VII
Whatever inconsistencies may be detected now and again by a minute analysis of motive,—and after all these inconsistencies are slight and infrequent,—the characters that Ibsen has brought upon the stage have one unfailing characteristic: they are intensely interesting. They are not mere puppets moved here and there by the visible hand of the playwright; they are human beings, alive in every nerve, and obeying their own volition. The breath of life has been breathed into them; they may be foolish or morbid, headstrong or perverse, illogical or fanatic, none the less are they real, vital, actual. And this is the reason why actors are ever eager for the chance to act them. Where Scribe and Sardou and the manufacturers of the "well-made play" give the performers only effective parts, to be presented as skilfully as might be, Ibsen has proffered to them genuine characters to get inside of as best they could,—characters not easy to personate, indeed, often obscure and dangerous. Because of this danger and this doubt, they are all the more tempting to the true artist, who is ever on the alert for a tussle with technical difficulty. The men and women who people Ibsen's plays are never what the slang of the stage terms "straight parts"; they are never the traditional "leading man" and "leading woman"; in a sense they are all of them, male and female, young and old, "character parts," complex, illusive, alluring. They are not readily mastered, for they keep on revealing fresh possibilities the more searchingly they are studied; and this is why the reward is rich, when the actor has been able at last to get inside of them.
Even when he has done this, when he has put himself into "the skin of the personage" (to borrow the illuminating French phrase), the actor cannot be certain that his personation is finally right. No one of Ibsen's characters is presented in profile only, imposing its sole interpretation on the baffled performer. Every one of them is rounded and various, like a man in real life, to be seen from contradictory angles and to be approached from all sides. No one is a silhouette; and every one is a chameleon, changing color even while we are looking at it. Every part is a problem to the actors who undertake it, a problem with many a solution, no one of which can be proved, however assured the performer may be that he has hit on the right one. To the actor the privilege of an artistic adventure like this comes but rarely; and it is prized accordingly. Not often does he find under his hand material at once fresh and solid. He feels the fascination of this chance and he lays hold of it firmly, even tho he has a haunting fear of failure, absent from the easy, daily exercise of his professional skill. He relishes the opportunity to speak Ibsen's wonderful prose, that dialog which seems to the mere reader direct and nervous, and which impresses the actual auditor in the theater as incomparable in its veracity, its vivacity, its flexibility, its subtlety, and its certainty; but which only the actor who delivers it on the stage can praise adequately, since he alone is aware of its full force, of its surcharged meaning, and of its carrying power.
To act Ibsen is worth while, so the actors themselves think; and it is significant that it is to the actors, rather than to the regular managers, that we owe the most of our chances for seeing his plays presented on the stage. That Ibsen offers opportunities not provided in the pieces of any other modern dramatist is the belief of many an actor and of many an actress longing for a chance to rival the great performers who have gone before, leaving only their fame behind them. So it is that the 'Pillars of Society' is set up in our theaters now and again, and that 'Ghosts' may revisit our stage from time to time. So it is that the ambitious leading lady, abandoning the Camille and the Pauline of a generation or two ago, yearns now to show what she can do as Nora and as Hedda Gabler, unable to resist the temptation to try her luck also in impersonating these women of the North, essentially feminine even when they are fatally enigmatic.
VIII
The actors and actresses do get their chance now and again to appear in an Ibsen part, in spite of the reluctance of the regular managers to risk the production of Ibsen's plays in their theaters. This reluctance is not caused solely by an inability to appreciate his real merits; it is magnified by a healthy distrust for the cranks and the freaks who are most vociferous and least intelligent in praise of him,—for Ibsen, like Browning and like Maeterlinck, has suffered severely from the fulsome adulation of the short-haired women and the long-haired men, who are ever exuberantly uncritical. Perhaps the unwillingness of managers to venture their money in staging these Scandinavian social dramas is due also to a well-founded belief that "there is no money in them,"—that they are not likely to attract American playgoers in remunerative multitudes,—that they cannot be forced to the long runs to which the theater is now unfortunately committed.
Ibsen is like all other great dramatists in that he has intended his plays to be performed in the theater, by actors, before an audience; and, therefore has he adjusted them most adroitly to the picture-frame stage of the modern playhouse and filled them with characters amply rewarding the utmost endeavor of ambitious players. But the influence of the actor and of the circumstances of the theater is only upon the outward form of the play, while the influence of the spectator is upon its content solely. This influence has been potent upon every true dramatist, who has had ever in mind the special audience for whom his plays were intended, and at whom they were aimed. Sophocles composed his stately tragedies for the cultivated citizens of Athens, seated on the curving hillside under the shadow of the Acropolis; Shakspere prepared his histories and his comedies to hold the interest of the turbulent throng which stood about the jutting platform in the yard of the half-roofed Tudor theater; and Molière, even when he was writing to order for Louis XIV, never forgot the likings of the fun-loving burghers of Paris. No one of the three ever lookt beyond his own time or wasted a thought upon any other than the contemporary audience in his own city. Even tho their plays have proved to possess universality and permanence, they were in the beginning frankly local in their appeal.
But who are the spectators that Ibsen saw in his mind's eye when he imagined his plays bodied forth in the actual theater? He was not a citizen of a great state, as Molière was, and Shakspere; he did not dwell in a great city, exercising his art in close contact with the abounding life of a metropolis. He was a native of a small country, not even independent, and without large towns; he was born in a petty village and there he grew to manhood; in his maturity he wandered abroad and for years abode in exile, an alien, if not a recluse.
Are not the memories of youth abiding? and can any one of us free himself wholly from the bonds of early environment? The audience that Ibsen has ever had in view when he was making his most searching tragedies of modern life, the audience he has always wisht to move and to rouse, morally and intellectually, was such a group of spectators as might gather in the tiny and isolated village where he had spent his boyhood. Ibsen himself may not have been conscious that this was the audience he was seeking to stimulate; indeed, he may never have suspected it; and he might even deny it in good faith. But the fact remains, nevertheless, obvious and indisputable; and it helps to explain not a little that might otherwise remain obscure. It enables us to suggest a reason for a certain closeness of atmosphere sometimes felt in this play or that, and for a certain lack of largeness of outlook, in spite of the depth of insight. It makes us more tolerant toward a certain narrowness, which is often provincial and sometimes almost parochial.
It is not merely that Ibsen's social dramas are all of them intensely Norwegian, peopled solely with natives and having the fiords ever present in the background. It is not merely that he has shrunk from all international contrasts, and from all cosmopolitanism;—and here, no doubt, he has chosen the better part. It is not that he himself has not shaken off the pettiness of the little village where he received his first impression of his fellow-man. It is that altho he has seen the world outside and altho he is thereby enabled to measure the smallness of what he left behind, he cannot forget the inhabitants of Grimstad, individually and collectively. They supply the constituent elements of the audience which he is ever addressing, consciously or unconsciously. It is their limited horizon he wants to enlarge; and it is their lethargy he is longing to shatter.
IX
Perhaps there is no injustice in holding that much of Ibsen's arrogant and aggressive individualism and self-assertion, is the result of his own youthful solitude and struggle in the little village where the druggist's ambitious apprentice who wrote poetry and who had opinions of his own, soon managed to get on a war-footing with most of his neighbors,—as the late Professor Boyesen recorded from his own observations at the time, explaining that "a small town, where everybody is interested in what his neighbor has for dinner, is invariably more intolerant of dissent, more tyrannical toward social rebels, than a city of metropolitan rank." And even when Ibsen removed to Christiania he did not get out of this atmosphere of pettiness. As Professor Boyesen remarked, again from personal experience, "One hundred thousand village souls do not make a city." And the same compatriot of the dramatist, in dealing with the 'Enemy of the People' declared that "each trait bears the indelible mark of a small society, which stunts and cripples the sons of men, making them crabbed and crooked, when in a richer soil many of them might have shot boldly up in the sunlight."
Norway seems to be a land of villages, with a people not yet enlarged and awakened from stifling bigotry. Its social organization still presses painfully on those who wish to do their own thinking; and half a century ago in Ibsen's impressionable youth, the pressure must have been tragic. There is no call for wonder that he should have reacted violently against these fettering restrictions. There is no need to speculate on the reasons why he has failed to feel the extraordinary delicacy of the problem of the equilibrium between the opposing forces, which have a cramping socialism on the one side and an exuberant anarchy on the other. His choice was swift and he exerted his strength unhesitatingly against the chains which had clanked on his limbs in his early manhood. He knew only too well and by bitter experience the hardness of the crust that encased the Norwegian community and he felt the need of blows still harder to break thru and let in a little light. And this is why he is so emphatic in his individualism; this is why he is so fiercely violent in his assertion of the right of every man to own himself and to obey his own will, contemptuous of the social bond which alone holds civilization together.
It is Boyesen, a fellow Norwegian and an ardent admirer of Ibsen's, who has most clearly stated Ibsen's position: "He seems to be in ill humor with humanity and the plan of creation in general (if, indeed, he recognized such a plan), and he devotes himself, with ruthless satisfaction, to showing what a paltry contemptible lot men are, and how aimless, futile, and irrational their existence is on this earth, with its chaotic strivings and bewildered endeavors." ... "Furthermore, he utterly undervalues what we call civilization, which he regards primarily as an ignominious compromise—a surrender and curtailment of our natural rights and liberties, in return for a paltry security for life and limb." ... "He has apparently no appreciation of the tremendous struggle, the immense suffering, the deluge of blood and tears, it has cost to redeem the world from that predatory liberty which he admires, and to build up gradually the safeguards of organized society which he so detests."
In other words, Ibsen is not what is called "an advanced thinker"; he is really the most extreme of reactionaries, because he wants to go back to the beginnings of civilization. He is willing to give up the chronometer and to return to the sun-dial.
It would be unfair, of course, to sustain what is here alleged by quoting speeches from his plays, since Ibsen is too completely a dramatist to use any one character merely as a mask thru the mouth of which he might voice his private opinion. But when we consider the whole group of the social dramas and when we disengage the philosophy underlying them and sustaining them, we may venture to deduce the private opinion of the author. And in his letters to Georg Brandes we find this opinion fearlessly exprest: "I have really never had any strong feeling of solidarity; in fact, I have only in a way accepted it as a traditional tenet of faith,—and if one had the courage to leave it out of consideration altogether, one would perhaps be rid of the worst ballast with which one's personality is burdened." In another letter he wrote: "I may as well say the one thing I love in freedom is the struggle for its attainment. Its possession does not greatly concern me."
As Brandes points out, this attitude of Ibsen's is partly a reminiscence of romanticism; and in Ibsen as in Balzac the romanticist is forever wrestling with the realist. There is in Ibsen's writing an echo of that note of revolt, which rings thruout all the romanticist clamor, a tocsin of anarchy, and which justified the remark of Thiers that the Romanticists of 1830 were the forerunners of the Communists of 1871. And the Communists were only putting into practise what Ibsen was preaching almost simultaneously in his correspondence with Brandes: "The state must be abolished.... Undermine the idea of the commonwealth; set up spontaneity and spiritual kinship as the sole determining points in a union; and there will be attained the beginning of a freedom that is of some value." This sounds very like a return to Rousseau, almost a century after the futility of Rousseau's theories had been made manifest to all.
There is no denying, however, that Ibsen's doctrine is most appealing to a dramatist, whose business it is to set on the stage the strivings of the individual. Perhaps the drama would be the one surviving art if anarchy should come,—just as it would be certain to die slowly if socialism should succeed. The self-subordination of socialism would be as deadening as the self-surrender of fatalism to that will-power which must ever be the mainspring of a play to move the multitude. Altho it cannot formulate what it feels, the multitude has no relish for extreme measures; it may be making up its mind to turn toward either anarchy or socialism; but it means to move very slowly and it refuses to be hurried.
Here is a reason why Ibsen's plays are never likely to be broadly popular in the theater. The anarchistic element they contain helps to make them more dramatic, no doubt, more vigorous and more vital; but it is dimly perceived by the plain people who form the crowd of theater-goers, and by them it is dumbly resented. The excessive individualism which gives to Ibsen's best plays their tensity of interest is also the cause of their inacceptability to the multitude shrinking from any surrender of the hard won conquests of civilization. There is significance in the fact that Ibsen's plays have totally failed to establish themselves permanently in France, where the esthetic appreciation of his mastery of his art has been keenest and most competent, but where also the value of the social compact is most clearly understood. Not only in France, but in all other countries governed by the Latin tradition of solidarity, Ibsen's doctrine was certain to be unwelcome—even if it might be wholesome. Outside of Scandinavia it is only in Germany that Ibsen has succeeded in winning acceptance as a popular dramatist, perhaps because it was there that the doctrine of individualism was most needed. In Great Britain, and in the United States, where the individual has his rights, altho with no relaxing of the social bond, the performances of Ibsen's plays have been surprisingly infrequent when we consider their delightful craftsmanship, their indisputable power and their unfailing interest.
X
After all, it is not as a philosopher that Ibsen demands attention, but as a dramatist, as a playwright who is also a poet. If it is his weakness that his theory of life is overstrenuous, one-sided and out of date, it is his strength that he has opinions of his own and that he is willing to face the problems that insistently confront us to-day. As Mr. Archer has put it tersely and conclusively, Ibsen is "not pessimist or optimist or primarily a moralist, tho he keeps thinking about morals. He is simply a dramatist, looking with piercing eyes at the world of men and women, and translating into poetry this episode and that from the inexhaustible pageant."
A moralist he must be, if his work is to have any far-reaching significance, any final value. Morality is not something a poet can put into his work deliberately; but it can be left out only at the poet's peril, since few works of art are likely to be worth while if they are ethically empty. Ibsen's inspiration is too rich for it to be void of moral purport, even tho the playwright may not have intended all that we read into his work. There is a moral in 'Ghosts' as there is in 'Œdipus,' in the 'Scarlet Letter,' and in 'Anna Karénina,'—a moral, austere and dispassionate. It contains much that is unpleasant and even painful, but—to quote Arnold's praise of 'Anna Karénina'—nothing "of a nature to trouble the senses or to please those who wish their senses troubled." Ibsen's play, like the tragedy of Sophocles, like the severe stories of Hawthorne and Tolstoi, is not spoon-meat for babes; it is not for young men and maidens; but as Goethe asked nearly a century ago, "What business have our young girls at the theater? They do not belong to it;—they belong to the convent; and the theater is only for men and women who know something of human affairs." It is for these men and these women that Ibsen, with stern self-control, has written his social dramas, that he may force them to look into matters they are willing enough to ignore and to front the facts of life, ugly as these may be.
More than once in the course of this essay has there been occasion to evoke the names of Sophocles, of Shakspere and of Molière, the supreme masters of the dramatic art. To venture upon any comparison with them is to measure Ibsen by the loftiest standard. In his technic alone can he withstand the comparison, for he is the latest and he has profited by all the experiments and achievements of the strong men who came before him; in mere craftsmanship he is beyond question the foremost of all the moderns. It must be said also that in his intellectual honesty, in his respect for the immitigable laws of character, he rarely falls short. He lacks the clear serenity of Sophocles, the depth and the breadth of the myriad-minded Shakspere, the humorous toleration of Molière. The great Greek, the great Englishman, and the great Frenchman, are, all of them, liberal and sane and wholesome, whatever their subject-matter may be; and here it is that the Scandinavian is felt to be inferior. There are few of his social dramas in which we cannot find more than a hint of abnormal eccentricity or of morbid perversity; and this is the reason why the most of them fail to attain the dignity of true and lofty tragedy.
Perhaps it is with Wagner that Ibsen should be grouped, rather than with Sophocles and Shakspere and Molière. They are the two master-spirits of the stage in the nineteenth century. They are both of them consummate craftsmen, having assimilated every profitable device of their predecessors and having made themselves chiefs, each in his own art. And yet with all their witchery and all their power, we may doubt whether their work will resist the criticism of the twentieth century, because there is at the core of it an exaggeration or disproportion which the future is likely to perceive more and more clearly in the receding perspective of time.
(1905.)
THE ART OF THE STAGE-MANAGER
As civilization becomes more and more complex, we can find more frequent instances of "specialization of function," as the scientists term it. Only a few years ago, engineering succeeded in getting itself recognized as one of the professions; and it has already split up into half a dozen branches, at least, and there are now not only civil engineers and mechanical engineers and mining engineers, but also electrical engineers—and even chemical engineers. The invention of the steel-frame building has brought into existence a special class of artizans known as "housesmiths," a word probably unintelligible to our British cousins. Sir Leslie Stephen, in his delightful 'Studies of a Biographer,' has a scholarly yet playful paper on the 'Evolution of the Editor'; and Mr. W.J. Henderson, in his interesting book on the 'Orchestra and Orchestral Music,' traces the development of the conductor—the musician whose duties are as important as they are novel, and who is not now expected to be able himself to play upon any particular instrument.
"It is impossible to tell when the conductor made his appearance in music," Mr. Henderson asserts. "At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the conductor was at first nothing more than a leader; he was one of the performers whom the rest followed." An inscription in verse on an engraving of a conductor, published in Nuremberg, early in the eighteenth century, declares that "silent myself, I cause the music I control." In the nineteenth century, the conductor had won full recognition as an instrumentalist of a new type, who, without any instrument of his own, played on the whole body of musicians under his command. Of late, he has become so prominent in the eyes of the public, and his personality has been so insisted upon, that there is danger often lest he may distract attention from the music to himself. As Mr. Henderson records calmly: "We have beheld the curious spectacle of people going, to hear not Beethoven or Wagner, but Nikisch or Seidl."
What the conductor is to a performance of orchestral music, the stage-manager is to the performance of a play in the theater. (And in this paper the term "stage-manager" is to be understood as meaning the "producer" of a drama.) His art is as special, as necessary, as novel, and as difficult; and, if it is as yet scarcely recognized and rarely appreciated, this is due in part to the conditions under which his work must be done. The conductor is not only visible but conspicuous; the audience is likely to watch him rather than any one of the musicians he is guiding; whereas the stage-manager must ever be invisible, and is, indeed, most successful if his existence is unsuspected. When the conductor brings a concert to a close, he bows to the applause and then lays down his wand; and all is over. The stage-manager has wrought his wonders, and his labors are practically concluded, before the curtain rises on the first act at the first performance. In this respect, he is like the trainer of a college-crew, who cannot go into the boat with them when the pistol is fired for the race to begin. But everybody is now well aware what it is that the trainer has done for the crew; his portrait appears with theirs in the newspapers and he shares in their glory.
Only the expert ever thinks of giving due meed of praise to the hidden stage-manager who is responsible for a more arduous victory in the theater than any ever won on the river. His face is not familiar on the posters; and his name is not in large type on the playbill. All the credit he gets is contained in the single line which records that the play has been "produced" by him. Yet he has been responsible for the entire performance—for the acting and for the costumes, for the scenery and for the properties, for the lighting and for the incidental music; not so much indeed for any one of these things as for the harmony of the whole. If there has been a perfect coördination of all these elements, if there have been no jarring notes, if the spirit of the play has been brought out completely, if everything has gone right from beginning to end, if the whole performance has moved so smoothly as to seem spontaneous, the stage-manager deserves the highest praise for what he has wrought unseen. Yet his sole reward is his own consciousness of work well done, and the chance appreciation of the scanty few who may be competent to estimate the worth of his achievement.
The "producer" of the play, the person who assumes the responsibility for the performance in all its details, may be the dramatist himself; M. Sardou and Mr. Belasco have shown surpassing skill in bringing forth all that lies latent in the inert manuscripts of their plays. He may be the actual manager of the theater; the late Augustin Daly was a stage-manager of striking individuality. He may be the actor of the chief part in the play; Mr. Willard and Mr. Sothern have revealed another aspect of their talent by the artistic manner in which they have staged both new plays and old. He may be at once author and actor and manager, like Mr. Gillette, a past-master of this new and difficult art. Or he may be simply a stage-manager and nothing else, a craftsman of a new calling, not author, not actor, yet able on occasion to give hints to playwright and to player. Here, again, is another resemblance to the conductor, who can impose his own will on the orchestra, altho he may not be able to play one of the instruments in it, and altho he may be quite incapable of composing.
That the task of the stage-manager is more difficult than that of the conductor is due to the fact that the composer has prescribed exactly what share each instrument shall take, the conductor having this full score in his possession; whereas the stage-manager receives from the author only the spoken words of the play, with but summary indications as to the gestures, the movements, the scenery, and so forth. He has not a full score, but only a sequence of themes incompletely orchestrated, and with the missing passages to be supplied at his own discretion. And as the richness of the harmony depends largely upon his ability to amplify properly the hints of the author, the stage-manager is, in fact, almost a collaborator of the playwright; he is forced into a more intimate relation with the dramatist than that which the conductor bears toward the composer. To a collaboration of this sort, ordinary playgoers never give a thought, content to take the performance as they see it, and ready often to credit the actor, not only with the inventions of the stage-manager, but even with those of the author also. They accept the play as it is presented to them, just as tho it had happened, with no suspicion of the forethought by which the performance has been made possible.
George Henry Lewes, in his stimulating essays, 'On Actors and the Art of Acting,' has told us that audiences are inclined to overestimate the genius of an actor and to underestimate his trained skill. We are prone to accept the fallacy of the "inspiration of the moment," and to give little credit to the careful preliminary rehearsing which is at once a humble substitute for inspiration, should this fail to appear, and its solid support, should it happen to present itself. For the thoroness of this preliminary preparation the stage-manager is responsible; and it is at rehearsal that he seeks to bring about the perfect "team-play" which is absolutely necessary,—the subordination of individual display to the larger advantage of the whole performance. The reason why the so-called "all-star revivals" of old plays are often sadly disappointing, is to be found in the absence of this team-play, in the exaggerated self-assertion of the individual actors, whom the stage-manager has been unable to control. Few members of an "all-star" company can be relied upon for the "sacrifice-hits," which the best team-play may now and then demand. And this is why a wise dramatist, if he were put to the choice, would prefer to have his piece performed by a company of average merit directed by a stage-manager of skill and authority, than by far better actors under lax and inefficient stage-management. One of the varied qualifications needed by stage-managers is the insight to estimate the personality of the actors, so that the play may profit by what each of them can do best, while the exuberance of an aggressive individuality is restrained from interfering with the due proportion of the performance.
While it is the duty of the stage-manager to handle all the elements in his control so as to make the performance as perfect as possible, his most important function is to direct the actors themselves, to see that they read their lines intelligently, with just the emphasis requisite at that given moment in the unfolding of the story of the play, and to advise them as to the gestures and movements which should tell this story almost as plainly as the words themselves. Some actors scarcely ever need a hint at rehearsal, reading their speeches naturally the first time and finding for themselves the appropriate byplay,—"business," as technical phrase terms it. Other actors, in no wise inferior in power of personation, need to be guided and stimulated by advice; even if not inventive themselves, they may be swift to take a hint and to wring from it all its effectiveness. Rachel, probably the greatest actress of the last century, felt herself lost without the tuition of Samson, a comic actor himself, but a teacher of force, originality and taste. Mrs. Siddons, again, owed some of her most striking effects to her brother, John Philip Kemble. It was Kemble who devised for her, and for himself, the new reading and the business now traditional in the trial scene of 'Henry VIII,' where the Queen at bay lashes Wolsey with the lines beginning:
Lord Cardinal, to you I speak—
Kemble suggested that the Queen should pause, after the first two words, as tho making up her mind what she should say. While she hesitates, the other cardinal, Campeius, thinking himself addrest by a lady, steps forward. The Queen, seeing this, waves him aside with an imperious gesture, which sweeps forward to Wolsey, at whom she hurls the next words,
To you I speak!
and then the rest of the fiery speech pours forth like scorching lava.
If the older plays, either tragedies or comedies, seem to us sometimes richer in detail than the more modern pieces, we shall do well to remember that these earlier dramas have profited by the accretions of business and of unexpected readings due to the unceasing endeavor of several generations of actors and of stage-managers. The plays of Shakspere that are most frequently performed, the comedies of Molière also, have accumulated a mass of traditions, of one kind or another, some of these being of hoary antiquity. In 'Hamlet,' for example, in the graveyard scene, it was the habit of the Second Grave-digger to take off his coat before beginning his work, and then to proceed to divest himself of an indeterminate number of waistcoats, to the increasing disgust of the First Grave-digger. Oddly enough, this same business is traditional in the 'Précieuses Ridicules,' the less important of the two comedians going through exactly the same mirth-provoking disrobing. Probably the business was elaborated for some medieval farce long before Molière was born, or Shakspere either. Of late, it has been omitted from 'Hamlet,' but it is still religiously preserved in the performances of the 'Précieuses' by the Comédie-Française, the company of actors that Molière founded.
Many another tradition is also cherished at the Français, the origin of which is lost in the mists of antiquity. In the 'Malade Imaginaire,' for example, Thomas Diafoirius is always provided with an absurdly high child's chair, apparently the property of Louison; and in the 'Avare,' after the miser has blown out a candle twice and finally pocketed it, the custom is for his servant to sneak behind him and to light the candle once again as it sticks out of his coat. Regnier, the cultivated and brilliant comedian (whose pupil M. Coquelin was in his 'prentice-days), published a text of Molière's most powerful play, which he called 'Le Tartuffe des Comédiens' because he had recorded in it all this traditional business. M. Coquelin has told me that he hopes to be able some day to edit other of Molière's masterpieces on this principle. And it is greatly to be wisht that some stage-manager of scholarly tastes would provide us with a record of the customary effects to be obtained in the performance of most of Shakspere's plays, as these have been accumulated in the theater itself. Perhaps this book might be able to tell us why it is that tradition warrants the same rather trivial practical joke in the performance of the 'Merchant of Venice,' and in the performance of 'Romeo and Juliet,'—the business of embarrassing a servant by repeated bows of mock courtesy and protracted farewell.
In preparing for a revival of one of the masterpieces of Shakspere, the accomplished stage-manager of to-day considers all these traditions inherited from the past, discarding some of them and selecting those which appear to him worthy of preservation, and which will accommodate themselves to the general scheme of the whole performance as he has conceived it in his mind's eye. He makes such arrangements as he deems necessary, devising wholly new effects to fit the more modern methods of presentation, which are less purely rhetorical than they were in the eighteenth century, and more pictorial. When Herr Barnay impersonated Mark Antony in the Meiningen revival of 'Julius Cæsar,' the novel stage-management gave freshness to the Forum scene and greatly increased its force. As Mark Antony ascended the rostrum, after Brutus had asked the mob to listen to him, the crowd was too highly wrought up over the speech they had just heard to pay heed to the next speaker. They gathered in knots praising Brutus; and the murmur of their chatter was all the greeting that Mark Antony received. Herr Barnay stood for a moment silent and then he began his appeal for their attention: "Friends—Romans—countrymen—!" but scarcely a citizen listened to him.
"Lend me your ears," he begged, "I come to bury Cæsar not to praise him!"
And then the nearest group or two grudgingly turned toward the rostrum; and to these the adroit speaker addrest himself, coaxing, cajoling, flattering,—making frequent pauses, in every one of which the audience could see another band of citizens drawn under the spell of his eloquence. When he had them all attentive, he played on their feelings and aroused their enthusiasm; then, after a swift and piercing glance around to see if they were ripe for it, he brought forth Cæsar's will; and after that Brutus was forgotten, and Mark Antony held the mob in the hollow of his hand to sway it at his will. It matters little whether the credit of this most ingenious rearrangement was due to Herr Barnay himself, or to the unseen stage-manager; the spectator could not but recognize that a great play had received new illumination by it, and that a certain richness of texture had been disclosed which had hitherto lain concealed and unsuspected.
Sometimes, it must be confest, this craving after pictorial novelty overreaches itself. Perhaps the allowable limit was not overstept when Sir Henry Irving gave Ophelia a fan of peacock-feathers, in order that Hamlet might play with it and have it in his hand when he has to say, "Ay, a very peacock!"
But it may be doubted whether the boundary of the justifiable was not crost, when the same stage-manager had the duel-scene of 'Romeo and Juliet' take place in an open square, with its raised fountain not far from the porch of the cathedral, so that Mercutio might be able to point right and left when he declared that his wound would serve, altho it was not "as deep as a well or as wide as a church-door." Pretty as this is and clever, it seems a little petty. To suggest that Mercutio was in need of visible promptings for his fancy, is to diminish the quick-wittedness of Shakspere's wittiest character.
Yet, either of these instances will serve to show the searching thoroness with which the stage-manager seeks to project the whole performance in all its minor details, having combined in advance the gestures of the several actors, the movements of each in relation to those of the others, the properties they make use of, and the scenery in the midst of which they play their parts. Altho the scenery, the properties and the costumes are designed by different artists, it is the duty of the stage-manager to control them all, to see that they are harmonious with each other, and that they are subdued to the atmosphere of the "production" as a whole. He subordinates now one and now another, that he may attain the more fitting contrast. Mr. Bronson Howard was one of the authors of 'Peter Stuyvesant, Governor of New Amsterdam,' and to his skilful direction the "production" of the play was committed. The first act took place in a Dutch garden ablaze with autumn sunshine; and, therefore, all the costumes seen in that act were grays and greens and drabs of a proper Dutch sobriety. The second act presented the New-Year's reception at night in the Governor's house, and then the costumes were rich and varied, so that they might stand out against the somber oak of the spacious hall.
To the first rehearsal of a play, new or old, the stage-manager sometimes comes with all the salient details of the future performance visualized in advance, knowing just where every character ought to place himself at every moment of the action, and having decided where every piece of furniture shall stand, and how the actors will avail themselves of its assistance. One accomplished stage-manager of my acquaintance, an actor himself, works out with a set of chess-men the intricate problem of moving his characters naturally about the stage. Another, a playwright this one, has a toy theater in which to manœuver the personages of the play into exactly the most effective positions. In one of M. Sardou's pieces, the manuscript of which I once had occasion to study, the chairs stand at the beginning of the first act in very different positions from those in which they are required to be at the end of the act; and the manuscript contained full directions indicating just when and exactly how one or another of the characters should seem accidentally to push a chair into the needed position.
Since modern science has revealed the influence of environment on character, and since modern fiction, following the example set by Balzac, has brought out the significance of the background before which an individual lives, moves and has his being, the stage-manager has a more difficult duty than ever before. He has to see to it that the scenery and all the fittings of the set are congruous, and that they are significant, not merely of the place itself, but of the people also. The late John Clayton showed me the model for the scene of the first act of 'Margery's Lovers,' remarking with a smile of satisfaction that, when the curtain should go up, and before a word had been uttered, everybody in the house would know that the story was laid in Southern France. When the late James A. Herne brought out a play in which husband and wife took opposite sides on the slavery question, the curiously stiff and old-fashioned furniture used in the first act seemed to strike the key-note of the drama; the spectators could not but feel that those who lived amid such surroundings were precisely the persons who would behave in that way.
The stage-manager is encouraged to try for these pictorial effects, because the stage is now withdrawn behind a picture-frame in which the curtain rises and falls. It is no longer thrust out into the midst of the spectators, as it was in Shakspere's time; nor does it now project beyond the line of the curtain, curving out alongside the stage-boxes, as it did until the third quarter of the nineteenth century. It is now separated from the audience by the straight row of footlights, within the lower border of the frame; and the electric light which reaches every corner of the stage, has put it into the power of the stage-manager to modify his illumination at will, and to be confident that no gesture will be lost no matter how he may arrange his groups against his background. He can darken the whole stage, slowly or suddenly, as he sees fit. Much of the intense effect attained by Sir Henry Irving in the trial-scene of the 'Bells' was due to the very adroit handling of the single ray of light that illumined the haunted burgomaster, while the persons who peopled his fatal dream were left in the shadow, indistinct and doubtful. Perhaps the most moving moment in Mrs. Fiske's production of Paul Heyse's 'Mary of Magdala' was after night had fallen, and when the betrayer knocked at the door of Caiaphas, who came forth with a lantern and cast its rays full on the contorted face of the villain,—that face being the sole object visible on the darkened stage, as the High Priest hissed forth the single word, "Judas!"
The expert playwright of every period when the drama has flourished abundantly, has always adjusted the structure of his play to conform to the conditions of the theater of his own time; and the more adroit of the dramatists of to-day have been swift to perceive the necessity for a change of method, since the thrust-out platform has been succeeded by the stage behind the picture-frame. They are relinquishing the rhetorical devices which were proper enough on the platform-stage, and which now seem out of place on the picture-stage. They find their profit in accepting as a principle the old saying that "actions speak louder than words." They are abandoning the confidential soliloquy, for example, which was quite in keeping with the position of an actor in close proximity to the spectators,—in the midst of them, in fact,—and which strikes us as artificial and unnatural now that the actor is behind the mystic line of the curtain. They are giving up the explanatory "aside,"—lines spoken directly to the audience, and supposed to be unheard by the other characters on the stage.
In Mr. Henry Arthur Jones's artfully articulated play, 'Mrs. Dane's Defence,' a most ingenious specimen of story-telling on the stage, the harassed heroine, left alone at a crucial moment, did not express her emotion in a soliloquy, as she would have done even fifty years ago. She revealed her agitation solely by the sudden change of her expression and by her feverish movements, which not only betrayed her anxiety, but were really more eloquent than any mere words were likely to be. Even more remarkable examples of the skill with which significant action may be substituted for speech, can be found in 'Secret Service'; and Mr. Gillette has explained that, in the performance of his own plays, he is "in the habit of resorting largely to the effects of natural pauses, intervals of silence,—moments when few words are spoken and much mental struggle is supposed to take place," finding these methods "especially effective at critical junctures." Perhaps no other modern dramatist relies so frankly upon sheer pantomime as Mr. Gillette does; and, certainly, no other has ever made a more skilful use of it. But the tendency can be observed in all our later playwrights, and it will surely increase as the possibilities of the picture-stage come to be better understood.
What the stage-manager is forever striving to attain, in addition to these salient effects, is variety of impression. He seeks to achieve a harmony of tone and to create an intangible atmosphere, in which the spirit of the play shall be revealed. To secure this, he often calls in the aid of music. When Sir Henry Irving produced 'Much Ado about Nothing,' the note of joyous comedy that echoed and reëchoed thruout the performance, was sustained by sparkling rhythms, old English dance-tunes, most of them, that frolicked gaily thru the evening. In Mr. Belasco's production of the 'Darling of the Gods,' the accompanying music was almost incessant, but so subdued, so artfully modulated, so delicately adjusted to the action, that perhaps a majority of the audience was wholly unconscious of the three Japanese themes which had been insisted upon again and again. To evoke the atmosphere of Japan as soon as possible, Mr. Belasco also had a special curtain designed for the play, which co-operated with the exotic music to bring about a feeling of vague remoteness and of brooding mystery.
But all these effects, audible or visible, may be resented as mere stage-tricks, unless they really belong where they are put, unless they are intimately related to the main theme of the play, and unless they are really helpful in evoking and sustaining the current of sympathy. They are excrescences if they exist for their own sake only; they are still worse if they interfere with this current of sympathy, if they distract attention to themselves. The stage-manager must ever be on his guard against the danger of sacrificing the major to the minor, and of letting some little effect of slight value in itself interfere with the true interest of the play as a whole. At the first performance of Mr. Bronson Howard's 'Shenandoah,' the opening act of which ends with the firing of the shot on Sumter, there was a wide window at the back of the set, so that the spectators could see the curving flight of the bomb and its final explosion above the doomed fort. This scenic marvel had cost time and money to devise; but it was never visible after the first performance, because it drew attention to itself, as a mechanical effect, and so took off the minds of the audience from the Northern lover and the Southern girl, the Southern lover and the Northern girl, whose loves were suddenly sundered by the bursting of that fatal shell.
At the second performance, the spectators did not see the shot, they only heard the dread report; and they were free to let their sympathy go forth to the young couples. Here, once more, as so often in the art of the stage, suggestion was far more potent than any attempt to exhibit the visible object. The truth of this axiom was shown in the third act of the same play, during its earlier performances, when the playwright with the aid of a scant dozen soldiers was able to suggest all the turmoil and all the hazards of a battle only a little removed. At later performances, the author allowed the attempt to be made actually to represent certain phases of a retreat, with horse, foot and artillery on the stage all at once; and altho the stage-management was excellent in every way, perhaps the total effect was less than when the far larger possibilities of a great battle had been merely suggested to the spectators, their own imaginations evoking the possibilities of war more completely than any stage-manager could set it before them.
So in the 'Tosca' of M. Sardou, the torture of the hero, if we were to see it, might be received with incredulity, but we are far more likely to accept it as real when we perceive it only thru the sufferings of the heroine at the sight of it. So again, in the 'Darling of the Gods,' the destruction of the little band of loyal Samurai is far more effectively conveyed to us by the faint voices which call and answer once and again in the Red Bamboo Forest, than it would be by any actual presentation of combat and carnage. So, in 'L'Aiglon,' the specters on the battle-field of Wagram are much more impressive, if they are merely imagined by the poor little prince, and if there is no vain attempt to realize them concretely. So, in 'Macbeth,' there is a loss of interest if the ghost of Banquo struts in upon the banquet. Our modern incredulity doubts the existence of returning spirits, altho it is willing enough to accept the reality of Macbeth's belief in them; but when the play was originally produced, the superstitious groundlings would have felt themselves cheated of an alluring spectacle if the sheeted ghost had not stalked out on the stage to shake his gory locks.
In the spacious days of Elizabeth, the half-roofed theaters were only a little less medieval than the pageants of the mysteries had been; and the task of the stage-manager must have been very simple indeed. There was no scenery, and the performance took place by daylight, so that all the producer of a new play had to do was to arrange such elementary business as was possible on a platform encumbered with an indefinite number of spectators. Like all stage-managers, then and now, he had of course to direct the actors themselves; and Hamlet's speech to the Players gives us good reason to believe that Shakspere must have been an excellent trainer, however modest may have been his own native gifts as an actor. Molière, like Shakspere in so many ways, was like him in being author and actor and manager; and in the 'Impromptu de Versailles' he has left us a most instructive record of his own methods of rehearsing his own company.
But, altho the playhouse in which Molière performed was roofed and lighted, and altho he had some scenery, yet there were spectators sitting on his stage as on Shakspere's, and the conditions were those of the platform and not of the picture. Oddly enough, the most pictorial of all the theaters that have preceded our own time is the theater of the Athenians. Few spectacles can ever have excelled in beauty an outdoor performance in the theater of Dionysius, when the richly-appareled chorus circled into the orchestra, to the sound of music, in the spring sunshine, with the breeze from the Bay of Salamis blowing back their floating draperies, that could not but fall into lines of unexpected delight and ineffable grace. Stage-management, which was necessarily neglected by the great Elizabethans, owing to the rudeness of their playhouses, was studied as an art by the great Greeks and held by them in high esteem. The dramatic poet was himself the producer, training the three actors, arranging the evolutions of the chorus, and accepting full responsibility for the perfection of the complete work of art. Silent himself, he caused the music he controlled.