Learning and Other Essays

by John Jay Chapman

A character comes on the Greek stage, and you perceive by his talk that he is supposed to be walking in a wood. In a few moments he arrives at an imaginary point of view. Another character walks on the stage, and you perceive that this second character is supposed to have come walking up the valley. Your whole attention is on the story, and any striking scenery would be an unpleasant intrusion, an inartistic element. Surely the Greeks were very clever at mechanical contrivances and could have had scenery if they had desired it. What they had was much better,—imagination.

It is the same with the French classic stage, whose meagreness of decoration is almost an offense to the American. The higher the intelligence of the audience, the less will scenery be valued in plays. In the case of children’s toys, we all know that a rag doll and a wooly dog speak a more eloquent language than a mechanical doll and a realistic dog that walks. But we dare not employ this philosophy in dressing our stage, because of the lack of imagination in grown people.

I have no doubt that if you had, say, thirty new plays to produce, each of them as good as Hamlet, and if your audience were to consist of the most intelligent people in the world, and if your actors were all and each as good as David Garrick, I have no doubt, I say, that the most thrilling way you could produce those plays would be on a stage without scenery and with just such suggestion of costume as should lift the characters into the world of idea. Such was the Elizabethan method; at least it was the practice which the Elizabethans stumbled upon in their riotous career.

The world of idea is what you are seeking, no matter how sure you may be that you want realism. The power of a play comes from this, that it makes people believe that the action on the stage is not merely a story, which has happened and is over—but is a thing which is going on, a truth, a spiritual, inward reality which has to do with the life and sentiments of the audience. This is what we want, what we always want, whether we are playing Lear, or Ibsen, or Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The different kinds of drama use different means of suggesting spiritual reality. Poetic images are one way, sideboards and furniture are another way. Now it must be confessed at once that realism does tend to convey spiritual truth to people who possess a low degree of reflective power. A reproduction in detail of something seen in real life—wax-works, for instance—impresses the unimaginative person more strongly than a sketch of the same thing done by Rembrandt; yet both the wax-works and the Rembrandt have the same end in view—to bring home an idea to the beholder. We may, then, measure the life in people’s fancy by the weight of suggestion which is requisite to awaken them—a feather of imagery or a cannon ball of actuality—and in this we shall not be dealing with several kinds of dramatic principle, but only with several conditions of education in the audience.

The recent realism seen on our own stage shows a deadness of wit in our life—the sad unresponsive seriousness of persons who do not habitually live in the world of imagination. That world seems flat to them. Nevertheless, the same persons will, with a little encouragement, begin to enjoy humor, and trust poetry. Put them where they have no critical responsibility and they will blossom into enjoyment. O blessed amateurs! I wish someone would write a book and show that the whole history of art has been but the history of amateurs; and that every revival of painting, drama, music, architecture, and poetry has been due to them. They cannot, perhaps, make great music themselves, but they hand the lyre to Apollo. They have not the training, but they have the passion that finds talent in others and protects the flame while it is young. They suspect the secret of a lost art and go in search of it as for the Golden Fleece. And amateurs, yes the amateurs are the persons who will keep the drama from ever quite losing all relation to its ancestor—its good genius—the charade.

The great aim of any drama is to make all the audience and all the actors think of the same thing at the same moment during the entire evening. The “argument,” as they used to call it, is the main thing. It is astonishing what a good name this is for the exposition of ideas that takes place in a very good play either ancient or modern. The argument is what both audience and actors breathlessly follow. We err only when we begin to define what the argument is. It seems, in truth, to be something too subtle for analysis. In some plays we think we find it in the plot, in others in the characters, in others in the language, and so forth. But there is hardly a definition of it which some famous example will not instantly confute. There is, for instance, a charm that comes out of As You Like It, and which for three hundred years has made audiences consent to sit through its three hours of happy trifling. That charm is the “argument” of As You Like It. You cannot state the charm. It is as subtle as the ether and as real as the power of light that moves across the ether. Our senses are not at fault, but only our theories. There is a fluctuating mystery about all that happens in the theatre, and perhaps this indefinable power is what most attaches us to the place. It is not a place of learning, nor of scholarship, nor of information or ethics, nor even of such flights of mind as accurate thought can always follow. It is a place of enchantment.

NORWAY.

In Norway people live in small houses in which the air is very bad. The people neither wash nor laugh, and common sense is unknown among them. Each man or woman is endowed with one idea, and that is sufficient for each. He is satisfied with it, and he is never seen without it. So that anyone may always very easily recognize the different characters of a Norwegian play. One knows that each idea is very significant, very logical, and very much to be noted. Thus, if a character has the idea of walking upstairs backward instead of forward, one feels perfectly satisfied about that person. He is always talking about his mania, and one knows that, in the end, some terrible and logical calamity is going to result from the perverse habit with which stepdame nature has endowed him. For all people in Norway are stepchildren of nature, and are barely endowed with sufficient complexity of intelligence to prevent them from swallowing poison, falling down wells, or walking over precipices. Indeed they do all these things, the moment the well or the poison or the precipice comes between themselves and their favorite hobby.

I saw a very nice play the other day about these people. If was about a very nice elderly man and his elderly sister, Jake Borg and Elisa Borg. Jake loved his sister, and his sister loved her cat—a Maltese cat of the largest variety. Both Jake and Elisa spent an hour or so each day in talking about the cat, and of how dangerous it was for the cat to insist upon walking on the back fence during the very hours when Jake was practising with his flint-lock at a target erected upon the fence. Jake, it appears, was a member of the village patriotic shooting society and was the president of it, and his whole heart and soul were wrapped up in it. The society used flint-locks rather than percussion caps because the time occupied by the explosion, being quite long with flint-locks, the nerves of the patriots would be the better steeled to bear the noise. Thus, during the forenoon, for several years, the devoted couple discussed the question whether or not the pet cat would be hit by the pet bullets; and it became alarmingly evident that such would be the case, unless one or the other of the afflicted persons should desist from the practice of his hobby. There were various other people who came in to help the principal characters in the play to discuss the peril. Neither party in the great conflict would budge from his principle—the one, for patriotic reasons, the other out of Christian piety and affection for dumb animals.