Learning and Other Essays

by John Jay Chapman

Even Molière is a little harsh to the critics. He seems not to remember that critics are “seized by the entrails” by a set of psychological terms, by “the sublime,” by “beauty,” by “contrast,” by the very idea that there should be laws underlying the mysteries of æsthetic enjoyment—laws which critics proclaim. The fact is that the sincerity and enthusiasm of the critic carries all before it. It seems to the critic as if the artist were a poor fool who does not quite understand himself. Molière has had his say, but what of that? No critic was listening. The critic feels too keenly about the matter to catch the drift of Molière’s remarks. You cannot persuade Ruskin that he does not understand painting. You cannot make Aristotle believe that he stands in the position of an outsider toward tragic poetry. He smiles at the suggestion. He feels himself to be quite on the level of his subject. Before he spoke, it had not spoken. Leave the critic, then, to his thesis: and let us confess that for everyone except for the artist, that thesis has a great and stimulating value.

The words of the critical, even though they come from outside the profession, have a value in preserving and in interpreting good traditions in art. The real power, however, through which these traditions live is the teaching done inside of the profession. What the apprentice learns at the bench from the master-craftsman—this is what controls the future of art. It is through this teaching that the raw youth is turned into a craftsman. No one who has not passed through the mill can conceive the depth to which nature must be affected through training before art is gained. The artist is as much a product of art as his own works are. To execute the simplest acts of his profession he must have passed through a severe novitiate. He cannot sound a note of it till he has been refashioned, as Mrs. Browning sang, from a reed into a musical instrument.

There are certain ways of reciting verse and of speaking prose, certain ways of walking on and off the stage, which are expressive, correct, and necessary. To drop them is a sign of ignorance and decadence. They cannot be replaced by something modern that is just as good: they are a race inheritance. If you lose them you will have to re-discover them subsequently, just as, if you were to lose the science of harmony, you would have to discover it again before you could understand the music of modern times. How is it that these practices and trade secrets of the arts get preserved during periods of public indifference, when perhaps the studios might forget them? It is by the institution of Academies and Lyceums: by the endowment of galleries and theatres. The nations of Continental Europe long ago resorted to state-supported schools, galleries, and play-houses as a means of preserving tradition. On the Continent no one is allowed to forget the old forms. They are nursed and cultivated. The very nations which need training the least, because of their natural talent, and of their proximity to the old Mediterranean seats of culture, get the most of it, because of their intelligent understanding of what art consists in. Among late-comers at the table of civilization, and among young people generally, there prevails an opinion that art is the result of genius, or of natural temperament, or of race endowment. But the persons who have the endowment of race, of temperament, and of genius know that art is a question of training.

It is a sign that civilization has been spreading to find that in England and in America, men are beginning to adopt Continental ideas upon the subject of endowed theatres. The chaotic condition of the English stage has been very largely due to the fact that it has been nobody’s business to preserve the old recipes. If the public taste swings away from lyrical drama for a decade, lyrical drama goes by the board—the very models and old wig stands are thrown out of the window. In a few years, only a few old actors and playgoers will remember the lost delights that went with these trappings. A whole province of human happiness has been eaten up by the sea of oblivion—by that all-surrounding, ever-active ocean that gnaws away the outlying realms of the mind, and will eat us back to mere grunts and a sign language unless we value our inheritance of articulation. Without the support of schools of acting the present moment remains continually too important. Those whole classes of exquisite, beautiful things which go out of fashion and are thereafter all but irrecoverable, should be held before the public with as firm a hand as orchestral music has been held before it, and for the same reasons. We are always being told by theatrical people that the public taste will or will not support something. Does anybody inquire whether the American public likes Bach or Beethoven, or does anybody take advice of the press as to how the works of those masters shall be played? No. The best traditions are followed, the best performers obtained, and the effect upon the public mind is awaited with patience and with certainty. That is the way a State Theatre is run in Europe, and that is the way that a New Theatre should be run in America.

With regard to music, we have adopted the Continental ideas easily, because we had no music of our own. But with regard to the drama we have certain crude ideas of our own, rooted in the existence of a domestic drama, and these ideas impede our progress. We have, for instance, a belief that because an audience is used to an inferior thing, therefore it will continue to prefer that thing to something better and that the reformer should content himself with giving the public only a taste now and then of something fine, and should keep in touch with them in the meantime through concessions to popular taste. This would be sound reasoning in the mouth of the business manager of an ordinary theatrical venture; but in the mouth of the manager of an educational theatre, it is blasphemy. The thesis upon which all education rests is this: give the best, and it will supplant the less good.

I doubt if anyone in the country is more grateful than I am to the managers of the New Theatre. They have begun a great work. The whole country is in debt to them already. They are showing a spirit which will make their future work continually improve; and their efforts have, on the whole, been received with that lack of intelligent gratitude with which society always receives its benefactors. Nevertheless their work and their position seem to illustrate so many points in the subject, that a little incidental criticism of them is unavoidable. If I find fault with the New Theatre for not being sufficiently academic, it is only to illustrate how completely academic standards have been vanishing in America. For instance, the art of reciting Shakespeare has been all but lost, and the New Theatre proved this quite unconsciously by a plunge, upon some occasions, into a sort of household naturalism in its method of reciting romantic drama. An epoch like the present, in which the current new plays are naturalistic, will tend to recite Shakespeare in a naturalistic way. But only the abeyance of good tradition could have led to the attempt to give Shakespeare’s lines in a conversational manner. We have forgotten how effective the lines are when conventionally given, or we should resent this experiment in taking the starch out of them. Indeed upon certain other occasions the old standards of speech were last winter brought back in magnificent triumph at the New Theatre. If it was chiefly to the Englishmen and Englishwomen of the New Theatre Company that we in America owed this beautiful lesson in speech, let us none the less be grateful for the lesson and draw from it what profit we may.

There are people who believe that verse is merely a decorated sort of prose; and that in connection with the drama, verse is a foolish superfluity. The people who think this have not heard verse well recited. The delivery of metrical language in an elevated manner is the noblest tradition of the stage. It is a thing at the same time completely artificial and completely beautiful. It lifts the play into a region native to great thoughts, where lightnings strike, as in their element, and music like a natural thunder rolls across the scene. To-day the secret of this majestic convention of verse is lost to the stage. Neither in the writing of it by the poet nor in the delivery of it by the actor, nor in the reception and enjoyment of it by the audience can the thing come off happily except under rare conditions, when all are prepared for it and when the right planets are in the ascendant. We live under an eclipse; yet is not the sun extinguished. Verse will return to the drama as soon as those themes return which only verse can carry.

All these conventions and settings of which we have been speaking are but the accessories, the servants of the stage; and, like insolent lackeys, they sometimes thrust themselves vulgarly forward. The wardrobe of Louis XIV might easily make the claim that the monarchy could not be carried on without it. And yet, on the stage, it is not quite so. On the stage, no particular set of accessories is ever so important as it thinks itself. The multiplicity of the forces at work saves us from such shameful subjection to detail. We can always, at a pinch, get on without any of the accessories. Have you ever, when charades were being acted, seen some talented person enter the room, wearing an old hat and having a shawl or perhaps a window curtain drawn across his shoulders? For some brief moments of inspiration he manages to make you see Hector of Troy, or The Man that broke the Bank at Monte Carlo. You cannot tell how it was done, it was so rapid. Yet you have had a glimpse of an idea. You have been transported somehow and somewhere. Perhaps the actor cannot do it again; for amateurs strike sparks and call up spirits by accident. Nevertheless, the thing you have seen is the essence of drama. An idea has been conveyed; and all the means that conveyed it have been lost—consumed like gunpowder in the explosion. We can all remember various amateur performances and revivals of old plays, in which the accessories were of the simplest; and in which the suppression of scenery and the focusing of the audience’s whole attention upon the actors had a wonderfully stimulating effect upon the talents of the actors. The means were at a minimum; the idea, the thought was at a maximum. In this amateur spark we have the key to the real theatre.

The building, the costumes, the incidental music, the blank verse, all the accessories of a play exist for the purpose of making an atmosphere of high conductivity, in which that spark of idea may fly out from the stage, across the footlights, into the audience. During great moments or great half-hours of a play this same disappearance of the accessories takes place, and gives us the life of drama. We are always losing this life, because the accessories have independent and fluctuating values of their own which attract our attention. Costume seems to be an advantage in helping to hold the illusion, and scenery is merely an extension of costume. Either of them may attract too much attention, and how much this too much is, depends upon the sensibilities of the auditor. For example, Twelfth Night is injured in my eyes when it is given with beautiful Italian scenery, no matter how beautiful. Toby Belch is, in my mind, connected with rural England, and to see him with Vesuvius in the background shocks me. Nevertheless, the next man may find in this Italian scenery a gentle stimulus which heightens his enjoyment of the inner drama. Again, blank verse, when properly spoken, adds to a play a moving charm like an accompaniment of music; but when the lines are declaimed with either too much or too little artifice, they become a nuisance. All the means and vehicles of expression should fill the mere margin of our attention, ready to step forward when the mind’s stage is empty and to vanish on the approach of the dramatic interest.

The Greek stage came as near to the charade as the theatre has ever come since. Here was no scenery, and the costume was merely suggestive. Play of feature was out of the question, because of the mask. The appeal of the natural voice was out of the question, because of the megaphone mouth-piece. There was nothing left but gesture and intonation. What a denudation that seems to us! But are you sure that the imagination is not heightened by just such devices as this? Are you sure that Hector or Heracles are not made ten times as real by this absence of realism as they ever could have been made by naturalistic treatment?