In Mrs. Wharton’s acute and often penetrating analysis of ‘French Ways and Their Meaning,’ she dwelt upon the innate intellectual honesty of the French, “the special distinction of the race, which makes it the torch-bearer of the world”; and she asserted that Bishop Butler’s celebrated declaration, “Things are what they are and will be as they will be,” might have been “the motto of the French intellect.” She called it “an axiom that makes dull minds droop, but exalts the brain imaginative enough to be amazed before the marvel of things as they are.”
She pointed out that in Paris the people who go to the moving-pictures to gaze at an empty and external panorama are also the people who flock to the state-subventioned theaters, the Français and the Odéon, to behold the searching tragedies of Corneille andRacine, immitigablyveracious in the portrayal of life as it is on the lofty plane of poetry:
The people who assist at these grand tragic performances have a strong enough sense of reality to understand the part that grief and calamity play in life and in art; they feel instinctively that no real art can be based on a humbugging attitude toward life, and it is their intellectual honesty which makes them exact and enjoy its fearless representation.
The people who assist at these grand tragic performances have a strong enough sense of reality to understand the part that grief and calamity play in life and in art; they feel instinctively that no real art can be based on a humbugging attitude toward life, and it is their intellectual honesty which makes them exact and enjoy its fearless representation.
This intellectual honesty Mrs. Wharton failed to find in the audiences of our American theaters, because it is not a habitual possession of Americans generally. And she ventured to quote a remark which she once heard Howells make on our theatrical taste. They had been talking about the pressure exerted upon the American playwright by the American playgoing public, compelling him to wind up his play, whatever its point of departure, with the suggestion that his hero and heroine lived happily ever after, like the prince and princess who are married off at the end of the fairy-tale. Mrs. Wharton declared that this predilection of our playgoers did not imply a preference for comedy, but that, on the contrary, “our audience wanted to be harrowed (and even slightly shocked) from eight till ten-thirty, and then consoled and reassured before eleven.”
“Yes,” said Howells, “what the American public wants is a tragedy—with a happy ending.”
And Mrs. Wharton added her own commentthat what Howells said of the American attitude in the theater “is true of the whole American attitude toward life.” In other words we Americans both in the playhouse and out of it are lacking in the intellectual honesty which the French possess. We are not convinced, and we are not willing to let our plays, and even our novels, convince us, that “things are what they are and will be as they will be.”
With the praise that Mrs. Wharton bestowed upon the French, no one who has profited by the masterpieces of French literature could cavil for a moment. The French are intellectually honest, more so than any other modern nation, and perhaps as much so as the Greeks. There is abundant insincerity in our drama and in our fiction; and no one long familiar with either is justified in denying this. But, none the less, Howells’s characteristically witty remark has not perhaps all the weight which Mrs. Wharton attached to it. And it instantly evokes the desire to ask questions. Is it really true that we Americans like tragedies with happy endings? And, supposing this to be true, are we the only people who have ever revealed this aberration? Finally, if we have revealed it, are there any special reasons for this manifestation of our deficiency in intellectual honesty?
Having propounded these three queries, I proposeto answer them myself as best I can, and as the farseeing reader probably expected me to do; and it appears to me prudent to commence by considering the second of them, leaving the first to be taken up immediately thereafter. Are we Americans the only people who like tragedies with happy endings? Here we have a starting point for a discursive inquiry into the tastes of the playgoing public in other countries and in other centuries. Nor need we begin this leisurely loitering by too long a voyage, for we have only to go back a hundred years, more or less, and to tarry a little while in France itself.
It was in the minor theatres of Paris at the end of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth that there was slowly developed a new type of play, the melodrama. Its first masters were Ducange and Pixérécourt, who had profited by the experience of their ruder forerunners and who taught the secrets of their special craft to their more expert followers, the fertile Bouchardy, for one, and, for another, the only lately departed Dennery, the most adroit and the most inventive of them all.
A melodrama may be described briefly as a play with a plot and nothing but a plot; itabounds in situations enthralling, intricately combined and adroitly presented; and it contains characters simplified to types, drawn in profile and violently stencilled with the primary colors. It has a Hero, who struggles against his fate and struggles in vain until the final episode, when the Villain, as black as he is painted, is cast into outer darkness, the entirely white Hero being then rewarded for all his sufferings and for all his struggles with the hand of the equally pale Heroine, truly the female of his species. The melodrama may be devoid of veracity, but it is compelling in its progressive interest. It is dextrously devised to delight audiences which want “to be harrowed (and even slightly shocked) from eight to ten-thirty, and then consoled and reassured before eleven.” In short, it is “a tragedy with a happy ending.”
What could be more tragic than the tale of the ‘Two Orphans’? In that ultimate masterpiece of melodrama, two lovely sisters, one of them blind, are severally lost in Paris in the wickedest days of the Regency. We are made to follow their appalling misadventures; and we behold them again and again in danger of death and worse than death. The sword of Damocles was suspended over their fair heads from the first rising of the curtain until within five minutes of its final fall. The odds are a hundred to one,nay, a thousand to one, against their escaping unscathed from their manifold perils. And yet, nevertheless, at the very end, the clouds lift, sunshine floods the stage; and the two heroines are left at last to live happy like two princesses with their two princes in the most entrancing of fairy tales. And many thousand Parisian audiences, laying aside their intellectual honesty for the occasion, dilated with the right emotion, sobbed at the sorrows of the sisters, cheered the rescuers and venomously hissed the villains who had pursued them.
So completely were the playgoers of Paris subdued to what they worked in, that the makers of melodrama were emboldened to strange tricks. Théophile Gautier once described a long-forgotten melodrama by Bouchardy, himself long forgotten, in which an important character was killed off in the third act. Then in the fifth act when the unfortunate but immaculate Hero was absolutely at the mercy of his vicious enemies, and when he could extricate himself from the toils only if he had the talisman he had been seeking in vain,—the needed password, the necessary key, the missing will, the incriminatory documents, or whatever you prefer—when all is lost, even honor, then in the very nick of time, the character who was killed off in the third act, and dead beyond all question, reappears andgives the Hero the talisman (whatever it was). The Hero receives this with joy, commingled with surprize. “I thought you were dead!” he cries; “how is it that you are here now?” “Ah,” answers the traveller from beyond, “that—that is a secret that I must carry back with me into the tomb!”
It is only fair to record that Parisian melodrama was not often as rude and as crude as this in its subterfuges and its expedients. Indeed, it sometimes rose to a far higher level, as in the ‘Don César de Bazan’ of Dennery and in the ‘Lyons Mail’ of Moreau, Giraudin and Delacour. It even served as the model for Victor Hugo’s superb and sonorous ‘Hernani’ and ‘Ruy Blas,’ in which he flung the rich embroidered mantle of his ample lyricism over an arbitrary skeleton of deftly articulated intrigue, as artificial as it was ingenious.
In its earlier manifestations it was imitated in Great Britain, notably by Edward Fitzball, the first playmaker who perceived the theatrical possibilities of the legend of the ‘Flying Dutchman.’ Fitzball did not disdain to intimate that he considered himself the “Victor Hugo of England,”—which tempted Douglas Jerrold to remark that Fitzball was really only the “Victor No Go” of England. In its later manifestations the melodrama of the French supplied a pattern for the‘Silver King’ of Henry Arthur Jones, one of the most satisfactory specimens of this type of play. The ‘Silver King’ won the high approval of Matthew Arnold, who called it an honest melodrama, relying necessarily “for its main effect on an outer drama of sensational incidents” and none the less attaining the level of literature because the dialog and the sentiments were natural.
By the side of the British ‘Silver King’ of Henry Arthur Jones may be set the American ‘Secret Service’ of William Gillette, which also relies for its main effect on an outer drama of sensational incidents; and yet the sensational incidents are so fitly chosen and so artfully interwoven that they serve to set off the very human hero, an accusable character, a Union spy, with a divided duty before him. Toward the end of the play it becomes evident that this brave and resourceful man is doomed to death; and to this fatality he is himself resigned, wilfully throwing away a chance to escape and welcoming a speedy exit from his impossible position. Yet, once more, just before the curtain falls, the dramatist intervenes, like a god from the machine, sparing his hero’s life, and even permitting the spectators to foresee that hero and heroine will live happily ever after, thus consoling and reassuring the audience before eleven o’clock.
I make bold to say that this happy ending isnot inartistic and that it does not outrage our intellectual honesty, for the obvious reason that ‘Secret Service’ is not essentially a tragedy; it is a serio-comic story which never uplifts us to the serene atmosphere of the irresistible and the inevitable in which tragedy lives. It is too brisk in its humor, too lively in its representation of the externalities of life, to justify a fatal conclusion. A true tragedy must not only end sadly, it has also to begin sadly; it has to impress us subtly with a sense of impending disaster, inherent in its theme. What Stevenson said of the short-story, when that is as dramatic as it can be, is applicable to the drama itself. “Make another end to it?” he wrote in answer to a suggestion to that effect. “Ah, yes, but that is not the way I write; the whole tale is unified. To make another end, that is to make the beginning all wrong.... The body and end of a short-story is bone of the bone and blood of the blood of the beginning.” In other words the beginning of a melodrama never demands a tragic ending, and rarely even permits it.
Altho modern melodrama was developed in the totally unliterary minor playhouses of Paris more than a hundred years ago, the playgoers ofFrance had not had to wait until the early nineteenth century or even until the early eighteenth to be consoled and reassured by a tragedy with a happy ending. It was in the first half of the seventeenth century that Corneille took over from a Spanish original the first and fieriest of his tragedies, the ‘Cid,’—the story of which leads up to one of the strongest situations in all dramatic literature. The duty is suddenly laid upon a high-strung warrior to fight a duel to the death with the father of the woman whom he loves and who loves him. Seemingly the deadly stroke of his sword has severed the lovers forever, for how could a woman wed the red-handed slayer of her father? Yet it is with this prospective wedding, abruptly brought about, that Corneille ends his play; and he was so dextrous a dramatist, so abundant in emotion and so persuasive in eloquence, that he was able to carry his audience with him, even at the cost of their intellectual honesty.
Nor did the playgoers of England have to await the importation of French melodrama in the original package before they could enjoy reassurance and consolation after being harrowed and even slightly shocked. Indeed, the Londoners had this pleasure provided for them even earlier than it had been vouchsafed to the Parisians. All students of the history of our stageare familiar with the type of play known as tragi-comedy. Its name sufficiently describes it, a name apparently first used in the prolog to a play by Plautus and revived by the Italian theorists of the theater. Dramas of this species sprang up spontaneously in Italy, in Spain and in France; and we find the form flourishing in England in the second half of the sixteenth century, altho it cannot be said to have been more popular among the English than it was among the French. Shakspere’s somber ‘Measure for Measure’ is the most immediately obvious example; and at the performance of this play the spectators were harrowed, and even more than slightly shocked, by a succession of powerful situations, only to be at last reassured and consoled by a happy ending, mechanically and unconvincingly brought about.
In the course of time tragi-comedy modified its methods and became the dramatic-romance, of which Beaumont and Fletcher’s ‘Philaster’ may be taken as one characteristic specimen and Shakspere’s ‘Cymbeline’ as another. Perhaps it would be more exact to say that the dramatic-romance is only an insular sub-species of sentimental tragi-comedy. Most of the best known of the dramatic-romances of Beaumont and Fletcher (or of Fletcher and Massinger) conform to the definition of tragi-comedy, as ProfessorRistine has skilfully condensed this from a defence of the type made by Guarini, author of the ‘Pastor Fido’:
Tragi-comedy, far from being a discordant mixture of tragedy and comedy, is a thorough blend of such parts of each as can stand together with verisimilitude, with the result that the deaths of tragedy are reduced to the danger of death, and the whole in every respect a graduated mean between the austerity and the dignity of the one and the pleasantness and ease of the other.
Tragi-comedy, far from being a discordant mixture of tragedy and comedy, is a thorough blend of such parts of each as can stand together with verisimilitude, with the result that the deaths of tragedy are reduced to the danger of death, and the whole in every respect a graduated mean between the austerity and the dignity of the one and the pleasantness and ease of the other.
This Italian definition of Renascence tragi-comedy can be transferred to modern melodrama of the more literary kind,—the ‘Silver King,’ for example, and ‘Secret Service,’ in which we find the graduated mean between austere dignity and easy pleasantness. After quoting from Guarini, Professor Ristine gave his own analysis of the elements combined in English tragi-comedy:
Love of some sort is the motive force; intrigue is rife; the darkest villainy is contrasted with the noblest and most exalted virtue. In the course of an action ... in which the characters are enmeshed in a web of disastrous complications, reverse and surprise succeed each other with lightning rapidity.... But final disaster is ingeniously averted.... Wrongs are righted, reconciliation sets in, penitent villainy is forgiven, and the happy ending made complete.
Love of some sort is the motive force; intrigue is rife; the darkest villainy is contrasted with the noblest and most exalted virtue. In the course of an action ... in which the characters are enmeshed in a web of disastrous complications, reverse and surprise succeed each other with lightning rapidity.... But final disaster is ingeniously averted.... Wrongs are righted, reconciliation sets in, penitent villainy is forgiven, and the happy ending made complete.
In its turn this American description of English tragi-comedy is applicable also to French melodrama of the less literary kind,—the ‘Lyons Mail’ and the ‘Two Orphans.’
It is possible to find at least one tragedy with a happy ending amid the two score plays which alone have come down to us from all the hundreds acted in the Theater of Dionysus before the assembled citizens of Athens,—probably the most intelligent body of playgoers to which any dramatist has ever been privileged to appeal. The ‘Alcestis’ of Euripides is a beautiful play, grave, inspiring and moving; yet it has been a constant puzzle to the historians of Greek literature, who have never been quite able to declare what manner of tragic drama it is, since it has one character who is frankly humorous and since it has a happy ending,—the revivification of the pathetic heroine who had given her life to save her husband and who is brought back by Hercules, after a combat with Death.
After this desultory ramble through the history of the drama in other centuries and in other countries, we are in better case to consider the first of the three questions suggested by Mrs. Wharton’s assertion that we Americans are deficientin the intellectual honesty which is a recognized characteristic of the French. Is it really true that we like tragedies with happy endings? If it is true, we are no worse off than the English in the time of Shakspere, the French in the time of Corneille and in the time of Hugo, the Greeks in the time of Euripides. But is it true?
It might be urged in our defence that we do not in the least object to the death of the hero and the heroine (or of both together) in the music-drama; and it must be admitted that in serious opera a tragic ending is not only acceptable but is actually expected. It might be pointed out that the final death of the heroine has never in any way interfered with the immense popularity of a host of star-plays, ‘Adrienne Lecouvreur,’ the ‘Dame aux Camélias,’ ‘Froufrou,’ ‘Théodora’ and ‘La Tosca.’ It might be permissible to record that the death of ‘Cyrano de Bergerac,’ (a fatal termination not inherent in the theme of that heroic comedy and in fact almost inconsistent,) did not dampen the pleasure of the American playgoer.
These things must be taken for what they are worth; and perhaps they are not really pertinent to our immediate inquiry, since opera is a very special form of the dramatic art, making an appeal of its own within arbitrary limits, and since a star-play is relished by the majority largely asa vehicle for the exhibition of the histrionic versatility of the star herself or himself, a last dying speech and confession affording the performer an excellent opportunity for the display of his or her virtuosity.
We must go behind Mrs. Wharton’s rather too sweeping accusation and center attention on a single point. American playgoers of to-day enjoy and hugely enjoy seeing on the stage stories which are harrowing, which deal liberally with life and death, and which after all end happily, sending us home consoled and reassured. So have the playgoers of other lands in other times; and the real question is whether we refuse to accept the tragic end when this is ordained by all that has gone before, when it is a fate not to be escaped. In other words, have we the intellectual honesty which shall compel us to accept George Eliot’s stern declaration that “consequences are unpitying”?
Thus put, the question is not easy to answer.
For myself I am inclined to think that when we are at liberty to choose between the happy and the unhappy ending, when one or the other is not imposed upon us by the action or by the atmosphere of the story set before us, we tend to prefer a conclusion which dismisses the hero and the heroine to a vague future felicity. But I am inclined also to believe that we do notshrink from the bitterest end if this has been foreordained from the beginning of time, if the author has been skilful enough and sincere enough to make us feel that his tragedy could not possibly have any other than a tragic termination.
In the ‘Second Mrs. Tanqueray’ the fatal ending is obligatory; it grows out of the nature of things; and the play has established itself. In ‘Mid-Channel’ there is no way out of the difficulty in which the heroine has entangled herself, except through the door of death. On the other hand, the plot of the ‘Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith’ cried aloud for a tragic ending, which the author refused to grant; and perhaps this is one reason why the piece has never taken hold on our playgoing public despite its indisputable qualities.
As it happens there have been seen on our stage in the first and second decades of the twentieth century four plays, unequal in sincerity and different in texture, but all of them variants of the same theme. Two are British, ‘Iris’ by Sir Arthur Pinero, and the ‘Fugitive’ by John Galsworthy; and two are American, the ‘Easiest Way’ by Eugene Walter and ‘Déclassée’ by Miss Zoe Akins. In each of them we are invited to follow the career of a young woman who loves luxury and who moves through life along the line of least resistance, until at last theground gives way beneath her feet. ‘Iris’ was the first of the four; it is the most delicately artistic and the most veracious. The ‘Easiest Way’ is perhaps the most vigorous. The ‘Fugitive’ is pallid and futile. ‘Déclassée’ is the least important of them all, as it is the least original. The two last-named pieces are unsatisfactory when we bring them to the bar of our intellectual honesty; and yet they both end with the death of the heroine, an arbitrary exit out of the moral entanglements in which she has involved herself. The two earlier plays have a more truly tragic ending, since they leave the heroine alive yet bereft of all that makes life worth living. No one of the four sent the spectators home reassured and consoled.
There might seem to be no necessity to put the third question now that the second has been discussed. And yet there may be profit in asking ourselves whether there are any special reasons why the American playgoing public might be expected to lapse from intellectual honesty and to compel our playwrights to violate the logic of their stories and to stultify themselves to achieve a puerile fairy-tale conclusion. Mrs. Wharton put forward one such reason, when sheasserted that our attitude in the theater is characteristic “of the whole American attitude toward life.” Here she is drawing an indictment against the American people and not merely against American playgoers.
To enter upon that broad problem would take me too far afield, too far, that is, from the theater itself, within the walls of which this inquiry must be confined. Are there any conditions in the American theater which make against the sincere and searching portrayal of life? I must confess that I think there is at least one such condition, the possible consequences of which are disquieting. This is the change in the composition of the audiences in our American theaters from what they were half-a-century ago—which is as far back as my own memories as a playgoer extend. I think that the average age of the spectators is now considerably less than it was when I was a play-struck boy; and I think also that the proportion of women is distinctly larger than it was in those distant days. If I am right in believing that this change has taken place, and also in anticipating that it is likely to be even more evident in the years that are to come, then there will probably be brought about a slow but certain modification of those implicit desires and of those explicit prejudices of his expected audience, which the playwright has always takeninto account even if he is often more or less unconscious that he is so doing.
Water cannot rise higher than its source; and the dramatist cannot soar too loftily above the level of the audience he has to allure. It is always the duty of the dramatist to find the common denominator of the throng. He need not write down to his public, but he must write broad; or otherwise he will fail to arouse and retain the interest of the spectators. If he shrinks from the toil of so presenting his vision of our common humanity that it shall be immediately attractive to his audiences then he is no dramatist, whatever else he may be; and he had better turn at once to sonneteering and to storywriting, arts wherein he can appeal to a chosen few. The theater is for the many-headed multitude; and the theater-poet cannot but accept the condition that confronts him.
If American audiences are younger than they were, then they are not so rich in knowledge of the world, not so ripe in judgment. If they are also more largely feminine, then they will be different from what they have been in the days when the drama attained to its superbest expression. The tragedies of Sophocles were represented in the Theater of Dionysus before the citizens of Athens; and the spectators were all men of more or less maturity. The tragediesand the comedies of Shakspere were written for the Globe Theater in London, in which the spectators were predominantly male. The comedies of Molière were acted in the Palais Royal Theater in Paris, before audiences which included comparatively few women. It is significant that women were admitted to the orchestra seats of the Théâtre Français only about forty years ago; and that Sarcey, a very shrewd observer of things theatrical, was moved more than once to record his regret that thishad helped tobring about the more rapid dispersal of the group of old playgoers, experts in playwriting and in acting, who were wont to follow the performances of the Comédie-Française assiduously and devotedly.
And it was almost a hundred years ago that Goethe anticipated Sarcey’s complaint. “What business have young girls in the theater?” he asked. “They do not belong to it; ... the theater is only for men and women, who know something of human affairs.”
But “things are what they are, and will be what they will be.”
(1919)