Learning and Other Essays

by John Jay Chapman

In fine, the scholars should take the public into their confidence and dominate the business men on our college boards. This will be found more easy than at first appears, because the money element, the millionaire element, is very sensitive to public feeling, and once the millionaire succumbs, the college president will succumb also. The step beyond this would consist in the scholars’ taking charge of the college themselves, merely making use of certain business men on their boards for purposes of financial administration.

THE DRAMA.

When a subject is too complex and too subtle to admit of any adequate analysis, people dogmatize about it. They believe that they are thus recurring to first principles. But what are the principles? That is just what no one can state. The drama is one of those difficult subjects which lure the writer on and draw him out. It is a subject upon which ideas flow easily, theories form of themselves, and convictions deepen in the very act of improvisation. The writer who will trust his own inspiration can hardly fail to end by saying something very true about the drama. That is the trouble with the drama: so many things are true of it. It is scarcely less confusing than human life itself. The difficult thing is to strike some balance between all these interlocking and oscillating truths.

Consider, for example, how many and illusive are the influences that go to make up a good dramatic performance. The elements are interwoven in our consciousness, mingled and flowing together like motes in the sunbeam, rising, falling, fading, changing, glowing, and ever suffering transformation and re-birth, like the dream-things that they are. No matter what you say about a performance you can hardly be sure that you have hit upon the right explanation. Let us suppose that there has been an evening of inspiring success. Some golden lead of the imagination has sprung up and overshot one performance—paused, passed and vanished—leaving audience and actors, and even critics, to account for it as they may. You think you have a clue to the situation; but you have barely time to rejoice over your discovery, when, on the next evening, disaster follows from the same apparent causes as led to the first success. The fact is that some unseen power has been at work upon one evening and not upon the next. The weather, or the composition of the audience, or the mood of the actors has changed. The fact is that no two occasions are really alike; but they differ in so many ways that one can scarcely catalogue their divergencies.

There is no ill-considered thing that an author may write, or an actor do on the stage, no mistake or violation of common sense and good art, that may not be counterbalanced by some happiness which carries the play in spite of it. And conversely, there is no well-reasoned, profound, and true theory of play-writing or stage management which, if logically carried out, may not prove the very vehicle of damnation. The reason is that your theories are mere nets waved in the air some miles below the stars which they seem to imprison. Your true theories are true only to theory; the conditions always upset them. It is, therefore, not without some trepidation that I tread the paths of this subject. I almost fear the sound of my own voice and the conclusions of my own reason. This fear shall be my compass, this the silken thread, unwinding as I walk, which shall lead me back again out of the labyrinth and into the daylight.

The aim of any dramatic performance is to have something happen on a stage that shall hold people’s attention for two hours and a half or three hours. Anything that does this is a good drama; and there are as many kinds of good drama as there are flowers in the meadow. All of these species are closely related to each other. They are modifications that spring up from the roots of old tradition, like shoots in an asparagus bed.

The different great divisions and species of drama depend on the size and shape of the theatre used, more than on any other one thing. For the great theatre you must have slow speech, or, at any rate, a concentration of theme. For a small modern theatre you must have quicker motion and more variety. Not only the actor but the playwright must have some special size of theatre in his mind as he plans a play, and must adapt his whole art to that size, as he fashions his work. You might call this the first canon of the drama.

Now, we have, at present, no controlling conventions, no overmastering habits of thought about stage matters, and this leads us to forget the original force, not to say tyranny, of convention in other ages. England has had no controlling convention in stage matters since Charles II’s time; and the English stage has thus become a free, wild sort of place where anything is permitted. It is like the exhibition of the “Independents” in Paris, where anyone may hire space and hang what pictures he please, leaving the public to reward or punish him for his temerity.

The disadvantage of this condition of things is that the public does not know what to expect, and therefore fine things may be misunderstood. The playwright is not sufficiently supported by the crutch of tradition. He has lost his task-master; but he has lost also the key to expression. A well-developed, formal tradition is as necessary to any powerful spiritual deliverance as a system of punctuation is to writing. It was not until Haydn and Mozart had developed the form of the symphony and sonata that Beethoven’s work became possible. The same holds true of all the arts; the great artist who finds no harness ready-made for his ideas must set to work like Giotto to painfully create a makeshift of his own.