The Decline of the Drama

The Dial , 1 January 1921, pages 1-11, 4,366 words

I would like to avail myself of this rare occasion to say my little say on a topic that seems, from its frequency in the newspapers, to interest everybody — the decline of the drama. It appears from the papers that I read last Sunday that the dramatic critics themselves cannot sit through the plays now in course of performance at the London theatres, and leave dejected, broken in spirit, after the second act, to return to their homes to write discourses on the almost universal stupidity to which, unfortunately, they are obliged to pander.

The articles of the discontented critics are concerned with the perennial problem of the actor manager, and the difficulties of obtaining enough rehearsals in the theatres that call themselves repertory theatres. State-subsidized theatres also occupy the pens of the critics, and everyone is certain that if some modifications were made, talent would return to the theatre. As certain are they as they ever were in the ‘nineties, when the common critical announcement was that Wagner had made the writing of a bad opera from henceforth impossible. It was thought, too, in the same ‘nineties, that Ibsen had hit upon a dramatic road that would lead everybody to Parnassus who cared to go there, even Mr — . But it would seem that whosoever produces a masterpiece, so far from helping his contemporaries to go and do likewise, poisons their aspirations: till the masterpiece is born the majority of men and women write the music and literature of their own time, and Art continues her matronly march down the well-known ways; but on the advent of the masterpiece Art is thrown into dismay, the young attach themselves to the new formula, and the elders are broken-hearted, as well they may be, for from henceforth they are old fogies.

I remember well how the spell of the seduction of unity stole over me in the stalls of the Gymnase Theatre in Paris in the ’seventies, and the ravishment with which I watched the skill of the dramatist, Dumas fils, introduce his characters into the same room one after the other, finding specious entrances and exits for all, and how my excitement at his handicraft was increased as the curtain rose again on the same furniture, not a table or a chair moved out of its place; the hand of God seemed in it all when on turning to the programme I learnt that the whole action of the play was comprised in the short space of a few hours. Maybe the play that astonished me out of my wits was Monsieur Alphonse, or maybe it was the work of some other craftsman, for there are always many about who can avoid soliloquies and asides. But to do this, and skilfully, does not carry the dramatist, so it would seem, any nearer to Shakespeare than he was before; an unpopular doctrine this is, almost a heresy, but I will dare to say that it is better to write Hamlet with soliloquies and asides than Monsieur Alphonse without.

At that time a large volume of Restoration plays was in my hand constantly, and my scorn of their craft brimmed over when I noticed that not one or two, but sometimes five, changes of scene occurred in each act, and that asides and monologues were the almost common means of expression of these forlorn dramatists. It may be that I dreamed of astonishing the London public with plays composed in the manner of Monsieur Alphonse, and it may be that no such thought entered my head, and it matters to nobody what I thought, or think that I thought, of Mr Jones’ play, Saints and Sinners; it comes into my mind naturally, for it is the last, or one of the last, plays written in our old English dramatic formula, come down to us, with some variations, from the sixteenth century — three, four, or five scenes in each act, a forest glade followed by a parlour, a parlour by a street scene, a street scene by a lady’s boudoir. The reader must think out for himself where the dramatist might have placed his fifth scene — in a cottage on a lonely heath, by the sea-shore, or in a tavern. It matters not where the scenes are placed; it’s enough to say that all these changes were made within sight of the audience, the side scenes being pulled.away by the scene-shifters. The craft of Saints and Sinners must have seemed to me very gross (after a long sojourn in France it could not seem otherwise), and it may be that once again I indulged myself in a dream of a play in three acts, in which the whole action would be confined to a parlour, each act comprising fourteen exits and entrances. Indeed, it could not have been else than that my thoughts turned to such a play, for the belief of everybody in the ’nineties was that to recapture Shakespeare we must denounce monologues and asides. Strange are the beliefs of men; but I am meditating history, so to continue.

It was in the late eighties or the ’nineties that Ibsen began to be spoken of and The Doll’s House was produced; and it was noticed at once that the master allowed himself to drop into short soliloquies, but these, it was confidently predicted, would disappear as the master developed his craft. And for once the critics were right in their predictions; Ibsen forebore henceforth to soliloquize, to everybody’s great delight, for everybody’s delight in Art is in an externality of no moment whatever. Nobody remembered that the most beautiful things in Shakespeare, and the most real, are the soliloquies, and no thought was given to the fact that Ibsen’s earlier plays (the plays in which he used monologues and asides as frequently as Shakespeare) are the most beautiful, and of all the most real. The master has never expressed himself better than in some of the monologues in The Pretenders.

But critics are not usually interested in the result, but in the means, and one of the master’s greatest works was alluded to as “a youthful indiscretion,” the reason being that for the last twenty years the critics have been busy cutting and pruning and making ready the road for the feet of the young Parnassians, who have, according to the Sunday papers, failed to “play up.” The critics stand waiting; the monologue has been felled, the aside has been grubbed up, and no doubt if a Don Quixote and a Sancho were sought in this journalistic reformation they would be found, for these are everywhere; but in finding them I should not escape a charge of attacking contemporaries who have, perhaps, on occasions, spoken well of my work. It will be well, therefore, to think of other designations that can point to nobody, and on returning from the window I bring back a remembrance of a lantern and a post-box; as nobody, not even the most invidious, can fix these names upon men now living amongst us, I will call upon them if their opinion should be needed.

The afternoon tea had just come in and I was filling a cup when a ring came at the front door, and who do you think my visitor was, reader? None other than my old friend Lantern. You will understand easily that it was delightful to me to hear the maidservant announce him; you can see me, no doubt, in your mind’s eye start from my chair, and hear me beg of him to share my tea. He had not been to see me for a long time, and in his apologies The Brook Kerith happened to be mentioned. “But, my dear Lantern,” I said, “my affection for my friends is not dependent upon the fact that they read or do not read my books.” “My case is worse than not having read The Brook Kerith,” said Lantern in a very grave tone. “The truth is, I couldn’t get on with it.” “Now how was that?’ I asked, tickled in my incurable curiosity; and having always clung on to the belief in Lantern’s shrewdness I was a little disappointed with the reason he gave for not being able to get on with The Brook Kerith. It appears that all the long pages about Joseph of Arimathea put him past his patience, for he wanted to know what I thought about Jesus and Paul. It was on my lips to remark that if I had begun with Jesus I could have escaped barely from the charge of rewriting the Gospels, but not wishing to embarrass Lantern (I love all Lanterns, be they bright or dim), I fell back upon Heine’s celebrated answer to Berlioz, who came to see the lonely poet when he was dying: “Always original, Berlioz.” At which remark Lantern’s wick spluttered in its socket for a moment, but it flared up quickly, and we fell to talking of Shakespeare, passing on to the way of the drama, the lighting of which had been my friend’s care for many years.

It may well have been that he asked me if I were writing a play, and if that was his question, I answered that the modern play was so strict a convention that the form would have to be enlarged, broken up, as the old English comedy was scrapped about thirty years ago. Lantern asked me why I did not undertake the task of writing something different from the ordinary play, but as nothing would be gained by noticing his irony, I answered that it required many years to create a new convention, and that perhaps no single man could do this, but a generation of writers. “‘Not only the man, but the moment is required,’ as Matthew Arnold has put it. He might have said ‘men’ instead of ‘man,’ for no man creates a literary tradition.” “But a man can start one,” replied Lantern. “Do you think so?’ I asked. “Are you sure?” He answered, “Ibsen,” and we talked for some time, myself claiming that the Ibsen formula could be discovered in France, the gist if not the spirit of it at least. In all these debates many words are wasted, and to bring to an end an argument in which neither was interested, I remarked that if I had to begin my life again and my lot was cast in the theatre, I should not be satisfied with following the rut, but would seek (unconsciously perhaps, but I should seek) new formulas — the old bottles would not have satisfied me for the new wine, if I had any. “In what direction would you have sought the new formula?” Lantern asked. “Or do you think it would have come of itself?” “The new form,” I replied, “would come unconsciously in response to some personal need.” “Can you tell me the need, or indicate it?” “Yes,” I answered, “I think I can do that.”

“The straitened form into which the drama has fallen would have set me thinking how it might be widened, and my take-off would have been the five-act comedy of our ancestors, each act consisting of three, four, perhaps five, different scenes changed within sight of the spectator. This form would allow of more story, more variety, in a word, more life. If I can rely on your patience?” Lantern nodded acquiescence. “The stream of story,” I continued, “that the present dramatic formula permits is but a mere trickle; it is not of our tradition,”and to rouse Lantern out of a lifetime of prejudices I told him that before he came I was thinking of the joy I had experienced when a boy in the stalls of the Gymnase during a performance of Monsieur Alphonse. "You have outgrown such crude aestheticism,” he said drily. ‘We grow into ourselves, Lantern, if we grow,” I answered. “But,” said Lantern, “you would not surely return to the whistle, at the sound of which a back cloth is lowered and the side scenes advanced or withdrawn?” “I am afraid I would,” I answered, “and shall be able to give you some reason for preferring the English form, which has come down, with some modifications, from Shakespeare to Congreve, and was accepted by Sheridan and Goldsmith; but I would ask you first to admit that a literary form may shrink and wither, and that — ” "The dramatic form,” said Lantern, “is a hard material (stone or marble it may be compared to) through which the dramatist has to cut his way with hammer and chisel.”

“But, Lantern, form is not meritorious in itself, it is but a vehicle, and a man is not a greater artist because he writes in the harder form of the ballade rather than in the looser form of the stanza.” “The soliloquy,” interposed Lantern, “is to some extent defensible, but words should never be spoken on the stage that the bystander is not supposed to hear,” and shuddering slightly he spent the rest of his feelings on his watch-chain. “But will you tell, Lantern, why an aside should never be indulged in? Will you give me a reason? Shakespeare, all the Elizabethan dramatists, Goldsmith, Sheridan, and all the early French dramatists use the aside — why, then, Lantern, why deride it?’ “Because the convention that only the audience hears the aside is too crude,” he answered. “We have progressed since then.” “In what, dear Lantern?’ I asked. “Not in the results, surely?” “In the means,” he replied, and instead of twitting him, as I might have done, for looking upon the means as more important than the end, I said: “You think we should cling closer to Nature?” Lantern nodded, and I continued: “But we do not get nearer to Nature by imprisoning all our characters into a single set.” “You were thinking,” he answered, “of the joy that you experienced when a boy at a performance of Monsieur Alphonse.” “I was, Lantern, and busily comparing the different literary methods of Mr Henry Arthur Jones in Saints and Sinners and Dumas fils in Monsieur Alphonse.” “A strange association of styles,” said Lantern, and he seemed interested to hear how two plays so different should have come into the same meditation. “Saints and Sinners,” I said, “was the last play written in the old English formula, several changes of scene in each act and the dialogue falling into soliloquies and asides, according to the nature of the story, without the author stopping to ask himself if the critics would approve, the method in its innocency reminding me of a picture by Francesca, in which one of the figures throws a shadow; the other figures in the picture are shadowless.” And I waited for Lantern to admire the point that I had made, but instead of rendering homage to it, he asked me, I thought a little drily, which play I preferred — Monsieur Alphonse, or Saints and Sinners. “Both are forgotten,” I answered. “Then,” he said, “you’re talking about means rather than results,” to which I made reply that I did not say, nor did I think of saying, that an enlargement of the formula would certainly lead to better results (of the results we can never be sure); my meaning was that the drama has fallen into the straitness that might be compared to certain forms of French verse.

“It was in the ’nineties that Ibsen appeared in England — ” “But Ibsen,” said Lantern, “whom you used to admire, wrote his greatest plays without dropping into monologues and asides.” “He did, Lantern, he did; we will speak of Ibsen’s craft and the fruit it has borne presently. At the present moment I am thinking of you walking at his head, with Post at his heels. By the way, I haven’t seen Post for a long time, many years; I hope he is well?" “We haven’t seen each other lately,” Lantern answered, “but I believe him to be quite well. You were saying that in the *nineties Ibsen appeared, with me walking at his head and Post at his heels.” “Yes, declaiming like the King of Dahomey’s Apparitor, who walks on certain occasions in front of the King’s bull, crying, ‘this is the bull, the one bull, the only bull.’ I can see you still in my imagination leading the ringed bull, the little hairy Norwegian bull, crying, ‘here is the bull of drama, the one bull, the only bull,’ and little Post in the rear crying, ‘this is the bull, the King of bulls, the bull with the crumpled horn, that tossed the aside and trampled the soliloquy,’ contriving exits and entrances from the same drawing-room with a skill unequalled by any French dramatist, and writing a dialogue that makes French dialogue seem very halting.” “Did Post ever say that?’ Lantern asked. “Somehow I don’t recognize him in it. It is much more like your own talk.” “No man ever wrote dialogue as skilfully as Ibsen,” I answered, “and his dreaming, questioning, spiritual soul was possessed of a particular sense of beauty.” “Well, then,” cried Lantern, “you have the result; the means produce the result.” “Ibsen was a man of genius,” I cried, “and like every man of genius he made the form that he acquired in France his own, extracting all that fourteen entrances and exits in each act can give, just as Wagner extracted all the beauty the leit-motif had for giving. In other hands the  leit-motif is abhorrent, and in the same way the fourteen exits and entrances in each act are abhorrent except in Ibsen. The form has given what it could give. Moreover, the form grew up with Ibsen, and it was his need.”

“The romantic formula having ceased to interest him, he turned to the realistic,” said Lantern.

“But, my dear Lantern, how can dramatic Art be described as realistic? We begin by supposing a room with three walls; the convention that the fourth wall has been removed is the first condition of the existence of the theatre. And if the scene be in the open air, the painted canvas which does duty for trees wouldn’t deceive a child, and the better painted the trees and the rhododendrons are, the uglier they are. To look at even the finest pictures in the National Gallery for more than five minutes is weariness, but on the stage we have to look at the same rhododendrons for two hours and a half. Then we are asked to accept a gas-light shining through a hole in a curtain as a star, and if there be any haymaking in the play the moon will be, of a certainty, as big, or bigger, as the moon that lights George Mason’s harvesters home from the fields. Conventions and artifices are part and parcel of the Art of the stage, of all Art, for Art is not Nature, because it is Art; why, then, should you object to soliloquies and asides, preferring in the interests of reality eighty-four entrances and exits in the space of two hours and a half?” “Eighty-four?” interjected Lantern suddenly. “Yes, eighty-four,” I replied; “fourteen entrances and exits in the first act are twenty-eight, twice twenty-eight are fifty-six, and twenty-eight added are eighty-four.” “But,” said Lantern, “the number of exits and entrances depends on the number of characters.” “Ibsen,” I answered him, “could write a play with five or six characters. To do this was his special gift, but the modern English comedy and the French contain if not eighty-four at least sixty-five or seventy exits and entrances. Have you never, Lantern, hand on your heart, experienced a feeling of exasperation when in the third act a man says that he will go and smoke a cigar on the terrace? In that horrid moment we feel dramatic Art to be more straitened and artificial than the ballade, the kyrielle, the rondeau, the rondel, the Sicilian octave, or the sestina. In its seventieth exit or entrance the modern comedy attains to the artificiality of the chant royal, and you will admit that this form has never produced a poem.” “But the ballade has produced many poems,” said Lantern, “and the form is nearly as strict as the chant royal.” “The ballade,” I answered, "existed long before Villon. In the works of Gower, a poet who wrote in three languages with equal facility and equal mediocrity, will be found fifty examples of the ballade quite as correctly written as Villon, but without his poetry. Gower lived a hundred years before Villon, and during these years the ballade was waxing to the perfect flower that it attained in Villon’s ballade to his mother. More it had not for giving, and it died like a flower that has seeded. Even the genius of Banville was not able to breathe life into it, and the history of the ballade is the history of all Art formulas.

“To return, Lantern, from poetry to the stage. I would like to ask you if the leanness of the dramatic formula does not awaken hope in you that somebody will be born who will dare to write long speeches in place of love scenes in which the lovers are almost mute. Instead of the love scene in Romeo and Juliet, we have the swain and his lady addressing the very curtest remarks to each other:

He. Have you nothing to say to me?

She. No, no.

He. No hopeful word?

She. Do not press me to speak.

He. To-morrow?

She. Perhaps.

He. You will write?

She. Yes, I will write.

[Exit. The lady returns to the fire, which goes out slowly.

CURTAIN.

Such scenes as these, and they are common in London plays, set me wondering what Rachel, Désclee, Frédéric Lemaître, and Salvini would think if they were asked to speak such dialogue. I can imagine them gathering up their grave clothes, anxious to return to their tombs, whispering, ‘But we are men and women, and can make nothing out of the speech of daws, jays, and magpies.’ A parrot is loquacious compared with these latter-day dramatists. I remember a comedy at the Haymarket in which the leading characters played dominoes, and my remembrance of the dialogue is:

‘Double-six.’ (Long silence.)

‘I can’t play, I must draw one.’ (Long silence.)

‘It’s your turn.’ (Long silence.)

An old woman occupied a corner of the stage, uttering now and again, as a parrot might: ‘I don’t think that man will come in to-night.’ I will not say, Lantern, for I wish to be quite fair with you, that in this play we have one after your own heart, but I do say that we have in it the ultimate fruit of the realistic formula, no soliloquies, no asides, no long speeches.”

“A good deal can be proved by choosing examples from unknown plays,” Lantern answered, and I know he was vexed from the way he played with his watch-chain. “You would have been more convincing if you had chosen your examples from our best writers.” “From Galsworthy?” I asked, and called to his memory a love scene in Justice or Strife, I have forgotten which, in which the quest of realism is carried to a triumphant end, for so strangled are the characters by their emotions that they become far less articulate than parrots. “But does not passion render us speechless?” Lantern asked. “I think it does, Lantern, in real life, but we cannot carry real life into Art.” “Why not?” said Lantern. “Because Art, Lantern, is Art, and life is life. In the legend of The Ring, the beauty of Brunnhilde rendered Siegfried speechless, but Wagner did not follow the legend, he wrote the exultant duet, leaving Reyer, an inferior writer, to allow the lovers to stand mutely gazing at each other, like Mr Galsworthy’s lovers.” “It all depends,” said Lantern, “which you prefer — the realistic method or the romantic.” “But I do not prefer either, for I do not distinguish between the two, Lantern. Wagner was romantic to the finger tips, he was a realist from the crown of his head to his heels, and the difference between him and Reyer was that one man was a genius and the other — well, a man of talent, if you like.” “And you think then,” said Lantern, “that if you were to devote yourself to the stage your quest of realism, perhaps I should say truth, would have led you to changes of scene, in which two footmen carry two chairs and a small table on to the stage, whereat the actors continue their discourses.” “My dear Lantern, the illusion created by externals, scenes, costumes, lighting, and short sentences is in itself illusory. The best performances of plays and operas are witnessed at rehearsals. Jean de Reszke was never so like Tristan at night as he was in the afternoon when he sang the part in a short jacket, a bowler hat, and an umbrella in his hand. The chain armour and the plumes that he wore at night were but a distraction, setting our thoughts on periods, on the short swords in use in the ninth century in Ireland or in Cornwall, on the comfort or the discomfort of the ships in which the lovers were voyaging, on the absurd nightdress which is the convention that Isolde should appear in, a garment she never wore and which we know to be make-believe. But the hat and feathers that Isolde appears in when she rehearses the part are forgotten the moment she sings; and if I had to choose to see Forbes-Robertson play Hamlet or rehearse Hamlet, I should not hesitate for a moment. The moment he speaks he ceases to be a modern man, but in black hose the illusion ceases, for we forget the Prince of Denmark and remember the mummer. When in a stall in Covent Garden a woman sitting beside me said (when Chaliapin appeared), ‘I have been waiting all the evening for Chaliapin,’ I answered, ‘And I have been waiting all the evening for Ivan the Terrible.’”