Florentia. The public has taste, then, if it recognizes and delights in a fine picture.
Dorriforth. I never said it hadn’t, so far as that goes. The public likes to be amused, and small blame to it. It isn’t very particular about the means, but it has rather a preference for amusements that I believes to be “improving,” other things being equal. I don’t think it’s either very intelligent or at all opinionated, the dear old public it takes humbly enough what is given it and it doesn’t cry for the moon. It has an idea that fine scenery is an appeal to its nobler part, and that it shows a nice critical sense in preferring it to poor. That’s a real intellectual flight, for the public.
Auberon. Very well, its preference is right, and why isn’t that a perfectly legitimate state of things?
Dorriforth. Why isn’t it? It distinctly is! Good scenery and poor acting are better than poor scenery with the same sauce. Only it becomes then another matter: we are no longer talking about the drama.
Auberon. Very likely that’s the future of the drama, in London—an immense elaboration of the picture.
Dorriforth. My dear fellow, you take the words out of my mouth. An immense elaboration of the picture and an immense sacrifice of everything else: it would take very little more to persuade me that that will be the only formula for our children. It’s all right, when once we have buried our dead. I have no doubt that the scenic part of the art, remarkable as some of its achievements already appear to us, is only in its infancy, and that we are destined to see wonders done that we now but faintly conceive. The probable extension of the mechanical arts is infinite. “Built in,” forsooth! We shall see castles and cities and mountains and rivers built in. Everything points that way; especially the constitution of the contemporary multitude. It is huge and good-natured and common. It likes big, unmistakable, knock-down effects; it likes to get its money back in palpable, computable change. It’s in a tremendous hurry, squeezed together, with a sort of generalized gape, and the last thing it expects of you is that you will spin things fine. You can’t portray a character, alas, or even, vividly, any sort of human figure, unless, in some degree, you do that. Therefore the theatre, inevitably accommodating itself, will be at last a landscape without figures. I mean, of course, without figures that count. There will be little illustrations of costume stuck about—dressed manikins; but they’ll have nothing to say: they won’t even go through the form of speech.
Amicia. What a hideous prospect!
Dorriforth. Not necessarily, for we shall have grown used to it: we shall, as I say, have buried our dead. To-day it’s cruel, because our old ideals are only dying, they are in extremis, they are virtually defunct, but they are above-ground—we trip and stumble on them. We shall eventually lay them tidily away. This is a bad moment, because it’s a moment of transition, and we still miss the old superstition, the bravery of execution, the eloquence of the lips, the interpretation of character. We miss these things, of course, in proportion as the ostensible occasion for them is great; we miss them particularly, for instance, when the curtain rises on Shakespeare. Then we are conscious of a certain divine dissatisfaction, of a yearning for that which isn’t. But we shall have got over this discomfort on the day when we have accepted the ostensible occasion as merely and frankly ostensible, and the real one as having nothing to do with it.
Florentia. I don’t follow you. As I’m one of the squeezed, gaping public, I must be dense and vulgar. You do, by-the-way, immense injustice to that body. They do care for character—care much for it. Aren’t they perpetually talking about the actor’s conception of it?
Dorriforth. Dear lady, what better proof can there be of their ineptitude, and that painted canvas and real water are the only things they understand? The vanity of wasting time over that!