Part 4 (2/2)

II. Remorse visits them both.

III. What will be the effect upon the pair?

Reflection upon this schematic summary will show that the interest of Shakespeare's great drama is not primarily a story interest; plot is not the chief thing, but character. The essential crux lies in the painful spectacle of the moral degeneration of husband and wife, sin working upon each according to their contrasted natures. Both have too much of the n.o.bler elements in them not to experience regret and the p.r.i.c.k of conscience. This makes the drama called _Macbeth_ a fine example of psychologic tragedy in the true sense.

Or take a well-known modern play, _Camille:_

I. A young man loves and lives with a member of the demi-monde.

II. His father pleads with her to give him up, for his own sake.

III. What will she do?

It will be observed that the way the lady of the camellias answers the question is the revelation of her character; so that the play again, although its story interest is sufficient, is primarily a character study, surrounded by Dumas fils with a rich atmosphere of understanding sympathy and with sentiment that to a later taste becomes sentimentality.

_The School for Scandal_ might be stated in this way:

I. An old husband brings his gay but well-meaning wife to town.

II. Her innocent love of fun involves her in scandal.

III. Will the two be reconciled, and how?

Ibsen's _A Doll's House_ may be thus expressed in a proposition:

I. A young wife has been babified by her husband.

II. Experiences open her eyes to the fact that she is not educated to be either wife or mother.

III. She leaves her husband until he can see what a woman should be in the home: a human being, not a doll.

These examples will serve to show what is meant by proposition and indicate more definitely the central purpose of the dramatic author and the technical demand made upon him. Be a.s.sured that under whatever varied garb of attraction in incident, scene and character, this underlying stern architectural necessity abides, and a drama's inability to reduce itself thus to a formula is a confession that in the structural sense the building is lop-sided and insecure, or, worse, that there is no structure there at all: nothing, so to put it, but a front elevation, a mere architect's suggestion.

As the spectator breathlessly enjoys the climax and watches to see that unknotting of the knot which gives the French word _denouement_ (unknotting) its meaning, he will notice that the intensity of the climactic effect is not derived alone from action and word; but that largely effective in the total result is the picture made upon the stage, in front of the background of setting which in itself has pictorial quality, by the grouped characters as the curtain falls.

This effect, conventionally called a _situation_, is for the eye as well as for the ear and the brain,--better, the heart. It would be an unfortunate limitation to our theater culture if we did not comprehend to the full how large a part of the effect of a good play is due to the ever-changing series of artistic stage pictures furnished by the dramatist in collaboration with the actors and the stage manager. This principle is important throughout a play, but gets its most vivid ill.u.s.tration in the climax; hence, I enlarge upon it at this point.

Among the most novel, fruitful and interesting experiments now being made in the theater here and abroad may be mentioned the attempts to introduce more subtle and imaginative treatment of the possibilities of color and form in stage setting than have hitherto obtained. The reaction influenced by familiarity with the unadorned simplicity of the Elizabethans, the Gordon Craig symbolism, the frank attempt to subst.i.tute artistic suggestion for the stupid and expensive reproduction on the stage of what is called ”real life,” are phases of this movement, in which Germany and Russia have been prominent. The stage manager and scene deviser are daily becoming more important factors in the production of a play; and along with this goes a clearer perception of the values of grouping and regrouping on the part of the plastic elements behind the footlights.[D] Many a scenic moment, many a climax, may be materially damaged by a failure to place the characters in such relative positions as shall visualize the dramatic feeling of the scene and reveal in terms of picture the dramatist's meaning. After all, the time-honored convention that the main character, or characters, should, at the moment when they are dominant in the story, take the center of the stage, is no empty convention; it is based on logic and geometry.

There is a direct correspondence between the unity of emotion concentrated in a group of persons and the eye effect which reports that fact. I have seen so fine a climax as that in Jones's _The Hypocrites_--one of the very best in the modern repertory--well nigh ruined by a stock company, when, owing to the purely arbitrary demand that the leading man should have the center at a crucial moment, although in the logic of the action he did not belong there, the two young lovers who were dramatically central in the scene were shunted off to the side, and the leading man, whose true position was in the deep background, delivered his curtain speech close up to the footlights on a spot mathematically exact in its historic significance. True dramatic relations were sacrificed to relative salaries, and, as a result, a scene which naturally receives half a dozen curtain calls, went off with comparative tameness. It was a striking demonstration of the importance of picture on the stage as an externalization of dramatic facts.

If the theater-goer will keep an eye upon this aspect of the drama, he will add much of interest to the content of his pleasure and do justice to a very important and easily overlooked phase of technic. It is common in criticism, often professional, to sneer at the tendency of modern actors, under the stage manager's guidance, continually to s.h.i.+ft positions while the dialogue is under way; thus producing an unnecessarily uneasy effect of meaningless action. As a generalization, it may be said that this is done (though at times no doubt, overdone) on a principle that is entirely sound: it expresses the desire for a new picture, a recognition of the law that, in drama, composition to the eye is as truly a principle as it is in painting. And with that consideration goes the additional fact that motion implies emotion; than which there is no surer law in psycho-physics. Abuse of the law, on the stage, is beyond question possible, and frequently met. But a redistribution of the positions of actors on the boards, when not abused, means they have moved under the compulsion of some stress of feeling and then the movement is an external symbol of an internal state of mind. The drama must express the things within by things without, in this way; that is its method. The audience is only properly irritated when a stage moment which, from the nature of its psychology, calls for the static, is injured by an unrelated, fussy, bodily activity. Motion in such a case becomes as foolish as the scene s.h.i.+fting in one of the highest colored and most phantasmagoric of our dreams. The wise stage director will not call for a change of picture unless it represents a psychologic fact.

Two men converse at a table; one communicates to the other, quietly and in conversational tone, a fact of alarming nature. The other leaps to his feet with an exclamation and paces the floor as he talks about it; nothing is more fitting, because nothing is truer to life. The repressive style of acting to-day, which might try to express this situation purely by facial work, goes too far in abandoning the legitimate tools of the craft. Let me repeat that, despite all the refining upon older, more violent and crudely expressive methods of technic, the stage must, from its very nature, indicate the emotions of human beings by objective, concrete bodily reaction. The Greek word for drama means _doing_. To exhibit feeling is to do something.

Or let us take a more composite group: that which is seen in a drawing room, with various knots of people talking together just before dinner is announced. A s.h.i.+ft in the groups, besides effecting the double purpose of pleasing the eye and allowing certain portions of the dialogue to come forward and get the ear of the audience, also incidentally tells the truth: these groups in reality would s.h.i.+ft and change more or less by the law of social convenience. The general greetings of such an occasion would call for it. In a word, then, the stage is, among other things, a plastic representation of life, forever making an appeal to the eye. The application of this to the climax shows how vastly important its pictorial side may be.

The climax that is prolonged is always in danger. Lead up to it slowly and surely, secure the effect, and then get away from it instantly by lowering the curtain. Do not fumble with it, or succ.u.mb to the insinuating temptation of clinging to what is so effective. The dramatist here is like a fond father loath to say _farewell_ to his favorite child. But say the parting word he must, if he would have his offspring prosper and not, like many a father ere this, keep the child with him to its detriment. A second too much, and the whole thing will he imperiled. At the _denouement_, every syllable must be weighed, nor found wanting; every extraneous word ruthlessly cut out, the feats of fine language so welcome in other forms of literary composition shunned as an arch enemy. Colloquialism, instead of literary speech, even bad grammar where more formal book-speech seems to dampen the fire, must be instinctively sought. And whenever the action itself, backed by the scenery, can convey what is aimed at, silence is best of all; for then, if ever, silence is indeed golden. All this the spectator will quietly note, sitting in his seat of judgment, ready to show his pleasure or displeasure, according to what is done.

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