And then is heard no more.
It is not mere chance, nor is it a histrionic whim on the part of the poet, that Faust abandons Gretchen and seeks and finds Helena. On this account the sensual impulses of the stage characters are the paths of error which lead up to the intellect. The great stage personages are never men of mere impulse. Thoas is not a barbarian of the senses; Tell is not a rude, crude fellow just as nature made him; Romeo is not a mere sensual seducer but a psychic visionary.
The legitimate stage strives after great, free thoughts; and characters such as Faust represent the very strongest expression of its arts.
In this excess of excelsior, however, in this defection from the wishes of this earth, lies a real danger to which not merely the poetising dilettant is apt to succumb; indeed the very greatest of German poets have at times failed to escape its intriguing peculiarity. It is the danger of the too-high, of arctic clarity, of the exclusively intellectual. The soul glows through real art like a vestal fire, pure, mild, serene. Let the flight be too hardy and too upward, and the fire goes out, art ceases, and shrewd, shivering theatrical dialectics set in.
In the case of the motion picture, the opposite takes place. The word withdraws, becomes unessential, often directly adverse to art and the canons of art. Then it is that mimicry steps out and up and becomes the bearer of the action.
If humanity had been born deaf and dumb, it would long since have perfected its mimic apparatus so completely that it would be the tool and symbol of thought. What can the gesture mean to us? Feeling that is so familiar to us that it awakens sympathy on the slightest provocation. Only that which is from the very beginning impulse within us is sensuality. Mimicry is the symbol of sensual values. The sign, the prognostic, the distinctive mark of mimic action is the sensual style. And since this art signifies the expression of the soul, the motion picture is the sensual soul. It is feeling expressed through gesture.
Consequently, an impulse that is not in everybody is not felt by everybody. This explains the failure of quite a few works. The homosexual film, for example, Anders als die Andern (“Different From Other People”) was a source of disordered loathing to those “other people.” How can we expect a healthy individual to feel the excitement of an insane person, as in Dr. Caligari, or of a pathological vampire, as in The Vampyre? And how can we expect a human being with a strong constitution to sympathize with the demented antics of a nervous wreck and feel his feelings after him, as in Nerven (“Nerves”)?
Fig. 15. Scene from Anne Boleyn.
[See p. [88]]