The other problem is a psychological and a physical problem, the problem of life-principles in art. In the beginning the theater was masculine. Its essence was a thrust. The phallus was borne in the processional ritual at the opening of the Theater of Dionysus each spring; and its presence was significant. The greatest and the healthiest of the theaters have always plunged their actors into the midst of the audience. It is only decadence, whether Roman or Victorian, that has withdrawn the actor into a sheath, a cave, a mouth, and has tried to drag the spirit of the spectator in with him. The peep show is essentially evil. I will not say it is feminine, but I will say that the art of the theater is a masculine art, that it is assertive and not receptive. Its business is to imbue the audience. It is not too difficult to see in the proscenium arch the reason for the barrenness of the realistic theater. Directors and artists who have felt this have tried to find a playhouse that lies nearer to the masculine vigor of Æschylus and Shakespeare. I think they can find it in the Cirque Medrano.
CHAPTER XVII
THE OLD SPIRIT—THE NEW THEATER
It is hard to escape the belief that this ferment in the theater means something. Something for life and from life; something for art and from art. Something immensely important to the sense of godhead in man which is life and art together, life and art fecundating one another.
It seems peculiarly clear that the new forces in the theater have been working towards a spiritual change far more novel, far more interesting, and naturally far more important than any of the technical changes which they have brought about.
The technical changes have been confusing. First this business of scenic designers and revolving stages and all manner of show and mechanism; and now the “naked stage,” abdication of the artist, scrapping of the machines, the actor alone, on a podium or in a circus ring. All in the name of drama.
There is only one explanation. These changes have come as part of an attempt to restore the theater to its old functions. They are two very extraordinary functions. One may be debauched into titillation, or may rise to that fulness of vitality, that excitation, upon which the second function of the theater is based, the function of exaltation.
Between the older theater, in which these functions worked as potently as they worked seldom, and the theater in which they may work again, lay the theater of Realism. It was a product of a tremendous force, a force for evil as well as good—the force of nineteenth century science. Science made the theater realistic and Realism made the drama scientific. It ceased to be a show. It became a photograph. The drama was made “truer,” but only in the sense that a photograph may be truer to fact than a drawing by Picasso. It achieved resemblance to life. And then it ceased to have excitement or exaltation, because excitement, in the vivid sense in which I use it here, is most uncommon in modern life, and because exaltation is a rare and hidden thing showing seldom in outward relations. Both are too exceptional for Realism.
The restoration of excitement to the theater may appear to degrade it from the exact and austere report of life which Realism demands. But the thrill of movement and event is the element in the theater which lifts our spirits to the point where exaltation is possible. The power of the theater lies in just this ability to raise us to ecstasy through the love of vitality which is the commonest sign of divinity in life. And when the theater gives us ecstasy, what becomes of science? And who cares?
The new forces in the theater have struggled more or less blindly toward this end. They have tried beauty, richness, novelty, to win back excitement. They have only just begun to see that the liveliest excitation in the playhouse may come from the art of the actor and the art of the régisseur when they are stripped to the task of providing exaltation. Present the actor as an actor, and the background as an honest, material background, and you are ready for what glories the playwright and the peculiar genius of the theater can provide. The drama is free again for its eternal task—the showing of the soul of life.
Just how much this may mean is perhaps the test of your belief in the theater. It is the conviction of some of us that there has resided in the theater—and our hope that there may reside once more—something akin to the religious spirit. A definition of this spirit is difficult. It is certainly not religion. It goes behind religion. It is the exaltation of which formal creeds are a product. It is the vitality which informs life, and begets art. Out of the intensity of spiritual feeling which rises from the eternal processes of the universe and in turn becomes conscious of them, the thing is born which made Greek tragedy noble and which called drama back to life in the Middle Ages. Then it was the spirit of religion. To-day we might call it the spirit of life.