One can form an infinitude of plans on the same subject and developed around the same characters. But the characters being once settled, they can have but one manner of speaking. Your figures will have this or that to say according to the situation in which you may have placed them, but being the same human beings in all the situations, they will not, fundamentally, contradict themselves.[27]
How may we know whether our motivation is good or not? First of all, it must be clear. If an audience cannot make out why one of our characters does what he is doing, from that moment the play weakens. It is on this ground that William Archer objected to the Becket of Tennyson:
“Some gents,” says the keeper, in Punch, to the unsuccessful sportsman, “goes a-wingin’ and a-worritin’ the poor birds; but you, sir—you misses ’em clane and nate!” With the like delicate tact criticism can only compliment the poet on the “clane and nate” way in which he has missed the historical interest, the psychological problem, of his theme. What was it that converted the Becket of Toulouse into the Becket of Clarendon—the splendid warrior-diplomatist into the austere prelate? The cowl, we are told, does not make the monk; but in Lord Tennyson’s psychology it seems that it does. Of the process of thought, the development of feeling, which leads Becket, on assuming the tonsure, to break with the traditions of his career, with the friend of his heart and with his own worldly interest—of all this we have no hint. The social and political issues involved are left equally in the vague. Of the two contending forces, the Church and the Crown, which makes for good, and which for evil? With which ought we to sympathize? It might be argued that we have no right to ask this question, and that it is precisely a proof of the poet’s art that he holds the balance evenly, and does not write as a partisan. But as a matter of fact this is not so. The poet is not impartial; he is only indefinite. We are evidently intended to sympathize, and we do sympathize, with Becket, simply because we feel that he is staking his life on a principle; but what that principle precisely is, and what its bearings on history and civilization, we are left to find out for ourselves. Thus the intellectual opportunity, if I may call it so, is missed “clane and nate.”[28]
Contrast the third, fourth, and fifth acts of Michael and His Lost Angel[29] with the first and second. So admirable is the characterization of Acts I and II that a reader understands exactly what Audrie and Michael are doing and why. In the other acts, though what they are doing is clear, why the Audrie and Michael of the first two acts behaved thus is by no means clear and plausible. Indeed, plausibility and clearness go hand in hand as tests of motivation. Accounting for the deeds of any particular character is easy if the conduct rests on motives which any audience will immediately recognize as both widespread and likely to produce the situation. It is just here, however, that national taste and literary convention complicate the work of the dramatist. An American, watching a performance of Simone[30] by M. Brieux, hardly understood the loud protests which burst from the audience when the heroine, at the end of the play, sternly denounced her father’s conduct. To him, it seemed quite natural that an American girl should assume this right of individual judgment. The French audience felt that a French girl, because of her training, would not, under the circumstances, thus attack her father. M. Brieux admitted himself wrong and changed the ending. It is this fact, that conduct plausible for one nation is not always equally plausible for another, which makes it hard for an American public to understand a goodly number of the masterpieces of recent Continental dramatic literature.
What literary convention may do in twisting conduct from the normal, the pseudo-classic French drama of Corneille and Racine, and its foster child, the Heroic Drama of England, illustrate. Dryden himself points out clearly the extent to which momentary convention among the French deflected the characters in their tragedies from the normal:
The French poets ... would not, for example, have suffer’d Cleopatra and Octavia to have met; or, if they had met, there must only have passed betwixt them some cold civilities, but no eagerness of repartee, for fear of offending against the greatness of their characters, and the modesty of their sex. This objection I foresaw, and at the same time contemn’d; for I judg’d it both natural and probable that Octavia, proud of her new-gain’d conquest, would search out Cleopatra to triumph over her; and that Cleopatra, thus attack’d, was not of a spirit to shun the encounter: and ’tis not unlikely that two exasperated rivals should use such satire as I have put into their mouths; for, after all, tho’ the one were a Roman, and the other a queen, they were both women.
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Thus, their Hippolytus is so scrupulous in point of decency that he will rather expose himself to death than accuse his stepmother to his father; and my critics I am sure will commend him for it: but we of grosser apprehensions are apt to think that this excess of generosity is not practicable, but with fools and madmen. This was good manners with a vengeance; and the audience is like to be much concern’d at the misfortunes of this admirable hero; but take Hippolytus out of his poetic fit, and I suppose he would think it a wiser part to set the saddle on the right horse, and choose rather to live with the reputation of a plain-spoken, honest man, than to die with the infamy of an incestuous villain. In the meantime we may take notice that where the poet ought to have preserv’d the character as it was deliver’d to us by antiquity, when he should have given us the picture of a rough young man, of the Amazonian strain, a jolly huntsman, and both by his profession and his early rising a mortal enemy to love, he has chosen to give him the turn of gallantry, sent him to travel from Athens to Paris, taught him to make love, and transformed the Hippolytus of Euripides into Monsieur Hippolyte.[31]