In general, every kind of literature can be adequately rendered aloud. The true spirit of those poems that have been considered unadapted to such rendering can possibly be shown by the voice if we find the real situation, and do not try to give the words the directness of an oration or a lesson, or the objectivity of a play.
When a story or a poem can be made more natural and more effective by being conceived as spoken by a character of a definite type to a definite type of hearer, it should usually be regarded as a monologue. Readers who picture not only the peculiar character speaking, but the person to whom he speaks, will receive and give a more adequate impression, one more dramatic, more simple, and far more expressive of character than those who confuse it with a lyric or a story.
Dramatic art, in fact all art, is indirect, except in some forms of speaking. The true orator or speaker, however, while having a direct purpose, never directly commands or dominates his audience. Every true artist, painter, musician, or even orator, simply awakens the faculties and powers of others, and leads men to decide for themselves. The true speaker should appeal to imagination and reason, and not attempt to force men to accept his ideals and convictions. That would be domination, not oratory. True art is on the rational basis of kinship of nature. Faculty awakens faculty, vision quickens vision.
No hard and fast line can be drawn between the arts, even between the oration and the monologue. But the oration is more direct, more conscious; speaker and listener understand, as a rule, exactly the purpose and the intention. The monologue, on the contrary, is indirect. Its interpreter endeavors faithfully to portray human nature. He reveals the impressions produced upon him instead of endeavoring directly to produce a specific impression upon an audience.
The conception of the listener in the monologue is different from that of the listener in the oration. In every monologue, the interpreter shows the contact of a speaker with a listener and conveys a definite impression made upon him by each. He especially conveys, not only his identification with the character speaking, but that character’s mental or conversational attitude towards another human being and the unconscious variation of mental action resulting from such a relationship.
IV. PLACE OR SITUATION
Whether or not we agree with the ancient rules of the unities regarding place, time, and action as laws of the drama, every one must recognize the fact that all three conceptions are in some sense necessary to an illusion. A dramatic action or position implies not only character, but specific location and circumstance. The situation helps to reveal the character and shows its relation to human life.
Therefore, dramatic effect implies more than contact of different characters. It is concerned with such a placing of the characters as will reveal something of motives.
Two men may meet continually in society or in the ordinary and conventional relations of business and the peculiar characteristics of neither may ever be revealed. Steel and flint may lie passively side by side or may be frozen in the same ice without any suggestion of heat. The steel must strike the flint suddenly to bring forth a spark of fire. In the same way, character must collide with character in such a situation, such a conflict of interests, such opposite determinations or ambitions, as will cause a revelation of motives and dispositions. Steel and flint illustrate character. The stroke is the situation, the spark the dramatic result. Place, accordingly, is often of great importance in dramatic art.