Every dramatist is of necessity subdued to what he works for—the playgoers of his own generation in his own country. Their approval it is that he has to win first of all; and if they render a verdict against him he has no appeal to posterity. It is a matter of record that a play which failed to please the public in its author’s lifetime never succeeded later in establishing itself on the stage. Partizans may prate about the dramatic power of the ‘Blot in the ’Scutcheon,’ but when it is—as it has been half-a-dozen times—galvanized into a semblance of life for a night or a fortnight, it falls prone in the playhouse as dead as it was when Macready first officiated at its funeral. Even the ‘Misanthrope,’ mightiest of Molière’s comedies and worthy of all the acclaim it has received, was not an outstanding triumph when its author impersonated Alceste, and it has rarely rewarded the efforts of the succession of accomplished actors who have tried to follow the footsteps of the master; it is praised, it is admired; but it does not attractthe many to the theater, because it does not give them abundantly the special pleasure that only the theater can bestow. ‘Tartuffe’ and the ‘Femmes Savantes’ do this and also half-a-score of Molière’s lighter and less ambitious pieces, supported by stories more theatrically effective than that of the ‘Misanthrope.’
The playwright who is merely a clever craftsman of the stage has no higher aim than to win the suffrages of his contemporaries. He knows what they want—for he is one of them—and he gives them what they want, no more and no less. He does not put himself into his plays; and perhaps his plays would be little better if he did. He is strenuously and insistently “up to date,” as the phrase is; and as a result he is soon “out of date.” He writes to be in the fashion; and the more completely he portrays the fleeting modes of the moment, the more swiftly must he fall out of fashion. The taste of the day is never the taste of after days; and the journalist-dramatist buys his evanescent popularity at a price. Who now is so poor as to pay reverence to Kotzebue and to Scribe, who once had all the managers at their feet? No maker of plays, not Lope de Vega or Dumas—Alexander the Great—was more fertile than Scribe in the invention of effective situations, none was ever more dextrous in the knotting andunknotting of plots, grave and gay. But his fertility and his dexterity have availed him little. He wrote for his own time, not for all time. What sprang up in the morning of his career and bloomed brightly in the sunshine, was by night-fall drooping and withered and desiccated.
The comic dramatists of the Restoration had perforce to gratify the lewd likings of vicious spectators who wanted to see themselves on the stage even more vicious than they were. Congreve and Wycherly put into their comedies what their contemporaries relished, a game flavor that stank in the nostrils of all decent folk. The Puritan shrank with horror from the picture in which the Impuritan recognized his own image. So it was that a scant hundred years after they had insulted the moral sense (which, like Truth, tho “crushed to earth will rise again; the eternal years of God are hers,”) they were swept from the stage. What had delighted under Charles II disgusted under George IV.
Even the frequent attempt to deodorize them failed, for, as Sheridan said—and he knew by experience since he had made his ‘Trip to Scarborough’ out of the ‘Relapse’—the Restoration comedies were “like horses; you rob them of their vice and you rob them of their vigor.” Charles Lamb, who had a whimsical predilection for them, admitted that they were “quite extincton our stage.” Congreve’s pistol no longer discharged its steel bullets; and Wycherly no longer knocked his victims down with the butt of his gun. Yet they died hard; I am old enough to have seen Daly’s company in the ‘Trip to Scarborough’ and the ‘Recruiting Officer,’ in the ‘Inconstant,’ in ‘She Would and She Would Not’ and the ‘Country Girl’ (Garrick’s skilful cleansing of Wycherly’s unspeakable ‘Country Wife’)—all of which reappeared because they had appealing plots, amusing situations and lively characters and because they did not portray the immorals of the days of Nell Gwyn.
Yet when an adroit playwright who seeks to please the public of his own time by the representation of its manners, happens to be also a creative artist, enamored of life, he is sometimes able so to vitalize his satire of a passing vogue that it has abiding vigor. This is what Molière did when he made fun of the ‘Précieuses Ridicules.’ Even when he was writing this cleverest of skits, the cotery which had clustered around Madame de Rambouillet was disintegrating and would have disappeared without his bold blows. But affectation is undying; it assumes new shapes; it is always a tempting target; and Molière, by the magic of his genius, transcended his immediate purpose. He composed a satire of one special manifestation of pretence which survivesafter two centuries and a half as an adequate satire of all later manifestations. The Précieuses in Paris have long since been gathered to their mothers; so have the Esthetes across the channel in London; and soon they will be followed to the grave by the Little Groups of Serious Thinkers who are to-day settling the problems of the cosmos by the aid of empty phrases. No one sees the ‘Précieuses Ridicules’ to-day without recognizing that it is almost as fresh as it was when Madame de Rambouillet enjoyed it.
The man of genius is able to please his own generation by his depiction of its foibles and yet to put into his work the permanent qualities which make it pleasing to the generations that come after him. The trick may not be easy, but it can be turned. How it shall be done,—well, that is one of the secrets of genius. In the case of the ‘Précieuses Ridicules’ we can see that Molière framed a plot for his lively little piece that is perennially pleasing, a plot which only a little modified was to support two popular successes nearly two centuries later,—the ‘Ruy Blas’ of Victor Hugo and the ‘Lady of Lyons’ of Bulwer-Lytton. He tinged his dialog with just enough timeliness to hit the taste of the town in 1658; and he did not so surcharge it as to fatigue the playgoers of Paris two centuries and a half later.
The likings of the groundlings who stood in the yard of the Globe theater when Shakspere began to write plays were coarser and grosser than those of the burghers whom Molière had to attract to the Petit-Bourbon; and unfortunately Shakspere in his earlier efforts was not as cautious as Molière. In the Falstaff plays, for example, the fat knight is as alive to-day as when Elizabeth is fabled to have expressed the wish to have him shown in love. But the talk of his companions, Nym and Pistol, is too thickly bespangled with the tricks of speech of Elizabethan London to interest American and British theater-goers three hundred years later. There is but a faded appeal in topical allusions which need to be explained before they are appreciated and even before they are understood; and in the playhouse itself footnotes are impossible.
In his earliest pieces, written during his arduous apprenticeship to the craft of playmaking, when he was not yet sure of his footing in the theater, Shakspere had to provide parts for a pair of popular fun-makers,—Will Kempe and another as yet unidentified. They were lusty and robust comedians accustomed to set the house in a roar as soon as they showed their cheerful faces. They created the two Dromios,the two Gobbos, Launce and Speed, Costard and Dull; and it is idle to deny that not a little of the talk that Shakspere put in their mouths is no longer laughter-provoking; it is not only too topical, too deliberately Tudor, it is also too mechanical in its effort at humor to move us to mirth to-day. Their merry jests,—Heaven save the mark!—are not lifted above the level of the patter of the “sidewalk comedians” of our variety-shows. They are frankly “clowns”; and Shakspere has set down for them what the groundlings expected them to utter, only little better than the rough repartee and vigorous innuendo and obvious pun which they would have provided for themselves if they had been free to do as they were wont to do. What he gives them to say is rarely the utterance of the characters they were supposed to be interpreting; and this is because the two Dromios are parts only, are not true characters, and are scarcely to be accepted even as types.
A difference of taste in jests, so George Eliot declared, is “a great strain on the affections”; and it would be insulting to the creator of Bottom and Falstaff to pretend that we have any affectionate regard for Costard and Dull, for Launce and Speed. It is only when Shakspere was coming to the end of his apprenticeship that he found out how to utilize the talents ofKempe and of Kempe’s unknown comrade in comedy, in parts which without ceasing to be adjusted to their personalitieswere also accusablecharacters, Dogberry and Touchstone. But when we come to Touchstone we are forced to perceive that Shakspere was the child of his own age even when he refrained from echoing its catchwords. He was cleaner than the majority of his rivals, but he was near enough to Rabelais to be frank of speech. On occasion he can be of the earth, earthy. He bestows upon Touchstone a humor which is at times Rabelaisian in its breadth, in its outspoken plainness of speech, assured of the guffaws of the riffraff and rabble of a Tudor seaport, but a little too coarse for the descendants of the Puritans on either side of the Atlantic to-day. Nearly fifty years ago when Harry Beckett was rehearsing in ‘As You Like It’ for one of the infrequent Shaksperian revivals that Lester Wallack ventured to make, he told me sorrowfully that his part had been sadly shorn, some of Touchstone’s best lines having been sacrificed in deference to the increasing squeamishness of American audiences.
These accessory comic parts are not alone in their readjustment to the modifying moods of a later age. The point of view changes with every generation, and with every change a character is likely to be seen from a different angle. Nodramatist, whatever his genius, can foresee the future and forecast the fate of his creatures. The centuries follow one another in orderly procession, and they are increasingly unlike. Moreover, the dramatist of genius, by the very fact that he is a genius, is forever building better than he knew. He may put a character into a play for a special purpose; and after a century or two that character will loom larger than its creator dreamt and will stand forward, refusing to keep the subordinate place for which it was deliberately designed. We listen to the lines he utters and we read into them meanings which the author could not have intended, but which, none the less, are there to be read by us.
We may even accept as tragic a figure whom the playwright expected to be received as comic and who was so received by the audience for which the playwright wrote. Sometimes this is a betrayal of his purpose, as it is when aspiring French actors have seen fit to represent the Figaro of Beaumarchais (in the ‘Marriage of Figaro,’ not in the ‘Barber of Seville’) as a violent and virulent precursor of the French Revolution; or as it is when the same French actors insist on making the Georges Dandin of Molière a subject for pity, tear-compelling rather than laughter-provoking.
It is not a betrayal, however, rather is it atransfiguration when the Shylock of Shakspere is made to arouse our sympathy. I make no doubt that Shakspere projected Shylock as a comic villain, at whom he intended the spectators to laugh, even if they also shuddered because of his bloodthirstiness. Yet by sheer stress of genius this sinister creature, grotesque as he may be, is drawn with such compelling veracity that we cannot but feel for him. We are shocked by the insulting jeers of Gratiano at the moment of his discomfiture. We are glad that his plot against Antonio has failed; none the less do we feel that he has been miserably tricked; we are almost ready to resent the way in which the cards have been stacked against him.
To anyone who has familiarized himself with the attitude of Elizabethan playgoers toward usurers and toward the Jews, it is evident that Shakspere intended the ‘Merchant of Venice’ to be a Portia play; its action begins with talk about Belmont and it ends at Belmont itself; and Shylock is absent from the final act. In spite of this intent of the author, the ‘Merchant of Venice’ has become in our eyes a Shylock play. In fact, Macready four-score years ago used to appear in a three-act version which ended with the trial scene,—a most inartistic perversion of the comedy. After all, the ‘Merchant of Venice’isa comedy, even if its love-story is sustained andstiffened by a terrible underplot. Shakspere created the abhorrent Shylock that the lovely Portia could cleverly circumvent him and score off him and put him to shame. His hardness of heart was to make more refulgent her brightness of soul. Shylock was set up to be scorned and hated and derided; he is a vindictive moneylender, insisting on a horrible penalty; no one in the play has a good word for him or a kindly thought; his servant detests him and his daughter has no natural affection for him.
When all is said, we cannot but feel that Shakspere in his treatment of Shylock displays a callousness not uncommon in Elizabethan England. And yet—and yet Shakspere is true to his genius; he endows Shylock with life. The Jew stands before us and speaks for himself; and we feel that we understand him better than the genius who made him. Our sympathy goes out to him; and altho we do not wish the play to end otherwise than it does, we are almost ready to regard him as the victim of a miscarriage of justice, guilty though he is. Ellen Terry has quoted from a letter of Henry Irving’s a significant confession: “Shylock is a ferocity, I know—but I cannot play him that way!” Why couldn’t he? It was because the nineteenth century was not the sixteenth, because Victorian audiences were not Elizabethan, because the peoples who have Englishfor their mother-tongue are less callous and more civilized than their forebears of three hundred years ago.
While it is more than three hundred years since Shakspere wrote the ‘Merchant of Venice,’ it is less than a hundred and fifty since Sheridan wrote the ‘School for Scandal.’ The gap that yawns between us and Sheridan is not so wide or so deep as the gulf that divides us from Shakspere; but it is obvious enough. Even a hundred years ago Charles Lamb declared that the audiences of his time were becoming more and more unlike those of Sheridan’s day, and that this increasing unlikeness was forcing the actors to modify their methods, a little against their wills. Sheridan’s two brilliant comedies continue to delight us by their solidity of structure, their vigor of characterization and their insistent sparkle of dialog. In the ‘Rivals’ Sheridan is following in the footsteps of his fellow Irishman, Farquhar, and in the ‘School for Scandal’ he is matching himself against Congreve. In both he was carrying on the tradition of Restoration comedy, with its coldheartedness, its hard glitter, its delineation of modes rather than morals. It is perhaps too much to assert that most of his characters are unfeeling; but it is not too much to saythat they are regardless of the feelings of others—perhaps because their own emotions are only skin-deep.
It is true that in the ‘Rivals’ Sheridan threw a sop to the admirers of Sentimental Comedy and introduced a couple of high-strung and weepful lovers, Falkland and Julia, who are forever sentimentalizing. But this precious pair have been found so uninteresting that in most of the later performances of the ‘Rivals’—all too infrequent, alas!—they have been omitted altogether or disgraced by relegation to the background.
The vogue of Sentimental Comedy was waning when Sheridan wrote, and it disappeared before he died, yet the playgoers of London and of New York were becoming more tender-hearted than their ancestors who had delighted in the metallic harshness of character-delineation customary in Restoration comedy. They were beginning to look for characters with whom they could sympathize and to desire the villains to remain consistent in their villainy. They were unwilling to remain in what Lamb termed “the regions of pure comedy, where no cold moral reigns.” Lamb called the ‘School for Scandal’ incongruous in that it is “a mixture of sentimental incompatibilities,” Charles Surface being “a pleasant reality” while Joseph Surface was “a no less pleasant poetical foil to it.”
The original performer of Joseph was John Palmer; and Lamb asserted that it required his consummate art “to reconcile the discordant elements.” Then the critic suggested, and this was a century ago, that
a player with Jack’s talents, if we had one now, would not dare do the part in the same manner. He would instinctively avoid every turn which might tend to unrealize, and so to make the character fascinating. He must take his cue from the spectators, who would expect a bad man and a good man as rigidly opposed to each other as the death-beds of those geniuses are contrasted in the prints.
a player with Jack’s talents, if we had one now, would not dare do the part in the same manner. He would instinctively avoid every turn which might tend to unrealize, and so to make the character fascinating. He must take his cue from the spectators, who would expect a bad man and a good man as rigidly opposed to each other as the death-beds of those geniuses are contrasted in the prints.
A little later in the same essay—the incomparable analysis of ‘Artificial Comedy’—Lamb pointed out that “Charles must be loved and Joseph hated,” adding that
to balance one disagreeable reality with another, Sir Peter Teazle must be no longer the comic idea of a fretful old bachelor bridegroom, whose teasings (while King played it) were evidently as much played off at you as they were meant to concern anybody on the stage,—he must be a real person, capable in law of sustaining an injury,—a person towards whom duties are to be acknowledged,—the genuine crim. con. antagonist of the villainous seducer Joseph. To realize him more, his sufferings under his unfortunate match must have the downright pungency of life,—must (or should) make you not mirthful but uncomfortable, just as the same predicament would move you in a neighbor or old friend.
to balance one disagreeable reality with another, Sir Peter Teazle must be no longer the comic idea of a fretful old bachelor bridegroom, whose teasings (while King played it) were evidently as much played off at you as they were meant to concern anybody on the stage,—he must be a real person, capable in law of sustaining an injury,—a person towards whom duties are to be acknowledged,—the genuine crim. con. antagonist of the villainous seducer Joseph. To realize him more, his sufferings under his unfortunate match must have the downright pungency of life,—must (or should) make you not mirthful but uncomfortable, just as the same predicament would move you in a neighbor or old friend.
I cannot count the number of occasions on which I have enjoyed the performance of the ‘School for Scandal,’—but they must amount to a score at the least. I recall most clearly John Gilbert’s Sir Peter; and I can testify that he had preserved the tradition of King. He was the fretful old bachelor bridegroom, who, when the screen fell and discovered Lady Teazle in the library of Joseph Surface, was wounded not in his heart but in his vanity. He preserved the comic idea, as Sheridan had designed. But John Gilbert was the only Sir Peter I can recall who was able to achieve this histrionic feat.
Of all the many Lady Teazles it has been my good fortune to see, Fanny Davenport stands out most sharply in my memory,—perhaps because she was the first I had ever beheld and perhaps because she was then in the springtime of her buoyant beauty. Certainly when the screen fell she was a lovely picture, like Niobe all tears. Her repentance was sincere beyond all question. She renounced the comic idea, which is that Lady Teazle has been caught in a compromising situation by the elderly husband with whom she is in the habit of quarrelling. Fanny Davenport saw only the pathos of the situation; and she made us see it and feel it and feel for her and hope that her impossible husband would accept her honest explanation,—the explanation which indeed hewould have to accept since we as eye-witnesses are ready to testify that it is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
But this rendering of the part is discomposing to the comic idea; and it forces a modification of method upon the actor of Charles Surface. It is in deference to the comic idea that when the screen falls Sheridan made Charles see the humor of the situation and only the humor of it. He is called upon to chaff Sir Peter and Lady Teazle and Joseph, one after the other. If the actor speaks these lines with due regard to the comic idea which created Sir Peter as a peevish old bachelor bridegroom and Lady Teazle as a frivolous woman of fashion, and if the actor of Sir Peter and the actress of Lady Teazle take the situation not only seriously but pathetically as they would in a twentieth century problem-play, then Charles’s speech is heartless and almost brutal. Now Charles is a character as sympathetic to the audience in his way as Lady Teazle is in hers. Charles is to be loved as Joseph is to be hated. And so the impersonator of Charles is compelled to modify his method, to transpose his lines and to recognize that the robust raillery natural to him and appropriate to the predicament must be toned down in deference to our more delicate susceptibilities.
He laughs at Sir Peter first; and then he turnsto Joseph, who is fair game and whom the spectators are glad to see held up to scorn. He says “you seem all to have been diverting yourselves here at hide and seek and I don’t see who is out of the secret.” With this he turns to Lady Teazle and asks, “Shall I beg your ladyship to inform me?” So saying he looks at her and perceiving that she is standing silent and ashamed, with downcast eyes, he makes her a bow of apology for his levity. Finally with another thrust at his brother, the unmasked hypocrite, he takes his departure airily, leaving them face to face. If the comic idea suffers from this contradiction of the intent of the comic dramatist, it must find what consolation it can in its sense of humor.
A large share of the success of even the masterpieces of the drama, comic and tragic, is due to the coincidence of its theme and its treatment with the desires, the opinions and the prejudices of the contemporary audiences for whose pleasure it was originally planned. But the play, comic or tragic, as the case may be, can survive through the ages (as the ‘Merchant of Venice’ and the ‘School for Scandal’ have survived) only if this compliance has not been subservient, if the play has the solidity of structure and the universalityof topic which will win it a welcome after its author is dead and gone. What is contemporary is three parts temporary, and what is up-to-date is certain soon to be out-of-date. Nevertheless it is always the audience of his own time and of his own place that the playwright has to please, first of all; and if their verdict is against him he has lost his case. Plays have their fates no less than books; and the dispensers of these fates are the spectators assembled in the playhouse. The dramatist who ignores this fact, or who is ignorant of it, does so at his peril. As Lowell once put it with his wonted pungency, “the pressure of public opinion is like the pressure of the atmosphere; you cannot see it, but it is sixteen pounds to the square inch all the same.”
(1921)