginations. To say, against this, that it is most often impossible to render a reading imagination into satisfactory concrete forms is doubtless to say what is, strictly, true. But art itself is at its highest merely an approach toward limitless imagination and beauty. Æsthetics is a pilgrim on the road to a Mecca that is ever just over the sky-line. Of how many great works of art can one say, with complete and final conviction, that art in this particular direction can conceivably go no farther? Is it not conceivable that some super-Michelangelo will some day fashion an even more perfect “Slave,” and some super-Shakespeare an even more beautiful poetic drama?
The detractors of the theatre are often expert in persuasive half-truths and masters of dialectic sleight-of-hand. Their performances are often so adroit that the spectator is quick to believe that the trunk is really empty, yet the false bottom is there for all its cunning concealment. Take, for example, George Moore, in the preface to his last play, “The Coming of Gabrielle.” “The illusion created by externals, scenes, costumes, lighting and short sentences is in itself illusory,” he professes to believe, though why he numbers the dramatist’s short sentences among the externals of the stage is not quite clear. “The best performances of plays and operas are witnessed at rehearsals. Jean de Reszke was never so like Tristan at night as he was in the afternoon when he sang the part in a short jacket, a bowler hat and an umbrella in his hand. The chain armour and the plumes that he wore at night were but a distraction, setting our thoughts on periods, on the short swords in use in the ninth century in Ireland or in Cornwall, on the comfort or the discomfort of the ships in which the lovers were voyaging, on the absurd night-dress which is the convention that Isolde should appear in, a garment she never wore and which we know to be make-believe. But the hat and feathers that Isolde appears in when she rehearses the part are forgotten the moment she sings; and if I had to choose to see Forbes-Robertson play Hamlet or rehearse Hamlet, I should not hesitate for a moment. The moment he speaks he ceases to be a modern man, but in black hose the illusion ceases, for we forget the Prince of Denmark and remember the mummer.” Years ago, in a volume of critical essays given the title “Another Book on the Theatre,” I took a boyish delight in setting off precisely the same noisy firework just to hear the folks in the piazza rocking-chairs let out a yell. These half-truths serve criticism as sauce serves asparagus: they give tang to what is otherwise often tasteless food. This is particularly true with criticism at its most geometrical and profound, since such criticism, save in rare instances, is not especially lively reading. But, nevertheless, the sauce is not the asparagus. And when Mr. Moore (doubtless with his tongue in his cheek) observes that he can much more readily imagine the lusty Frau Tillie Pfirsich-Melba as Isolde in a pink and green ostrich feather hat confected in some Friedrichstrasse atelier than in the customary stage trappings, he allows, by implication, that he might even more readily imagine the elephantine lady as the seductive Carmen if she had no clothes on at all.
This is the trouble with paradoxes. It is not that they prove too little, as is believed of them, but that they prove altogether too much. If the illusion created by stage externals is in itself illusory, as Mr. Moore says, the complete deletion of all such stage externals should be the best means for providing absolute illusion. Yet the complete absence of illusion where this is the case is all too familiar to any of us who have looked on such spectacles as “The Bath of Phryne” and the like in the theatres of Paris. A prodigality of stage externals does not contribute to disillusion, but to illusion. These externals have become, through protracted usage, so familiar that they are, so to speak, scarcely seen: they are taken by the eye for granted. By way of proof, one need only consider two types of Shakespearian production, one like that of Mr. Robert Mantell and one like that lately employed for “Macbeth” by Mr. Arthur Hopkins. Where the overladen stereotyped first production paradoxically fades out of the picture for the spectator and leaves the path of illusion clear for him, the superlatively simple second production, almost wholly bereft of familiar externals, arrests and fixes his attention and makes illusion impossible. It is true, of course, that all this may be changed in time, when the deletion of externals by the new stagecraft shall have become a convention of the theatre as the heavy laying-on of externals is a convention at present. But, as things are today, these externals are, negatively, the most positive contributors to illusion.
It is the misfortune of the theatre that critics have almost always approached it, and entered it, with a defiant and challenging air. I have, during the eighteen years of my active critical service, met with and come to know at least fifty professional critics in America, in England and on the Continent, and among all this number there have been but four who have approached the theatre enthusiastically prejudiced in its favour—two of them asses. But between the one large group that has been critically hostile and the other smaller group that has been uncritically effervescent, I have encountered no sign of calm and reasoned compromise, no sign of frank and intelligent willingness to regard each and every theatre as a unit, and so to be appraised, instead of lumping together good and bad theatres alike and labelling the heterogeneous mass “the theatre.” There is no such thing as “the theatre.” There is this theatre, that theatre, and still that other theatre. Each is a unit. To talk of “the theatre” is to talk of the Greek theatre, the Elizabethan theatre and the modern theatre in one breath, or to speak simultaneously of the Grosses Schauspielhaus of Max Reinhardt and the Eltinge Theatre of Mr. A. H. Woods. “The theatre,” of course, has certain more or less minor constant and enduring conventions—at least, so it seems as far as we now can tell—but so, too, has chirography, yet we do not speak of “the chirography.” There are some theatres—I use the word in its proper restricted sense—that glorify drama and enhance its beauty; there are others that vitiate drama. But so also are there some men who write fine drama, and others who debase drama to mere fodder for witlings.... The Shakespeare of the theatre of Gordon Craig is vivid and brilliant beauty. Call it art or not art as you will—what does a label matter? The Molière of the theatre of Alexander Golovine is suggestive and exquisite enchantment. Call it art or not art as you will—what does a label matter? The Wagner of the opera house of Ludwig Sievert is triumphant and rapturous splendour. Call it anything you like—and again, what does a label matter? There are too many labels in the world.
IV. THE PLACE OF ACTING