Learning and Other Essays

by John Jay Chapman

If we have to-day no great tyrant of contemporary convention in any of the arts, we have a hundred fashions. The age is eclectic; the conventional side of art is at a discount. Now in the drama, the conventional side of art is of peculiar importance. The more you surprise an audience, the less you will please it. The thing that entertains and relaxes people is to have something unmistakable and easy unrolled before them; something in which the problems are plainly stated and solved beyond the possibility of a doubt. The good man and bad man must be labeled; and so must the different sorts of plays receive labels—as, Comedy, Tragedy, Farce, Problem-play, Tank-drama, etc.; otherwise a great part of the attention of the audience will be exhausted in finding the right humor. The modern playwright has thus a problem that is new to the stage, the problem of giving the grand cue to the audience as to which kind of play is coming.

After all, the condition of the contemporary stage is very much like the condition of contemporary painting. Any good historical gallery contains samples from the whole history of art. There are as well-defined classes of pictures as there are of dramas: e. g., the religious picture, the genre picture, the portrait, the landscape, etc.; and within each of these classes there exists a world of half-defined traditions in which educated persons are learned, and by which all artists are somewhat controlled. Now each of these classes was originally the product of an age devoted to it. But to-day the artist is eclectic. He is eclectic in spite of himself because he is not forced by universal expectation to do a particular thing: he must choose. Whether he be painter or dramatist, the artist in Western Europe to-day is born into an epoch of miscellaneous experiment. Let him choose. The spread of international education has brought about this state of things: art is becoming an international commodity.

Let us return to the drama, and seize upon some convenient model of a conventional play—for instance, the old-fashioned melodrama. What a relief it is to find in the opening act of a play that we are upon familiar ground, that we know very well what is coming and can enjoy the elaboration of it. We must have a taste for the whole species or we can never either like or understand the particular example. And so also in judging of any drama of another age we must positively bring the whole of the epoch to bear upon it or we are lost. The Elizabethans before Shakespeare’s time had developed a drama of horrors, or running-mad play, in which the audience knew from the outset that someone was to be dogged and tortured and dragged through a living Inferno before being thrown on the dung-hill. The audience expected to be moved to awe and to a certain sort of solemn horror by the tragedy. The play was to be in blank verse, a narrative play full of incident—with a host of characters and many changes of imaginary scene. The story was to be new to the audience and as exciting as possible. Very often it had, to our modern thinking, no plot; but was a helter-skelter of delirious cruelty, accompanied by torrents of passionately excited words which sometimes broke into great poetry and more often soared in a cloudland of divine bombast. The people loved this language. They reveled in the rhetoric of the dialogue, and wallowed in the boldness of the action. The first line, or even the very name of a horror-play in Elizabeth’s time, was enough to throw the audience into the proper mood. How mistaken is it for one of us to-day to read any old play without conjuring up something of its epoch.

Now let us remember the Greeks, since we cannot escape them. The cultivated, conventional, logical, and over-civilized Greek wished his tragedy to be elegant and in a just measure solemn, not to say awe-inspiring. He expected this, much as we expect coffee after dinner when we dine out. It was to be done through the means of one of the old Greek myths, a thing half history, half fable in its complexion.

In the days of Æschylus the Athenian audience was made up of God-fearing, conservative people who could be moved to awe by the contemplation of religious ideas, and by pictures of lofty moral sufferings. But as time went on, the people became bored by the old Greek religion, and it required more highly colored pictures to satisfy them. In the days of Sophocles there is a certain amount of religious feeling left in the people, though one feels that Sophocles is making use of it for artistic purposes. In Euripides’ day, however, everything has been used up in the way of big moral ideas, and the emphasis is laid on the suffering. Mental agony is manipulated by a skilled hand. The taste is refined, the logic is perfect, the art is wonderful; but the dramas of Euripides were felt in his own day and thereafter to be a little corrupt. People blame Euripides instead of blaming the insensibility of the Athenian theatre-goer who required this sort of enginery to make him weep delicious tears. The thing to be noted in both of these instances—from the English and the Greek stage—is the part played by the audience. It is only through a tacit consent on all hands that a certain game shall be played, that very highly-finished, complex and perfect works of art are produced. There is so much to be conveyed by a drama that unless the audience will agree to take nine-tenths of it for granted, the project is hopeless. The conventions! These are the precious symbols which have been developed by centuries of toil. They possess such telling value that by their aid even mediocrity can do good things, and genius, miracles. How shall we preserve them?

The world of drama appears to-day to be at sea, by reason of the loss of the great compass of a controlling dramatic tradition, yet this is not quite true; because other influences—vague perhaps, yet very authoritative—supply, in some degree, the place of the older tyrant, custom. The controlling force of living dramatic practice has died away in the world, and has become dissipated into a thousand traditions. But in dying, it has left two influences as its heirs—namely, the influence of criticism, and the influence of academic training. These two watch-dogs of the drama tend to keep at least some record of the past. They organize and classify the new varieties of drama which are constantly springing up. For it appears that a new kind of drama is not so very difficult a thing for a community to develop. The oratorio, for example, and modern opera in all its forms, are even more artificial than the Greek drama, and require an even greater conventional sympathy on the part of the audience. Yet they have grown up naturally among us and are true children of stage life. In quite recent years Wagner, Ibsen, and Mæterlinck has each developed a personal theatre of his own. Each has drawn to himself a sort of international public, held together by ties of education, by taste and by the spirit of the age—such a public as a novelist might collect, but which one would never have predicted for a playwright. This could only have happened in an age when there existed a large reading public made up of persons who were scattered throughout all the nations. For it must be noted that the reading of plays is as good as a chorus. It warns the people of what is to come. Not only the reading of plays but the reading of pamphlets and of essays is necessary in order that people may be primed to accept any new departure in the drama. The undeniable genius of Gluck was not able to establish his lyrical drama without the aid of many writers, talkers, and promoters. It required a war of pamphlets and the influence of royalty to make the new opera acceptable. Ibsen and Wagner have been accompanied by a wagonload of pamphlets and broadsides, as if they were the forerunners of a new circus. Bernard Shaw went with every play he gave as an advertising agent, a gladiator and shouting billman that would get the attention of the public at any price. It was quieter inside the theatre than outside of it, so people took refuge within.

Let no one think that criticism is an unnecessary part of the modern drama. Criticism to-day is but the articulate utterance of those conventions, those assumptions, and prejudices which must accompany and support any drama in the mind of the audience, and which in simpler ages hardly needed statement, because they were established. They stood in the public consciousness much as the walls of the theatre stood in the market-place, while the plays proceeded within them.

There has always been criticism. Aristotle did not begin it, but he is the starting-point of that great river of Thought-about-Art which has accompanied the developments of the arts since Greek times. The history of criticism is tremendous in volume, in brilliancy, and in seriousness; and it has a great utility and mission toward the world at large. If anyone have a curiosity to know what this literature is, let him glance through Saintsbury’s History of Criticism in three great tomes of many hundred pages each, in which the great names and the great theories in criticism are reviewed. This is a part of the literary history, of the bookish history of the world. From Plato to Lessing, from Longinus to Santayana there have been acute-minded individuals who loved the fine arts, poetry, sculpture, music, the drama, etc., and who busied themselves with speculation upon them. These men would pluck out the heart of the mystery, they would touch our quick with their needle, they would satisfy our intellect with their explanations. And here arises one of the subtlest difficulties in all psychology; the difficulty of explaining clearly how men of the greatest intellect may be subject to the grossest self-delusion. The reasonings of these critics about art are valid as reasonings of critics about art, so long as they are kept in the arena of the reasoning of critics about art. But if you try to translate those reasonings back again into the substance of art itself—if, for instance, you bid the artist follow the admonition of the critic, you will find that the artist cannot do this without making a retranslation of the critic’s ideas into terms which now become incomprehensible to the critic. In order to take the critic’s advice—to produce the effects which the critic calls for—the artist must do with his material things which the critic has not mentioned and does not conceive of.

The critic, after all, is a parasite. He lives by illustrating the brains of the artist. He is an illuminator. He has produced a wonderful literature—a literature of embroidery—and this literature is very valuable to the world at large; but has, as it were, no mission as toward the artist. The reason is that the artist gets his experience of art by working directly and immediately in the art; and the problems he works on can neither be stated nor solved except in the terms of his art. The critic, meanwhile, believes that he himself has stated and solved those problems; but what he says is folly to the ears of the artist. The misunderstanding must continue forever, and neither of the parties is to blame for it. Listen to the most good-natured of artists, Molière, speaking with the authority of unbounded success, upon the subject that drives lesser men to helpless rage:—

“Vous êtes de plaisantes gens avec vos règles, dont vous embarrassez les ignorants et nous étourdissez tous les jours. Il semble, à vous ouïr parler, que ces règles de l’art soient les plus grands mystères du monde, et cependant ce ne sont que quelques observations aisées que le bon sens a faites sur ce qui peut ôter le plaisir que l’on prend à ces sortes de poèmes; et le même bon sens, qui a fait autrefois ces observations, les fait aisément tous les jours sans le secours d’Horace et d’Aristote. Je voudrais bien savoir si la grande règle de toutes les règles n’est pas de plaire, et si une pièce de théatre qui a attrapé son but n’a pa suivi un bon chemin. Laissons-nous aller de bonne foi aux choses qui nous prennent par les entrailles, et ne cherchons point de raisonnement pour nous empêcher d’avoir du plaisir.”...