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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Inquiries and Opinions, by Brander Matthews
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Inquiries and Opinions
+
+Author: Brander Matthews
+
+Release Date: September 25, 2005 [EBook #16746]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INQUIRIES AND OPINIONS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Bill Tozier, Barbara Tozier, Janet Blenkinship
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+https://www.pgdp.net
+
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+
+
+
+  INQUIRIES AND OPINIONS
+
+
+
+
+
+  Copyright, 1907, by
+  BRANDER MATTHEWS
+
+  _Published September, 1907_
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  TO MY FRIEND AND FELLOW CRAFTSMAN
+  HENRY ARTHUR JONES
+
+
+
+
+
+        CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                         PAGE
+
+     I _Literature in the New Century_                     1
+
+    II _The Supreme Leaders_                              27
+
+   III _An Apology for Technic_                           49
+
+    IV _Old Friends with New Faces_                       73
+
+     V _Invention and Imagination_                        95
+
+    VI _Poe and the Detective-story_                     111
+
+   VII _Mark Twain_                                      137
+
+  VIII _A Note on Maupassant_                            167
+
+    IX _The Modern Novel and the Modern Play_            179
+
+     X _The Literary Merit of our Latter-day Drama_      205
+
+    XI _Ibsen the Playwright_                            227
+
+   XII _The Art of the Stage-manager_                    281
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERATURE IN THE NEW CENTURY
+
+[This paper was read on September 24th, 1904, in the section of
+Belles-lettres of the International Congress of the Arts and Sciences,
+held at St. Louis.]
+
+
+There is no disguising the difficulty of any attempt to survey the whole
+field of literature as it is disclosed before us now at the opening of a
+new century; and there is no denying the danger of any effort to declare
+the outlook in the actual present and the prospect in the immediate
+future. How is it possible to project our vision, to foresee whither the
+current is bearing us, to anticipate the rocks ahead and the shallows
+whereon our bark may be beached?
+
+But one reflection is as obvious as it is helpful. The problems of
+literature are not often merely I literary; and, in so far as literature
+is an honest attempt to express life,--as it always has been at the
+moments of highest achievement,--the problems of literature must have an
+intimate relation to the problems which confront us insistently in life.
+If we turn from the disputations of the schools and look out on the
+world, we may discover forces at work in society which are exerting also
+a potent influence upon the future of literature.
+
+Now that the century in which we were born and bred is receding swiftly
+into the past, we can perceive in the perspective more clearly than ever
+before its larger movements and its main endeavor. We are at last
+beginning to be able to estimate the heritage it has left us, and to see
+for ourselves what our portion is, what our possessions are, and what
+our obligations. While it is for us to make the twentieth century, no
+doubt, we need to remember that it was the nineteenth century which made
+us; and we do not know ourselves if we fail to understand the years in
+which we were molded to the work that lies before us. It is for us to
+single out the salient characteristics of the nineteenth century. It is
+for us to seize the significance of the striking advance in scientific
+method, for example, and of the wide-spread acceptance of the scientific
+attitude. It is for us, again, to recognize the meaning of that
+extension of the democratic movement, which is the most obvious
+characteristic of the past sixscore years. It is for us, once more, to
+weigh the importance of the intensifying of national spirit and of the
+sharpening of racial pride. And, finally, it is for us to take account
+also of the growth of what must be called "cosmopolitanism," that
+breaking down of the hostile barriers keeping one people apart from the
+others, ignorant of them, and often contemptuous.
+
+Here, then, are four legacies from the nineteenth century to the
+twentieth:--first, the scientific spirit; second, the spread of
+democracy; third, the assertion of nationality; and, fourth, that
+stepping across the confines of language and race, for which we have no
+more accurate name than "cosmopolitanism."
+
+
+I
+
+"The scientific spirit," so an acute American critic defined it recently
+in an essay on Carlyle,--who was devoid of it and detested it,--"the
+scientific spirit signifies poise between hypothesis and verification,
+between statement and proof, between appearance and reality. It is
+inspired by the impulse of investigation, tempered with distrust and
+edged with curiosity. It is at once avid of certainty and skeptical of
+seeming. It is enthusiastically patient, nobly literal, candid,
+tolerant, hospitable." This is the statement of a man of letters, who
+had found in science "a tonic force" stimulating to all the arts.
+
+By the side of this, it may be well to set also the statement of a man
+of science. In his address delivered in St. Louis in December, 1903, the
+President of the American Association for the Advancement of
+Science,--who is also the president of one of the foremost of American
+universities,--declared that "the fundamental characteristic of the
+scientific method is honesty.... The sole object is to learn the truth
+and to be guided by the truth. Absolute accuracy, absolute fidelity,
+absolute honesty are the prime conditions of scientific progress." And
+then Dr. Remsen went on to make the significant assertion that "the
+constant use of the scientific method must in the end leave its impress
+upon him who uses it. A life spent in accord with scientific teaching
+would be of a high order. It would practically conform to the teachings
+of the highest type of religion."
+
+This "use of the scientific method" is as remote as may be from that
+barren adoption of scientific phrases and that sterile application of
+scientific formulas, which may be dismissed as an aspect of "science
+falsely so called." It is of deeper import also than any mere
+utilization by art of the discoveries of science, however helpful this
+may be. The painter has been aided by science to perceive more precisely
+the effect of the vibrations of light and to analize more sharply the
+successive stages of animal movement; and the poet also has found his
+profit in the wider knowledge brought to us by later investigations.
+Longfellow, for example, drew upon astronomy for the figure with which
+he once made plain his moral:
+
+  Were a star quenched on high,
+    For ages would its light,
+  Still travelling downward from the sky,
+    Shine on our mortal sight.
+
+  So, when a great man dies,
+    For years beyond our ken
+  The light he leaves behind him lies
+    Upon the paths of men.
+
+Wordsworth, a hundred years ago, warmly welcomed "the remotest
+discoveries of the chemist, the botanist and mineralogist," as "proper
+objects of the poet's art," declaring that "if the time should ever come
+when what is now called 'science,' thus familiarized to men, shall be
+ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the poet will
+lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the
+being thus produced as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of
+man."
+
+Again, the "use of the scientific method" is not equivalent to the
+application in the arts of scientific theories, altho here once more the
+man of letters is free to take these for his own and to bend them to his
+purpose. Ibsen has found in the doctrine of heredity a modern analog of
+the ancient Greek idea of fate; and altho he may not "see life steadily
+and see it whole," he has been enabled to invest his somber 'Ghosts'
+with not a little of the inerrable inevitability which we feel to be so
+appalling in the master work of Sophocles. Criticism, no less than
+creation, has been stimulated by scientific hypothesis; and for one
+thing, the conception of literary history has been wholly transformed
+since the theory of evolution was declared. To M. Brunetière we owe the
+application of this doctrine to the development of the drama in his own
+language. He has shown us most convincingly how the several literary
+forms,--the lyric, the oration, the epic, with its illegitimate
+descendant, the modern novel in prose,--may cross-fertilize each other
+from time to time, and also how the casual hybrids that result are ever
+struggling to revert each to its own species.
+
+Science is thus seen to be stimulating to art; but the "use of the
+scientific method" would seem to be more than stimulation only. It leads
+the practitioners of the several arts to set up an ideal of
+disinterestedness, inspired by a lofty curiosity, which shall scorn
+nothing as insignificant, and which is ever eager after knowledge
+ascertained for its own sake. As it abhors the abnormal and the
+freakish, the superficial and the extravagant, it helps the creative
+artist to strive for a more classic directness and simplicity; and it
+guides the critic toward passionless proportion and moderation. Altho it
+tends toward intellectual freedom, it forces us always to recognize the
+reign of law. It establishes the strength of the social bond, and
+thereby, for example, it aids us to see that, altho romance is ever
+young and ever true, what is known as "neo-romanticism," with its
+reckless assertion of individual whim, is anti-social, and therefore
+probably immoral.
+
+The "use of the scientific method" will surely strengthen the conscience
+of the novelist and of the dramatist; and it will train them to a
+sterner veracity in dealing with human character. It will inhibit that
+pitiful tendency toward a falsification of the facts of life, which
+asserts the reform of a character in the twinkling of an eye just before
+the final fall of the curtain. It will lead to a renunciation of the
+feeble and summary psychology which permits a man of indurated habits of
+weakness or of wickedness to transform himself by a single and sudden
+effort of will. And, on the other hand, it may tempt certain students of
+life, subtler than their fellow-craftsmen and more inquisitive, to dwell
+unduly on the mere machinery of human motive and to aim not at a rich
+portrayal of the actions of men and women, but at an arid analysis of
+the mechanism of their impulses. More than one novelist of the twentieth
+century has already yielded to this tendency. No doubt, this is only the
+negative defect accompanying a positive quality,--yet it indicates an
+imperfect appreciation of the artist's duty. "In every art," so Taine
+reminded us, "it is necessary to linger long over the true in order to
+attain the beautiful. The eye, fixing itself on an object, begins by
+noting details with an excess of precision and fulness; it is only
+later, when the inventory is complete, that the mind, master of its
+wealth, rises higher, in order to take or to neglect what suits it."
+
+The attitude of the literary critic will be modified by the constant use
+of the scientific method, quite as much as the attitude of the literary
+creator. He will seek to relate a work of art, whether it is an epic or
+a tragedy, a novel or a play, to its environment, weighing all the
+circumstances of its creation. He will strive to estimate it as it is,
+of course, but also as a contribution to the evolution of its species
+made by a given people at a given period. He will endeavor to keep
+himself free from lip-service and from ancestor-worship, holding himself
+derelict to his duty if he should fail to admit frankly that in every
+masterpiece of the past, however transcendent its merits, there must
+needs be much that is temporary admixt with more that is
+permanent,--many things which pleased its author's countrymen in his own
+time and which do not appeal to us, even tho we can perceive also what
+is eternal and universal, even tho we read into every masterpiece much
+that the author's contemporaries had not our eyes to perceive. All the
+works of Shakspere and of Molière are not of equal value,--and even the
+finest of them is not impeccable; and a literary critic who has a
+scientific sincerity will not gloss over the minor defects, whatever his
+desire to concentrate attention on the nobler qualities by which
+Shakspere and Molière achieved their mighty fame. Indeed, the scientific
+spirit will make it plain that an unwavering admiration for all the
+works of a great writer, unequal as these must be of necessity, is proof
+in itself of an obvious inability to perceive wherein lies his real
+greatness.
+
+Whatever the service the scientific spirit is likely to render in the
+future, we need to be on our guard against the obsession of science
+itself. There is danger that an exclusive devotion to science may starve
+out all interest in the arts, to the impoverishment of the soul. Already
+there are examples of men who hold science to be all-sufficient and who
+insist that it has superseded art. Already is it necessary to recall
+Lowell's setting off of "art, whose concern is with the ideal and the
+potential, from science which is limited by the actual and the
+positive." Science bids us go so far and no farther, despite the fact
+that man longs to peer beyond the confines. Vistas closed to science are
+opened for us by art; and science fails us if we ask too much; for it
+can provide no satisfactory explanation of the enigmas of existence.
+Above all, it tempts us to a hard and fast acceptance of its own
+formulas, an acceptance as deadening to progress as it is false to the
+scientific spirit itself. "History warns us," so Huxley declared, "that
+it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies, and to end
+as superstitions."
+
+
+II
+
+The growth of the scientific spirit is not more evident in the
+nineteenth century than the spread of the democratic movement. Democracy
+in its inner essence means not only the slow broadening down of
+government until it rests upon the assured foundation of the people as a
+whole, it signifies also the final disappearance of the feudal
+organization, of the system of caste, of the privileges which are not
+founded on justice, of the belief in any superiority conferred by the
+accident of birth. It starts with the assertion of the equality of all
+men before the law; and it ends with the right of every man to do his
+own thinking. Accepting the dignity of human nature, the democratic
+spirit, in its finer manifestations, is free from intolerance and rich
+in sympathy, rejoicing to learn how the other half lives. It is
+increasingly interested in human personality, in spite of the fact that
+humanity no longer bulks as big in the universe as it did before
+scientific discovery shattered the ancient assumption that the world had
+been made for man alone.
+
+Perhaps, indeed, it is the perception of our own insignificance which is
+making us cling together more closely and seek to understand each other
+at least, even if we must ever fail to grasp the full import of the
+cosmic scheme. Whatever the reason, there is no gainsaying the growth of
+fellow-feeling and of a curiosity founded on friendly interest,--both of
+which are revealed far more abundantly in our later literatures than in
+the earlier classics. In the austere masterpieces of the Greek drama,
+for example, we may discover a lack of this warmth of sympathy; and we
+can not but suspect a certain aloofness, which is akin to callousness.
+The cultivated citizens of Athens were supported by slave-labor; but
+their great dramatic poets cast little light on the life of the slaves
+or on the sad conditions of their servitude. Something of this narrow
+chilliness is to be detected also in the literature of the court of
+Louis XIV; Corneille and Racine prefer to ignore not only the peasant
+but also the burgher; and it is partly because Molière's outlook on life
+is broader that the master of comedy appears to us now so much greater
+than his tragic contemporaries. Even of late the Latin races have seemed
+perhaps a little less susceptible to this appeal than the Teutonic or
+the Slavonic, and the impassive contempt of Flaubert and of Maupassant
+toward the creatures of their imaginative observation is more
+characteristic of the French attitude than the genial compassion of
+Daudet. In Hawthorne and in George Eliot there is no aristocratic
+remoteness; and Turgenieff and Tolstoi are innocent of haughty
+condescension. Everywhere now in the new century can we perceive the
+working of the democratic spirit, making literature more clear-sighted,
+more tolerant, more pitying.
+
+In his uplifting discussion of democracy, Lowell sought to encourage the
+timid souls who dreaded the danger that it might "reduce all mankind to
+a dead level of mediocrity" and that it might "lessen the respect due to
+eminence whether in station, virtue, or genius;" and he explained that,
+in fact, democracy meant a career open to talent, an opportunity equal
+to all, and therefore in reality a larger likelihood that genius would
+be set free. Here in America we have discovered by more than a century
+of experience that democracy levels up and not down; and that it is not
+jealous of a commanding personality even in public life, revealing a
+swift shrewdness of its own in gaging character, and showing both
+respect and regard for the independent leaders strong enough to
+withstand what may seem at the moment to be the popular will.
+
+Nor is democracy hostile to original genius, or slow to recognize it.
+The people as a whole may throw careless and liberal rewards to the
+jesters and to the sycophants who are seeking its favor, as their
+forerunners sought to gain the ear of the monarch of old, but the
+authors of substantial popularity are never those who abase themselves
+or who scheme to cajole. At the beginning of the twentieth century there
+were only two writers whose new books appeared simultaneously in half a
+dozen different tongues; and what man has ever been so foolish as to
+call Ibsen and Tolstoi flatterers of humanity? The sturdy independence
+of these masters, their sincerity, their obstinate reiteration each of
+his own message,--these are main reasons for the esteem in which they
+are held. And in our own language, the two writers of widest renown are
+Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling, known wherever English is spoken, in
+every remote corner of the seven seas, one an American of the Americans
+and the other the spokesman of the British Empire. They are not only
+conscientious craftsmen, each in his own way, but moralists also and
+even preachers; and they go forward in the path they have marked out,
+each for himself, with no swervings aside to curry favor or to avoid
+unpopularity.
+
+The fear has been exprest freely that the position of literature is made
+more precarious by the recent immense increase in the reading public,
+deficient in standards of taste and anxious to be amused. It is in the
+hope of hitting the fancy of this motley body that there is now a
+tumultuous multiplication of books of every degree of merit; and amid
+all this din there must be redoubled difficulty of choice. Yet the
+selection gets itself made somehow, and not unsatisfactorily. Unworthy
+books may have vogue for a while, and even adulation; but their fame is
+fleeting. The books which the last generation transmitted to us were,
+after all, the books best worth our consideration; and we may be
+confident that the books we shall pass along to the next generation will
+be as wisely selected. Out of the wasteful overproduction only those
+works emerge which have in them something that the world will not
+willingly let die.
+
+Those books that survive are always chosen from out the books that have
+been popular, and never from those that failed to catch the ear of their
+contemporaries. The poet who scorns the men of his own time and who
+retires into an ivory tower to inlay rimes for the sole enjoyment of his
+fellow mandarins, the poet who writes for posterity, will wait in vain
+for his audience. Never has posterity reversed the unfavorable verdict
+of an artist's own century. As Cicero said--and Cicero was both an
+aristocrat and an artist in letters,--"given time and opportunity, the
+recognition of the many is as necessary a test of excellence in an
+artist as that of the few." Verse, however exquisite, is almost
+valueless if its appeal is merely technical or merely academic, if it
+pleases only the sophisticated palate of the dilettant, if it fails to
+touch the heart of the plain people. That which vauntingly styles itself
+the _écriture artiste_ must reap its reward promptly in praise from the
+_précieuses ridicules_ of the hour. It may please those who pretend to
+culture without possessing even education; but this aristocratic
+affectation has no roots and it is doomed to wither swiftly, as one fad
+is ever fading away before another, as Asianism, euphuism, and Gongorism
+have withered in the past.
+
+Fictitious reputations may be inflated for a little space; but all the
+while the public is slowly making up its mind; and the judgment of the
+main body is as trustworthy as it is enduring. 'Robinson Crusoe' and
+'Pilgrim's Progress' hold their own generation after generation, altho
+the cultivated class did not discover their merits until long after the
+plain people had taken them to heart. Cervantes and Shakspere were
+widely popular from the start; and appreciative criticism limped lamely
+after the approval of the mob. Whatever blunders in belauding, the plain
+people may make now and again, in time they come unfailingly to a hearty
+appreciation of work that is honest, genuine, and broad in its appeal;
+and when once they have laid hold of the real thing they hold fast with
+abiding loyalty.
+
+
+III
+
+As significant as the spread of democracy in the nineteenth century is
+the success with which the abstract idea of nationality has exprest
+itself in concrete form. Within less than twoscore years Italy has
+ceased to be only a geographical expression; and Germany has given
+itself boundaries more sharply defined than those claimed for the
+fatherland by the martial lyric of a century ago. Hungary has asserted
+itself against the Austrians, and Norway against the Swedes; and each by
+the stiffening of racial pride has insisted on the recognition of its
+national integrity. This is but the accomplishment of an ideal toward
+which the western world has been tending since it emerged from the Dark
+Ages into the Renascence and since it began to suspect that the Holy
+Roman Empire was only the empty shadow of a disestablished realm. In the
+long centuries the heptarchy in England had been followed by a monarchy
+with London for its capital; and in like manner the seven kingdoms of
+Spain had been united under monarchs who dwelt in Madrid. Normandy and
+Gascony, Burgundy and Provence had been incorporated finally with the
+France of which the chief city was Paris.
+
+Latin had been the tongue of every man who was entitled to claim benefit
+of clergy; but slowly the modern languages compacted themselves out of
+the warring dialects when race after race came to a consciousness of its
+unity and when the speech of a capital was set up at last as the
+standard to which all were expected to conform. In Latin Dante discust
+the vulgar tongue, tho he wrote the 'Divine Comedy' in his provincial
+Tuscan; yet Petrarch, who came after, was afraid that his poems in
+Italian were, by that fact, fated to be transitory. Chaucer made choice
+of the dialect of London, performing for it the service Dante had
+rendered to the speech of the Florentines; yet Bacon and Newton went
+back to Latin as the language still common to men of science. Milton
+practised his pen in Latin verse, but never hesitated to compose his
+epic in English. Latin served Descartes and Spinoza, men of science
+again; and it was not until the nineteenth century that the invading
+vernaculars finally ousted the language of the learned which had once
+been in universal use. And even now Latin is retained by the church
+which still styles itself Catholic.
+
+It was as fortunate as it was necessary that the single language of the
+learned should give way before the vulgar tongues, the speech of the
+people, each in its own region best fitted to phrase the feelings and
+the aspirations of races dissimilar in their characteristics and in
+their ideals. No one tongue could voice the opposite desires of the
+northern peoples and of the southern; and we see the several modern
+languages revealing by their structure as well as by their vocabularies
+the essential qualities of the races that fashioned them, each for its
+own use. Indeed, these racial characteristics are so distinct and so
+evident to us now that we fancy we can detect them even tho they are
+disguised in the language of Rome; and we find significance in the fact
+that Seneca, the grandiloquent rhetorician, was by birth a Spaniard, and
+that Petronius, the robust realist, was probably born in what is now
+France.
+
+The segregation of nationality has been accompanied by an increasing
+interest in the several states out of which the nation has made itself,
+and sometimes even by an effort to raise the dialects of these provinces
+up to the literary standard of the national language. In this there is
+no disloyalty to the national ideal,--rather is it to be taken as a
+tribute to the nation, since it seeks to call attention again to the
+several strands twined in the single bond. In literature this tendency
+is reflected in a wider liking for local color and in an intenser relish
+for the flavor of the soil. We find Verga painting the violent passions
+of the Sicilians, and Reuter depicting the calmer joys of the
+Platt-Deutsch. We see Maupassant etching the canny and cautious Normans,
+while Daudet brushed in broadly the expansive exuberance of the
+Provençals. We delight alike in the Wessex-folk of Mr. Hardy and in the
+humorous Scots of Mr. Barrie. We extend an equal welcome to the patient
+figures of New England spinsterhood as drawn by Miss Jewett and Miss
+Wilkins, and to the virile Westerners set boldly on their feet by Mr.
+Wister and Mr. Garland.
+
+What we wish to have explored for us are not only the nooks and corners
+of our own nation; those of other races appeal also to our sympathetic
+curiosity. These inquiries help us to understand the larger peoples, of
+whom the smaller communities are constituent elements. They serve to
+sharpen our insight into the differences which divide one race from
+another; and the contrast of Daudet and Maupassant on the one hand with
+Mark Twain and Kipling on the other brings out the width of the gap that
+yawns between the Latins (with their solidarity of the family and their
+reliance on the social instinct) and the Teutons (with their energetic
+independence and their aggressive individuality). With increase of
+knowledge there is less likelihood of mutual misunderstandings; and here
+literature performs a most useful service to the cause of civilization.
+As Tennyson once said: "It is the authors, more than the diplomats, who
+make nations love one another." Fortunately, no high tariff can keep out
+the masterpieces of foreign literature which freely cross the frontier,
+bearing messages of good-will and broadening our understanding of our
+fellowmen.
+
+
+IV
+
+The deeper interest in the expression of national qualities and in the
+representation of provincial peculiarities is to-day accompanied by an
+increasing cosmopolitanism which seems to be casting down the barriers
+of race and of language. More than fourscore years ago, Goethe said that
+even then national literature was "rather an unmeaning term" as "the
+epoch of world-literature was at hand." With all his wisdom Goethe
+failed to perceive that cosmopolitanism is a sorry thing when it is not
+the final expression of patriotism. An artist without a country and with
+no roots in the soil of his nativity is not likely to bring forth flower
+and fruit. As an American critic aptly put it, "a true cosmopolitan is
+at home,--even in his own country." A Russian novelist set forth the
+same thought; and it was the wisest character in Turgenieff's 'Dimitri
+Roudine' who asserted that the great misfortune of the hero was his
+ignorance of his native land:--"Russia can get along without any of us,
+but we cannot do without Russia. Wo betide him who does not understand
+her, and still more him who really forgets the manners and the ideas of
+his fatherland! Cosmopolitanism is an absurdity and a zero,--less than a
+zero; outside of nationality, there is no art, no truth, no life
+possible."
+
+Perhaps it may be feasible to attempt a reconciliation of Turgenieff and
+Goethe, by pointing out that the cosmopolitanism of this growing century
+is revealed mainly in a similarity of the external forms of literature,
+while it is the national spirit which supplies the essential inspiration
+that gives life. For example, it is a fact that the 'Demi-monde' of
+Dumas, the 'Pillars of Society' of Ibsen, the 'Magda' of Sudermann, the
+'Grand Galeoto' of Echegaray, the 'Second Mrs. Tanqueray' of Pinero, the
+'Gioconda' of d'Annunzio are all of them cast in the same dramatic mold;
+but it is also a fact that the metal of which each is made was smelted
+in the native land of its author. Similar as they are in structure, in
+their artistic formula, they are radically dissimilar in their essence,
+in the motives that move the characters and in their outlook on life;
+and this dissimilarity is due not alone to the individuality of the
+several authors,--it is to be credited chiefly to the nationality of
+each.
+
+Of course, international borrowings have always been profitable to the
+arts,--not merely the taking over of raw material, but the more
+stimulating absorption of methods and processes and even of artistic
+ideals. The Sicilian Gorgias had for a pupil the Attic Isocrates; and
+the style of the Athenian was imitated by the Roman Cicero, thus helping
+to sustain the standard of oratory in every modern language. The 'Matron
+of Ephesus' of Petronius was the great-grandmother of the 'Yvette' of
+Maupassant; and the dialogs of Herondas and of Theocritus serve as
+models for many a vignette of modern life. The 'Golden Ass' went before
+'Gil Blas' and made a path for him; and 'Gil Blas' pointed the way for
+'Huckleberry Finn.' It is easy to detect the influence of Richardson on
+Rousseau, of Rousseau on George Sand, of George Sand on Turgenieff, of
+Turgenieff on Mr. Henry James, of Mr. James on M. Paul Bourget, of M.
+Bourget on Signor d'Annunzio; and yet there is no denying that
+Richardson is radically English, that Turgenieff is thoroly Russian, and
+that d'Annunzio is unquestionably Italian.
+
+In like manner we may recognize the striking similarity--but only in so
+far as the external form is concerned--discoverable in those
+short-stories which are as abundant as they are important in every
+modern literature; and yet much of our delight in these brief studies
+from life is due to the pungency of their local flavor, whether they
+were written by Kjelland or by Sacher-Masoch, by Auerbach or by Daudet,
+by Barrie or by Bret Harte. "All can grow the flower now, for all have
+got the seed"; but the blossoms are rich with the strength of the soil
+in which each of them is rooted.
+
+This racial individuality is our immediate hope; it is our safeguard
+against mere craftsmanship, against dilettant dexterity, against
+cleverness for its own sake, against the danger that our cosmopolitanism
+may degenerate into Alexandrianism and that our century may come to be
+like the age of the Antonines, when a "cloud of critics, of compilers,
+of commentators darkened the face of learning," so Gibbon tells us, and
+"the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste." It
+is the spirit of nationality which will help to supply needful idealism.
+It will allow a man of letters to frequent the past without becoming
+archaic and to travel abroad without becoming exotic, because it will
+supply him always with a good reason for remaining a citizen of his own
+country.
+
+     (1904.)
+
+
+
+
+THE SUPREME LEADERS
+
+
+In the fading annals of French Romanticism it is recorded that at the
+first performance of an early play of the elder Dumas at the Odéon, a
+band of enthusiasts, as misguided as they were youthful, were so
+completely carried away that they formed a ring and danced in derision
+around a bust of Racine which adorned that theater, declaring
+boisterously that the elder dramatist was disgraced and disestablished:
+_'Enfoncé Racine!'_
+
+This puerile exploit took place not fourscore years ago, and already has
+this play of Dumas disappeared beneath the wave of oblivion, its very
+name being recalled only by special students of the history of the
+French stage, while the Comédie-Française continues, year in and year
+out, to act the best of Racine's tragedies, now nearly two centuries and
+a half since they were first performed.
+
+Again, in the records of the British theater of the eighteenth century,
+we find mention of a countryman of John Home, who attended the first
+performance of the reverend author's 'Douglas.' The play so worked upon
+the feelings of this perfervid Scot that he was forced to cry out
+triumphantly: "Whaur's your Wully Shakspere noo?"
+
+And yet this Scottish masterpiece failed to establish itself finally on
+the stage; and it has long since past out of men's memories, leaving
+behind it only a quotation or two and a speech for boys to spout. So in
+every age the disinterested observer can take note of the rise and fall
+of some unlucky author or artist, painter or poet, widely and loudly
+proclaimed as a genius, only to be soon forgotten, often in his own
+generation. He may have soared aloft for a brief moment with starry
+scintillations, like a rocket, only at last to come down like the stick,
+empty and unnoticed.
+
+The echoes of the old battle of the Ancients and Moderns have not died
+away, even yet; and there is never a time when some ardent disciple is
+not insisting that his immediate master must be admitted as one of the
+immortals, and when some shrill youth is not ready to make room for the
+new-comer by ousting any number of the consecrated chiefs of art. Now
+and again, of course, the claim is allowed; the late arrival is made
+welcome in the Pantheon; and there is a new planet on high. But most of
+those who are urged for this celestial promotion prove to be mere
+shooting-stars at best, vanishing into space before there is opportunity
+to examine their spectrum and to compare it with that of the older orbs
+which have made the sky glorious thru the long centuries.
+
+It is only by comparison with these fixt stars that we can measure the
+light of any new luminary which aspires to their lofty elevation. It is
+only by keeping our gaze full upon them that we may hope to come to an
+understanding of their immeasurable preëminence. Taine has told us that
+"there are four men in the world of art and of literature exalted above
+all others, and to such a degree as to seem to belong to another
+race--namely, Dante, Shakspere, Beethoven, and Michelangelo. No profound
+knowledge, no full possession of all the resources of art, no fertility
+of imagination, no originality of intellect, sufficed to secure them
+this position, for these they all had. These, moreover, are of secondary
+importance; that which elevated them to this rank is their soul."
+
+Here we have four great lights for us to steer by when we are
+storm-driven on the changing sea of contemporary opinion and
+contemporary prejudice; and by their aid we may hope to win safety in a
+harbor of refuge.
+
+Perhaps it is a praiseworthy striving for a permanent standard of value
+which accounts for the many attempts to draw up lists of the Hundred
+Best Books and of the Hundred Best Pictures. It may be admitted at once
+that these lists, however inadequate they must be, and however
+unsatisfactory in themselves, may have a humble utility of their own as
+a first aid to the ignorant. At least, they may serve to remind a man
+lost in a maze amid the clatter and the clutter of our own time, that
+after all this century of ours is the heir of the ages, and that it is
+for us to profit by the best that the past has bequeathed to us. Even
+the most expertly selected list could do little more than this.
+
+Nevertheless these attempts, after all, cannot fail to be more or less
+misleading, since the best books and the best pictures do not number
+exactly a hundred. Nor can there be any assured certainty in the
+selection, since no two of those most competent to make the choice would
+be likely to agree on more than half of the masterpieces they would
+include.
+
+The final and fatal defect in all these lists is that they seek to
+single out an arbitrary number of works of the highest distinction,
+instead of trying to find out the few men of supreme genius who were
+actually the makers of acknowledged masterpieces. It is of no
+consequence whether we hold that 'Hamlet' or 'Macbeth' is the most
+splendid example of Shakspere's surpassing endowment, or whether we
+consider the 'Fourth Symphony' or the 'Seventh' the completest
+expression of Beethoven's mastery of music. What it is of consequence
+for us to recognize and to grasp effectually is that Shakspere and
+Beethoven are two of the indisputable chiefs, each in his own sphere.
+What it imports us to realize is that there is in every art a little
+group of supreme leaders; they may be two or three only; they may be
+half a dozen, or, at the most, half a score; but they stand in the
+forefront, and their supremacy is inexpugnable for all time.
+
+Every one recognizes to-day that "certain poets like Dante and
+Shakspere, certain composers like Beethoven and Mozart, hold the
+foremost place in their art." So Taine insisted, adding that this
+foremost place is also "accorded to Goethe, among the writers of our
+century; to Rembrandt among the Dutch painters; to Titian among the
+Venetians." And then Taine asserted also that "three artists of the
+Italian renascence, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael, rise,
+by unanimous consent, far above all others."
+
+No doubt this list of supreme leaders in the arts is unduly scanted; but
+there is wisdom in Taine's parsimony of praise. The great names he has
+here selected for signal eulogy are those whose appeal is universal and
+whose fame far transcends the boundaries of any single race.
+
+It may have been from Sainte-Beuve that Taine inherited his catholicity
+of taste and his elevation of judgment; and it was due to the influence
+of Sainte-Beuve also that Matthew Arnold attained to a breadth of vision
+denied to most other British critics. Arnold invited us to "conceive of
+the whole group of civilized nations as being, for intellectual and
+spiritual purposes, one great confederation whose members have a due
+knowledge both of the past out of which they all proceed, and of one
+another." He went on to suggest that for any artist or poet "to be
+recognized by the verdict of such a confederation as a master is indeed
+glory, a glory which it would be difficult to rate too highly. For what
+could be more beneficent, more salutary? The world is forwarded by
+having its attention fixt on the best things; and here is a tribunal,
+free from all suspicion of national and provincial partiality, putting a
+stamp on the best things and recommending them for general honor and
+acceptance." Then he added the shrewd suggestion that there would be
+direct advantage to each race in seeing which of its own great men had
+been promoted to the little group of supreme leaders, since "a nation is
+furthered by recognition of its real gifts and successes; it is
+encouraged to develop them further."
+
+Who, then, are the supreme leaders in the several departments of human
+endeavor? By common consent of mankind who are the supreme soldiers, the
+supreme painters, the supreme poets? To attempt to name them is as
+difficult as it is dangerous; but the effort itself may be profitable,
+even if the ultimate result is not wholly satisfactory. To undertake
+this is not to revive the puerile debate as to whether Washington or
+Napoleon was the greater man; rather it is a frank admission that both
+were preëminent, with the further inquiry as to those others who may
+have achieved a supremacy commensurate with theirs. To seek out these
+indisputable masters is not to imitate the vain desire of the pedagog to
+give marks to the several geniuses, and to grade the greatest of men as
+if they were school-boys. There is no pedantry in striving to ascertain
+the list of the lonely few whom the assembled nations are all willing
+now to greet as the assured masters of the several arts.
+
+The selection made by a single race or by a single century is not likely
+to be widely or permanently acceptable. Long years ago the Italians were
+wont to speak of the Four Poets, _quattro poete_, meaning thereby Dante,
+Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso. But this was a choice far too local and
+far too narrow. Of these four Italian poets perhaps only the severe
+Florentine has won his way outside of the boundaries of the language he
+did so much to ennoble,--altho it may be admitted that the gentle
+Petrarch had also for a century a wide influence on the lyrists of other
+tongues.
+
+Lowell had a more cosmopolitan outlook on literature, when he discust
+'The Five Indispensable Authors'--Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Shakspere,
+and Goethe. "Their universal and perennial application to our
+consciousness and our experience accounts for their permanence and
+insures their immortality." We may admit that all five of the authors
+designated by Lowell are truly indispensable, just as we must accept
+also the incomparable position of the four leaders in the several arts
+whom Taine set apart in lonely elevation. But both Taine's list and
+Lowell's we feel to be too brief. The French critic had ranged thru
+every realm of art to discover finally that the incontestable masters
+were four and four only. The American critic, altho he limited himself
+to the single art of literature, dealt with it at large, not
+distinguishing between the poets and the masters of prose.
+
+If we strike out of Lowell's list the single name of Cervantes, who was
+a poet only in a special and arbitrary sense, we shall have left the
+names of the four poets whose fame is world-wide--Homer, Dante,
+Shakspere, Goethe--the only poets whose supremacy is admitted thruout
+our modern civilization.
+
+To these Matthew Arnold insisted on adjoining a fifth, Milton; and we
+who speak the same tongue would gladly enroll the blind singer with the
+other four. Indeed, we might even hold Milton to be securer in this
+place than Goethe, who has not yet been a hundred years in his grave.
+But if we ask the verdict of "the whole group of civilized nations,"
+which Matthew Arnold himself impaneled as "free from all suspicion of
+national and provincial partiality," we are met with the doubt whether
+Milton has established himself among the races that inherit the Latin
+tradition as securely as Dante has been accepted by the peoples of
+Teutonic stock. However high our own appreciation of Milton may be, the
+cosmopolitan verdict might not include him among the supreme poets.
+Indeed, we may doubt whether Vergil might not have more votes than
+Milton, when the struck jury is polled.
+
+Here, perhaps, we may find our profit in applying a test suggested by
+Lowell--the test of imitability. "No poet of the first class has ever
+left a school, because his imagination is incommunicable," whereas "the
+secondary intellect seeks for excitement in expression, and stimulates
+itself into mannerism." The greater geniuses may have influenced those
+who came after them by their thoughts, by what they have contributed to
+the sum of human knowledge; but "they have not infected contemporaries
+or followers with mannerism." Then Lowell points out that "Dante,
+Shakspere, and Goethe, left no heirs either to the form or mode of their
+expression."
+
+It was in his lecture on Emerson that Matthew Arnold asked: "Who are the
+great men of letters?"--meaning thereby the masters of prose. "They are
+men like Cicero, Plato, Bacon, Pascal, Swift, Voltaire--writers with, in
+the first place, a genius and instinct for style, writers whose prose is
+by a kind of native necessity true and sound." The British critic added
+that: "It is a curious thing, that quality of style, which marks the
+great writer, the born man of letters. It resides in the whole tissue of
+his work, and of his work regarded as a composition for literary
+purposes." The six masters of prose whom Arnold chose have all of them
+this quality of style; and their prose is true and sound. Altho this
+list of six was selected by an Englishman, and altho it contains the
+names of two Englishmen, it would be acceptable, one may venture to
+believe, to the cosmopolitan tribunal, to the heirs of the Latin
+tradition and to the peoples of the Teutonic stock. It may lack the
+completeness and the finality of the limitation of the supreme poets to
+four; but it must be taken as a not unsuccessful attempt to select the
+supreme prose-writers.
+
+Arnold excluded Emerson from the class of "great men of letters" because
+the American philosopher had not the instinct for style, and because
+his prose was not always true and sound. Lowell, in a letter to a
+friend, protested against this, suggesting that the Oxford critic was
+like Renan in that he was apt to think "the _super_fine as good as the
+fine, or better even than that." Yet we may agree with the lecturer in
+holding that Emerson was rather to be ranked with Marcus Aurelius as
+"the friend of those who would live in the spirit," than to be classed
+with Cicero and with Swift, obviously inferior in elevation and in aim,
+but both of them born men of letters.
+
+In like manner we must strike out the name of Burke from among the great
+orators. A political philosopher he was of keenest insight and of
+unfailing eloquence; but he was a poor speaker, and he did not often
+rivet the attention of the audiences he addrest. This is why he cannot
+establish a claim to inclusion among the supreme orators. Perhaps such a
+claim could be made good before the cosmopolitan tribunal by two
+speakers only, both belonging far back in the history of our
+civilization--Demosthenes and Cicero. Both revealed the needful double
+qualifications of the real orator, who shall hold his hearers in the
+hollow of his hand while he is speaking, bending them to his will and
+swaying them to the course he advocates, while the words he spoke then
+must survive now for our delight in their style and in their substance,
+a delight independent of the occasion of their utterance.
+
+Others there are, no doubt, who were also possest of this double gift.
+The French, for instance, might well urge the claim of Bossuet to be
+raised to the same pinnacle; but the English and the Germans have not
+yielded to the spell of his majestic periods. Perhaps we here in the
+United States should not be extravagant if we set up also a claim for
+Daniel Webster; but, however firm our faith, and however solid our
+justification, we should be met with a silent stare from the French and
+the Italians and the Spaniards, who might fail even to recognize
+Webster's name. Demosthenes and Cicero alone would be hailed as the
+supreme orators thruout the whole group of civilized nations.
+
+There is close kinship between oratory and history; and as the supreme
+orators are only two, one a Greek and the other a Roman, so the supreme
+historians, however tightly we may restrict the selection, will include
+a Greek, Thucydides, and a Roman, Tacitus. With them, and not inferior,
+stands Gibbon; and perhaps these three, Thucydides, Tacitus, and Gibbon,
+are all about whom there would be nowhere any dispute. But there is need
+to note that Taine held Macaulay to be in no wise inferior to Gibbon.
+Again, it may be well to mention also that an American authority insists
+on elevating Voltaire also, as the earliest of the modern masters of
+history.
+
+So we find that the supreme historians are three at the least, and at
+most four or five, just as the supreme poets are four, the supreme
+masters of prose are perhaps six, and the supreme orators are only two.
+And if we apply the same standards, if we disregard personal and
+provincial and national predilections and preferences, if we try to take
+the verdict of the cosmopolitan tribunal, we should find that the
+supreme dramatists are but three--Sophocles, Shakspere, and Molière.
+These three only were at once playwrights of contemporary popularity,
+masters of dramaturgic craftsmanship, creators of character independent
+of their own personality, makers of plays which deal with themes of an
+import at once permanent and universal, and poets also, each with his
+own philosophy of life.
+
+Others there are who unite some of these qualifications, but none who
+can make good a right to be ranked with the mighty three. It is true
+that the power of Æschylus is as undeniable as the pathos of Euripides;
+but it is always the clear-eyed Sophocles whom Aristotle accepted as the
+master of all who strive for distinction in the theater. And
+Aristophanes, with all his exuberance of humor and all his lyric
+elevation, is, after all, too local and too temporary to be ranked with
+the broad-minded Molière. So also Calderon, whom the polemic Schlegel
+wisht to promote to an equality with the very greatest of dramatic
+poets, is too careless of form and too medieval in spirit. Promotion
+must also be denied, for one reason or another, to Ben Jonson, to
+Corneille and Racine, to Schiller, to Alfieri, and to Victor Hugo.
+However ardently their claims may be urged by their compatriots, the
+international tribunal would refuse to admit any one of them to an
+equality with Sophocles, Shakspere, and Molière, the greatest of the
+Greeks, the greatest of the English, the greatest of the French, the
+three races that have excelled in the arts of the theater.
+
+Even tho no German can sustain a claim to supremacy in the drama, it is
+to the Germans that the consent of the whole world now awards the
+incontestable supremacy in the sister art of music. To the race that
+gave birth to Bach and Beethoven, to Mozart and Schubert and Wagner, it
+matters little whether the chiefs of music number two only, or whether
+they may be so many as four or five. Indeed, it may be admitted at once
+that the list would need to be widely extended before it would include
+the name of any composer who was not a scion of the Teutonic stock.
+
+There is a certain significance, also, in the probability that the
+outsider who could best justify a claim for inclusion would be a Russian
+rather than an Italian or a Frenchman. And this estimate, it may be well
+to confess, is not personal to the present writer, who has no skill in
+music and scant acquaintance with its intricacies; it is the outcome of
+a disinterested endeavor to discover the consensus of expert opinion,
+free from any racial bias.
+
+But the northern races who excel in the art of the musician seem to be
+inferior to the southern in the arts of the painter and of the
+sculptor,--more particularly in the latter. The supreme sculptors are
+apparently two or three: Phidias and Michelangelo, beyond all question,
+and with them probably we ought also to place Donatello. Of Praxiteles
+we know too little. Of most other artists in marble and in bronze we
+know too much, however fine their occasional achievements,--Verrocchio's
+'Colleoni,' for example. They do not sustain themselves at the lofty
+level on which Michelangelo moves with certainty and ease--"the greatest
+of known artists," so Mr. Lafarge has ventured to acclaim him; and just
+as Shakspere is unsurpassed as a poet and also as a playwright, just as
+Cicero takes a foremost place as an orator and also as a writer of
+prose, so Michelangelo is mighty as a sculptor, as an architect, and as
+a painter.
+
+As a painter he has more rivals than as a sculptor. We may limit the
+supreme masters of the plastic art to two, or to three at the most; but
+the supreme masters of the pictorial art are twice three, at the very
+least. By the side of Michelangelo there is Raphael, also an Italian;
+and has any one really a right to exclude Titian from their fellowship?
+Then there are Velasquez, the Spaniard, and Dürer, the German. And
+farther north in the Netherlands, there are Rembrandt and Rubens; and
+ought not Vandyke to be allowed to stand aloft with them? Six, at the
+lowest count, and eight by the more liberal estimate, are the men who
+have gone to the forefront in the art of the brush, half of them from
+the north and half of them from the south; and among them all not one
+who had English for his native speech, and not one whose mother-tongue
+was French. Indeed, at least one German, Holbein, and two or three more
+Italians would be admitted within the sacred enclosure before any
+Frenchman or any Englishman could have free entry.
+
+Those who speak French and those who speak English fare no better when
+we turn from the arts of peace to the art of war. Every race takes pride
+in the renown of the far-sighted and swift-striking commanders who have
+led it to victory, and every race is prone to over-estimate the military
+genius of its own successful soldiers. Here in the United States we
+seek to set up Washington and Grant and Lee as the rivals of the most
+gifted warriors that the old world has to show in all the long centuries
+of its incessant warfare; and in Great Britain our kin across the sea
+are led by local loyalty to do the same disservice to Marlborough and
+Wellington. But if we were to search the countless treatises on battles
+and campaigns written in every modern language, we should soon be forced
+to record that there were five men, and only five, whom the experts of
+every race united in singling out. In any list of the ten greatest
+soldiers, prepared in any country in the world, these five names would
+surely appear, even tho the other names on the several lists might be
+those of merely national heroes. The five international masters of war
+are Alexander, Hannibal, Cæsar, Frederick, and Napoleon.
+
+Napoleon, altho he rose to be Emperor of the French, was a Corsican by
+birth and an Italian by descent. The French have ever battled bravely
+for military glory; but they have not brought forth one of the supreme
+soldiers. The race that speaks English has done its full share of
+fighting on land and on sea, but it is on the blue water that it can
+give the best account of itself. The supreme leaders in war at sea
+worthy to be set by the side of the five supreme leaders in war on land
+are two at the very utmost; and probably an international tribunal
+would hold that Nelson alone was to be classed with Alexander, Hannibal,
+Cæsar, Frederick, and Napoleon. But it is the opinion of the foremost
+living expert on sea-power that Farragut deserves to be placed not far
+distant from Nelson, and that the gap which separates the American
+sailor from the British is smaller than that which stretches between
+Farragut and the third claimant, whoever he may be and of whatever
+nationality.
+
+Turning from the art of war and from the arts of peace to the sciences
+whereon all the arts are based, we find that the English and the French
+are richly represented. The supreme leaders in science, the men whose
+discoveries have been fecundating and fundamental, seem to be at least
+seven--Euclid, Archimedes, Copernicus, Newton, Laplace, Lavoisier, and
+Darwin. This list might well be larger; it could not be less; and no
+matter how it might be extended it would include these seven. None of
+them was merely an inventor of specific devices; all of them were
+discoverers of essential principles, and thereby contributors to the
+advancement of civilization and to man's mastery of knowledge.
+
+It would be interesting, as it would be instructive, if we could also
+enumerate the supreme leaders in religion; but this is a field in which
+prejudice is too violent ever to permit a serene view, and there is no
+hoping for an international verdict. Nor would it be possible to find
+any agreement as to the supreme statesmen, leaders of men and makers of
+nations. That Washington could not be excluded from any choice, however
+limited, we may rest assured; but who or how many might really deserve
+to be set beside him, we can only guess. National pride is as potent as
+religious feeling, and there is no likelihood that rival patriotisms can
+ever be reconciled.
+
+A comparison of the several lists will serve to show the field in which
+each of the great races of the world has revealed its native qualities;
+and, as Matthew Arnold suggested, this is most useful, since a nation is
+benefitted "by recognition of its real gifts and successes; it is
+encouraged to develop them further."
+
+And a consideration also of the character of each of the men whose names
+have here been set on high as the supreme leaders of humanity will make
+clear once more what is often clouded and obscured--the fact that the
+true genius is never an erratic creature, irregular and irresponsible,
+clamoring for indulgence and appealing for pity. He is always strong and
+sane and wholesome. Clear-eyed and broad-minded, he has self-control and
+common-sense.
+
+     (1905.)
+
+
+
+
+AN APOLOGY FOR TECHNIC
+
+
+If the chief end of all art is delight, there is small blame to be
+attached to most of us in that we are glad to take our pleasure
+carelessly and to give little thought to the means whereby we have been
+moved. Properly enough, the enjoyment of most of us is unthinking; and
+in the appreciation of the masterpieces of the several arts few of us
+are wont to consider curiously the craftsmanship of the men who wrought
+these marvels, their skill of hand, their familiarity with the mechanics
+of their art, their consummate knowledge of technic. Our regard is
+centered rather on the larger aspects of the masterwork, on its meaning
+and on its veracity, on its intellectual elevation, and on its moral
+appeal. No doubt this is best, for it is only by its possession of these
+nobler qualities that a work of art endures. On the other hand, these
+nobler qualities by themselves will not suffice to confer immortality,
+unless they are sustained by the devices of the adroit craftsman. As
+Massinger asserted long ago:
+
+                      No fair colors
+  Can fortify a building faintly joined.
+
+Technic is most successful when its existence is least suspected, and
+this is one reason why it is often overlooked and neglected in the very
+achievements which owe to its aid their vitality. Perhaps this happens
+the more frequently because it is the affectation of many an artist to
+hurry his tools out of sight as swiftly as he can, and to sweep up the
+chips of his workshop as soon as may be, so that the result of his
+effort shall seem almost as if it were the sudden effect of the
+inspiration that is believed to visit a genius now and again. He may
+have toiled at it unceasingly for months, joying in the labor and
+finding keen pleasure in every workmanlike artifice he had used to
+attain his end; and yet he refrains from confessing his many struggles
+with his rebellious material, wisely preferring to let what he has done
+speak for itself, simply and without commentary. But the artists know
+that the pathway to achievement is never along the line of least
+resistance; and they smile when they hear Mascarille, in Molière's
+little comedy, tell the affected young ladies whom he is seeking to
+impress that all he did "was done without effort." By this the artists
+at once perceive the fellow to be a pretender, who had never
+accomplished anything and who never would. They know, as no others can
+know, that there is no cable-road to the tops of the twin-peaks of
+Parnassus, and that he who would climb to these remote heights must
+trudge afoot,--even if he is lucky enough now and again to get a lift on
+Pegasus.
+
+What the artists do not care to parade, it is the duty of the
+commentators to point out; and an understanding of the technic of any
+art, of its possibilities and of its limitations, is as necessary for
+the critics as for the creators. Perhaps it is not pedantic to suggest
+that the critic who seeks to be of service ought to be able to see in
+every masterpiece the result of the combined action of three forces,
+without any one of which that work of art could not have come into
+being. First, there is the temperament of the artist himself, his native
+endowment for the practise of that special art, his gift of
+story-telling or of play-making, as the case may be. Second, there is
+the training of the artist, his preparation for his work, his slowly
+acquired mastery of the processes of his craft, his technical
+accomplishments. And, thirdly, there is the man's own character, his
+intelligence, and energy, and determination, his moral sense, his
+attitude toward life and its insistent problems. Now, of these three
+necessary factors--first, his native gift; second, his technic; and,
+third, his character--only the second is improvable by taking thought.
+The native gift must remain ever what it is, neither more nor less; and
+it cannot be enlarged by any effort of will. So also the character,
+which is conditioned by much that is beyond a man's control,--which can
+be bettered, perhaps, but only as the man himself climbs upward.
+
+Technic, however, can be had for the asking. Any man can acquire it if
+he will but pay the price,--the needful study and experiment. Any man
+can make himself a master of his craft, if he will but serve his
+apprenticeship loyally. The beginner in painting, for example, can go
+into the studio of an older practitioner to get grounded in the grammar
+of his art, and to learn slowly how to speak its language, not
+eloquently at first, but so as to make his meaning clear. In that
+workshop he soon awakens to the fact that permanent success is never won
+by any audacity of ignorance, and that the most famous artists are those
+who acquainted themselves with every artifice of their craft and with
+every trick of their trade. They went to school to certain of their
+elders to acquire that tradition of technic, past along from hand to
+hand, enriched by the devices of one after another of the strong men who
+had practised the art, following each in the other's footsteps and
+broadening the trail blazed by those who went first.
+
+Every generation is privileged to stand on the shoulders of its
+predecessors, and it is taller by what they accomplished. The art of
+fiction, for example, is a finer art to-day than it was yesterday; and
+so is every other art, even tho the artists themselves are no greater
+now than then, and even tho genius is no more frequent than it was
+formerly. Ghirlandajo and Marlowe and Cervantes were men of genius; but
+their technic is seen to-day to be as primitive as their native talent
+is indisputable. We can perceive them doubtfully feeling for a formula,
+fumbling in the dark, for want of the model which they themselves were
+to aid in establishing and which every novice nowadays has ready to his
+hand, even tho he may lack the temperament to profit by what is set
+before him.
+
+It is significant that not a few of the masters, in the days when they
+were but novices, found so much satisfaction in this mere acquiring of
+the secrets of the craft, that they chose to linger in the
+apprentice-stage longer than might seem necessary. In their earlier work
+they were content modestly to put in practise the technical principles
+they had just been acquiring; and for a little while they sought
+scarcely more than mere technical adroitness. Consider the firstlings of
+Shakspere's art and of Molière's; and observe how they reveal these
+prentice playwrights at work, each seeking to display his cleverness
+and each satisfied when he had done this. In 'Love's Labor's Lost,'
+Shakspere is trying to amuse by inventive wit and youthful gaiety and
+ingenuity of device, just as Molière in the 'Étourdi' is enjoying his
+own complicating of comic imbroglios, not yet having anything of
+importance to say on the stage, but practising against the time when he
+should want to say something. Neither in the English comedy nor in the
+French is there any purpose other than the desire to please by the
+devices of the theater.
+
+There is so little hint of a deeper meaning in either 'Love's Labor's
+Lost' or the 'Étourdi,' of a moral, so to speak, of a message of
+ulterior significance, that, if Shakspere and Molière had died after
+these plays were produced, nobody would ever have suspected that either
+youthful playwright had it in him to develop into a philosophic observer
+of the deeper realities of life. Of course, neither of them was long
+satisfied with this dexterous display of technical adroitness alone;
+and, as they grew in years, we find their plays getting richer in
+meaning and dealing more seriously with the larger problems of
+existence. But technic was never despised; and, if it was not always the
+chief end of the playwright, it remained the means whereby he was
+enabled to erect the solid framework of masterpieces like 'Othello' and
+'Tartuffe,' in which the craftsmanship is overshadowed by the nobler
+qualities, no doubt, but in which the stark technical skill is really
+more abundant than in the earlier and emptier plays.
+
+As Shakspere and Molière matured mentally and morally, so also did they
+grow in facility of accomplishment, in the ease with which they could
+handle the ever-present problems of exposition and construction. The
+student of dramaturgy notes with increasing delight the ingenuity with
+which the first appearance of Tartuffe is prepared; and he finds an
+almost equal joy in the bolder beginnings of 'Romeo and Juliet' and of
+'Hamlet,' where the difficulty was less, it may be, but where the
+interest of the craftsman in the excellence of his device is quite as
+obvious. Shakspere was the greatest of dramatic poets and Molière was
+the greatest of comic dramatists; and both of them were good workmen,
+taking an honest pride in the neatness with which they finished a job.
+In his later years, Shakspere seems to have relaxed a little his
+interest in technic, and the value of his work is at once seen to
+suffer. Altho his mind is as powerful as ever up to the last years of
+his stay in London, 'Cymbeline' and 'A Winter's Tale' are far inferior
+to 'Hamlet' and to 'Macbeth'; and the cause is apparently little more
+than a carelessness of technic, an unwillingness to take the trouble
+needful to master his material and to present it in due proportion.
+
+If Shakspere and Molière ever meet in that other world which was so much
+in the mind of the one and so little in the thought of the other, and if
+they chance to fall into chat--Shakspere spoke French, pretty certainly,
+even if Molière knew no English--we may rest assured that they will not
+surprize each other by idle questions about the meaning of this play or
+that, its moral purpose or its symbolic significance. We may be
+confident that their talk would turn promptly to technic; and, perhaps,
+Shakspere would congratulate Molière on his advantage in coming later,
+when the half-open, semi-medieval playhouse, with which the English
+dramatist had perforce to be contented, had been superseded by a more
+modern theater, roofed and lighted and set with scenery. And, in his
+turn, Molière might be curious to inquire how the English playwright was
+able to produce upon the spectators the effect of a change of scene
+when, in fact, there was no actual scenery to change.
+
+To suggest that these two masters of the dramatic art would probably
+confine their conversation to matters of mere technic is not so vain or
+adventurous as it may seem, since technic is the one theme the
+dramatists from Lope de Vega to Legouvé have always chosen to discuss,
+whenever they have been emboldened to talk about their art in public.
+Lope's 'New Art of Writing Plays' is in verse, and it has taken for its
+remote model Horace's 'Art of Poetry,' but none the less does it contain
+the practical counsels of a practical playwright, advising his
+fellow-craftsmen how best to succeed on the stage; and it is just as
+technical in its precepts as Mr. Pinero's acute lecture on the probable
+success of Robert Louis Stevenson as a dramatist, if only the Scots
+romancer had taken the trouble to learn the rules of the game, as it is
+played in the theater of to-day.
+
+In thus centering the interest of their public utterance upon the
+necessities of craftsmanship, the dramatists are in accord with the
+customs of the practitioners of all the other arts. Consider the
+criticism of poetry by the poets themselves, for example,--how narrowly
+it is limited to questions of vocabulary or of versification, whether
+the poet-critic is Dryden or Wordsworth or Poe. Consider the criticism
+of painting by the painters themselves,--how frankly it is concerned
+with the processes of the art, whether the painter-critic is Fromentin
+or La Farge. It is La Farge who records that Rembrandt was a "workman
+following his trade of painting to live by it," and who reminds us that
+"these very great artists"--Rembrandt and his fellows--"are primarily
+workmen, without any pose or assumption of doing more than a daily
+task." What they did was all in the day's work. One of the most
+distinguished of American sculptors was once standing before a
+photograph of the Panathenaic frieze, and a critical friend by his side
+exprest a wonder as to "what those old Greeks were thinking of when they
+did work like that?" The professional artist smiled and responded: "I
+guess that, like the rest of us, they were thinking how they could pull
+it off!"
+
+The method, the tricks of the trade, the ingenious devices of one kind
+or another, these are what artists of all sorts like to discuss with
+fellow-practitioners of the art; and it is by this interchange of
+experiences that the means of expression are multiplied. The inner
+meaning of what they have wrought, its message, its morality, its
+subtler spirit, the artists do not care ever to talk over, even with
+each other. This is intangible and incommunicable; and it is too
+personal, too intimate, to be vulgarized in words; it is to be felt
+rather than phrased. Above all, it must speak for itself, for it is
+there because it had to be there, and not because the artist put it
+there deliberately. If he has not builded better than he knew, then is
+the result of his labor limited and narrow. A story is told of
+Thorwaldsen in his old age, when a friend found him disconsolate before
+a finished statue and inquired if he was despondent because he had not
+been able to realize his ideal. And the sculptor responded that, on the
+contrary, he had realized his ideal, and therefore he was downcast; for
+the first time his hand had been able to accomplish all that his mind
+had planned.
+
+"Neither in life, nor even in literature and in art, can we always do
+what we intend to do," M. Brunetière once asserted, adding that, "in
+compensation, we have not always intended to do all that we have
+actually accomplished." Often no one is more astonished than the artist
+himself--be he poet or painter--at what the critics sometimes find in
+his work; and he is frankly unaware of any intention on his part to do
+all the fine things which he is told that he has done. But the critics
+may be justified, despite the disclaimer of the artist; and the fine
+things are, of a truth, to be discovered even tho they get into the work
+by accident, as it were, and even tho they may be the result of an
+intention which was either unconscious on the artist's part, or
+subconscious.
+
+We cannot help feeling the sublimity so obvious in the frescos of the
+Sistine Chapel; and yet it is equally obvious--if we care to look for
+the evidence--that while he was at this work the mind of Michelangelo
+was absorbed by the conquest of a host of technical difficulties. Of
+course, it would be going too far to assert that the great artist did
+not actually intend the sublimity that we admire and wonder at; but we
+may be sure that this sublimity is not something deliberately planned
+and achieved by him. It is there because the theme evoked it, and
+because Michelangelo was himself a man of the noblest character and of
+the loftiest imagination. It was inherent and latent in him, and it had
+to come out, inevitably and mightily, when he was engaged on a piece of
+work that tasked all his powers.
+
+An ideal, a significance, a moral, that has to be inserted into a work
+of art and that might have been omitted, is not likely to be firmly
+joined; and it is liable to fall apart sooner or later. Morality, for
+example, is not something to be put in or left out, at the caprice of
+the creator; it is, as Mr. Henry James once called it, "a part of the
+essential richness of inspiration." Therefore the artist need not give
+thought to it. If his own soul is as clean as may be, and if his vision
+is clear, the moral of his work may be left to take care of itself.
+Nearly always when an artist has been over-anxious to charge his work
+with a moral message, written so plain that all who run may read, he has
+failed to attain either of his ends, the ethical or the esthetic. There
+is a purpose plainly exprest in Miss Edgeworth's 'Moral Tales' and in
+her 'Parent's Assistant'; and the result is that healthy girls and
+wholesome boys are revolted. There was no moral intent in her
+ever-delightful 'Castle Rackrent'; and yet it has an ethical
+significance which few of its readers can have failed to feel.
+
+Perhaps 'Castle Rackrent' is the finest of Miss Edgeworth's stories,
+because it is the only one in which she had set herself a technical
+problem of exceeding difficulty. She chose to use the faithful old
+retainer to tell the tale of the family's downfall in consequence of its
+weakness, its violence, and its vice. Thady has never a word of blame
+for any son of the house he has served generation after generation.
+Indeed, he is forever praising his succession of masters; but so
+artfully does the author utilize the device of transparency that the
+reader is put in possession of the damning facts, one by one, and is
+soon able to see the truth of the matter which Thady himself has no
+thought of revealing,--which, indeed, he would probably deny indignantly
+if it was suggested by any one else.
+
+The chief reason why the novel is still held to be inferior to the drama
+is to be found in its looseness of form. The novel is not strictly
+limited, as the play must be by the practical necessities of the
+theater; and the practitioners of the art of fiction permit themselves a
+license of structure which cannot but be enfeebling to the artists
+themselves. Few of the novelists have ever gone about a whole winter
+with a knot in their foreheads, such as Hawthorne carried there while he
+was thinking out the 'Scarlet Letter.' And only by strenuous grappling
+with his obstacles was he able to attain the masterly simplicity of that
+Puritan tragedy. A resolute wrestling with difficulty is good not only
+for the muscles but also for the soul; and it may be because they know
+this, that artists are inclined to go afield in search of difficulties
+to be overthrown, that they set themselves problems, that they accept
+limitations. Herein we may see a cause for the long popularity of the
+sonnet, with its restricted scheme of rimes. Herein, again, we may see a
+reason for the desire of the novelist to try his fate as a dramatist.
+"To work successfully beneath a few grave, rigid laws," so Mr. James
+once declared, "is always a strong man's highest ideal of success." The
+novelist often fails as a dramatist, because he has the gift of the
+story-teller only, and not that of the play-maker, but more often still
+because the writing of fiction has provided him with no experience in
+working beneath any law other than his own caprice.
+
+The modern sculptor, by the mere fact that he may now order marble of
+any shape and of any size, finds his work far easier and, therefore,
+far less invigorating than it was long ago, when the artist needed to
+have an alerter imagination to perceive in a given piece of marble the
+beautiful figure he had to cut out of that particular block and no
+other. Professor Mahaffy has suggested that the decay of genius may be
+traced to the enfeebling facilities of our complex civilization. "In
+art," he maintained, "it is often the conventional shackles,--the
+necessities of rime and meter, the triangle of a gable, the circular top
+of a barrel--which has led the poet, the sculptor, or the painter, to
+strike out the most original and perfect products of their art.
+Obstacles, if they are extrinsic and not intrinsic, only help to feed
+the flame." Professor Butcher has declared that genius "wins its most
+signal triumphs from the very limitations within which it works." And
+this is what Gautier meant when he declared that the greater the
+difficulty the more beautiful the work; or, as Mr. Austin Dobson has
+paraphrased it:
+
+  Yes; when the ways oppose--
+    When the hard means rebel,
+  Fairer the work outgrows,--
+    More potent far the spell.
+
+Not only has a useful addition to the accepted devices of the craft been
+the guerdon of a victorious grapple with a difficulty, but the
+successful effort to solve a purely technical problem has often led to
+an ennobling enlargement of the original suggestion, with which the
+artist might have rested content if he had not been forced to the
+struggle. From the history of sculpture and of architecture here in the
+United States during the last years of the nineteenth century, it is
+easy to select two instances of this enrichment of the fundamental idea,
+as the direct consequence of an unexpected obstacle which the artist
+refused to consider a stumbling-block, preferring to make it a
+stepping-stone to a loftier achievement.
+
+When the city of New York was making ready to welcome the men of the
+navy on their return from Manila and Santiago, the Architectural League
+offered to design a triumphal arch. The site assigned, in front of
+Madison Square, just where Broadway slants across Fifth Avenue, forced
+the architect to face a difficulty seemingly unsurmountable. The line of
+march was to be along Fifth Avenue, and, therefore, the stately monument
+was set astride that street. But the line of approach, for most of the
+multitude certain to come to gaze on the temporary addition to civic
+beauty, was along Broadway; and the arch built squarely across the
+avenue would seem askew to all who first caught sight of it from the
+other street. To avoid this unfortunate effect the designer devised a
+colonnade, extending north and south, up and down the avenue. Thus he
+corrected the apparent slant by emphasizing the fact that it was the
+avenue in which the arch was placed and not the more popular highway
+that chanced to cut across it. But this colonnade, invented solely to
+solve a difficulty, lent itself readily to rich adornment. It became at
+once an integral element of the architectural scheme, to which it gave
+breadth as well as variety. It was accepted instantly as a welcome
+modification of the tradition,--as an amplification not to be wantonly
+disregarded by any architect hereafter called upon to design a triumphal
+arch.
+
+To this illustration from architecture may be added another from
+sculpture, as suggestive and as useful in showing how a conquest of
+technical difficulty is likely ever to increase the resources of the
+art. The sculptor of the statue of Lincoln, which ennobles a park of
+Chicago, was instructed that the work of his hands was to stand upon a
+knoll, visible from all sides, stark against the sky, unprotected by any
+background of entablature or canopy. The gaunt figure of Lincoln is not
+a thing of beauty to be gazed at from all the points of the compass; and
+the stern veracity of the artist would not permit him to disguise the
+ill-fitting coat and trousers by any arbitrary draperies, mendaciously
+cloaking the clothes which were intensely characteristic of the man to
+be modeled. To shield the awkwardness of the effigy when seen from the
+rear, a chair was placed behind it; and so the sculptor was led to
+present Lincoln as the Chief Magistrate of the Republic, arisen from the
+chair of state, to address the people from whom he had received his
+authority. And thus, at that late day, at the end of the nineteenth
+century, Mr. Saint-Gaudens did a new thing; altho there had been
+standing statues and seated statues, no sculptor had ever before
+designed a figure just rising from his seat.
+
+It is by victories like these over technical difficulties that the arts
+advance; and it is in combats like these that the true artist finds his
+pleasure. The delight of battle is his, as he returns to the attack,
+again and again, until at last he wins the day and comes home laden with
+the spoil. The true artist hungers after technic for its own sake, well
+knowing the nourishment it affords. He even needlessly puts on fetters
+now and again, that he may find sharper zest in his effort. This
+ravenous appetite for technic leads many an artist to go outside his own
+art in search of unforeseen but fascinating difficulties. The painter is
+tempted to stretch his muscles by a tussle with the unknown obstacles of
+the sculptor; and the sculptor in his turn contends with the limitations
+of the painter. Michelangelo called himself a sculptor and pretended to
+be no more; but in time he took up the craft of the architect, of the
+painter and of the poet. And this interchange of field in search of new
+worlds to conquer seems to be characteristic of the great periods of
+artistic activity and achievement. In all such periods, the more
+accomplished craftsmen have never wearied of technical experiment to the
+constant enrichment of the processes of their art.
+
+It is the uncreative critics, it is never the creative craftsmen, who
+dwell on the danger of taking too much interest in technic. The critics
+may think that the more attention the artist pays to his manner, the
+less he has for his matter, and that he is in peril of sacrificing
+content to form. But the craftsmen themselves know better; they know
+that no one may surely separate manner and matter, form and content,
+Siamese twins often, coming into being at a single birth. Furthermore,
+the artist knows that technic is the one quality he can control, every
+man for himself, every man improving himself as best he can. His native
+gift, his temperament,--this is what it is; and what it is it must be;
+and no man can better it by any effort. His character, also, the
+personality of the artist, that which gives a large meaning to his
+work,--how little can any man control this result of heredity and
+environment?
+
+If an artist has anything to say it will out, sooner or later, however
+absorbed he may be in finding the best way of saying it. If he has
+nothing to say, if he has no message for the heart of man, he may at
+least give some pleasure to his contemporaries by the sheer dexterity of
+his craftsmanship. There would have been no more meaning in Poe's verse,
+if there had been less melody, if the poet had less devotedly studied
+the "book of iambs and pentameters." There would have been no larger
+significance in the painted epigrams of Gérôme, if that master of line
+had cared less for draftsmanship. There would have been no more solid
+value in the often amusing plays of Sardou, if he had not delighted in
+the ingenuity of his dramaturgical devices. At bottom, Sardou, Gérôme,
+and Poe, had little or nothing to say; that is their misfortune, no
+doubt; but it is not their fault, for, apparently, each one of them made
+the best of his native gift.
+
+In his time Milton was the most careful and conscientious of artists in
+verse-making, and so, in his turn, was Pope, whose ideals were
+different, but whose skill was no less in its kind. So, again, was
+Tennyson untiring in seeking to attain ultimate perfection of phrase,
+consciously employing every artifice of alliteration, assonance and
+rime. But, if Milton's verse seems to us now noble and lofty, while
+Pope's appears to us as rather petty and merely clever, surely this is
+because Milton himself was noble and his native endowment lofty, and
+because Pope himself was petty and his gift only cleverness; surely it
+is not because they were both of them as much interested in the
+mechanics of their art as was Tennyson after them.
+
+One of the wittiest critics of our modern civilization, the late
+Clarence King, remarked, some ten years ago, that the trouble with
+American fiction just then lay in the fact that it had the most
+elaborate machinery,--and no boiler. But the fault of our fiction at
+that time was to be sought in the absence of steam,--and not in the
+machinery itself which stood ready to do its work, to the best advantage
+and with the utmost economy of effort, just so soon as the power might
+be applied.
+
+     (1904.)
+
+
+
+
+OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES
+
+
+Thackeray was frequent in praise of Fenimore Cooper, hailing
+Leatherstocking as better than any of "Scott's lot"; and this laudation
+appeared in the 'Roundabout Papers' long after the British novelist had
+paid to the American romancer the sincere flattery of borrowing from the
+last words of Natty Bumppo the suggestion, at least, of the last words
+of Colonel Newcome. Cooper's backwoodsman, hearing an inaudible
+roll-call had responded "Here!" a score of years before Thackeray's old
+soldier had become again a child to answer "Adsum!" Not less than a
+score of years later an old sailor in one of the stories of Sir Walter
+Besant made his final exit from this world with a kindred phrase, "Come
+on board, sir!" And then, once more, in one of Mr. Kipling's 'Plain
+Tales from the Hills,' we find the last dying speech and confession of a
+certain McIntosh who had been a scholar and a gentleman in days gone by,
+and who had sunk into irredeemable degradation in India. When his hour
+came, he rose in bed and said, as loudly as slowly, "Not guilty, my
+Lord!" Then he fell back, and the stupor held him till he died.
+
+There are criticasters not a few who would denounce Thackeray and Besant
+and Mr. Kipling as arrant plagiarists; but critics of a more delicate
+perception of the principles of art would rather praise these authors
+for the ingenuity with which they had successively made use of Cooper's
+original device. Indeed, the more delicate the perceptions of the critic
+the less likely would he be to assert positively that all four authors
+had not hit on the same effect independently. Thackeray may have taken
+it over from Cooper, consciously or unconsciously; Besant may have
+borrowed it from either his British or his American predecessor; and
+Kipling may have been familiar with it in the pages of Cooper, of
+Thackeray, and of Besant, and still have found amusement in giving a new
+twist to an old trick. But it is perfectly possible that we have here an
+instance of purely accidental similarity, such as keen-eyed readers can
+discover abundantly in the highways and byways of literary history.
+
+The theme of M. Paul Bourget's 'André Cornélis' is that of 'Hamlet,' but
+in all probability the French novelist was not aware that he was
+treading in the footsteps of the English dramatist until his own plot
+had taken shape in his mind. A situation in 'Vanity Fair'--that of
+Dobbin in love with the widowed Amelia and yet unwilling to break down
+her belief in her dead husband's fidelity--was utilized in the
+'Henrietta' of Mr. Bronson Howard, who was characteristically scrupulous
+in recording on the playbill his indebtedness to Thackeray's novel; and
+this same situation at about the same time had been utilized also in a
+little one-act play, 'This Picture and That,' by an author who had never
+doubted it to be of his own invention (altho he had read 'Vanity Fair'
+more than once), and who did not discover how he had exposed himself to
+the accusation of plagiarism until he happened to see the 'Henrietta'
+acted, and to perceive the full significance of Mr. Howard's memorandum.
+
+It deserves to be noted also that when Colonel Esmond broke his sword
+before the unworthy prince whom he had served so long and so loyally, he
+was only following an example which had been set by the noble Athos, who
+had snapt his weapon asunder before Louis XIV because that inhuman
+monarch had taken for himself Mlle. de la Vallière, the young lady
+beloved by the Vicomte de Bragelonne, the son of Athos. And the same
+effect is to be found also in the opera of 'La Favorite.' The book of
+Donizetti's opera bears the names of Alphonse Royer and Gustave Vaëz;
+but it is said to have been revised by Scribe. It was derived from a
+forgotten play called the 'Comte de Comminges,' written by one
+Baculard-D'Arnaud, and this in turn had been taken from a novel written
+by the notorious Mme. de Tencin, the callous mother of D'Alembert. The
+scene of the sword-breaking is not in the novel or the play; and quite
+possibly it may have been introduced into the book of the opera by the
+fertile and ingenious Scribe. 'La Favorite' was produced in 1840, when
+Thackeray was in Paris preparing the 'Paris Sketch Book.' It was in 1850
+that Dumas published the 'Vicomte de Bragelonne'; and it was in 1852
+that Thackeray put forth 'Henry Esmond.' But it was back in 1829 that
+the commandant Hulot in Balzac's 'Chouans' had broken his sword across
+his knee rather than carry out an order that seemed to him unworthy.
+This is not quite the same effect that we find in 'La Favorite'; but
+none the less Scribe may have been indebted to Balzac for the
+suggestion.
+
+There is no denying that the striking situation which Thackeray used
+with so much skill in his novel had already been utilized in the
+stirring romance of Durras and in the pathetic libretto of Royer, Vaëz,
+and Scribe. Did Thackeray borrow it from the romance or from the
+libretto? Or did he reinvent it for himself, forgetting that it had
+already served? He was in Paris when Donizetti's tuneful music was
+first heard; and he was going to the opera as often as he could. He was
+fond of Dumas's interminable tales of adventure; and he had a special
+liking for Athos. It is in one of the 'Roundabout Papers'--'On a Peal of
+Bells'--that he declared his preference. "Of your heroic heroes, I think
+our friend, Monseigneur Athos, Comte de la Fère, is my favorite." Is
+this a case of conveyance, such as is often carelessly called
+plagiarism? or is it a case of unconscious reminiscence? That Dumas knew
+what he was doing when he lifted the situation out of 'La Favorite' is
+very likely, for it was not his custom to be overscrupulous in taking
+what he could make his own. But Thackeray had been careful to credit the
+suggestion of one or two of his earlier French sketches to the Parisian
+story-tellers he had put under contribution. Besides he was a man of
+transparent honesty; and it is therefore highly probable that he had no
+consciousness that the scene was not original with him.
+
+In one of his conversations with Eckermann, Goethe declared that Byron
+had not known how to meet the charge of levying on the earlier poets.
+The German sage asserted that the English bard should have been far
+bolder in his own defence, and far franker also. Byron should have said:
+"What is there, is mine; and whether I got it from a book or from life,
+is of no consequence; the only point is, whether I have made a right use
+of it." And then Goethe added that in one of the Waverley novels Scott
+had appropriated a scene from 'Egmont'; "and he had a right to do so;
+and because he did it well, he deserves praise." Goethe seemed to think
+that the privilege of using again what had been invented by another was
+justified only when the later author improved on the earlier, or at
+least attained to an equal level. He noted that Scott had taken Mignon
+in 'Wilhelm Meister' as the model of Fenella in 'Peveril of the
+Peak'--"but whether with equal judgment is another question."
+
+Goethe was wise enough to know that human invention is finite and that
+the number of possible effects is limited. He once told Eckermann and
+Soret that the Italian playwright, Gozzi, had asserted the existence of
+only thirty-six possible tragic situations, and that Schiller had taken
+much trouble in trying to prove that there were more, only in the end to
+find himself unable to gather even so many as Gozzi had collected. "It
+is almost impossible, in the present day," commented Goethe, "to find a
+situation which is thoroly new. Only the manner of looking at it can be
+new, and the art of treating it and representing it."
+
+Unfortunately, we have not Gozzi's list of the three dozen situations,
+nor Schiller's smaller catalog to compare with it. Gérard de
+Nerval--that strangest figure of a strange period--considered the matter
+anew in the fervid days of French romanticism, and decided that there
+were in reality only twenty-four typical situations available for the
+theater; but his classification has also failed to come down to us.
+However, in the last decade of the nineteenth century an ingenious
+Frenchman, M. Georges Polti, accepting the number originally proposed by
+Gozzi, examined the plots of several thousand plays, classified the
+result of his arduous investigation, and published a little book of two
+hundred pages on the '36 Situations Dramatiques.'
+
+Highly interesting as is M. Polti's book, there is not a little
+difficulty in grasping the theory upon which he has assorted his immense
+collection into exactly three dozen divisions. The logic of his grouping
+is not immediately apparent, as it would have been had he taken the
+passions, for instance, as the several foundations. His first situation,
+for example, is that which we find in one of the earliest of Greek
+plays, the 'Suppliants.' M. Polti entitles it 'To Implore,' and he
+indicates varying possible subdivisions: (A1) Fugitives imploring
+shelter against their enemies, as in the tragedy of Æschylus, the second
+act of Shakspere's 'King John,' and repeatedly in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin';
+(B1) the ship-wrecked imploring hospitality, as in more than one ancient
+drama. But this first situation of his M. Polti finds to be infrequent
+on the modern stage, altho often met with in the Greek theater. His
+second situation, which we may call 'To Rescue from Imminent Danger,'
+has been widely popular alike with the ancients and the moderns, so we
+have in subdivision (A) a condemned person rescued by a hero, as in the
+myth of Andromeda, the folk-tale of Bluebeard, and the first act of
+'Lohengrin'; and in subdivision (B2) a condemned person rescued by a
+guest of the house, as in the 'Alcestis' of Euripides.
+
+These two situations, however, are far less effective in evoking the
+special pleasure proper to the theater than the nineteenth on M. Polti's
+list, "To kill unknowingly one of your own blood." The full force of the
+theatric effect of this situation is dependent on the spectators'
+complete knowledge of the relationship of slayer and slain, unsuspected
+by the victims themselves; and the strength of the situation resides not
+in the mere killing, which may indeed be averted at the last moment, but
+in the steadily gathering dread which ought to accompany the
+preparations for the evil deed. This situation in one or another of its
+subdivisions we find in 'Nicholas Nickleby,' as well as in 'OEdipus
+the King' and in 'Lady Inger of Ostraat'; in Sophocles it is a son who
+murders his unknown father, and in Ibsen it is a mother who murders her
+unknown son. It is to be found in the 'Semiramis' of Voltaire, in the
+'Merope' of Alfieri, in the 'Ion' of Euripides, and again and again in
+Victor Hugo's dramas. M. Polti points out that this single situation is
+utilized as the culminating point at the very end of four of Hugo's
+plays--the 'Burgraves,' 'Marie Tudor,' 'Lucrèce Borgia' and 'Le Roi
+s'amuse' (which supplied the plot for the opera of 'Rigoletto') and he
+insists further that one or another subdivision of this situation has
+been employed by Hugo at least five times in the single drama of
+'Lucrèce Borgia.' If there are still any who hold that Hugo as a
+dramatist was "of the race and lineage of Shakspere," they may find
+instruction in the fact that this highly artificial situation, which the
+superb French lyrist was seemingly unable to leave out of his
+arbitrarily complicated plots, was not employed even once by the great
+English dramatist.
+
+Probably nothing would have more disagreeably surprized Hugo--who held
+himself to be extraordinarily prolific and various, and who indeed had
+abundant reason for this belief--than the disclosure of the fact that he
+had made use so often of a single situation. And this is evidence, if
+any was needed, that the repetition of the same situation by the same
+author, or even by a succession of authors down thru the ages, is more
+often than not wholly unconscious, and that it is the result, not so
+much of any poverty of invention, as of the absolute limitation of the
+number of possible situations. The utmost of novelty that any plot-maker
+may hope to attain now in the twentieth century is only the result of
+his own shuffling of the same pack with which all the plot-makers of the
+past have been playing. A new principle he can scarcely hope to invent
+for himself; and all that he can safely claim for his most original
+sequence of scenes is a patent on the combination.
+
+M. Polti, indeed, has bravely offered to supply ten thousand new plots,
+put together by combining and recombining the manifold subdivisions of
+his thirty-six situations, some of which he has ascertained to have been
+sadly neglected by the playwrights of our time. One may venture to doubt
+whether there would be profit in taking advantage of this generous
+offer, for if certain situations essayed in the past have not been
+popular of late, there is warrant for wondering whether this neglect is
+not due to an instinctive feeling on the part of the playwright of the
+present that these situations would fail to excite the interest of the
+playgoers of our own time and to evoke an emotional response. To insure
+the success of a play, it is not enough that the author should combine
+an ingenious sequence of striking scenes; he has always the spectators
+to reckon with also, their likes and dislikes. The practical playwright
+knows only too well, and often by sad experience, that the audience of
+to-day does not relish certain situations which run counter to its
+prejudices and its predilections, however pleasing these same situations
+may have been to audiences of the past. The duty of personal vengeance,
+for example--which was at the center of the tragedy-of-blood, ever
+delightful to Tudor theatergoers--has been disestablished by the advance
+of civilization; and it is therefore no longer acceptable as the
+dominant motive of a drama of modern life.
+
+There is not a little significance, however, in another of M. Polti's
+suggestions--that perhaps a portion of the beauty and power we discern
+in the great plays of the Greeks was directly due to the accepted
+limitation of the themes which a tragic writer held himself authorized
+to treat. The restriction of the number of available legends forced the
+successive dramatists of Athens to handle again, each in his turn, the
+dark stories already dealt with by his predecessors. The fateful lives
+of OEdipus, for example, and of his family, of Agamemnon, and of his
+unhappy offspring--these were shown in action in the orchestra of the
+theater of Dionysus again and again, by Æschylus, by Sophocles, by
+Euripides, and by many another poet-playwright of that splendid epoch
+whose works have not descended to us. Of necessity, the dramatist was
+nerved to keenest endeavor by the knowledge that his play had to
+withstand a comparison with other plays presenting the same characters
+in the same situations, and by the certainty that his personal
+contribution would stand out sharply. A similar ordeal was undergone by
+the great painters of the Italian Renascence, who tried their hands,
+almost all of them, on the Madonna with the Holy Child, on the Descent
+from the Cross, and on every other of the score of stock subjects then
+in favor for the appropriate decoration of altar and alcove and dome.
+There is wisdom in M. Brunetière's assertion that "just as obedience is
+the apprenticeship of command, so is imitation the novitiate of
+originality."
+
+We may be assured that this narrow limiting of the number of themes
+likely to be treated by the painters of Italy and by the playwrights of
+Greece at once diminished the demand on them for mere invention and left
+them free to put forth the utmost strength of their imagination, so that
+the artist could express himself fully and interpret in his own fashion
+a subject certain to be handled sooner or later by the chief of his
+fellow-crafts-men. And if the descent from the sublime is not too
+sudden, attention might here be called to the similar method of
+measuring the skill of the individual performer which we perceive in a
+later and more scientific development of what was once almost a game of
+chance. In "duplicate whist," as it is called, identical hands are
+played in turn by a succession of players, who are thus put to the test
+sharply, each withstanding comparison with every one of his rivals.
+
+A strange fascination there is in the wish that it might be possible to
+apply to the art of fiction--which is often little more than a game of
+chance--the comparative method of duplicate whist. It would be possible
+for us to weigh the merits of the novelists far more exactly, if we
+could only impose upon all of them, once in a way, the treatment of the
+same theme, every successive story-teller making it his own for the
+moment, assimilating it, handling it as he pleased, in accordance with
+his own instincts and his own principles. It would enable us to note how
+adroitly the artist in narrative could deal with a topic which he did
+not feel to be sympathetic or stimulating; and on the other hand, it
+would show us how much this author or that has been sustained by the
+signal good fortune which put into his hands once at least the one
+subject best suited to his method and his temperament. In time, it
+would train the critical reader in the habit of distinguishing between
+theme and treatment; and it would encourage him to face the task of
+weighing the merits of each of these separately.
+
+Altho we cannot insist that the novelists of the twentieth century shall
+undergo this ordeal, we may amuse ourselves by guessing at the result if
+the test had been applied to the novelists of the centuries that have
+gone before. There is no difficulty in picking out a plot familiar to
+all of us now and universal in its appeal--a plot which any story-teller
+of any age might have chosen to develop in his own fashion. And perhaps
+no story is better fitted for this experiment than the heart-rending
+tale which Shakspere took from the Italian and transfigured by his
+genius into the immortal tragedy of 'Romeo and Juliet.' Quarrels between
+rival families have been frequent enough, and young couples there have
+always been who loved wilfully in spite of a heritage of hate. There is
+a never-fading enchantment in the story of their struggles, whatever the
+country where they lived and died, and whatever their station in
+society.
+
+How would this tale have been told in the eighteenth century by the
+author of 'Robinson Crusoe'? by the author of 'Clarissa Harlowe'? by the
+author of 'Tom Jones'? by the author of 'Tristram Shandy'? How would it
+have fared in the nineteenth century if Dickens had been attracted to
+it, or Thackeray? How would it be presented now in the twentieth century
+if it should be chosen again by Mr. Howells or by Mr. James? We need not
+ask what Mark Twain would do with it, because he has shown us in the
+Shepardson-Grangerford episode of 'Huckleberry Finn' that he could bring
+out its inherent romance, even tho he intrusted the telling to the
+humorous realist who was the son of the town drunkard. Nor have we to
+inquire how it would have presented itself to Erckmann-Chatrian, because
+the Alsatian collaborators made it their own in the somber pages of the
+'Rantzau.'
+
+It is not rash to assume that Defoe would have set up rival shopkeepers,
+one with a son and the other with a daughter; and he would have
+delighted in accumulating the minutest details of the daily life of the
+competing tradesmen. The fathers would have been sturdy Englishmen, both
+of them, obstinate and pious; and the preaching of a sound morality
+would never have been neglected. The narrative would purport to be
+truth; and probably it would be credited to the pen of one of the
+partisans, setting down in the first person a conscientious record of
+what he had seen with his own eyes. But if Richardson had wisht to make
+our ancestors weep at the woes of Romeo and the sad trials of Juliet, he
+would have abandoned the autobiographic form characteristic of Defoe's
+method of approach, for the epistolary, in which the author of 'Pamela'
+felt himself more at ease; and he would have spared us none of the
+letters of Romeo to Juliet, and of Juliet to Romeo, and of Romeo to
+Mercutio, and of Juliet to her nurse. The tenser the tragic gloom, the
+more voluminous these letters would become, the more self-analytical,
+and at the same time, the more pathetic. If Fielding had selected this
+story as the basis of a prose-epic we should have a masterly structure,
+perhaps distorted by an undue insistence upon Romeo's youthful intrigue
+with Rosaline. And if Sterne had pretended to play with this tragic
+tale, he would have given us the married life of Juliet's parents, with
+all the humorous whims of old Capulet; and after unending digressions
+the author might die himself before his heroine was fairly out of the
+arms of the nurse.
+
+To declare how Dickens might have presented the same theme is not
+difficult. The tragedy would sink to tortuous melodrama, and there would
+be much mystery-mongering, with a careful covering up of dark secrets to
+be revealed only at an opportune moment. The large simplicity of the
+theme would be frittered away, and every opportunity for deliberate
+pathos would be insisted upon. Probably Juliet would die in blank verse,
+disguised as prose. But Mercutio, altho he would certainly cease to be a
+gentleman, would be a most amusing personality whose whimsical behavior
+would seem highly laughable; and the nurse might become another Mrs.
+Gamp, with a host of peculiarities realized with riotous humor. And it
+is possible also to make a guess at the treatment which would have been
+accorded to the pitiful tale if Thackeray had undertaken it. The tragedy
+would have softened into a tragi-comedy with a happy ending probably,
+the loving couple being reprieved somehow in the final chapters just
+before the kindly author put his puppets away, after preaching a last
+gentle sermon on the vanity of life. The background would be the British
+society of the middle of the nineteenth century; and some Lady Kew,
+delightfully clever and selfishly arrogant, might be the chief of one
+clan, and some Lord Steyne, bitter and masterful, might head the rival
+house. And not improbably the narrator would be Mr. Arthur Pendennis
+himself.
+
+Perhaps Mr. and Mrs. March might constitute the chorus, if Mr. Howells
+were to lay the scene here in New York, bringing one family from the
+West, endowed somehow with a certain elemental largeness of mold, and
+importing the other from that New England which could be held
+responsible for the sensitiveness of their self-torturing consciences.
+There would be no blinking of the minor selfishnesses of humanity; and
+neither hero nor heroine would stand forth flawless. Their failures
+would be very human; and the author would withhold all comment, leaving
+the veracity of the portrayal to speak for itself. There would be
+unrolled before the reader the broad panorama of the cosmopolitan
+metropolis, infinitely variegated, often harsh in color, but forever
+fascinating in the intensity of its vitality. The modern tragedy with
+its catastrophe internal rather than external, would be laid before us
+in a narrative containing endless miracles of delicate observation and
+countless felicities of delicate phrasing.
+
+Like many another distinguished painter, Mr. Henry James has at least
+three manners, following one another in the order of time; and there is
+no certainty at which stage of his career he might be tempted to the
+telling of this tale. Early in his evolution as a novelist, he might
+have seized upon it as the promising foundation for an international
+complication, altho even then he would have attenuated the more violent
+crudities of the original story. Later, he might have been lured into
+essaying the analysis of Juliet's sentiments, as she was swayed by her
+growing attachment for Romeo, and as she was restrained by her
+indurated fidelity to the family tradition. More recently still, Mr.
+James might have perceived the possibility of puzzling us by letting us
+only dimly surmise what had past behind the closed doors that shut in
+the ill-fated lovers, and of leaving us in a maze of uncertainty and a
+mist of doubt, peering pitifully, and groping blindly for a clew to
+tangled and broken motives.
+
+Perhaps it is idle thus to wonder how any one of a dozen novelists of
+distinctive talent would have treated this alluring theme had he taken
+it for his own. But of this we may be certain, that any novelist of
+individuality who had chosen it would have made it his own, and would
+have sent it forth stamped with his own image and superscription.
+Indeed, the same tale told by Richardson and by Sterne, altho they were
+contemporary sentimentalists, would have had so little in common that
+the careless reader might fail to see any similarity whatsoever; and
+probably even the pettiest of criticasters would feel no call to bring
+an accusation of plagiarism against either of them.
+
+     (1905.)
+
+
+
+
+INVENTION AND IMAGINATION
+
+
+Probably not a few readers of Prof. Barrett Wendell's suggestive
+lectures on the 'Temper of the Seventeenth Century in English
+Literature' were surprized to be told that a chief peculiarity of the
+greatest of dramatic poets "was a somewhat sluggish avoidance of
+needless invention. When anyone else had done a popular thing, Shakspere
+was pretty sure to imitate him and to do it better. But he hardly ever
+did anything first." In other words, Shakspere was seeking, above all
+else, to please the contemporary playgoers; and he was prompt to
+undertake any special type of piece they had shown a liking for; so we
+can see him borrowing, one after another, the outer form of the
+chronicle-play from Marlowe, of the tragedy-of-blood from Kyd, of
+romantic-comedy from Greene, and of dramatic-romance from Beaumont and
+Fletcher. And in like manner Molière was content to return again and
+again to the type of play which he had taken over from the Italian
+comedy-of-masks.
+
+This "sluggish avoidance of needless invention," which is
+characteristic of Shakspere--and of Molière also, altho in a less
+degree--is evidenced not only by their eager adoption of an accepted
+type of play, an outer form of approved popularity, it is obvious also
+in their plots, wherein we find situations, episodes, incidents drawn
+from all sorts of sources. In all the twoscore of Shakspere's plays,
+comic and tragic and historic, there are very few, indeed, the stories
+of which are wholly of his own making. The invention of Molière is not
+quite so sluggish; and there are probably three or four of his plays the
+plots of which seem to be more or less his own; but even in building up
+these scant exceptions he never hesitated to levy on the material
+available in the two hundred volumes of uncatalogued French and Spanish
+and Italian plays, set down in the inventory of his goods drawn up at
+his death. Apparently Shakspere and Molière accepted in advance Goethe's
+theory that much time may be lost in mere invention, whereas, "with a
+given material all goes easier and better. Facts and characters being
+provided, the poet has only the task of animating the whole. He
+preserves his own fulness ... since he has only the trouble of
+execution."
+
+It has long been a commonplace of criticism that great poets seldom
+invent their myths; and it may in time become a commonplace of
+criticism that they seldom invent their forms. But in default of the
+lesser invention, they have the larger imagination; and there is no
+pedantry in seeking to emphasize the distinction between these two
+qualities, often carelessly confused. Invention is external and
+imagination is internal. The poets, by the mere fact that they are
+poets, possess the power of imagination, which alone gives vitality and
+significance to the ready-made plots they are willing to run into
+ready-made molds. Invention can do no more than devise; imagination can
+interpret. The details of 'Romeo and Juliet' may be more or less
+contained in the tale of the Italian novelist; but the inner meaning of
+that ideal tragedy of youthful love is seized and set forth only by the
+English dramatist.
+
+Imagination in its fullest meaning must be held to include invention;
+but invention is only one of the less important elements of imagination;
+and it is the element which seems to be more or less negligible when the
+other elements are amply developed. La Fontaine, one of the most
+individual of French poets, devised only a few--and not the best--of the
+delightful fables he related with unfailing felicity. Calderon, who was
+the most imaginative of the dramatists of Spain, was perhaps the least
+inventive of them all, contentedly availing himself of the situations,
+and even of the complete plots of his more fertile fellow-playwrights;
+and two of his most characteristic dramas, for example, two in which he
+has most adequately exprest himself, the 'Alcalde of Zalamea' and the
+'Physician of His Own Honor,' are borrowed almost bodily from his fecund
+contemporary Lope de Vega. Racine seems to have found a special pleasure
+in treating anew the themes Euripides had already dealt with almost a
+score of centuries earlier. Tennyson, to take another example, displayed
+not a little of this "sluggish avoidance of needless invention," often
+preferring to apply his imagination to the transfiguring of what Malory
+or Miss Mitford, Froude or Freeman had made ready for his hand. This
+eschewing of overt originality fitted him all the more to be spokesman
+of his time, and to voice the ideals of his race and of his day.
+Tennyson, so Sir Leslie Stephen told us, "could express what occurred to
+everybody in language that could be approached by nobody." Browning, on
+the other hand, made his own plots, and on the whole made them none too
+well, especially in his dramatic poems, in the structure of which he was
+entirely neglectful of the accepted forms of the theater of his own
+time--accepted forms of which Shakspere and Molière would have availed
+themselves instinctively. It was not Browning, but Whitman--and Whitman
+in 1855, when the bard of Manhattan had not yet shown the stuff that
+was in him--that Lowell had in mind in the letter where he says "when a
+man aims at originality he acknowledges himself consciously
+unoriginal.... The great fellows have always let the stream of their
+activity flow quietly."
+
+What is true of the poets is true also of the painters; and Lowell, who
+did not lose his Yankee shrewdness in the galleries of Italy, saw this
+also and phrased it happily in another of his letters. "The great merit,
+it seems to me, of the old painters was that they did not try to be
+original." The old painters were following in the footsteps of painters
+still older, from whom they received the accepted formulas for
+representing the subjects most likely to be ordered by customers. These
+accepted formulas representing the Annunciation, for instance, the
+Disputing in the Temple, the Crucifixion even, were passed down from one
+generation of artists to another; and in each successive generation the
+greatest painter was generally he who had no strong desire to be
+different from his fellows, and who was quite willing to express himself
+in the patterns which were then accepted traditions of his craft. To a
+student of the work of the generation that went before, there is often
+little or no invention in some of the mightiest masterpieces of
+painting, however much imagination there may be. The painters who
+wrought these masterpieces were only doing what their immediate
+predecessors had been doing, the same thing more or less in the same
+way--but with infinitely more insight, power, and inspiration. As
+Professor Butcher has put it tersely, "the creative art of genius does
+not consist in bringing something out of nothing, but in taking
+possession of material that exists, in appropriating it, interpreting it
+anew."
+
+In the very ingenious and highly original tale called the 'Murders in
+the Rue Morgue,' the earliest of all detective-stories, Poe displayed
+his remarkable gift of invention; but he revealed his share of
+penetrative imagination far more richly in the simpler story of the
+'Fall of the House of Usher.' Wilkie Collins had more invention than
+Dickens, as Dickens had more than Thackeray. Indeed, Thackeray, indolent
+as he was by temperament, was not infrequently "sluggish in his
+avoidance of needless invention." He kept his eye intent on the lurking
+inconsistencies of human nature, and did not give his best thought to
+the more mechanical element of the novelist's art. Cooper and Dumas were
+far more fertile in the invention of situations than was Thackeray; and
+even Scott, careless as he was in his easy habit of narration, gave more
+of his thought to the constructing of unexpected scenes.
+
+Three centuries ago Sidney asserted that "it is not riming and versing
+that maketh a poet, no more than a long gown maketh an advocate"; and
+to-day we know that it is not skill in plot-making or ingenuity in
+devising unforeseen situations which proves the story-teller's
+possession of imagination. It is scarcely needful now to repeat that
+'Called Back' and 'She'--good enough stories, both of them, each in its
+kind--did not demand a larger imaginative effort on the part of their
+several authors than was required to write the 'Rise of Silas Lapham' or
+'Daisy Miller.' More invention there may be in the late Hugh Conway's
+tale and in Mr. Haggard's startling narrative of the phenix-female; but
+it is invention that we discover in their strange stories rather than
+imagination. Indeed, he is an ill-equipt critic who does not recognize
+the fact that it calls for less imagination to put together a sequence
+of unexpected happenings such as we enjoy in the fictions of the
+neo-romanticists than is needed to vitalize and make significant the
+less exciting portrayals of character which we find in the finer
+narratives of the true realists.
+
+It was Dr. Johnson who declared, rather ponderously, it is true, but
+none the less shrewdly, that "the irregular combinations of fanciful
+invention may delight a while by that novelty of which the common
+satiety of life sends us all in quest; but the pleasures of sudden
+wonder are soon exhausted and the many can only repose on the stability
+of truth." Johnson was speaking here from the point of view of the
+reader only; but he might have noted also that the "irregular
+combinations of fanciful invention" tend to lose their interest even for
+the very writers who have been successful in supplying their readers
+with the "pleasures of sudden wonder." For example, in the opening years
+of this twentieth century the witty historian of the kingdom of
+Zenda--that land of irresponsible adventure which lies seemingly between
+the Forest of Arden and the unexplored empire of Weissnichtwo--this
+historian, after regaling us with brisk and brilliant chronicles of that
+strange country and of the adjacent territory, apparently wearied of
+these pleasant inventions of his and wisht to come to a closer grapple
+with the realities of life and character. But he soon found that this
+task was not so easy as it appeared--not so easy, indeed, as the earlier
+writing had been; and 'Quisanté,' for all its cleverness, did not prove
+its author's possession of the informing imagination which alone can
+give life and meaning to a novel dealing with men and women as they are
+in the real world.
+
+Not unlike is the case of the narrator of the manifold and varied
+deductions of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, that British reincarnation of Poe's
+M. Dupin. There is danger of unfairness in accepting the authenticity
+of words put into a man's mouth by any interviewer, however well
+intentioned; and there is, therefore, a possibility that the biographer
+of the Brigadier Gerard did not confess his own slight esteem for the
+many tales of invented adventure which had given him his wide-spread
+popularity. But there is an accent of veracity in the reported assertion
+of the author of 'A Duet with an Occasional Chorus' that this is the
+book closest to his heart, because it is an honest attempt to deal with
+the facts of life as they stare us in the face to-day. And yet 'A Duet'
+is unknown to a tithe of the countless readers who have devoured its
+writer's other volumes with avidity. And what is more to the point, it
+does not--favorite of its author tho it is--it does not deserve to be
+known so widely. This is because it is not so good as the other books of
+the same writer, not so good in its kind as they are in theirs. The
+tales that dealt with Sherlock Holmes and Brigadier Gerard and the White
+Company are works of invention mainly; and the writer had proved himself
+capable of adroit and ingenious invention. 'A Duet,' dealing with the
+commonplaces of life, needed not invention, which would indeed almost be
+out of place in a humdrum chronicle; it demanded imagination to
+interpret the commonplace and to transfigure the humdrum, revealing
+their essential significance. And this imagination the author had not
+at his call, in spite of his command over the more showy invention.
+
+It may not be without interest to consider how another writer of our
+time, not seeking for originality, happened to find it, and how his
+acceptance of certain literary patterns, so to call them--patterns
+inherited from the remote and shadowy past of our race--led him to an
+unforeseen effort of illuminative imagination, which suddenly elevated
+what he had done and gave it a significance far wider and far deeper
+than the author had foreseen. In the two successive volumes of the
+'Jungle Book' (as it was originally published) there are two sets of
+stories commingled and yet sharply distinct. One group deals with the
+boyhood of Mowgli among the beasts of the forest; and to many of us
+these linked tales represent the highest achievement of Mr. Kipling's
+genius; they seem as assured of survival as anything which the
+nineteenth century has transmitted to the twentieth. The other stories,
+the 'White Seal' and the 'Undertakers' and their companions, stand on a
+lower level; they are good stories, no doubt,--very good, indeed, one or
+two of them. But they have an added importance in that they seem to have
+been the needful accompaniment of the Mowgli tales; they may be
+considered as the underbrush that at first protected the growth of the
+loftier tree.
+
+They are modern examples of the beast-fable, latter-day amplifications
+of the simple tale of animals credited with human cunning, such as
+primitive man told to his naked children as they huddled around the
+embers in the cave, which was then their only home. The beast-fable is a
+literary pattern of an undiscoverable antiquity, as alluring to-day as
+ever before, since the child in us fortunately never dies. It is a
+pattern which Mr. Kipling has handled with a constant affection and with
+a large freedom. His earlier animal tales dealt with wild beasts, or at
+least with the creatures of the forests and of the ocean beyond the
+influence of man and remote from his haunts. Soon he availed himself of
+the same pattern to tell stories of animals domesticated and in close
+contact with man; and thus he gave us the 'Walking Delegate' and the
+'Maltese Cat.' In time betook a further step and applied to the iron
+horse of the railroad the method which had enabled him to set before us
+the talk of the polo pony and of the blooded trotter; and thus he was
+led to compose '007,' in which we see the pattern of the primitive
+beast-fable so stretched as to enable us to overhear the intimate
+conversation of humanized locomotives, the steeds of steel that puff and
+pant in and out of the roundhouse in an American railroad yard. Yet one
+more extension of the pattern enabled him to take a final step; after
+having given a human soul to separate engines, he proceeded then to
+animate the several parts of a single machine. And thus we have 'How the
+Ship Found Herself' and the later 'Below the Mill-dam.' But altho these
+are successive stages of the primitive beast-fable as it has been
+modified in Mr. Kipling's restless hands, there is little flagrant
+originality, even at the end, since 'How the Ship Found Herself' is seen
+to be only an up-to-date version of one of the earliest fables, the
+'Belly and the Members.'
+
+Interesting as it may be to clamber up into the spreading family-tree of
+fiction, it is not here that we must seek for the stem from which the
+Mowgli stories ultimately flowered. These stories are not directly
+derived from the beast-fable, altho his mastery of that literary pattern
+may have helped the author to find his final form. They are a
+development from one of his own tales, 'In the Rukh,' included at first
+in 'Many Inventions,' and now transferred to its proper place at the end
+of the book in which the adventures of Mowgli are recorded. In that
+first tale, which is now the last, we have set before us the impression
+Mowgli and his little brothers, the wolves, made upon two white men in
+the Indian service; and incidentally we are permitted to snatch a
+glimpse or two of Mowgli's youth in the jungle. But the story is told
+from the point of view of these white men; and it is small wonder that
+when the author came to look again at what he had written he saw how
+rich it was in its possibilities. He was moved to go back to narrate the
+whole series of Mowgli's adventures from the very beginning, with Mowgli
+himself as the center of the narrative and with little obtrusion of the
+white man's civilization.
+
+There was invention in this early story, and imagination also, altho not
+so abundant. But as the author brooded over the incidents of Mowgli's
+babyhood there in the thick of the forest, in the midst of the beasts,
+whose blood-brother he became, suddenly his imagination revealed to him
+that the jungle and all its inhabitants must be governed by law, or else
+it was a realm of chaos. It is this portrayal of wild life subject to an
+immitigable code which gives its sustaining moral to the narrative of
+Mowgli's career. As Mr. Kipling said to me once, "When I had found the
+Law of the Jungle the rest was easy!" For him it may have been easy,
+since his invention is ever fresh and fertile; but the finding of the
+Law of the Jungle--that transcended mere invention with all its
+multiplied ingenuities--that was a stroke of imagination.
+
+This distinction between imagination and invention may not be as
+important as that between imagination and fancy urged by Wordsworth a
+century ago; and no doubt there is always danger in any undue
+insistence upon catchwords, which are often empty of meaning, and which
+are sometimes employed to convey a misleading suggestion. This
+distinction has its own importance, however, and it is not empty or
+misleading. It needs to be accepted in art as it has been accepted in
+science, in which domain a fertile discovery is recognized as possible
+only to the imagination, while a specific device is spoken of as an
+invention. Newton and Darwin were discoverers by their possession of
+imagination; whereas the telegraph and the telephone are to be credited
+to humbler inventors, making application of principles already
+discovered.
+
+This opening century of ours is an era of extraordinary dexterity and of
+wide-spread cleverness, and we need to be put on our guard against the
+risk of mistaking the products of our abundant invention for the rarer
+gifts of inspiring imagination. It is well for us to be reminded now and
+again that the great masters, painters and poets alike, novelists and
+dramatists, have often displayed "a sluggish avoidance of needless
+invention" at the very minute when their robust imagination was putting
+forth its full strength.
+
+     (1904.)
+
+
+
+
+POE AND THE DETECTIVE-STORY
+
+
+I
+
+In one of those essays which were often as speculative and suggestive as
+he claimed, the late John Addington Symonds called attention to three
+successive phases of criticism, pointing out that the critics had first
+set up as judges, delivering opinions from the bench and never
+hesitating to put on the black cap; that then they had changed into
+showmen, dwelling chiefly on the beauties of the masterpieces they were
+exhibiting; and that finally, and only very recently, they had become
+natural historians, studying "each object in relation to its antecedents
+and its consequences" and making themselves acquainted "with the
+conditions under which the artist grew, the habits of his race, the
+opinions of his age, his physiological and psychological peculiarities."
+And Symonds might have added that it is only in this latest phase, when
+the critics have availed themselves of the methods of the comparative
+biologists, that they are concerned with the interesting problems
+connected with the origin of the several literary species.
+
+All over the world to-day devoted students are working at the hidden
+history of the lyric, for example, and of certain subdivisions of this
+species, such as the elegy, as it flowered long ago in Greece and as it
+has flourished in most of the literatures of modern Europe. To the
+"natural historian" of literary art, these subdivisions of a species are
+becoming more and more interesting, as he perceives more clearly how
+prone the poets have always been to work in accord with the pattern
+popular in their own time and to express themselves freely in the form
+they found ready to their hands. The student of the English drama is
+delighted when he can seize firmly the rise and fall of the
+tragedy-of-blood for one example, of the comedy-of-humors for another,
+and of sentimental-comedy for a third; just as the investigator into the
+annals of fiction is pleased to be able to trace the transformations of
+the pastoral, of the picaresque romance, and of the later short-story.
+
+The beginnings of a species, or of a subspecies, are obscure more often
+than not; and they are rarely to be declared with certainty. "Nothing is
+more difficult than to discover who have been in literature the first
+inventors" of a new form, so M. Jules Lemaître once asserted, adding
+that innovations have generally been attempted by writers of no great
+value, and not infrequently by those who failed in those first efforts,
+unable to profit by their own originality. And it is natural enough that
+a good many sighting shots should be wasted on a new target before even
+an accomplished marksman could plump his bullet in the bull's-eye. The
+historical novel as we know it now must be credited to Scott, who
+preluded by the rather feeble 'Waverley,' before attaining the more
+boldly planned 'Rob Roy' and 'Guy Mannering.' The sea-tale is to be
+ascribed to Cooper, whose wavering faith in its successful
+accomplishment is reflected in the shifting of the successive episodes
+of the 'Pilot' from land to water and back again to land; and it was
+only when he came to write the 'Red Rover' that Cooper displayed full
+confidence in the form he had been the first to experiment with. But the
+history of the detective-story begins with the publication of the
+'Murders in the Rue Morgue,' a masterpiece of its kind, which even its
+author was unable to surpass; and Poe, unlike most other originators,
+rang the bell the very first time he took aim.
+
+
+II
+
+The detective-story which Poe invented sharply differentiates itself
+from the earlier tales of mystery, and also from the later narratives
+in which actual detectives figure incidentally. Perhaps the first of
+these tales of mystery is Walpole's 'Castle of Otranto,' which appears
+to us now clumsy enough, with its puerile attempts to excite terror. The
+romances of Mrs. Radcliffe are scarcely more solidly built--indeed, the
+fatigue of the sophisticated reader of to-day when he undertakes the
+perusal of these old-fashioned and long-winded chronicles may be
+ascribed partly to the flimsiness of the foundation which is supposed to
+support the awe-inspiring super-structure. Godwin's 'Caleb Williams' is
+far more firmly put together; and its artful planning called for
+imagination as well as mere invention. In the 'Edgar Huntley' of Charles
+Brockden Brown the veil of doubt skilfully shrouds the unsuspected and
+the unsuspecting murderer who did the evil deed in his
+sleep--anticipating the somnambulist hero of Wilkie Collins's
+'Moonstone.'
+
+The disadvantages of this mystery-mongering have been pointed out by Poe
+with his wonted acuteness in his criticism of 'Barnaby Rudge.' After
+retelling the plot of Dickens's contorted narrative, and after putting
+the successive episodes into their true sequence, Poe asserted that "the
+thesis of the novel may thus be regarded as based upon curiosity," and
+he declared that "every point is so arranged as to perplex the reader
+and whet his desire for elucidation." He insisted "that the secret be
+well kept is obviously necessary," because if it leaks out "against the
+author's will, his purposes are immediately at odds and ends." Then he
+remarked that altho "there can be no question that ... many points ...
+which would have been comparatively insipid even if given in full detail
+in a natural sequence, are endued with the interest of mystery; but
+neither can it be denied that a vast many more points are at the same
+time deprived of all effect, and become null, through the impossibility
+of comprehending them without the key." In other words, the novelist has
+chosen to sacrifice to the fleeting interest which is evoked only by
+wonder the more abiding interest which is aroused by the clear
+perception of the inter-play of character and motive. Poe suggested that
+even 'Barnaby Rudge'--in spite of its author's efforts to keep secret
+the real springs of action which controlled the characters--if taken up
+a second time by a reader put into possession of all that had been
+concealed, would be found to possess quadruple brilliance, "a brilliance
+unprofitably sacrificed at the shrine of the keenest interest of mere
+mystery."
+
+Dickens was not the last novelist of note to be tempted and to fall
+into this snare. In the 'Disciple,' and again in 'André Cornélis' M.
+Paul Bourget was lured from the path of psychologic analysis into the
+maze of mystery-mongering; but he had the tact to employ his secrets to
+excite interest only in the beginning of what were, after all, studies
+from life, each of them setting forth the struggle of a man with the
+memory of his crime. In the 'Wreckers' Stevenson and his young
+collaborator attempted that "form of police novel or mystery-story which
+consisted in beginning your yarn anywhere but at the beginning, and
+finishing it anywhere but at the end." They were attracted by its
+"peculiar interest when done, and the peculiar difficulties that attend
+its execution." They were "repelled by that appearance of insincerity
+and shallowness of tone which seems its inevitable drawback," because
+"the mind of the reader always bent to pick up clews receives no
+impression of reality or life, rather of an airless, elaborate
+mechanism; and the book remains enthralling, but insignificant, like a
+game of chess, not a work of human art." They hoped to find a new way of
+handling the old tale of mystery, so that they might get the profit
+without paying the price. But already in his criticism of 'Barnaby
+Rudge' had Poe showed why disappointment was unavoidable, because the
+more artfully the dark intimations of horror are held out, the more
+certain it is that the anticipation must surpass the reality. No matter
+how terrific the circumstances may be which shall appear to have
+occasioned the mystery, "still they will not be able to satisfy the mind
+of the reader. He will surely be disappointed."
+
+Even Balzac, with all his mastery of the novelist's art, lost more than
+he gained when he strove to arouse the interest of his readers by an
+appeal to their curiosity. His mystery-mongering is sometimes perilously
+close to blatant sensationalism and overt charlatanry; and he seems to
+be seeking the bald effect for its own sake. In the 'Chouans,' and again
+in the 'Ténébreuse Affaire,' he has complicated plots and counterplots
+entangled almost to confusion, but the reader "receives no impression of
+reality or life" even if these novels cannot be dismist as empty
+examples of "airless, elaborate mechanism."
+
+The members of the secret police appearing in these stories have all a
+vague likeness to Vidocq, whose alleged memoirs were published in 1828,
+a few years before the author of the 'Human Comedy' began to deal with
+the scheming of the underworld. Balzac's spies and his detectives are
+not convincing, despite his utmost effort; and we do not believe in
+their preternatural acuteness. Even in the conduct of their intrigues
+we are lost in a murky mistiness. Balzac is at his best when he is
+arousing the emotions of recognition; and he is at his worst when he
+sinks to evoking the emotions of surprize.
+
+
+III
+
+In the true detective-story as Poe conceived it in the 'Murders of the
+Rue Morgue,' it is not in the mystery itself that the author seeks to
+interest the reader, but rather in the successive steps whereby his
+analytic observer is enabled to solve a problem that might well be
+dismist as beyond human elucidation. Attention is centered on the
+unraveling of the tangled skein rather than on the knot itself. The
+emotion aroused is not mere surprize, it is recognition of the
+unsuspected capabilities of the human brain; it is not a wondering
+curiosity as to an airless mechanism, but a heightening admiration for
+the analytic acumen capable of working out an acceptable answer to the
+puzzle propounded. In other words, Poe, while he availed himself of the
+obvious advantages of keeping a secret from his readers and of leaving
+them guessing as long as he pleased, shifted the point of attack and
+succeeded in giving a human interest to his tale of wonder.
+
+And by this shift Poe transported the detective-story from the group of
+tales of adventure into the group of portrayals of character. By
+bestowing upon it a human interest, he raised it in the literary scale.
+There is no need now to exaggerate the merits of this feat or to suggest
+that Poe himself was not capable of loftier efforts. Of course the 'Fall
+of the House of Usher,' which is of imagination all compact, is more
+valid evidence of his genius than the 'Murders in the Rue Morgue,' which
+is the product rather of his invention, supremely ingenious as it is.
+Even tho the detective-story as Poe produced it is elevated far above
+the barren tale of mystery which preceded it and which has been revived
+in our own day, it is not one of the loftiest of literary forms, and its
+possibilities are severely limited. It suffers to-day from the fact that
+in the half century and more since Poe set the pattern it has been
+vulgarized, debased, degraded by a swarm of imitators who lacked his
+certainty of touch, his instinctive tact, his intellectual
+individuality. In their hands it has been bereft of its distinction and
+despoiled of its atmosphere.
+
+Even at its best, in the simple perfection of form that Poe bestowed on
+it, there is no denying that it demanded from its creator no depth of
+sentiment, no warmth of emotion, and no large understanding of human
+desire. There are those who would dismiss it carelessly, as making an
+appeal not far removed from that of the riddle and of the conundrum.
+There are those again who would liken it rather to the adroit trick of a
+clever conjurer. No doubt, it gratifies in us chiefly that delight in
+difficulty conquered, which is a part of the primitive play-impulse
+potent in us all, but tending to die out as we grow older, as we lessen
+in energy, and as we feel more deeply the tragi-comedy of existence. But
+inexpensive as it may seem to those of us who look to literature for
+enlightenment, for solace in the hour of need, for stimulus to stiffen
+the will in the never-ending struggle of life, the detective tale, as
+Poe contrived it, has merits of its own as distinct and as undeniable,
+as those of the historical novel, for example, or of the sea-tale. It
+may please the young rather than the old, but the pleasure it can give
+is ever innocent; and the young are always in the majority.
+
+
+IV
+
+In so far as Poe had any predecessor in the composing of a narrative,
+the interest of which should reside in the application of human
+intelligence to the solution of a mystery, this was not Balzac,--altho
+the American romancer was sufficiently familiar with the 'Human Comedy'
+to venture quotation from it. Nor was this predecessor Cooper, whom
+Balzac admired and even imitated, altho Leatherstocking in tracking his
+redskin enemies revealed the tense observation and the faculty of
+deduction with which Poe was to endow his Dupin. The only predecessor
+with a good claim to be considered a progenitor is Voltaire, in whose
+'Zadig' we can find the method which Poe was to apply more elaborately.
+The Goncourts perceived this descent of Poe from Voltaire when they
+recorded in their 'Journal' that the strange tales of the American poet
+seemed to them to belong to "a new literature, the literature of the
+twentieth century, scientifically miraculous story-telling by A + B, a
+literature at once monomaniac and mathematical, Zadig as
+district-attorney, Cyrano de Bergerac as a pupil of Arago."
+
+Voltaire tells us that Zadig by study gained "a sagacity which
+discovered to him a thousand differences where other men saw only
+uniformity"; and he describes a misadventure which befell Zadig when he
+was living in the kingdom of Babylon. One day the chief eunuch asked if
+he had seen the queen's dog. "It's a female, isn't it?" returned Zadig;
+"a spaniel, and very small; she littered not long ago; she is lame of
+the left forefoot; and she has very long ears." "So you have seen her?"
+cried the eunuch. "No," Zadig answered; "I have never seen her; and I
+never even knew that the queen had a dog."
+
+About the same time the handsomest horse in the king's stables escaped;
+and the chief huntsman, meeting Zadig, inquired if he had not seen the
+animal. And Zadig responded: "It is the horse that gallops the best; he
+is five feet high; his shoe is very small; his tail is three and a half
+feet long; the knobs of his bit are of twenty-three-carat gold; and he
+is shod with eleven-penny silver." And the chief huntsman asked, "Which
+way did he go?" To which Zadig replied: "I have not seen him; and I have
+never heard anything about him."
+
+The chief eunuch and the chief huntsman naturally believed that Zadig
+had stolen the queen's dog and the king's horse; so they had him
+arrested and condemned, first to the knout, and afterward to exile for
+life in Siberia. And then both the missing animals were recovered; so
+Zadig was allowed to plead his case. He swore that he had never seen
+either the dog of the queen or the horse of the king. This is what had
+happened: He had been walking toward a little wood and he had seen on
+the sand the track of an animal, and he judged that it had been a dog.
+Little furrows scratched in the low hillocks of sand between the
+footprints showed him that it was a female whose teats were pendent, and
+who therefore must have littered recently. As the sand was less deeply
+marked by one foot than by the three others, he had perceived the
+queen's dog to be lame.
+
+As for the larger quadruped, Zadig, while walking in a narrow path in
+the wood, had seen the prints of a horse's shoes, all at an equal
+distance; and he had said to himself that here was a steed with a
+perfect stride. The path was narrow, being only seven feet wide, and
+here and there the dust had been flicked from the trees on either hand,
+and so Zadig had made sure that the horse had a tail three and a half
+feet long. The branches crossed over the path at the height of five
+feet, and as leaves had been broken off, the observer had decided that
+the horse was just five feet high. As to the bit, this must be of gold,
+since the horse had rubbed it against a stone, which Zadig had
+recognized as a touchstone and on which he had assayed the trace of
+precious metal. And from the marks left by the horse's shoes on another
+kind of stone Zadig had felt certain that they were made of eleven-penny
+silver.
+
+Huxley has pointed out that the method of Zadig is the method which has
+made possible the incessant scientific discovery of the last century. It
+is the method of Wellington at Assaye, assuming that there must be a
+ford at a certain place on the river, because there was a village on
+each side. It is the method of Grant at Vicksburg, examining the
+knapsacks of the Confederate soldiers slain in a sortie to see if these
+contained rations, which would show that the garrison was seeking to
+break out because the place was untenable. It is also the method of Poe
+in the 'Gold-Bug' and in the 'Murders of the Rue Morgue.' In all
+probability Poe borrowed it directly from Voltaire, who had taken it
+over from Oriental folklore.
+
+In his application of this method, not casually, playfully, and with
+satiric intent, as Voltaire had applied it, but seriously and taking it
+as the mainspring of his story, Poe added an ingenious improvement of
+his own devising. Upon the preternaturally acute observer who was to
+control the machinery of the tale, the American poet bestowed a
+companion of only an average alertness and keenness; and to this
+commonplace companion the romancer confided the telling of the story. By
+this seemingly simple device Poe doubled the effectiveness of his work,
+because this unobservant and unimaginative narrator of the unraveling of
+a tangled skein by an observant and imaginative analyst naturally
+recorded his own admiration and astonishment as the wonder was wrought
+before his eyes, so that the admiration and astonishment were
+transmitted directly and suggestively, to the readers of the narrative.
+
+In the 'Gold-Bug' the wonder-worker is Legrand, and in both the 'Murders
+in the Rue Morgue' and the 'Purloined Letter' he is M. Dupin; and in all
+three tales the telling of the story is entrusted to an anonymous
+narrator, serving not only as a sort of Greek chorus to hint to the
+spectators the emotions they ought to feel, but also as the describer of
+the personality and peculiarities of Legrand and Dupin, who are thus
+individualized, humanized, and related to the real world. If they had
+not been accepted by the narrator as actual beings of flesh and blood,
+they might otherwise retain the thinness and the dryness of disembodied
+intelligences working in a vacuum.
+
+This device of the transmitting narrator is indisputably valuable; and,
+properly enough, it reappears in the one series of detective tales which
+may be thought by some to rival Poe's. The alluring record of the
+investigations of Mr. Sherlock Holmes is the work of a certain Dr.
+Watson, a human being but little more clearly characterized than the
+anonymous narrators who have preserved for us the memory of Legrand and
+Dupin. But Poe here again exhibited a more artistic reserve than any of
+his imitators, in so far as he refrained from the undue laudation of the
+strange intellectual feats which are the central interest of these
+three tales. In the 'Gold-Bug' he even heightens his suspense by
+allowing the narrator to suggest that Legrand might be of unsound mind;
+and in the 'Murders in the Rue Morgue' the narrator, altho lost in
+astonishment at the acuteness of Dupin, never permits his admiration to
+become fulsome; he holds himself in, as tho fearing that overpraise
+might provoke a denial. Moreover, Poe refrained from all exhibitions of
+Dupin's skill merely for its own sake--exhibitions only dazzling the
+spectators and not furthering his immediate purpose.
+
+Nothing could be franker than Sir Conan Doyle's acknowledgment of his
+indebtedness. "Edgar Allen Poe, who, in his carelessly prodigal fashion,
+threw out the seeds from which so many of our present forms of
+literature have sprung, was the father of the detective tale, and
+covered its limits so completely that I fail to see how his followers
+can find any fresh ground which they can confidently call their own. For
+the secret of the thinness and also of the intensity of the
+detective-story is that the writer is left with only one quality, that
+of intellectual acuteness, with which to endow his hero. Everything else
+is outside the picture and weakens the effect. The problem and its
+solution must form the theme, and the character drawing is limited and
+subordinate. On this narrow path the writer must walk, and he sees the
+footmarks of Poe always in front of him. He is happy if he ever finds
+the means of breaking away and striking out on some little side-track of
+his own."
+
+The deviser of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes hit on a happy phrase
+when he declared that "the problem and its solution must form the
+theme." This principle was violated by Dumas, in the 'Vicomte de
+Bragelonne,' giving us the solution before the problem, when he showed
+how d'Artagnan used the method of Zadig to deduce all the details of the
+duel on horseback, after the author had himself described to us the
+incidents of that fight. But when he was thus discounting his effect
+Dumas probably had in mind, not Poe, but Cooper, whose observant
+redskins he mightily admired and whom he frankly imitated in the
+'Mohicans of Paris.'
+
+
+V
+
+Altho Poe tells these three stories in the first person, as if he was
+himself only the recorder of the marvelous deeds of another, both
+Legrand and Dupin are projections of his own personality; they are
+characters created by him to be endowed with certain of his own
+qualifications and peculiarities. They were called into being to be
+possest of the inventive and analytical powers of Poe himself. "To be
+an artist, first and always, requires a turn for induction and
+analysis"--so Mr. Stedman has aptly put it; and this turn for induction
+and analysis Poe had far more obviously than most artists. When he was a
+student he excelled in mathematics; in all his other tales he displays
+the same power of logical construction; and he delighted in the exercise
+of his own acumen, vaunting his ability to translate any cipher that
+might be sent to him and succeeding in making good his boast. In the
+criticism of 'Barnaby Rudge,' and again in the explanation of the
+Maelzel chess-player, Poe used for himself the same faculty of
+divination, the same power of seizing the one clue needful, however
+tangled amid other threads, which he had bestowed upon Legrand and
+Dupin.
+
+If we may exclude the 'Marie Roget' narrative in which Poe was working
+over an actual case of murder, we find him only three times undertaking
+the "tale of ratiocination," to use his own term; and in all three
+stories he was singularly happy in the problem he invented for solution.
+For each of the three he found a fit theme, wholly different from that
+employed in either of the others. He adroitly adjusted the proper
+accessories, and he created an appropriate atmosphere. With no sense of
+strain, and no awkwardness of manner, he dealt with episodes strange
+indeed, but so simply treated as to seem natural, at least for the
+moment. There is no violence of intrigue or conjecture; indeed Poe
+strives to suggest a background of the commonplace against which his
+marvels may seem the more marvelous. In none of his stories is Poe's
+consummate mastery of the narrative art, his ultimate craftsmanship, his
+certain control of all the devices of the most accomplished
+story-teller, more evident than in these three.
+
+And yet they are but detective-stories, after all; and Poe himself,
+never prone to underestimate what he had written, spoke of them lightly
+and even hinted that they had been overpraised. Probably they were easy
+writing--for him--and therefore they were not so close to his heart as
+certain other of his tales over which he had toiled long and
+laboriously. Probably also he felt the detective-story to be an inferior
+form. However superior his stories in this kind might be, he knew them
+to be unworthy of comparison with his more imaginative tales, which he
+had filled with a thrilling weirdness and which attained a soaring
+elevation far above any height to be achieved by ingenious narratives
+setting forth the solving of a puzzle.
+
+It is in a letter to Philip Pendleton Cooke, written in 1846, that Poe
+disparaged his detective-stories and declared that they "owe most of
+their popularity to being something in a new key. I do not mean to say
+that they are not ingenious--but people think them more ingenious than
+they are--on account of their method and _air_ of method. In the
+'Murders in the Rue Morgue,' for instance, where is the ingenuity of
+unraveling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven for the
+express purpose of unraveling? The reader is made to confound the
+ingenuity of the supposititious Dupin with that of the writer of the
+story." Here, surely, Poe is over-modest; at least he over-states the
+case against himself. The ingenuity of the author obviously lies in his
+invention of a web which seemingly cannot be unraveled and which
+nevertheless one of the characters of the tale, Legrand or Dupin,
+succeeds in unraveling at last. This ingenuity may be, in one way, less
+than that required to solve an actual problem in real life; but it is
+also, in another way, more, for it had to invent its own puzzle and to
+put this together so that the secret seemed to be absolutely hidden,
+altho all the facts needed to solve it were plainly presented to the
+reader.
+
+In the same letter to Cooke, Poe remarked on the "wide diversity and
+variety" of his tales when contrasted one with another; and he asserted
+that he did not consider any one better than another. "There is a vast
+variety of kinds, and in degree of value these kinds vary--but each tale
+is equally good _of its kind_." He added that "the loftiest kind is that
+of the highest imagination." For this reason only he considered that
+'Ligeia' might be called the best of his stories. Now, after a lapse of
+threescore years, the 'Fall of the House of Usher,' with its "serene and
+somber beauty," would seem to deserve the first place of all. And among
+the detective-stories, standing on a lower plane as they do, because
+they were wrought by invention rather than by the interpreting
+imagination, the foremost position may be given to the 'Murders in the
+Rue Morgue.' In this tale Poe's invention is most ingenious and his
+subject is selected with the fullest understanding of the utmost
+possibilities of the detective-story. At the core of it is a strange,
+mysterious, monstrous crime; and M. Anatole France was never wiser than
+when he declared the unfailing interest of mankind in a gigantic misdeed
+"because we find in all crimes that fund of hunger and desire on which
+we all live, the good as well as the bad." Before a crime such as this
+we seem to find ourselves peering into the contorted visage of primitive
+man, obeying no law but his own caprice.
+
+The superiority of the poet who wrote the first detective-story over all
+those who have striven to tread in the trail he blazed is obvious
+enough. It resides not only in his finer workmanship, his more delicate
+art, his surer certainty of execution, his more absolute knowledge of
+what it was best to do and of the way best to do this; it is to be seen
+not only in his command of verisimilitude, in his plausibility, in his
+faculty of enwrapping the figures of his narrative in the atmosphere
+most fit for them; it is not in any of these things or in all of them
+that Poe's supremacy is founded. The reason of that supremacy must be
+sought in the fact that, after all, Poe was a poet, and that he had the
+informing imagination of a poet, even tho it was only the more prosaic
+side of the faculty divine which he chose to employ in these tales of
+ratiocination.
+
+It is by their possession of poetry, however slight their portion might
+be, that Fitzjames O'Brien and M. Jean Richepin and Mr. Rudyard Kipling
+were kept from frank failure when they followed in Poe's footsteps and
+sought to imitate, or at least to emulate his more largely imaginative
+tales in the 'Diamond Lens' of the Irish-American, in the 'Morts
+Bizarres' of the Frenchman, and in half a dozen tales of the
+Anglo-Indian. But what tincture of poesy, what sweep of vision, what
+magic of style, is there in the attempts of the most of the others who
+have taken pattern by Poe's detective-stories? None, and less than
+none. Ingenuity of a kind there is in Gaboriau's longer fictions, and
+in those of Fortuné du Boisgobey, and in those of Wilkie Collins; but
+this ingenuity is never so simply employed, and it is often artificial
+and violent and mechanical. It exists for its own sake, with little
+relation to the admitted characteristics of our common humanity. It
+stands alone, and it is never accompanied by the apparent ease which
+adds charm to Poe's handling of his puzzles.
+
+Consider how often Gaboriau puts us off with a broken-backed narrative,
+taking up his curtain on a promising problem, presenting it to us in
+aspects of increasing difficulty, only at last to confess his impotence
+by starting afresh and slowly detailing the explanatory episodes which
+happened before the curtain rose. Consider how frequently Fortuné du
+Boisgobey failed to play fair. Consider how juiceless was the
+documentary method of Wilkie Collins, how mechanical and how arid, how
+futilely complicated, how prolonged, and how fatiguing. Consider all the
+minor members of the sorry brood hatched out of the same egg, how cheap
+and how childish the most of them are. Consider all these; and we are
+forced to the conclusion that if the writing of a good detective-story
+is so rare and so difficult, if only one of Poe's imitators has been
+able really to rival his achievement, if this single success has been
+the result of an acceptance of Poe's formula and of a close adherence to
+Poe's practise, then, what Poe wrought is really unique; and we must
+give him the guerdon of praise due to an artist who has accomplished the
+first time of trying that which others have failed to achieve even after
+he had shown them how.
+
+     (1904.)
+
+
+
+
+MARK TWAIN
+
+[This biographical criticism was written to serve as an introduction to
+the complete edition of Mark Twain's Works.]
+
+
+It is a common delusion of those who discuss contemporary literature
+that there is such an entity as the "reading public," possest of a
+certain uniformity of taste. There is not one public; there are many
+publics,--as many in fact as there are different kinds of taste; and the
+extent of an author's popularity is in proportion to the number of these
+separate publics he may chance to please. Scott, for example, appealed
+not only to those who relished romance and enjoyed excitement, but also
+to those who appreciated his honest portrayal of sturdy characters.
+Thackeray is preferred by ambitious youths who are insidiously flattered
+by his tacit compliments to their knowledge of the world, by the
+disenchanted who cannot help seeing the petty meannesses of society, and
+by the less sophisticated in whom sentiment has not gone to seed in
+sentimentality. Dickens in his own day bid for the approval of those who
+liked broad caricature (and were, therefore, pleased with Stiggins and
+Chadband), of those who fed greedily on plentiful pathos (and were,
+therefore, delighted with the deathbeds of Smike and Paul Dombey and
+Little Nell) and also of those who asked for unexpected adventure (and
+were, therefore, glad to disentangle the melodramatic intrigues of Ralph
+Nickleby).
+
+In like manner the American author who has chosen to call himself Mark
+Twain has attained to an immense popularity because the qualities he
+possesses in a high degree appeal to so many and so widely varied
+publics,--first of all, no doubt, to the public that revels in hearty
+and robust fun, but also to the public which is glad to be swept along
+by the full current of adventure, which is sincerely touched by manly
+pathos, which is satisfied by vigorous and exact portrayal of character,
+which respects shrewdness and wisdom and sanity and which appreciates a
+healthy hatred of pretense and affectation and sham. Perhaps no one book
+of Mark Twain's--with the possible exception of 'Huckleberry Finn'--is
+equally a favorite with all his readers; and perhaps some of his best
+characteristics are absent from his earlier books or but doubtfully
+latent in them. Mark Twain is many-sided; and he has ripened in
+knowledge and in power since he first attracted attention as a wild
+Western funny man. As he has grown older he has reflected more; he has
+both broadened and deepened. The writer of "comic copy" for a
+mining-camp newspaper has developed into a liberal humorist, handling
+life seriously and making his readers think as he makes them laugh,
+until to-day Mark Twain has perhaps the largest audience of any author
+now using the English language. To trace the stages of this evolution
+and to count the steps whereby the sage-brush reporter has risen to the
+rank of a writer of world-wide celebrity, is as interesting as it is
+instructive.
+
+
+I
+
+SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS was born November 30, 1835, at
+Florida, Missouri. His father was a merchant who had come from Tennessee
+and who removed soon after his son's birth to Hannibal, a little town on
+the Mississippi. What Hannibal was like and what were the circumstances
+of Mr. Clemens's boyhood we can see for ourselves in the convincing
+pages of 'Tom Sawyer.' Mr. Howells has called Hannibal "a loafing,
+out-at-elbows, down-at-the-heels, slave-holding Mississippi town"; and
+the elder Clemens was himself a slave-owner, who silently abhorred
+slavery.
+
+When the future author was but twelve his father died, and the son had
+to get his education as best he could. Of actual schooling he got little
+and of book-learning still less; but life itself is not a bad teacher
+for a boy who wants to study, and young Clemens did not waste his
+chances. He spent three years in the printing office of the little local
+paper,--for, like not a few others on the list of American authors that
+stretches from Benjamin Franklin to William Dean Howells, he began his
+connection with literature by setting type. As a journeyman printer the
+lad wandered from town to town and rambled even as far east as New York.
+
+When he was seventeen he went back to the home of his boyhood resolved
+to become a pilot on the Mississippi. How he learnt the river he has
+told us in 'Life on the Mississippi,' wherein his adventures, his
+experiences, and his impressions while he was a cub-pilot are recorded
+with a combination of precise veracity and abundant humor which makes
+the earlier chapters of that marvelous book a most masterly fragment of
+autobiography. The life of a pilot was full of interest and excitement
+and opportunity, and what young Clemens saw and heard and divined during
+the years when he was going up and down the mighty river we may read in
+the pages of 'Huckleberry Finn' and 'Pudd'nhead Wilson.' But toward the
+end of the fifties the railroads began to rob the river of its supremacy
+as a carrier; and in the beginning of the sixties the Civil War broke
+out and the Mississippi no longer went unvext to the sea. The skill,
+slowly and laboriously acquired, was suddenly rendered useless, and at
+twenty-five the young man found himself bereft of his calling. As a
+border state, Missouri was sending her sons into the armies of the Union
+and into the armies of the Confederacy, while many a man stood doubting,
+not knowing which way to turn. The ex-pilot has given us the record of
+his very brief and inglorious service as a soldier of the South. When
+this escapade was swiftly ended, he went to the northwest with his
+brother, who had been appointed lieutenant-governor of Nevada. Thus the
+man who had been born on the borderland of North and South, who had gone
+East as a jour printer, who had been again and again up and down the
+Mississippi, now went West while he was still plastic and
+impressionable; and he had thus another chance to increase that intimate
+knowledge of American life and American character which is one of the
+most precious of his possessions.
+
+While still on the river he had written a satiric letter or two signed
+"Mark Twain"--taking the name from a call of the man who heaves the lead
+and who cries "By the mark, three," "Mark twain," and so on. In Nevada
+he went to the mines and lived the life he has described in 'Roughing
+It,' but when he failed to "strike it rich," he naturally drifted into
+journalism and back into a newspaper office again. The 'Virginia City
+Enterprise' was not overmanned, and the new-comer did all sorts of odd
+jobs, finding time now and then to write a sketch which seemed important
+enough to permit of his signature. The name of Mark Twain soon began to
+be known to those who were curious in newspaper humor. After a while he
+was drawn across the mountains to San Francisco, where he found casual
+employment on the 'Morning Call,' and where he joined himself to a
+little group of aspiring literators which included Bret Harte, Noah
+Brooks, Charles Henry Webb, and Mr. Charles Warren Stoddart.
+
+It was in 1867 that Webb published Mark Twain's first book, the
+'Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras'; and it was in 1867 that the
+proprietors of the 'Alta California' supplied him with the funds
+necessary to enable him to become one of the passengers on the steamer
+_Quaker City_, which had been chartered to take a select party on what
+is now known as the Mediterranean trip. The weekly letters, in which he
+set forth what befell him on this journey, were printed in the 'Alta'
+Sunday after Sunday, and were copied freely by the other Californian
+papers. These letters served as the foundation of a book published in
+1869 and called the 'Innocents Abroad,' a book which instantly brought
+to the author celebrity and cash.
+
+Both of these valuable aids to ambition were increased by his next step,
+his appearance on the lecture platform. Noah Brooks, who was present at
+his first attempt, has recorded that Mark Twain's "method as a lecturer
+was distinctly unique and novel. His slow, deliberate drawl, the anxious
+and perturbed expression of his visage, the apparently painful effort
+with which he framed his sentences, the surprize that spread over his
+face when the audience roared with delight or rapturously applauded the
+finer passages of his word-painting, were unlike anything of the kind
+they had ever known." In the many years since that first appearance the
+method has not changed, altho it has probably matured. Mark Twain is one
+of the most effective of platform-speakers and one of the most artistic,
+with an art of his own which is very individual and very elaborate in
+spite of its seeming simplicity.
+
+Altho he succeeded abundantly as a lecturer, and altho he was the author
+of the most widely-circulated book of the decade, Mark Twain still
+thought of himself only as a journalist; and when he gave up the West
+for the East, he became an editor of the 'Buffalo Express,' in which he
+had bought an interest. In 1870 he married; and it is perhaps not
+indiscreet to remark that his was another of those happy unions of which
+there have been so many in the annals of American authorship. In 1871 he
+removed to Hartford, which was to be his home for thirty years; and at
+the same time he gave up newspaper work.
+
+In 1872 he wrote 'Roughing It,' and in the following year came his first
+sustained attempt at fiction, the 'Gilded Age,' written in collaboration
+with Charles Dudley Warner. The character of Colonel Mulberry Sellers
+Mark Twain soon took out of this book to make it the central figure of a
+play, which the late John T. Raymond acted hundreds of times thruout the
+United States, the playgoing public pardoning the inexpertness of the
+dramatist in favor of the delicious humor and the compelling veracity
+with which the chief character was presented. So universal was this type
+and so broadly recognizable its traits that there were many towns in
+which someone accosted the actor who impersonated the ever-hopeful
+schemer with the declaration: "I'm the original of _Sellers_! Didn't
+Mark ever tell you? Well, he took the _Colonel_ from me!"
+
+Encouraged by the welcome accorded to this first attempt at fiction,
+Mark Twain turned to the days of his boyhood and wrote 'Tom Sawyer,'
+published in 1875. He also collected his sketches, scattered here and
+there in newspapers and magazines. Toward the end of the seventies he
+went to Europe again with his family; and the result of this journey is
+recorded in 'A Tramp Abroad,' published in 1880. Another volume of
+sketches, the 'Stolen White Elephant,' was put forth in 1882; and in the
+same year Mark Twain first came forward as a historical novelist--if the
+'Prince and the Pauper' can fairly be called a historical novel. The
+year after he sent forth the volume describing his 'Life on the
+Mississippi'; and in 1884 he followed this with the story in which that
+life has been crystallized forever, 'Huckleberry Finn,' the finest of
+his books, the deepest in its insight, and the widest in its appeal.
+
+This Odyssey of the Mississippi was published by a new firm, in which
+the author was a chief partner, just as Sir Walter Scott had been an
+associate of Ballantyne and Constable. There was at first a period of
+prosperity in which the house issued the 'Personal Memoirs' of Grant,
+giving his widow checks for $350,000 in 1886, and in which Mark Twain
+himself published 'A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court,' a
+volume of 'Merry Tales,' and a story called the 'American Claimant,'
+wherein Colonel Sellers reappears. Then there came a succession of hard
+years; and at last the publishing-house in which Mark Twain was a
+partner failed, as the publishing-house in which Walter Scott was a
+partner had formerly failed. The author of 'Huckleberry Finn' was past
+sixty when he found himself suddenly saddled with a load of debt, just
+as the author of 'Waverley' had been burdened full threescore years
+earlier; and Mark Twain stood up stoutly under it as Scott had done
+before him. More fortunate than the Scotchman, the American lived to pay
+the debt in full.
+
+Since the disheartening crash came, he has given to the public a third
+Mississippi River tale, 'Pudd'nhead Wilson,' issued in 1894; and a third
+historical novel, 'Joan of Arc,' a reverent and sympathetic study of the
+bravest figure in all French history, printed anonymously in 'Harper's
+Magazine' and then in a volume acknowledged by the author in 1896. As
+one of the results of a lecturing tour around the world he prepared
+another volume of travels, 'Following the Equator,' published toward the
+end of 1897. Mention must also be made of a fantastic tale called 'Tom
+Sawyer Abroad,' sent forth in 1894, of a volume of sketches, the
+'Million Pound Bank-Note,' assembled in 1893, and also of a collection
+of literary essays, 'How to Tell a Story,' published in 1897.
+
+This is but the barest outline of Mark Twain's life,--such a brief
+summary as we must have before us if we wish to consider the conditions
+under which the author has developed and the stages of his growth. It
+will serve, however, to show how various have been his forms of
+activity,--printer, pilot, miner, journalist, traveler, lecturer,
+novelist, publisher,--and to suggest the width of his experience of
+life.
+
+
+II
+
+A humorist is often without honor in his own country. Perhaps
+this is partly because humor is likely to be familiar, and familiarity
+breeds contempt. Perhaps it is partly because (for some strange reason)
+we tend to despise those who make us laugh, while we respect those who
+make us weep--forgetting that there are formulas for forcing tears quite
+as facile as the formulas for forcing smiles. Whatever the reason, the
+fact is indisputable that the humorist must pay the penalty of his
+humor, he must run the risk of being tolerated as a mere fun-maker, not
+to be taken seriously, and not worthy of critical consideration. This
+penalty has been paid by Mark Twain. In many of the discussions of
+American literature he has been dismist as tho he were only a competitor
+of his predecessors, Artemus Ward and John Phoenix, instead of being,
+what he is really, a writer who is to be classed--at whatever interval
+only time may decide--rather with Cervantes and Molière.
+
+Like the heroines of the problem-plays of the modern theater, Mark
+Twain has had to live down his past. His earlier writing gave but little
+promise of the enduring qualities obvious enough in his later works.
+Noah Brooks has told us how he was advised if he wisht to "see genuine
+specimens of American humor, frolicsome, extravagant, and audacious," to
+look up the sketches which the then almost unknown Mark Twain was
+printing in a Nevada newspaper. The humor of Mark Twain is still
+American, still frolicsome, extravagant, and audacious; but it is riper
+now and richer, and it has taken unto itself other qualities existing
+only in germ in these firstlings of his muse. The sketches in the
+'Jumping Frog' and the letters which made up the 'Innocents Abroad' are
+"comic copy," as the phrase is in newspaper offices--comic copy not
+altogether unlike what John Phoenix had written and Artemus
+Ward,--better indeed than the work of these newspaper humorists (for
+Mark Twain had it in him to develop as they did not), but not
+essentially dissimilar.
+
+And in the eyes of many who do not think for themselves, Mark Twain was
+only the author of these genuine specimens of American humor. For when
+the public has once made up its mind about any man's work, it does not
+relish any attempt to force it to unmake this opinion and to remake it.
+Like other juries, it does not like to be ordered to reconsider its
+verdict as contrary to the facts of the case. It is always sluggish in
+beginning the necessary readjustment, and not only sluggish, but
+somewhat grudging. Naturally it cannot help seeing the later works of a
+popular writer from the point of view it had to take to enjoy his
+earlier writings. And thus the author of 'Huckleberry Finn' and 'Joan of
+Arc' was forced to pay a high price for the early and abundant
+popularity of the 'Innocents Abroad.'
+
+No doubt, a few of his earlier sketches were inexpensive in their
+elements; made of materials worn threadbare by generations of earlier
+funny men, they were sometimes cut in the pattern of his predecessors.
+No doubt, some of the earliest of all were crude and highly colored, and
+may even be called forced, not to say violent. No doubt, also, they did
+not suggest the seriousness and the melancholy which always must
+underlie the deepest humor, as we find it in Cervantes and Molière, in
+Swift and in Lowell. But even a careless reader, skipping thru the book
+in idle amusement, ought to have been able to see in the 'Innocents
+Abroad,' that the writer of this liveliest of books of travel was no
+mere merry-andrew, grinning thru a horse-collar to make sport for the
+groundlings; but a sincere observer of life, seeing thru his own eyes
+and setting down what he saw with abundant humor, of course, but also
+with profound respect for the eternal verities.
+
+George Eliot in one of her essays calls those who parody lofty themes
+"debasers of the moral currency." Mark Twain is always an advocate of
+the sterling ethical standard. He is ready to overwhelm an affectation
+with irresistible laughter, but he never lacks reverence for the things
+that really deserve reverence. It is not at the Old Masters that he
+scoffs in Italy, but rather at those who pay lip-service to things which
+they neither enjoy nor understand. For a ruin or a painting or a legend
+that does not seem to him to deserve the appreciation in which it is
+held he refuses to affect an admiration he does not feel; he cannot help
+being honest--he was born so. For meanness of all kinds he has a burning
+contempt; and on Abelard he pours out the vials of his wrath. He has a
+quick eye for all humbugs and a scorching scorn for them; but there is
+no attempt at being funny in the manner of the cockney comedians when he
+stands in the awful presence of the Sphinx. He is not taken in by the
+glamor of Palestine; he does not lose his head there; he keeps his feet;
+but he knows that he is standing on holy ground; and there is never a
+hint of irreverence in his attitude.
+
+'A Tramp Abroad' is a better book than the 'Innocents Abroad'; it is
+quite as laughter-provoking, and its manner is far more restrained. Mark
+Twain was then master of his method, sure of himself, secure of his
+popularity; and he could do his best and spare no pains to be certain
+that it was his best. Perhaps there is a slight falling off in
+'Following the Equator'; a trace of fatigue, of weariness, of
+disenchantment. But the last book of travels has passages as broadly
+humorous as any of the first; and it proves the author's possession of a
+pithy shrewdness not to be suspected from a perusal of its earliest
+predecessor. The first book was the work of a young fellow rejoicing in
+his own fun and resolved to make his readers laugh with him or at him;
+the latest book is the work of an older man, who has found that life is
+not all laughter, but whose eye is as clear as ever and whose tongue is
+as plain-spoken.
+
+These three books of travel are like all other books of travel in that
+they relate in the first person what the author went forth to see.
+Autobiographic also are 'Roughing It' and 'Life on the Mississippi,' and
+they have always seemed to me better books than the more widely
+circulated travels. They are better because they are the result of a
+more intimate knowledge of the material dealt with. Every traveler is of
+necessity but a bird of passage; he is a mere carpet-bagger; his
+acquaintance with the countries he visits is external only; and this
+acquaintanceship is made only when he is a full-grown man. But Mark
+Twain's knowledge of the Mississippi was acquired in his youth; it was
+not purchased with a price; it was his birthright; and it was internal
+and complete. And his knowledge of the mining-camp was achieved in early
+manhood when the mind is open and sensitive to every new impression.
+There is in both these books a fidelity to the inner truth, a certainty
+of touch, a sweep of vision, not to be found in the three books of
+travels. For my own part I have long thought that Mark Twain could
+securely rest his right to survive as an author on those opening
+chapters in 'Life on the Mississippi' in which he makes clear the
+difficulties, the seeming impossibilities, that fronted those who wisht
+to learn the river. These chapters are bold and brilliant; and they
+picture for us forever a period and a set of conditions, singularly
+interesting and splendidly varied, that otherwise would have had to
+forego all adequate record.
+
+
+III
+
+It is highly probable that when an author reveals the power of evoking
+views of places and of calling up portraits of people such as Mark
+Twain showed in 'Life on the Mississippi,' and when he has the masculine
+grasp of reality Mark Twain made evident in 'Roughing It,' he must needs
+sooner or later turn from mere fact to avowed fiction and become a
+story-teller. The long stories which Mark Twain has written fall into
+two divisions,--first, those of which the scene is laid in the present,
+in reality, and mostly in the Mississippi Valley, and second, those of
+which the scene is laid in the past, in fantasy mostly, and in Europe.
+
+As my own liking is a little less for the latter group, there is no need
+for me now to linger over them. In writing these tales of the past Mark
+Twain was making up stories in his head; personally I prefer the tales
+of his in which he has his foot firm on reality. The 'Prince and the
+Pauper' has the essence of boyhood in it; it has variety and vigor; it
+has abundant humor and plentiful pathos; and yet I for one would give
+the whole of it for the single chapter in which Tom Sawyer lets the
+contract for white-washing his aunt's fence.
+
+Mr. Howells has declared that there are two kinds of fiction he likes
+almost equally well,--"a real novel and a pure romance"; and he joyfully
+accepts 'A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court' as "one of the
+greatest romances ever imagined." It is a humorous romance overflowing
+with stalwart fun; and it is not irreverent but iconoclastic, in that it
+breaks not a few disestablished idols. It is intensely American and
+intensely nineteenth century and intensely democratic--in the best sense
+of that abused adjective. The British critics were greatly displeased
+with the book:--and we are reminded of the fact that the Spanish still
+somewhat resent 'Don Quixote' because it brings out too truthfully the
+fatal gap in the Spanish character between the ideal and the real. So
+much of the feudal still survives in British society that Mark Twain's
+merry and elucidating assault on the past seemed to some almost an
+insult to the present.
+
+But no critic, British or American, has ventured to discover any
+irreverence in 'Joan of Arc,' wherein indeed the tone is almost devout
+and the humor almost too much subdued. Perhaps it is my own distrust of
+the so-called historical novel, my own disbelief that it can ever be
+anything but an inferior form of art, which makes me care less for this
+worthy effort to honor a noble figure. And elevated and dignified as is
+the 'Joan of Arc,' I do not think that it shows us Mark Twain at his
+best; altho it has many a passage that only he could have written, it is
+perhaps the least characteristic of his works. Yet it may well be that
+the certain measure of success he has achieved in handling a subject so
+lofty and so serious, helped to open the eyes of the public to see the
+solid merits of his other stories, in which his humor has fuller play
+and in which his natural gifts are more abundantly displayed.
+
+Of these other stories three are "real novels," to use Mr. Howells's
+phrase; they are novels as real as any in any literature. 'Tom Sawyer'
+and 'Huckleberry Finn' and 'Pudd'nhead Wilson' are invaluable
+contributions to American literature--for American literature is nothing
+if it is not a true picture of American life and if it does not help us
+to understand ourselves. 'Huckleberry Finn' is a very amusing volume,
+and a generation has read its pages and laughed over it immoderately;
+but it is very much more than a funny book; it is a marvelously accurate
+portrayal of a whole civilization. Mr. Ormsby, in an essay which
+accompanies his translation of 'Don Quixote,' has pointed out that for a
+full century after its publication that greatest of novels was enjoyed
+chiefly as a tale of humorous misadventure, and that three generations
+had laughed over it before anybody suspected that it was more than a
+mere funny book. It is perhaps rather with the picaresque romances of
+Spain that 'Huckleberry Finn' is to be compared than with the
+masterpiece of Cervantes; but I do not think that it will be a century
+or that it will take three generations before we Americans generally
+discover how great a book 'Huckleberry Finn' really is, how keen its
+vision of character, how close its observation of life, how sound its
+philosophy, and how it records for us once and for all certain phases of
+southwestern society which it is most important for us to perceive and
+to understand. The influence of slavery, the prevalence of feuds, the
+conditions and the circumstances that make lynching possible--all these
+things are set before us clearly and without comment. It is for us to
+draw our own moral, each for himself, as we do when we see Shakspere
+acted.
+
+'Huckleberry Finn,' in its art, for one thing, and also in its broader
+range, is superior to 'Tom Sawyer' and to 'Pudd'nhead Wilson,' fine as
+both these are in their several ways. In no book in our language, to my
+mind, has the boy, simply as a boy, been better realized than in 'Tom
+Sawyer.' In some respects 'Pudd'nhead Wilson' is the most dramatic of
+Mark Twain's longer stories, and also the most ingenious; like 'Tom
+Sawyer' and 'Huckleberry Finn,' it has the full flavor of the
+Mississippi River, on which its author spent his own boyhood, and from
+contact with the soil of which he has always risen reinvigorated.
+
+It is by these three stories, and especially by 'Huckleberry Finn,' that
+Mark Twain is likely to live longest. Nowhere else is the life of the
+Mississippi Valley so truthfully recorded. Nowhere else can we find a
+gallery of southwestern characters as varied and as veracious as those
+Huck Finn met in his wanderings. The histories of literature all praise
+the 'Gil Blas' of Le Sage for its amusing adventures, its natural
+characters, its pleasant humor, and its insight into human frailty; and
+the praise is deserved. But in every one of these qualities 'Huckleberry
+Finn' is superior to 'Gil Blas.' Le Sage set the model of the picaresque
+novel, and Mark Twain followed his example; but the American book is
+richer than the French--deeper, finer, stronger. It would be hard to
+find in any language better specimens of pure narrative, better examples
+of the power of telling a story and of calling up action so that the
+reader cannot help but see it, than Mark Twain's account of the
+Shepardson-Grangerford feud, and his description of the shooting of
+Boggs by Sherbourn and of the foiled attempt to lynch Sherbourn
+afterward.
+
+These scenes, fine as they are, vivid, powerful, and most artistic in
+their restraint, can be matched in the two other books. In 'Tom Sawyer'
+they can be paralleled by the chapter in which the boy and the girl are
+lost in the cave, and Tom, seeing a gleam of light in the distance,
+discovers that it is a candle carried by Indian Joe, the one enemy he
+has in the world. In 'Pudd'nhead Wilson' the great passages of
+'Huckleberry Finn' are rivaled by that most pathetic account of the weak
+son willing to sell his own mother as a slave "down the river." Altho no
+one of the books is sustained thruout on this high level, and altho, in
+truth, there are in each of them passages here and there that we could
+wish away (because they are not worthy of the association in which we
+find them), I have no hesitation in expressing here my own conviction
+that the man who has given us four scenes like these is to be compared
+with the masters of literature; and that he can abide the comparison
+with equanimity.
+
+
+IV
+
+Perhaps I myself prefer these three Mississippi Valley books above all
+Mark Twain's other writings (altho with no lack of affection for those
+also) partly because these have the most of the flavor of the soil about
+them. After veracity and the sense of the universal, what I best relish
+in literature is this native aroma, pungent, homely, and abiding. Yet I
+feel sure that I should not rate him so high if he were the author of
+these three books only. They are the best of him, but the others are
+good also, and good in a different way. Other writers have given us
+this local color more or less artistically, more or less convincingly:
+one New England and another New York, a third Virginia, and a fourth
+Georgia, and a fifth Wisconsin; but who so well as Mark Twain has given
+us the full spectrum of the Union? With all his exactness in reproducing
+the Mississippi Valley, Mark Twain is not sectional in his outlook; he
+is national always. He is not narrow; he is not western or eastern; he
+is American with a certain largeness and boldness and freedom and
+certainty that we like to think of as befitting a country so vast as
+ours and a people so independent.
+
+In Mark Twain we have "the national spirit as seen with our own eyes,"
+declared Mr. Howells; and, from more points of view than one, Mark Twain
+seems to me to be the very embodiment of Americanism. Self-educated in
+the hard school of life, he has gone on broadening his outlook as he has
+grown older. Spending many years abroad, he has come to understand other
+nationalities, without enfeebling his own native faith. Combining a
+mastery of the commonplace with an imaginative faculty, he is a
+practical idealist. No respecter of persons, he has a tender regard for
+his fellowman. Irreverent toward all outworn superstitions, he has ever
+revealed the deepest respect for all things truly worthy of reverence.
+Unwilling to take pay in words, he is impatient always to get at the
+root of the matter, to pierce to the center, to see the thing as it is.
+He has a habit of standing upright, of thinking for himself, and of
+hitting hard at whatsoever seems to him hateful and mean; but at the
+core of him there is genuine gentleness and honest sympathy, brave
+humanity and sweet kindliness. Perhaps it is boastful for us to think
+that these characteristics which we see in Mark Twain are
+characteristics also of the American people as a whole; but it is
+pleasant to think so.
+
+Mark Twain has the very marrow of Americanism. He is as intensely and as
+typically American as Franklin or Emerson or Hawthorne. He has not a
+little of the shrewd common-sense and the homely and unliterary
+directness of Franklin. He is not without a share of the aspiration and
+the elevation of Emerson; and he has a philosophy of his own as
+optimistic as Emerson's. He possesses also somewhat of Hawthorne's
+interest in ethical problems, with something of the same power of
+getting at the heart of them; he, too, has written his parables and
+apologs wherein the moral is obvious and unobtruded. He is
+uncompromisingly honest; and his conscience is as rugged as his style
+sometimes is.
+
+No American author has to-day at his command a style more nervous, more
+varied, more flexible, or more direct than Mark Twain's. His colloquial
+ease should not hide from us his mastery of all the devices of rhetoric.
+He may seem to disobey the letter of the law sometimes, but he is always
+obedient to the spirit. He never speaks unless he has something to say;
+and then he says it tersely, sharply, with a freshness of epithet and an
+individuality of phrase always accurate, however unacademic. His
+vocabulary is enormous, and it is deficient only in the dead words; his
+language is alive always, and actually tingling with vitality. He
+rejoices in the daring noun and in the audacious adjective. His instinct
+for the exact word is not always assured, and now and again he has
+failed to exercise it; but we do not find in his prose the flatting and
+sharping he censured in Fenimore Cooper's. His style has none of the
+cold perfection of an antique statue; it is too modern and too American
+for that, and too completely the expression of the man himself, sincere
+and straightforward. It is not free from slang, altho this is far less
+frequent than one might expect; but it does its work swiftly and
+cleanly. And it is capable of immense variety. Consider the tale of the
+Blue Jay in 'A Tramp Abroad,' wherein the humor is sustained by unstated
+pathos; what could be better told than this, with every word the right
+word and in the right place? And take Huck Finn's description of the
+storm when he was alone on the island, which is in dialect, which will
+not parse, which bristles with double negatives, but which none the less
+is one of the finest passages of descriptive prose in all American
+literature.
+
+
+V
+
+After all, it is as a humorist pure and simple that Mark Twain is best
+known and best beloved. In the preceding pages I have tried to point out
+the several ways in which he transcends humor, as the word is commonly
+restricted, and to show that he is no mere fun-maker. But he is a
+fun-maker beyond all question, and he has made millions laugh as no
+other man of our century has done. The laughter he has aroused is
+wholesome and self-respecting; it clears the atmosphere. For this we
+cannot but be grateful. As Lowell said, "let us not be ashamed to
+confess that, if we find the tragedy a bore, we take the profoundest
+satisfaction in the farce. It is a mark of sanity." There is no laughter
+in Don Quixote, the noble enthusiast whose wits are unsettled; and there
+is little on the lips of _Alceste_, the misanthrope of Molière; but for
+both of them life would have been easier had they known how to laugh.
+Cervantes himself, and Molière also, found relief in laughter for their
+melancholy; and it was the sense of humor which kept them tolerantly
+interested in the spectacle of humanity, altho life had prest hardly on
+them both. On Mark Twain also life has left its scars; but he has bound
+up his wounds and battled forward with a stout heart, as Cervantes did,
+and Molière. It was Molière who declared that it was a strange business
+to undertake to make people laugh; but even now, after two centuries,
+when the best of Molière's plays are acted, mirth breaks out again and
+laughter overflows.
+
+It would be doing Mark Twain a disservice to compare him to Molière, the
+greatest comic dramatist of all time; and yet there is more than one
+point of similarity. Just as Mark Twain began by writing comic copy
+which contained no prophesy of a masterpiece like 'Huckleberry Finn,' so
+Molière was at first the author only of semi-acrobatic farces on the
+Italian model in no wise presaging 'Tartuffe' and the 'Misanthrope.'
+Just as Molière succeeded first of all in pleasing the broad public that
+likes robust fun, and then slowly and step by step developed into a
+dramatist who set on the stage enduring figures plucked out of the
+abounding life about him, so also has Mark Twain grown, ascending from
+the 'Jumping Frog' to 'Huckleberry Finn,' as comic as its elder brother
+and as laughter-provoking, but charged also with meaning and with
+philosophy. And like Molière again, Mark Twain has kept solid hold of
+the material world; his doctrine is not of the earth earthy, but it is
+never sublimated into sentimentality. He sympathizes with the spiritual
+side of humanity, while never ignoring the sensual. Like Molière, Mark
+Twain takes his stand on common-sense and thinks scorn of affectation of
+every sort. He understands sinners and strugglers and weaklings; and he
+is not harsh with them, reserving his scorching hatred for hypocrites
+and pretenders and frauds.
+
+At how long an interval Mark Twain shall be rated after Molière and
+Cervantes it is for the future to declare. All that we can see clearly
+now is that it is with them that he is to be classed,--with Molière and
+Cervantes, with Chaucer and Fielding, humorists all of them, and all of
+them manly men.
+
+     (1898.)
+
+
+
+
+A NOTE ON MAUPASSANT
+
+
+A student of the literature of our own time who has only recently
+completed his first half century of life cannot help feeling suddenly
+aged and almost antiquated when he awakes to the fact that he has been
+privileged to see the completed literary career of two such accomplished
+craftsmen as Robert Louis Stevenson and Guy de Maupassant. In youth they
+were full of promise, and in maturity they were rich in performance; and
+all too soon the lives of both came to an end, when their powers were
+still growing, when their outlook on life was still broadening, and when
+they bid fair, both of them, to bring forth many another book riper and
+wiser than any they had already given us.
+
+The points of contrast between the two men thus untimely taken away are
+as striking as the points of similarity. Both were artists ardently in
+love with the technic of their craft, delighting in their own skill, and
+ever on the alert to find new occasion for the display of their mastery
+of the methods of fiction. Stevenson was a Scotchman; and his
+pseudo-friend has told us that there was in him something of "the
+shorter catechist." Maupassant was a Norman, and he had never given a
+thought to the glorifying of God. The man who wrote in English found the
+theme of his minor masterpieces in the conflict of which the
+battle-ground is the human heart. The man who wrote in French began by
+caring little or nothing for the heart or the soul or the mind, and by
+concentrating all his skill upon a record of the deeds of the human
+body. The one has left us 'Markheim' and the 'Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll
+and Mr. Hyde,' while the other made his first bid for fame with 'Boule
+de suif.'
+
+In the preface of 'Pierre et Jean,' Maupassant has recorded how he
+acquired from Louis Bouilhet the belief that a single lyric, a scant
+hundred lines, would give immortality to a poet if only the work were
+fine enough, and that for the author who sought to escape oblivion there
+was only one course to pursue--to learn his trade thoroly, to master
+every secret of the craft, to do his best always, in the hope that some
+fortunate day the Muse would reward his unfailing devotion. And from
+Flaubert, the author of that merciless masterpiece 'Madame Bovary,' the
+young man learned the importance of individuality, of originality, of
+the personal note which should be all his own, and which should never
+suggest or recall any one else's. Flaubert was kindly and encouraging,
+but he was a desperately severe taskmaster. At Flaubert's dictation
+Maupassant gave up verse for prose; and for seven years he wrote
+incessantly and published nothing. The stories and tales and verses and
+dramas of those seven years of apprenticeship were ruthlessly criticized
+by the author of 'Salammbô,' and then they were destroyed unprinted. In
+all the long history of literature there is no record of any other
+author who served so severe a novitiate.
+
+Douglas Jerrold once said of a certain British author who had begun to
+publish very young that "he had taken down the shutters before he had
+anything to put up in the shop window." From being transfixt by such a
+jibe Maupassant was preserved by Flaubert. When he was thirty he
+contributed that masterpiece of ironic humor 'Boule de suif,' to the
+'Soirées de Médan,' a volume of short-stories put forth by the late
+Émile Zola, with the collaboration of a little group of his friends and
+followers. On this first appearance in the arena of letters Maupassant
+stept at once to a foremost place. That was in 1880; and in 1892 his
+mind gave way and he was taken to the asylum, where he soon died. In
+those twelve years he had published a dozen volumes of short-stories
+and half a dozen novels. Of the novel he might have made himself master
+in time; of the short-story he proved himself a master with the very
+earliest of all his tales.
+
+It must be admitted at once that many of Maupassant's earlier
+short-stories have to do with the lower aspects of man's merely animal
+activity. Maupassant had an abundance of what the French themselves
+called "Gallic salt." His humor was not squeamish; it delighted in
+dealing with themes that our Anglo-Saxon prudery prefers not to touch.
+But even at the beginning this liking of his for the sort of thing that
+we who speak English prefer to avoid in print never led him to put dirt
+where dirt was not a necessary element of his narrative. Dirty many of
+these tales were, no doubt; but many of them were perfectly clean. He
+never went out of his way to offend, as not a few of his compatriots
+seem to enjoy doing. He handled whatever subject he took with the same
+absolute understanding of its value, of the precise treatment best
+suited to it. If it was a dirty theme he had chosen--and he had no
+prejudice against such a theme--he did whatever was needful to get the
+most out of his subject. If it was not a dirty theme, then there was
+never any touch of the tar-brush. Whenever the subject itself was
+inoffensive his treatment was also immaculate. There is never any
+difficulty in making a choice out of his hundred or two brief tales;
+and it is easy to pick out a dozen or a score of his short-stories
+needing absolutely no expurgation, because they are wholly free from any
+phrase or any suggestion likely to bring the blush of shame to the cheek
+of innocence. In matters of taste, as we Anglo-Saxons regard them,
+Maupassant was a man without prejudices. But he was a man also of
+immitigable veracity in his dealing with the material of his art, in his
+handling of life itself. He told the truth as it was given to him to see
+the truth; not the whole truth, of course, for it is given to no man to
+see that. His artistic standard was lofty; and he did his best not to
+lie about life. And in some ways this veracity of his may be accepted,
+if not as an equivalent for morality, at least as a not wholly unworthy
+substitute.
+
+The most of Maupassant's earlier tales were not a little hard and stern
+and unsympathetic; and here again Maupassant was the disciple of
+Flaubert. His manner was not only unemotional at first, it was icily
+impassive. These first stories of his were cold and they were
+contemptuous;--at least they made the reader feel that the author
+heartily despised the pitiable and pitiful creatures he was depicting.
+They dealt mainly with the externals of life,--with outward actions; and
+the internal motives of the several actors were not always adequately
+implied. But in time the mind came to interest Maupassant as much as the
+body. In the beginning he seems to have considered solely what his
+characters did, and he cared little to tell us what they felt and what
+they thought; probably he did not know himself and did not try to know.
+
+The inquirers who should read his stories in the strict sequence of
+their production could not fail to be struck with the first awakening of
+his curiosity about human feeling; and they might easily trace the
+steady growth of his interest in psychologic states. Telling us at first
+bluntly and barely what his characters did, he came in time to find his
+chief pleasure in suggesting to us not only what they felt, but
+especially what they vaguely feared. Toward the end of his brief career
+the thought of death and the dread of mental disease seemed to possess
+him more and more with a haunting horror that kept recurring with a
+pathetic persistence. He came to have a close terror of death, almost an
+obsession of the grave; and to find a parallel to this we should have to
+go back four hundred years, to Villon, also a realist and a humorist
+with a profound relish for the outward appearances of life. But
+Maupassant went far beyond the earlier poet, and he even developed a
+fondness for the morbid and the abnormal. This is revealed in 'Le
+Horla,' the appalling story in which he took for his own Fitzjames
+O'Brien's uncanny monster, invisible, and yet tangible. In the hands of
+the clever Irish-American this tale had been gruesome enough; but the
+Frenchman was able to give it an added touch of terror by making the
+unfortunate victim discover that the creature he feared had a stronger
+will than his own and that he was being hypnotized to his doom by a
+being whom he could not see, but whose presence he could feel. There is
+more than one of these later tales in which we seem to perceive the
+premonition of the madness which came upon Maupassant before his death.
+
+At first he was an observer only, a recorder of the outward facts of
+average humanity. He had no theories about life, or even about art. He
+had no ideas of his own, no general ideas, no interest in ideas. He did
+not care to talk about technic or even about his own writings. He put on
+paper what he had seen, the peasants of Normandy, the episodes of the
+war, the nether-world of the newspaper. He cared nothing for morality,
+but he was unfailingly veracious, never falsifying the facts of
+existence as he had seen it himself. Then, at the end, it is not what
+his characters do that most interested him, not what they are, not what
+they think, but what they feel, and, above all, what they fear.
+
+In every work of art there are at least four elements, which we may
+separate if we wish to consider each of them in turn. First of all,
+there is the technic of the author, his craftsmanship, his mastery of
+the tools of his trade; and by almost universal consent Maupassant is
+held to be one of the master craftsmen of the short-story. Second, there
+is the amount of observation of life which the author reveals; and here
+again Maupassant takes rank among the leaders, altho the sphere in which
+he observed had its marked limitations and its obvious exclusions.
+Thirdly, there is the underlying and informing imagination which invents
+and relates and sustains; and there is no disputing the vigor of
+Maupassant's imagination, altho it was not lofty and altho it lacked
+variety. Finally, there is always to be taken into account what one may
+term the author's philosophy of life, his attitude toward the common
+problems of humanity; and here it is that Maupassant is most
+lacking,--for his opinions are negligible and his attempts at
+intellectual speculation are of slight value.
+
+Technic can be acquired; and Maupassant had studied at the feet of that
+master technician Flaubert. Observation can be trained; and Maupassant
+had deliberately developed his power of vision. Imagination may be
+stimulated by constant endeavor to a higher achievement; and
+Maupassant's ambitions were ever tending upward. Philosophy, however, is
+dependent upon the sum total of a man's faculties, upon his training,
+upon his temperament, upon the essential elements of his character; and
+Maupassant was not a sound thinker, and his attitude toward life is not
+that by which he can best withstand the adverse criticism of posterity.
+Primarily, he was not a thinker any more than Hugo was a thinker, or
+Dickens. He was only an artist--an artist in fiction; and an artist is
+not called upon to be a thinker, altho the supreme artists seem nearly
+all of them to have been men of real intellectual force.
+
+     (1902.)
+
+
+
+
+THE MODERN NOVEL AND THE MODERN PLAY
+
+
+As we glance down the long history of literature, we cannot but remark
+that certain literary forms, the novel at one time and the drama at
+another, have achieved a sweeping popularity, seemingly out of all
+proportion to their actual merit at the moment when they were
+flourishing most luxuriantly. In these periods of undue expansion, the
+prevalent form absorbed many talents not naturally attracted toward it.
+In the beginning of the sixteenth century in England, for instance, the
+drama was more profitable, and, therefore, more alluring, than any other
+field of literary endeavor; and so it was that many a young fellow of
+poetic temperament adventured himself in the rude theater of those
+spacious days, even tho his native gift was only doubtfully dramatic. No
+reader of Peele's plays and of Greene's can fail to feel that these two
+gentle poets were, neither of them, born play-makers called to the stage
+by irresistible vocation. Two hundred years later, after Steele and
+Addison had set the pattern of the eighteenth-century essay, the drama
+was comparatively neglected, and every man of letters was found striving
+for the unattainable ease and charm of the 'Tatler' and the 'Spectator.'
+Even the elephantine Johnson, congenitally incapable of airy nothings
+and prone always to "make little fishes talk like whales," disported
+ponderously in the 'Idler' and the 'Rambler.' The vogue of the essay was
+fleeting also; and a century later it was followed by the vogue of the
+novel,--a vogue which has already endured longer than that of the essay,
+and which has not yet shown any signs of abating. Yet the history of
+literature reminds us that the literary form most in favor in one
+century is very likely to drop out of fashion in the next; and we are
+justified in asking ourselves whether the novel is to be supreme in the
+twentieth century as it was in the nineteenth, or whether its popularity
+must surely wane like that of the essay.
+
+Altho the art of fiction must be almost as old as mankind itself, the
+prose novel, as we know it now, is a thing of yesterday only. It is not
+yet a hundred years since it established itself and claimed equality
+with the other forms of literature. Novelists there had been, no doubt,
+and of the highest rank; but it was not until after 'Waverley' and its
+successors swept across Europe triumphant and overwhelming that a
+fiction in prose was admitted to full citizenship in the republic of
+letters. Nowadays, we are so accustomed to the novel and so familiar
+with its luxuriance in every modern language that we often forget its
+comparative youth. Yet we know that no one of the muses of old was
+assigned to the fostering of prose-fiction, a form of literary endeavor
+which the elder Greeks did not foresee. If we accept Fielding's
+contention that the history of 'Tom Jones' must be considered as a
+prose-epic, we are justified in the belief that the muse of the
+epic-poetry is not now without fit occupation.
+
+Indeed, the modern novel is not only the heir of the epic, it has also
+despoiled the drama, the lyric and the oration of part of their
+inheritance. The 'Scarlet Letter,' for example, has not a little of the
+lofty largeness and of the stately movement of true tragedy; 'Paul and
+Virginia,' again, abounds in a passionate self-revelation which is
+essentially lyric; and many a novel-with-a-purpose, needless to name
+here, displays its author's readiness to avail himself of all the
+devices of the orator. In fact, the novel is now so various and so
+many-sided that its hospitality is limitless. It welcomes alike the
+exotic eroticism of M. Pierre Loti and the cryptic cleverness of Mr.
+Henry James, the accumulated adventure of Dumas and the inexorable
+veracity of Tolstoi. It has tempted many a man who had no native
+endowment for it; Motley and Parkman and Froude risked themselves in
+imaginative fiction, as well as in the sterner history which was their
+real birthright. And so did Brougham, far more unfitted for
+prose-fiction than Johnson was for the graceful eighteenth-century essay
+or than Peele and Greene were for the acted drama. Perhaps it is a
+consequence of this variety of method, which lets prose-fiction proffer
+itself to every passer-by, that we recognize in the Victorian novel the
+plasticity of form and the laxity of structure which we have discovered
+to be characteristic of the Elizabethan drama.
+
+In her encroaching on the domain of the other muses, the prose-epic has
+annexed far more from her comic and tragic sisters than from any of the
+other six. An opportunity for a most interesting inquiry awaits the
+alert scholar who shall undertake to tell the rivalry of the novel and
+the play, tracing their influence on each other and making a catalog of
+their mutual borrowings. Altho the record has no special significance,
+it may be noted that they have never hesitated to filch plots from each
+other, the playwrights appropriating the inventions of the novelists and
+the novelists levying on the works of the playwrights,--Shakspere, the
+dramatist, finding the action of his 'As You Like It' ready to his hand
+in a tale of Lodge's, and Le Sage, the story-teller, in his 'Gil Blas'
+availing himself of scenes from Spanish comedies.
+
+Far deeper, however, than any purloining of material are other
+interrelations of the novel and the play, which have been continually
+influencing one another, even when there was no hint of any plagiarism
+of subject-matter. The older of the two, the drama, long served as the
+model of prose-fiction; and not a few of the earlier practitioners of
+the later art began their literary careers as writers for the
+theater,--Le Sage for one, and, for another, Fielding. It is not to be
+wondered at that they were inclined to approach the novel a little as
+tho it were a play, and to set their characters in motion with only a
+bare and summary indication of the appropriate environment. They were
+inclined to follow the swift methods proper enough on the stage, if not
+absolutely necessary there, instead of developing for themselves the
+more leisurely movement appropriate to prose-fiction. Both Fielding and
+Le Sage, it may be well to note, had profited greatly by their careful
+study of Molière and of his logical method of presenting character. In
+the 'Princess of Cleves,'--perhaps the first effort at feminine
+psychology in fiction,--we discover the obvious impress of both
+Corneille and Racine on Madame de Lafayette,--the stiffening of the will
+to resolute self-sacrifice of the elder dramatist and the subtler
+analysis of motive dexterously attempted by the younger and more tender
+tragic poet.
+
+Just as Beaumarchais in the eighteenth century found his profit in a
+study of Le Sage's satiric attitude, so Augier in the nineteenth
+century, and still more, Dumas _fils_, responded to the sharp stimulus
+of Balzac. The richer and far more complicated presentation of character
+which delights and amazes us in the 'Human Comedy' was most suggestive
+to the younger generation of French dramatists; and no one can fail to
+see the reflection of Balzac in the 'Maître Guérin' of Augier and in the
+'Ami des femmes' of Dumas. And, in their turn, these plays and their
+fellows supplied a pattern to the novelist--to Daudet especially. A
+certain lack of largeness, a certain artificiality of action in Daudet's
+'Fromont jeune et Risler aîné,' is probably to be ascribed to the fact
+that the story was first conceived in the form of a play, altho it was
+actually written as a novel.
+
+The British novelist with whom this French novelist is often compared,
+and with whom he had much in common, was also impressed profoundly by
+the theater of his own time and of his own country. But Dickens was less
+fortunate than Daudet, in that the contemporary English stage did not
+afford a model as worthy of imitation as the contemporary French stage.
+Of course, the native genius of Dickens is indisputable, but his
+artistic ideals are painfully unsatisfactory. His letters show him
+forever straining after effects for their own sake only, and striving to
+put just so much humor and just so much pathos into each one of the
+successive monthly parts into which his stories were chopped up. Very
+fond of the theater from his early youth, Dickens had come near going on
+the stage as an actor; and, in his search for effects, he borrowed
+inexpensive mysteries from contemporary melodrama, and he took from it
+the implacable and inexplicable villain ever involved in dark plottings.
+It is significant that 'No Thoroughfare,' the one play of his invention
+which was actually produced, was performed at the Adelphi, and was
+discovered then not to differ widely from the other robust and
+high-colored melodramas ordinarily acted at that hopelessly unliterary
+playhouse. Daudet, altho he was not gifted with the splendid creative
+force of Dickens, inherited the Latin tradition of restraint and harmony
+and proportion; and he had before his eyes on the French stage the
+adroitly contrived comedies of Augier and of Dumas _fils_, models far
+more profitable to a novelist than the violent crudities of the Adelphi.
+
+Perhaps there is more than a hint of ingratitude in Daudet's later
+disgust with the inherent limitations of the drama,--a disgust more
+forcibly phrased by his friends, Zola and Goncourt and Flaubert,
+realists all of them, eager to capture the theater also and to rule it
+in their own way. In their hands, the novel was an invading conqueror;
+and they had the arrogance that comes from an unforeseen success. They
+were all eager to take possession of the playhouse, and to repeat in
+that new field of art the profitable victories they had gained in the
+library. But they declined to admit that the drama was a special art,
+with a method of its own. They resented bitterly the failures that
+followed when they refused to accept the conditions of the actual
+theater; and they protested shrilly against these conditions when they
+vainly essayed to fulfil them. "What a horrible manner of writing is
+that which suits the stage!" Flaubert complained to George Sand. "The
+ellipses, the suspensions, the interrogations must be lavished, if one
+wishes to have liveliness; and all these things, in themselves, are very
+ugly." In other words, Flaubert was concerned with the rhetoric of the
+written word, and he had no relish for the rhythm of spoken dialog.
+
+These French novelists refused to perceive that the drama is, of
+necessity, the most democratic of the arts, since it depends, and has
+always depended, and must ever depend, absolutely upon the public as a
+whole. The strength of the drama, its immense advantage over other forms
+of literature, lies in this, that it must appeal to the mass of men,
+not to the intelligent more than to the unintelligent, not to the
+educated more than to the uneducated, not to any sect or clique, or
+cotery, but to men as men. The laws of the drama may be deduced, all of
+them, from this principle, that in the theater the play-maker has to
+interest a gathering of his own contemporaries, all sorts and conditions
+of men. If he cannot hold their attention, move them, sway them, control
+them, then he has failed frankly to do what he set out to do. And he can
+do this, he can make them laugh, and make them weep, make them feel, and
+make them think, only by accepting the conditions of the theater itself.
+Daudet and Zola had more of the needful understanding of their fellow
+creatures than Flaubert and Goncourt, more of the necessary sympathy;
+but they had all of them not a little of the conceit of the self-made
+man and they assumed the egotistic attitude of the cultivated
+aristocrat. It would have been well if they could have taken to heart
+what George Sand once wrote to Flaubert: "It seems to me that your
+school does not consider enough the substance of things, and that it
+lingers too much on the surface. By dint of seeking for form, it lets go
+of the fact. It addresses itself to men of cultivation. But there are,
+strictly speaking, no men of cultivation, for we are, first of all,
+men."
+
+Because the drama was popular, these artistic aristocrats despised it.
+Altho they pined to succeed as play-makers, they scorned the trouble of
+mastering the methods of the theater. Because the drama, at its highest,
+attained to the loftier levels of literature, they assumed that a man of
+letters had no need to spy out the secrets of the stage. If they could
+not apply in the play the methods they had been applying skilfully and
+successfully in the novel, so much the worse for the play. Evidently,
+the drama was not literature, and the theater was no place for a
+literary man. The fault was not in them; it could not be, since they had
+regenerated the novel. It must be in the stage itself, and in the
+stupidity of the public.
+
+In one of his most vigorous essays, Brunetière joined issue with this
+little group of French novelists, and told them sharply that they had
+better consider anew the theatrical practises and prejudices which
+seemed to them absurdly out-worn, and which they disdained as born of
+mere chance and surviving only by tradition. He bade them ask themselves
+if these tricks of the trade, so to style them, were not due to the fact
+that the dramatist's art is a special art, having its own laws, its own
+conditions, its own conventions, inherent in the nature of the art
+itself. When they exprest their conviction that the method of the novel
+ought to be applicable to the play, Brunetière retorted that, if the
+novel was the play and if the play was the novel, then in all accuracy
+there would be neither novel nor play, but only a single and undivided
+form; and he insisted that, if as a matter of fact this single form did
+not actually exist, if it had divided itself, if there was such a thing
+as a novel and such a thing as a play, then that could be only because
+we go to the theater to get a specific pleasure which we cannot get in
+the library. The practical critic gave them the sound advice that, if
+they sought to succeed in the theater as they had succeeded in the
+library, they should study the art of the playwright, endeavoring to
+perceive wherein it differs from the art of the story-teller.
+
+The points of agreement between the novel and the play are so obvious
+that there is some excuse for overlooking the fact that the points of
+disagreement are almost as numerous. It is true that, in the play as in
+the novel, a story is developed by means of characters whose
+conversation is reproduced. So the game of golf is like the game of
+lawn-tennis, in so far as there are in both of them balls to be placed
+by the aid of certain implements. But as the balls are different and as
+the implements are different, the two games are really not at all alike;
+and it is when they are played most skilfully and most strictly
+according to the rules that they are most unlike.
+
+The play is least dramatic when it most closely resembles the novel, as
+it did in the days of Peele and Greene, whose dramas are little more
+than narratives presented in dialog. In the three centuries since Peele
+and Greene, the play and the novel have been getting further and further
+away from each other. Each has been steadily specializing, seeking its
+true self, casting out the extraneous elements proved to be useless. The
+novel in its highest development is now a single narrative, no longer
+distended and delayed by intercalated tales, such as we find in 'Don
+Quixote' and 'Tom Jones,' in 'Wilhelm Meister' and in 'Pickwick,'
+inserted for no artistic reason, but merely because the author happened
+to have them on hand. The play in its highest development is now a
+single action, swiftly presented, and kept free from lyrical and
+oratorical digressions existing for their own sake and not aiding in the
+main purpose of the drama.
+
+The practitioners of each art conceive their stories in accordance with
+the necessities of that art, the novelist thinking in terms of the
+printed page and the dramatist thinking in terms of the actual theater,
+with its actors and with its spectators. Here, indeed, is a chief reason
+why the perspective of the play is different from the perspective of
+the novel, in that the playwright must perforce take account of his
+audience, of its likes and its dislikes, of its traditions and its
+desires. The novelist need not give a thought to his readers, assured
+that those in sympathy with his attitude and his mood will find him out
+sooner or later. To the story-teller, readers may come singly and at
+intervals; but the play-maker has to attract his audience in a mass.
+Much of the merely literary merit of a drama may be enjoyed by a lone
+reader under the library lamp; but its essential dramatic quality is
+completely and satisfactorily revealed only in front of the footlights
+when the theater is filled with spectators.
+
+It is this consciousness that his appeal is not to any individual man,
+but to man in the mass, that makes the dramatist what he is. To
+scattered readers, each sitting alone, an author may whisper many things
+which he would not dare blurt out before a crowd. The playwright knows
+that he can never whisper slyly; he must always speak out boldly so that
+all may hear him; and he must phrase what he has to say so as to please
+the boys in the gallery without insulting the women in the stage-boxes.
+To the silent pressure of these unrelated spectators he responds by
+seeking the broadest basis for his play, by appealing to elemental human
+sympathy, by attempting themes with more or less of universality. It is
+because the drama is the most democratic of the arts that the dramatist
+cannot narrow himself as the novelist may, if he chooses; and it is
+because this breadth of appeal is inherent in the acted play that
+Aristotle held the drama to be a nobler form than the epic. "The
+dramatic poem," said Mr. Henry James some thirty years ago, when he was
+dealing with Tennyson's 'Queen Mary,' "seems to me of all literary forms
+the very noblest.... More than any other work of literary art, it needs
+a masterly structure."
+
+Whether nobler or not, the dramatic form has always had a powerful
+fascination for the novelists, who are forever casting longing eyes on
+the stage. Mr. James himself has tried it, and Mr. Howells and Mark
+Twain also. Balzac believed that he was destined to make his fortune in
+the theater; and one of Thackeray's stories was made over out of a
+comedy, acted only by amateurs. Charles Reade called himself a dramatist
+forced to be a novelist by bad laws. Flaubert and the Goncourts, Zola
+and Daudet wrote original plays, without ever achieving the success
+which befell their efforts in prose-fiction. And now, in the opening
+years of the twentieth century, we see Mr. Barrie in London and M.
+Hervieu in Paris abandoning the novel in which they have triumphed for
+the far more precarious drama. Mr. Thomas Hardy also appears to have
+wearied of the novel and to be seeking relief, if not in real drama, at
+least in a form borrowed from it, a sort of epic in dialog. Nor is it
+without significance that the professional playwrights seem to feel
+little or no temptation to turn story-tellers. Apparently the dramatic
+form is the more attractive and the more satisfactory, in spite of its
+greater difficulty and its greater danger.
+
+Perhaps, indeed, we may discover in this difficulty and danger one
+reason why the drama is more interesting than prose-fiction. A true
+artist cannot but tire of a form that is too facile; and he is ever
+yearning for a grapple with stubborn resistance. He delights in technic
+for its own sake, girding himself joyfully to vanquish its necessities.
+He is aware that an art which does not demand a severe apprenticeship
+for the slow mastery of its secrets will fail to call forth his full
+strength. He knows that it is bad for the art and unwholesome for the
+artist himself, when the conditions are so relaxed that he can take it
+carelessly.
+
+It was a saying of the old bard of Brittany that "he who will not answer
+to the rudder must answer to the rocks"; and not a few writers of
+prose-fiction have made shipwreck because they gave no heed to this
+warning. Many a novelist is a sloven in the telling of his tale,
+beginning it anywhere and ending it somehow, distracting attention on
+characters of slight importance, huddling his incidents, confusing his
+narrative, simply because he has never troubled himself with the
+principles of construction and proportion with which every playwright
+must needs make himself familiar. Just as the architectural students at
+the Beaux Arts in Paris are required to develop at the same time the
+elevation and the ground-plan and the cross-section of the edifice they
+are designing, so the playwright, while he is working out his plot, must
+be continually solving problems of exposition and of construction, of
+contrast and of climax. These are questions with which the ordinary
+novelist feels no need to concern himself, for the reading public makes
+no demand on him and there is nothing urging him to attain a high
+standard. It is worthy of remark that the newspaper reviewers of current
+fiction very rarely comment on the construction of the novels they are
+considering.
+
+In other words, the novel is too easy to be wholly satisfactory to an
+artist in literature. It is a loose form of hybrid ancestry; it may be
+of any length; and it may be told in any manner,--in letters, as an
+autobiography or as a narrative. It may win praise by its possession of
+the mere externals of literature, by sheer style. It may seek to please
+by description of scenery, or by dissection of motive. It may be empty
+of action and filled with philosophy. It may be humorously perverse in
+its license of digression,--as it was in Sterne's hands, for example. It
+may be all things to all men: it is a very chameleon-weathercock. And it
+is too varied, too negligent, too lax, to spur its writer to his utmost
+effort, to that stern wrestle with technic which is a true artist's
+never-failing tonic.
+
+On the other hand, the drama is a rigid form, limited to the two hours'
+traffic of the stage. Just as the decorative artist has to fill the
+space assigned to him and must respect the dispositions of the
+architect, so the playwright must work his will within the requirements
+of the theater, turning to advantage the restrictions which he should
+not evade. He must always appeal to the eye as well as to the ear, never
+forgetting that the drama, while it is in one aspect a department of
+literature, in another is a branch of the show-business. He must devise
+stage-settings at once novel, ingenious and plausible; and he must
+invent reasons for bringing together naturally the personages of his
+play in the single place where each of his acts passes. He must set his
+characters firm on their feet, each speaking for himself and revealing
+himself as he speaks; for they need to have internal vitality as they
+cannot be painted from the outside. He must see his creatures as well
+as hear them; and he must know always what they are doing and how they
+are looking when they are speaking. He cannot comment on them or explain
+them, or palliate their misdeeds. He must project them outside of
+himself; and he cannot be his own lecturer to point out their motives.
+He must get on without any attempt to point out the morality of his
+work, which remains implicit altho it ought to be obvious. He must work
+easily within many bonds, seeming always to be free and unhampered; and
+he must turn to account these restrictions and find his profit in them,
+for they are the very qualities which differentiate the drama and make
+it what it is.
+
+This essential unlikeness of the drama to the novel is so keenly
+appreciated by every novelist who happens also to be a dramatist, that
+he is rarely tempted to treat the same theme in both forms, feeling
+instinctively that it belongs either to the stage or to the library.
+Often, of course, he writes a novel rather than a play, because he knows
+that a certain theme, adequate as it may be for a novel, lacks that
+essential struggle, that naked assertion of the human will, that clash
+of contending desires, which must be visible in a play if this is to
+sustain the interest of an audience. Many a tale, pleasing to thousands
+of readers because it abounds in brisk adventure, will not lend itself
+to successful dramatization because its many episodes are not related to
+a single straight-forward conflict of forces.
+
+When Mr. Gillette undertook to make a play out of the Sherlock Holmes
+stories, which were not really dramatic, however ingeniously packed with
+thrilling surprizes, he seized at once on the sinister figure of
+Professor Moriarty, glimpsed only for a moment in a single tale, and he
+set this portentous villain up against his hero,--thereby displaying his
+mastery of a major principle of play-making. Many a novel has seemed
+vulgarized on the stage, because the adapter had to wrench its structure
+in seeking a struggle strong enough to sustain the framework of a play.
+Many a story has been cheapened pitifully by the theatrical adapter,
+simply because he was incapable of seeing in it more than a series of
+striking scenes which could be hewn into dialog for rough and ready
+representation on the stage, and because he had seized only his raw
+material, the bare skeleton of intrigue, without possessing the skill or
+the taste needed to convey across the footlights the subtle psychology
+which vitalized the original tale, or the evanescent atmosphere which
+enveloped it in charm. Mr. Bliss Perry phrased it most felicitously when
+he asserted that "a novel is typically as far removed from a play as a
+bird is from a fish," and that "the attempt to transform one into the
+other is apt to result in a sort of flying-fish, a betwixt-and-between
+thing."
+
+We all know that the ultimate value of certain accepted works of fiction
+is to be found, not in the story itself or even in the characters, but
+rather in the interpretative comment with which the novelist has
+encompassed people and happenings commonplace enough; and we all can see
+that, when one of these stories is set on the stage, the comment must be
+stript off, the incidents and the characters standing naked in their
+triteness. But this betrayal is not to be charged against dramatic form,
+for all that the dramatization did was to uncover brutally an inherent
+weakness which the novelist had hoped to hide.
+
+The novelist has privileges denied to the playwright; and, chief among
+them, of course, is the right to explain his characters, to analize
+their motives, to set forth every fleeting phase of emotion to which
+they are subject. Sidney Lanier asserted that the novel was a finer form
+than the drama because there were subtleties of feeling which Shakspere
+could not make plain and George Eliot could. Unfortunately for Lanier,
+his admiration for George Eliot is felt now to be excessive; and few of
+us are ready to accept Gwendolen Harleth as a more successful attempt at
+portraiture than any one of half a score of Shakspere's heroines, so
+convincingly feminine. But there is truth, no doubt, in the contention
+that the novel is freer, more fluid, more flexible than the play; and
+that there are themes and subjects unsuited to the stage and wholly
+within the compass of the story-teller. To say this is but to repeat
+again that the drama is not prose-fiction and prose-fiction is not the
+drama,--just as painting is not sculpture and sculpture not painting.
+
+But to emphasize this distinction is not to confess that the drama
+cannot do at all certain things which the novel does with unconscious
+ease. Is there no rich variety of self-analysis in 'Macbeth,' one may
+ask, and in 'Hamlet'? Did any novelist of the seventeenth century lay
+bare the palpitations of the female heart more delicately than Racine?
+Did any novelist of the eighteenth century reveal a subtler insight into
+the hidden recesses of feminine psychology than Marivaux? It may be true
+enough that, in the nineteenth century, prose-fiction has been more
+fortunate than the drama and that the novelists have achieved triumphs
+of insight and of subtlety denied to the dramatists. But who shall say
+that this immediate inferiority of the play to the novel is inherent in
+the form itself? Who will deny that it may be merely the defect of the
+playwrights of our time? Who will assert that a more accomplished
+dramatist may not come forward in the twentieth century to prove that
+the drama is a fit instrument for emotional dissection?
+
+No one has more clearly indicated the limitations of the dramatic medium
+than Mr. A.B. Walkley, who once declared that the future career of the
+drama "is likely to be hampered by its inability to tell cultivated and
+curious people of to-day a tithe of the things they want to know. What
+the drama can tell, it can tell more emphatically than any other art.
+The novel, for instance, is but a report; the drama makes you an
+eyewitness of the thing in the doing. But then there is a whole world of
+things which cannot be done, of thoughts and moods and subconscious
+states which cannot be exprest on the stage and which can be exprest in
+the novel. In earlier ages, which could do with a narrow range of vivid
+sensations, the drama sufficed; it will not suffice for an age which
+wants an illimitable range of sensations, and, being quick in the
+uptake, can dispense with vividness." And then the brilliant critic of
+the London _Times_ dwelt on the meagerness of Ibsen's 'Master-Builder'
+when contrasted with "the extraordinarily complicated texture of subtle
+thoughts and minute sensations" in Mr. James's 'Wings of the Dove.'
+
+It may as well be confest frankly that, even in the twenty-first
+century, the playhouse is unlikely to be hospitable to an
+"extraordinarily complicated texture of subtle thoughts and minute
+sensations"; but we may ask also if the playhouse will really be very
+much poorer by this inhospitality. Even tho a small subdivision of the
+public shall find a keen pleasure in them, there are other things in
+life than subtle thoughts and minute sensations; there are larger
+aspects of existence than those we find registered either in the 'Wings
+of the Dove' or in the 'Master-Builder.' The texture of Mr. James's book
+may be more complicated than that of Ibsen's play; but this is not
+entirely because one is a novel and the other a drama. Both works fail
+in breadth of appeal; they are narrow in their outlook on life, however
+skilful in craftsmanship they may be, each in its own way; they are
+devised for the dilettants, for the men of cultivation, and for these
+mainly; and that way danger lies. Taine dwelt on the disintegration
+impending when artists tended to appeal to the expert rather than to the
+public as a whole. "The sculptor," so he declared, "no longer addresses
+himself to a religious, civic community, but to a group of isolated
+lovers of the art." In the future as in the past, the appeal of the
+playwright must be to the main body of his contemporaries, even tho this
+may be at the risk of not fully satisfying one group or another.
+
+The art of the dramatist is not yet at its richest; but it bristles with
+obstacles such as a strong man joys in overcoming. In this sharper
+difficulty is its most obvious advantage over the art of the novelist;
+and here is its chief attraction for the story-teller, weary of a method
+almost too easy to be worth while. Here is a reason why one may venture
+a doubt whether the novel, which has been dominant, not to say
+domineering, in the second half of the nineteenth century, may not have
+to face a more acute rivalry of the drama in the first half of the
+twentieth century. The vogue of the novel is not likely to wane
+speedily; but its supremacy may be challenged by the drama more swiftly
+than now seems likely.
+
+     (1904.)
+
+
+
+
+THE LITERARY MERIT OF OUR LATTER-DAY DRAMA
+
+
+In trying to present our own opinions upon a question at issue, we can
+often find an advantage in getting first of all a clear statement of the
+other side. This must serve as an excuse for here quoting a paragraph
+(from a British magazine) which chanced to get itself copied in an
+American newspaper:
+
+     The truth is, our dramatists have long since forgotten that the
+     English language is still the medium of the English drama, and that
+     no branch of literary art is worth a word of praise that wantonly
+     divorces itself from literature. The foolish dramatist who was once
+     loquacious concerning what he was pleased to call "the literary
+     drama" condemned his own craft in a single phrase. No doubt,
+     prosperity being essential, the audience of our theaters must share
+     the blame with their favorites. Too idle to listen to exquisite
+     prose or splendid verse, they prefer the quick antics of comedians,
+     and in their ear, as in Mr. Pinero's, "theatrical," has a far more
+     splendid sound than "dramatic." To sum the matter up, that poets
+     have failed upon the stage is no compliment to the professional
+     playwrights, who believe themselves the vessels of an esoteric
+     inspiration. It merely means that literature and the drama travel
+     by different roads, and they will continue to travel by those roads
+     so long as the actor is master of the dramatist, so
+
+     long as the merits of a drama are judged by the standard of
+     material prosperity. After all, to get your puppets on and off the
+     stage is not the sole end of drama, and modesty might suggest that
+     it is better to fail with Tennyson than to succeed with the gifted
+     author who is at this moment engaged in whitewashing Julia.
+
+Inexpensive in wit as this paragraph is, it serves the purpose of
+showing us that there are still those who believe the drama of our own
+time to be a thing of naught. Brief as this quotation is, it is long
+enough to reveal that the writer of it had the arrogance of ignorance,
+and that he was expressing what he conceived to be opinions, without
+taking the trouble to learn anything about the history of the theater or
+about the principles of the dramatic art.
+
+The full measure of his ignorance it would be a waste of time to point
+out, but it can be estimated by his two remarks, that it was better to
+fail with Tennyson than to succeed with Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, and that
+there is likely to be no change for the better so long as the merits of
+a drama are judged by "the standard of material prosperity." Taking
+these assertions in turn, we may note, first, that Tennyson ardently
+longed to write a play which should please the playgoers of his own
+time; second, that he desired to be judged by these very standards of
+material prosperity,--just as Mr. Jones does. Mr. Jones has more than
+once succeeded in pleasing the playgoers of his own time, and Tennyson
+failed to achieve the particular kind of success he was aiming at. His
+failure may have been due to his lack of the native dramatic faculty; it
+may have been due to his following of outworn models no longer adjusted
+to the conditions of the modern theater; but whatever the reason, there
+is no doubt as to the fact itself. He did not attain the goal he was
+striving for any more than Browning was able to do so; and it is not for
+their eulogists now to say that their goal was unworthy. The test of
+"material prosperity" was the very test by which the poets wisht to be
+tried, and by this test they both failed--and Mr. Henry Arthur Jones
+more than once has succeeded. Tennyson and Mr. Jones were aiming at the
+same target--popular success in the theater. Even if Mr. Jones has not
+always made a bull's-eye, he has often put his bullet on the target--the
+very target which Tennyson mist completely, even if his ball happened to
+make a hit on another.
+
+Tennyson desired to meet the conditions which all the great dramatists
+have ever been willing to meet. He did not follow their example and
+study carefully the circumstances of theatrical representation as they
+had done, nor did he make himself master of the secrets of the
+dramaturgic art. And this is a chief reason why he was unable to
+produce any impression upon the drama of his day; while the dramatic
+poets of the past, the masters whom he respected--Sophocles and
+Shakspere and Molière--each of them, accepting the formula of the
+theater as this had been elaborated by his immediate predecessors,
+enlarged this formula, modified it, made it over to suit his own ampler
+outlook on life, and thus stamped his own individuality upon the drama
+of succeeding generations.
+
+Shakspere and Molière are accepted by us now as the greatest of dramatic
+poets; but to their own contemporaries they were known rather as
+ingenious playwrights up to every trick of the trade, finding their
+profit in every new device of their fellow-craftsmen, and emerging
+triumphant from a judgment by "the standard of material prosperity." And
+by this same standard, unworthy as it may seem to some, Lope de Vega and
+Calderon were judged in their own day. Corneille and Racine also,
+Beaumarchais and Sheridan, Hugo and Augier and Rostand. The standard of
+material prosperity is not the only test,--indeed, it is not the final
+test,--but it is the first and the most imperative, because a dramatist
+who fails to please the play-going public of his own time will never
+have another chance. There is no known instance of a poet unsuccessful
+on the stage in his own country and winning recognition in the theater
+after his death. Posterity never reverses the unfavorable verdict of an
+author's contemporaries; it has no time to waste on this, for it is too
+busy reversing the favorable verdicts which seem to it to be in
+disaccord with the real merits of the case.
+
+It was Mark Twain who pithily summed up a prevailing opinion when he
+said that "the classics are the books everybody praises--and nobody
+reads." Let us hope that this is an overstatement and not the exact
+truth; but whatever the proportion of verity in Mark Twain's saying,
+there is no doubt that we are running no great risk if we reverse it and
+say that when they were first produced the classics were books that
+everybody read--and that nobody praised. Shakspere to-day is the prey of
+the commentators and of the criticasters, but in his own time Shakspere
+was the most popular of the Elizabethan playwrights--so popular that his
+name was tagged to plays he had not written, in order that the public
+might be tempted to take them into favor. Yet it was years before the
+discovery was made that this popular playwright was also the greatest
+poet and the profoundest psychologist of all time. Cervantes lived long
+enough to be pleased by the widespread enjoyment of his careless
+masterpiece; but it was a century at least before the first suspicion
+arose that 'Don Quixote' was more than a "funny book." Molière was very
+lucky in filling his theater when his own pieces were performed; but
+contemporary opinion held that his plays owed their attraction not so
+much to their literary merit as to the humorous force of his own acting.
+Molière was acknowledged to be the foremost of comic actors, but only
+Boileau was sure of his genius as a dramatist; and Boileau's colleagues
+in the French Academy never recognized Molière's superiority over all
+his immediate rivals.
+
+The very fact that Molière and Shakspere were pleasing the plain people,
+that they were able to attract the main body of the unlearned populace,
+that they sought frankly to be judged by "the standard of material
+prosperity"--this very fact seems to have prevented their contemporaries
+from perceiving the literary merit of their plays. Indeed, it is not
+unfair to suggest that the cultivated critics of the past--like some
+cultivated critics of our own time--are predisposed to deny literary
+merit to anything which is broadly popular. They think of literary merit
+as something upon which they alone are competent to decide, as something
+to be tried by the touchstones they keep in their studies, under lock
+and key. The scholarly contemporaries of Shakspere saw that he did not
+conform to the classic traditions they revered, and they could not
+guess he was establishing a classic tradition of his own. They were so
+full of the past that they could not see the present right before their
+eyes. They mist in Shakspere's work what they had been trained to
+consider as the chief essential of dramatic art; and they were not acute
+enough to inquire whether there were not good reasons why he was so
+attractive to the vulgar mob whom they despised.
+
+To most critics of the drama "literary merit" is something external,
+something added to the play, something adjusted to the structure. They
+blame modern playwrights for not putting it in. They take an attitude
+toward the drama of their own day like that of the New England farmer,
+when he was asked who had been the architect of his house. "Oh, I built
+that house myself," was the answer; "but there's a man coming down from
+Boston next week to put the architecture on." To this New England
+farmer, architecture was not in the planning and the proportion and the
+structure; to him it seemed to mean only some sort of jig-saw fretwork
+added as an afterthought. To most of those who amuse themselves by
+writing about the drama, "literary merit" is chiefly a matter of pretty
+speeches, of phrase-making, of simile and metaphor--in short, of
+rhetoric.
+
+It seems absurd that at this late day it should be needful to repeat
+once more that literature is not a matter of rhetoric; that it is not
+external and detachable, but internal and essential. It has to do with
+motive and character, with form and philosophy; it is a criticism of
+life itself, or else it is mere vanity and vexation. If literature is no
+more than a stringing of flowers of speech, then is 'Lucile' a greater
+book than 'Robinson Crusoe,' or then is the 'Forest Lovers' a finer book
+than 'Huckleberry Finn'; then is Pater a better writer than Benjamin
+Franklin or Abraham Lincoln. Books are not made by style alone. Even
+lyric poetry is estimated by its fervor and by its sincerity rather than
+by the dulcet phrases in which the lyrist has voiced his emotion of the
+moment. If verbal felicity alone is all that the poet needs, if he is to
+be judged only by the compelling melody of the words he has chosen to
+set in array, then is Poe the foremost of lyrists. Even the essay, the
+most narrowly literary of all prose-forms, is valued for its wisdom
+rather than for its phrasing. The essays of Stevenson, for example, will
+survive not because of their style alone, polished as that is and
+unexpectedly happy in its phrasing, but because the man who wrote them,
+artist as he was in words, had something to say--something which was his
+own, the result of his own observation of life from his own angle of
+vision. Style is the great antiseptic, no doubt; but style cannot bestow
+life on the still-born.
+
+Not only do such critics as the anonymous writer from whom quotation has
+been made, persist in thinking of the literary merit of the drama as
+"exquisite prose" and "splendid verse,"--in other words as an added
+grace, applied externally,--but they also seem to believe that all plays
+possessing what they would regard as "literary merit" stand in a class
+apart. They are looking for a literary drama which shall be different
+from the popular drama. Apparently they expect to be able to recognize a
+literary play at first sight--and probably by its excess of applied
+ornament. And this attitude is quite as absurd as the other. In no one
+of the greater periods of the poetic drama have the plays which we now
+revere as masterpieces differed in form from the mass of the other plays
+of that epoch. They were better, no doubt, excelling in power, in
+elevation, in insight, in skill. But they bore a striking resemblance in
+structure and in intent to the host of contemporary plays which we now
+perceive to be hopelessly inferior to them.
+
+So far as their outward appearance goes the great plays of Sophocles, of
+Shakspere, and of Molière are closely akin to the plays of their
+undistinguished contemporaries. It is in their content that they are
+immeasurably superior. They differ in degree only, never in kind.
+Shakspere early availed himself of the framework of the tragedy-of-blood
+that Kyd had made popular; and later he borrowed from Beaumont and
+Fletcher the flexible formula of the dramatic-romance. His genius
+towered above theirs, but he was content to appropriate their patterns.
+Molière modeled many of his earlier plays upon the loosely-knit
+comedy-of-masks of the Italian comedians, and the difference between his
+work and theirs is not external but internal; it is the difference
+between adroitness and cleverness on their part, and supreme comic
+genius on his. Probably it was this apparent similarity of Shakspere's
+work and Molière's to the uninspired efforts of their competitors which
+prevented their contemporaries from discovering their preëminence--the
+preëminence which is so obvious to us now that the plays of their
+fellow-craftsmen have fallen out of memory.
+
+The blindness of the contemporary critic of Shakspere and of Molière,
+inexplicable as it may appear nowadays, has its parallel in the
+blindness of the contemporary critic in regard to 'Don Quixote' and 'Gil
+Blas,' 'Robinson Crusoe' and the 'Pilgrim's Progress.' He had not the
+insight to see in these comparatively commonplace narratives the
+essential truth of the enduring masterpiece. He was seeking an outward
+and visible sign; he saw nothing unusual, abnormal, eccentric, in these
+books, nothing novel, nothing that cried aloud for recognition; and so
+he past by on the other side. These books seemed to him in nowise raised
+above the common; they were to be enjoyed in some measure, but they
+evoked no high commendation; and the contemporary critic never suspected
+that these unpretending volumes, unlike the most of their competitors in
+public favor, contained the vital spark which alone bestows enduring
+life. He failed wholly to guess that these books had in them the
+elements of the universal and the permanent--just as he was unable to
+perceive that the more obviously literary, rhetorical, academic works he
+was ready enough to commend highly, lacked these elements and therefore
+were doomed soon to sink into deserved oblivion.
+
+This is precisely the attitude of many a critic of our own time. He is
+looking for a literary drama which shall be different in kind from the
+popular play; and as he fails to find this to-day--as he would have
+failed to find it in every period of the theater's most splendid
+achievement--he asserts that the literary drama is nowadays nonexistent.
+He does not care to inquire into the genuine qualities of the plays that
+happen to be able to attain "the standard of material prosperity." He is
+quick to perceive the attempt to be literary in the plays of Mr.
+Stephen Phillips, because this promising dramatic poet has so far tended
+rather to construct his decoration than to decorate his construction:
+and, therefore, the literary merit in Mr. Phillips's acted pieces seems
+sometimes to be somewhat external, so to speak, or at least more
+ostentatiously paraded. He is forced to credit 'Quality Street' with a
+certain literary merit, because Mr. Barrie has published novels which
+have an undeniable literary flavor.
+
+Considering literary merit as something applied on the outside, too
+obvious to be mistaken, the critic of this type disdains to give to
+certain of the plays of Mr. Pinero the discussion they deserve. In the
+'Benefit of the Doubt,' in the 'Second Mrs. Tanqueray,' in 'Iris,' Mr.
+Pinero has used all his mastery of stage-craft, not for its own sake,
+but as the instrument of his searching analysis of life as he sees it.
+All three plays bring out the eternal truth of George Eliot's saying
+that "Consequences are unpitying." In all three plays the inevitable and
+inexorable catastrophe is brought about, not by "the long arm of
+coincidence," but rather by the finger of fate itself. In 'Iris' more
+particularly we have put before us the figure of a gentle and kindly
+creature of compelling personal charm, but weak of will and moving thru
+life along the line of least resistance--a feminine counterpart of the
+Tito Melema etched with such appalling veracity in 'Romola.' And Mr.
+Pinero has the same sincerity in his portrayal of the gradual
+disintegration of character under the stress of recurring temptation,
+until the woman is driven forth at last stript of all things that she
+held desirable, and bare of the last shred of self-respect. The play may
+be unpleasant, but it is profoundly moral. It is not spoon-meat for
+babes, but it is poignant and vital. The picture of human character
+betrayed by its own weakness is so true, so transparently sincere, that
+the spectator, however quick he may be to discuss the theme, remains
+unconscious of the art by which the wonder has been wrought; he gives
+scarcely a thought to the logic of the construction, and to the honesty
+with which character is presented--literary merits both of them, if
+literature is in fact a criticism of life.
+
+The shrewd remark of M. Jules Lemaître must ever be borne in mind,--that
+criticism of our contemporaries is not criticism, it is only
+conversation. Yet there is sufficient self-revelation in the fact that
+those who have been ready enough to praise the 'Lady of Lyons,' with its
+tawdry rhetoric and its shabby morality, have not seen the superiority
+of Mr. Pinero over Lord Lytton even as a stylist, as a master of
+English, tense, nervous, and flexible, adjusting itself to the thought,
+never protruding itself on our vision, and yet withstanding verbal
+criticism when we take time afterward to subject it to that test also.
+
+Just as the Elizabethan critics thought little of Shakespeare because he
+failed to follow in the footsteps of the great Greeks, so some modern
+critics care naught for the best work of the dramatists of our own time,
+because this is not cast in the Shakespearean mold. The Elizabethan
+critics could not know the difference between the theater of Dionysius
+in Athens and the bare cockpit of the Globe in London; and there are
+their kin to-day who cannot perceive the difference between the
+half-roofed playhouse for which Shakespeare wrote and the
+electric-lighted place of amusement to which we are now accustomed.
+These latter-day critics do not see why the haphazard structure which
+was good enough for Tudor times is not good enough for us; and they have
+so little sense of form that they are unaware how the change in the
+circumstances of performance has forced a more compact presentation of
+the theme than was necessary in the days of "Eliza and our James."
+
+As Mr. John Morley has pointed out, "the prodigy of such amazing results
+from such glorious carelessness as Shakespeare's has plunged hundreds of
+men of talent into a carelessness most inglorious." The history of
+English literature is strewed with wrecked tragedies, lofty enough in
+aspiration, but pitifully lacking in inspiration. The same tragedies,
+slovenly as they might be in structure and empty of dramatic energy,
+were cased in the traditional trappings; they were divided into five
+acts and they were bedecked with blank verse; and contemporary critics
+made haste to credit them with the literary merit these same critics do
+not even look for in 'Iris' and in the 'Second Mrs. Tanqueray,'
+tragedies, both of them, of a purifying pathos that Aristotle would have
+understood. In fact, there would be no great difficulty in showing how
+near Aristotle came to an explicit assertion that in the drama "literary
+merit" is almost a by-product--valuable, no doubt, like many another
+by-product, but not the chief thing to be sought.
+
+Mr. Pinero has discust Robert Louis Stevenson as a dramatist, and his
+lecture contained passages which every man of letters should ponder. He
+showed that Stevenson had in him the true dramatic stuff, but that he
+refused to serve the severe apprenticeship to play-making that he gladly
+gave to novel-writing. Mr. Pinero made plain the further fact that
+Stevenson, who was ever a sedulous ape of the masters he admired, had
+here set himself a bad pattern to copy. This was not the loose and
+rambling Elizabethan model which had led Tennyson and Browning astray;
+it was the model of the cheap melodrama of the early years of the
+nineteenth century. "Stevenson with all his genius failed to realize
+that the art of drama is not stationary, but progressive," said Mr.
+Pinero. "By this I do not mean that it is always improving; what I do
+mean is that its conditions are always changing and that every dramatist
+whose ambition it is to produce live plays is absolutely bound to study
+carefully ... the conditions that hold good for its own age and
+generation."
+
+This is what every great dramatist has done; it is what Shakespeare did
+and Molière also; it is what Stevenson did not care to do, because he
+did not understand the necessity of it. He did not borrow the formula of
+the most successful of the plays which chanced to be pleasing the public
+just then. If he had done this, he could have put into this formula all
+the fine writing he so much enjoyed; he might have given to his plays
+the utmost polish of style. Instead of trying to write dramas externally
+like those popular in the theater of his own time, and making them
+internally whatsoever he chose, he went back half a century and tried to
+revive a poor formula already defunct. The game was lost before the
+cards were dealt. He had refused to consider the conditions of the
+problem he was handling--"the problem of how to tell a dramatic story
+truly, convincingly, and effectively, on the modern stage"; as Mr.
+Pinero described it, "the problem of disclosing the workings of the
+human heart by methods which shall not destroy the illusion which a
+modern audience expects to enjoy in the modern theater."
+
+Stevenson was here making the mistake which so many men of letters make
+when they turn to the theater. He was going upon the theory that the
+drama is made literary, not from within, by observation and imagination
+and sincerity, but from without, by the application of fine speeches.
+His speeches were fine, no doubt, even tho they were not in keeping with
+that special kind of play when it had been alive. But as it happened,
+that kind of play was dead and gone, and no injection of oratory would
+bring it to life again. And here the Scotch story-teller failed to
+profit by the example of the French poet whose romances he had so
+sympathetically studied. Hugo had also a gift for oratory and a talent
+for fine speeches; but when he yearned for theatrical success he went to
+the most popular playhouses where the plain people gathered, and he
+adopted as his own the formula of play-making which was proving its
+value in these boulevard theaters. This was not in itself much better
+than the formula Stevenson borrowed and did not trouble to
+understand--indeed, the two are not unlike. But Hugo had made his
+choice half a century before Stevenson; and when he made it he was
+taking possession of the very latest fashion.
+
+Hugo's formula is now fallen out of mode, yet his plays have
+accomplished their threescore years and ten. It was Hugo who declared
+that there are three classes of theater-goers whom the playwright must
+please: the crowd that demands action, the women who wish for emotion,
+and the thinkers who seek for character. And it was Hugo's early rival
+as a play-maker, the elder Dumas, who asserted that the only rules he
+knew for success upon the stage were to make the first act clear, the
+last act short, and all the acts interesting. A dramatist who shall
+accept the formula which has been found satisfactory by his immediate
+contemporaries, and who shall succeed in making all the acts of his play
+interesting alike to the crowd, to the women, and to the thinkers, will
+be very likely to achieve literary merit without striving for it
+specifically.
+
+For we cannot repeat too often that in the drama "literary merit" is a
+by-product,--as it is in oratory also. And we cannot assert too
+emphatically that the drama has an independent existence--that it does
+not lie wholly within the domain of literature. "The art of the drama,"
+so M. Emile Faguet has assured us, "touches all the other arts and
+includes them." The drama is not intended primarily to be read in the
+study; it is devised to be performed on the stage by actors before
+spectators. It has a right, therefore, to avail itself of the aid of all
+other arts and to enlist them all in its service. This is one of the
+reasons why those who have studied the secrets of this art are inclined
+to esteem it as the noblest and most powerful of them all. As M. Faguet
+has declared, with that sympathetic understanding of the essential
+principles of the drama which is common enough in France and only too
+rare elsewhere--"it is not contradictory to the definition of dramatic
+art that it can synthesize in space like painting, that it can
+synthesize in time like poetry, that it can synthesize outside of time
+and space like music, that it can unite all the arts without forcing
+them to interfere the one with the other, and, therefore, without taking
+from any one aught of its force or aught of its dignity; that it can
+unite them all in a vast, powerful, and harmonious synthesis embracing
+the whole of life and the whole of art."
+
+     (1903.)
+
+
+
+
+IBSEN THE PLAYWRIGHT
+
+
+I
+
+One indisputable service has Ibsen rendered to the drama: he has
+revealed again that it may be an incomparable instrument in the hands of
+a poet-philosopher who wishes to make people think, to awaken them from
+an ethical lethargy, to shock them into asking questions for which the
+complacent morality of the moment can provide no adequate answer. In the
+final decades of the nineteenth century,--when the novel was despotic in
+its overwhelming triumph over all the other forms of literary
+expression, and when arrogant writers of fiction like Edmond de Goncourt
+did not hesitate to declare that the drama was outworn at last, that it
+was unfitted to convey the ideas interesting to the modern world, and
+that it had fallen to be no more than a toy to amuse the idle after
+dinner,--Ibsen brought forth a succession of social dramas as tho to
+prove that the playhouse of our own time could supply a platform whereon
+a man might free his soul and boldly deliver his message, if only he
+had first mastered the special conditions of the playwright's art. Of
+course, Ibsen has solved none of the problems he has propounded; nor was
+it his business as a dramatist to provide solutions of the strange
+enigmas of life, but rather to force us to exert ourselves to find each
+of us the best answer we could.
+
+No one who has followed the history of the theater for the past quarter
+of a century can fail to acknowledge that these social plays of Ibsen
+have exerted a direct, an immediate and a powerful influence on the
+development of the contemporary drama. It is easy to dislike them;
+indeed, it is not hard even to detest them; but it is impossible to deny
+that they have been a stimulus to the dramatists of every modern
+language--and not least to playwrights of various nationalities wholly
+out of sympathy with Ibsen's own philosophy. The fascination of these
+social dramas may be charmless, as Mr. Henry James once asserted; but
+there is no gainsaying the fascination itself. As M. Maeterlinck has
+declared, Ibsen is "perhaps the only writer for the stage who has caught
+sight of and set in motion, a new, tho still disagreeable, poetry, which
+he has succeeded in investing with a kind of savage, gloomy beauty"; and
+M. Maeterlinck then questions whether this beauty is not too savage and
+too gloomy to become general or definitive. But, none the less, it is
+at least beauty, a quality long banished from the stage, when Ibsen
+showed how it might be made to bloom there again.
+
+Nor is there any dispute as to the variety and the veracity of the
+characters that people these studies from life. Indeed, as Mr. Archer
+once pointed out, "habitually and instinctively men pay to Ibsen the
+compliment (so often paid to Shakspere) of discussing certain of his
+female characters as tho they were real women, living lives apart from
+the poet's creative intelligence." And in yet another way is Ibsen
+treated like Shakspere, in that there is superabundant discussion not
+only of his characters, male and female, but also of his moral aim, of
+his sociological intention, of his philosophy of life, while very little
+attention is paid to his dramaturgic craftsmanship, to his command of
+structural beauty, to his surpassing skill in the difficult art of the
+play-maker. Yet Shakspere and Ibsen are professional playwrights, both
+of them, each making plays adjusted exactly to the conditions of the
+theater of his own time; and if the author of 'Othello' can prove
+himself (when the spirit moves him) to be a master-technician, so also
+can the author of 'Ghosts.'
+
+There is ample recognition of Ibsen as the ardent reformer seeking to
+blow away the mists of sentimentality, and of Ibsen, the symbolist,
+suggesting dimly a host of things unseen and strangely beautiful; but
+there is little consideration of Ibsen's solid workmanship, of his sure
+knowledge of all the secrets of the stage, of his marvelous dexterity of
+exposition, construction and climax. No doubt, it is as a poet, in the
+largest meaning of the word, that Ibsen is most interesting; but he is a
+playwright also,--indeed, he is a playwright, first and foremost; and in
+that aspect also he is unfailingly interesting. For those who insist
+that a poet must be a philosopher, Ibsen is to be ranked with Browning
+as affording endless themes for debate; but for those who demand that a
+dramatic poet shall be a playwright, Ibsen is a rival of Scribe and of
+the younger Dumas and of all the school of accomplished craftsmen in
+France who have made Paris the capital of the dramatic art. Ibsen's
+skill as a playwright is so consummate that his art is never obtruded.
+In fact, it was so adroitly hidden that when he first loomed on the
+horizon, careless theatrical critics were tempted rather to deny its
+existence. He is such a master of all the tricks of the trade that he
+can improve upon them or do without them, as occasion serves; and
+perhaps it is only those thoroly familiar with the practises of the
+accomplished French playwrights of the nineteenth century who perceive
+clearly the superiority of Ibsen in the mere mechanism of the
+dramaturgical art.
+
+
+II
+
+Altho it is possible to consider his stage-technic apart from his
+teaching, it needs to be noted at the outset that Ibsen the playwright
+owes a large portion of his power and effectiveness to Ibsen the
+poet-philosopher. As it happens, the doctrine of individual
+responsibility, which is the core of Ibsen's code, is a doctrine most
+helpful to the dramatist. The drama, indeed, differentiates itself from
+all other literary forms in that it must deal with a struggle, with a
+clash of contending desires, with the naked assertion of the human will.
+This is the mainspring of that action without which a drama is a thing
+of naught; and perhaps the most obvious backbone for a play is the tense
+contest of two human beings, each knowing clearly what he wants and each
+straining to attain it, at whatever cost to his adversary, to all
+others, and even to himself. Rivals fighting to the death, a hero at war
+with the world, a single soul striving to wrench itself free from the
+fell clutch of fate,--such is the stuff out of which the serious drama
+must be compounded.
+
+Now, as it happens, no philosopher has ever reiterated more often than
+Ibsen his abhorrence of smug and complacent compromise, his belief in
+the unimpeded independence of the individual, his conviction that every
+creature here below owes it as a duty to himself to live his own life in
+his own way. Just as _Brand_ stiffens himself once more and makes the
+implacable declaration:
+
+  Beggar or rich,--with all my soul
+  I _will_; and that one thing's the whole!
+
+So _Dr. Stockman_ announces his discovery that "the strongest man upon
+earth is he who stands most alone"; and in every play we find characters
+animated by this unhesitating determination and this unfaltering energy.
+Even Ibsen's women, so subtly feminine in so many ways, are forever
+revealing themselves virile in their self-assertion, in their claim to
+self-ownership. His plays move us strangely in the performance, they
+grip at the outset and firmly hold us to the relentless end, because his
+dramaturgic skill is exerted upon themes essentially dramatic in that
+they deal with this stark exhibition of the human will and with the
+bitter struggle that must ensue when the human will is in revolt against
+the course of nature or against the social bond.
+
+When the poet-philosopher has suggested to the playwright one of these
+essentially dramatic themes, Ibsen handles it with a directness which
+intensifies its force and which is in itself evidence of his poetic
+power. As Professor Butcher has pointed out, "we are perhaps inclined to
+rate too low the genius which is displayed in the general structure of
+an artistic work; we set it down merely as the hard-won result of labor,
+and we find inspiration only in isolated splendors, in the
+lightning-flash of passion, in the revealing power of poetic imagery."
+In these last gifts Ibsen may seem to many, if not deficient, at least,
+less abundant than some other dramatic poets; but he can attain "the
+supreme result which Greek thought and imagination achieve by their
+harmonious coöperation"; he can present "the organic union of parts." He
+has the sense of form which we feel to be the final guerdon of Greek
+endeavor.
+
+A play of Ibsen's is always compact and symmetrical. It has a beginning,
+a middle, and an end; it never straggles, but ever moves straightforward
+to its conclusion. It has unity; and often it conforms even to the
+pseudo-unities proclaimed by the superingenious critics of the Italian
+renascence. Sometimes a play of Ibsen's has another likeness to a
+tragedy of the Greeks, in that it presents in action before the
+assembled spectators only the culminating scenes of the story. 'Ghosts'
+recalls 'OEdipus the King,' not only in the horror at the heart of it
+and the poignancy of the emotion it evokes, but also in its being a
+fifth act only, the culmination of a long and complex concatenation of
+events, which took place before the point at which Sophocles and Ibsen
+saw fit to begin their plays. In the Greek tragedy, as in the
+Scandinavian social drama, the poet has chosen to deal with the result
+of the action, rather than with the visible struggle itself; it is not
+the present doings of the characters, but their past deeds, which
+determine their fate.
+
+Altho no other play of Ibsen's attains the extraordinary compactness and
+swiftness of 'Ghosts,' several of them approach closely to this
+standard, the 'Master-Builder,' for example, 'Little Eyolf' and more
+especially 'Rosmersholm,'--in which the author did not display on the
+stage itself more than a half of the strong series of situations he had
+devised to sustain the interest of the spectator and to elucidate his
+underlying thesis. But Ibsen does not hold himself restricted to any one
+formula; and sometimes he prefers, as in the 'Enemy of the People,' to
+let the whole story unroll itself before the audience. Only slowly did
+Ibsen come to a mastery of his own methods; and he had begun, in the
+'League of Youth' and in the 'Pillars of Society' by doing what every
+great dramatist had done before him,--by accepting the form worked out
+by his immediate predecessors and adjusted to the actual theater of his
+own time. Just as Shakspere followed the patterns set by Kyd and
+Marlowe, by Lyly and Greene, just as Molière copied the model ready to
+his hand in the Italian comedy-of-masks, so Ibsen began by assimilating
+the formulas which had approved themselves in France, the land where the
+drama was flourishing most luxuriantly in the middle of the nineteenth
+century, formulas devised by Scribe and only a little modified by Augier
+and the younger Dumas.
+
+
+III
+
+For threescore years, at least, Scribe was the salient figure in the
+French theater; and his influence endured more than twoscore years after
+his death. He can be considered from discordant standpoints; to the men
+of letters Scribe seems wholly unimportant, since his merits were in
+great measure outside of literature; to the men of the theater Scribe is
+a personality of abiding interest, since he put his mark on the drama of
+his own day in almost every one of its departments. In the course of his
+active career as a playwright he made over farce, first of all, then the
+comedy-of-intrigue, and finally the comedy-of-manners; he tried his hand
+at the historical play; and he was the chief librettist of the leading
+French composers of opera, both grand and comic. He might lack style;
+he might be barren of poetry; he might be void of philosophy; his
+psychology might be pitifully inadequate; his outlook on life might be
+petty;--but he was pastmaster of the theater, and from him were hidden
+none of the secrets of that special art.
+
+It was in Scribe's hands that there was worked out the formula of the
+"well-made play,--" _la pièce bien faite_,--in which the exposition was
+leisurely and careful, in which the interest of expectancy was aroused
+early and sustained to the end, in which the vital scenes of the
+essential struggle,--the _scènes à faire_,--were shown on the stage at
+the very moment of the story when they would be most effective, and in
+which a logical conclusion dimly foreseen, but ardently desired, was
+happily brought about by devices of unexpected ingenuity. In perfecting
+the formula of the "well-made play" Scribe may have taken hints from
+Beaumarchais, especially from the final act of the 'Marriage of Figaro';
+and he had found his profit also in a study of the methods of the
+melodrama, which had been elaborated in the theaters of the Parisian
+boulevards at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and which had
+been imitated already by Hugo and the elder Dumas. At its best, the
+"well-made play" was an amusing piece of mechanism, a clockwork toy
+which had a mere semblance of life, but which did precisely what its
+maker had constructed it to do.
+
+The piece put together according to this formula was sufficient to
+itself, with its wheels within wheels; and its maker had no need of
+style or of poetry, of psychology or of philosophy. So long as the
+playwright was content to be a playwright only and did not aspire to be
+a dramatist with his own views of life, the formula was satisfactory
+enough; but when the younger Dumas and Augier came on the stage they
+wanted to put a broader humanity into their plays, and they could make
+room for this only by simplifying the machinery. Yet, while they were
+delivering each his own message, they accepted the model of the
+"well-made play"; and it is to this that we may ascribe the
+artificiality we begin to discern even in such masterpieces of
+dramaturgic craftsmanship as the 'Gendre de M. Poirier' and the
+'Demi-monde.'
+
+Upon Ibsen also the influence of Scribe is as obvious as it is upon
+Augier and Dumas _fils_. The earliest of his social dramas, the 'League
+of Youth' and the 'Pillars of Society' are composed according to the
+formula of the "well-made play," with its leisurely exposition, its
+intricate complications of recoiling intrigue, its ingeniously contrived
+conclusion. If we compare the 'League of Youth' with Scribe's 'Bertrand
+et Raton,' or with Sardou's 'Rabagas'; if we compare the 'Pillars of
+Society' with Dumas's 'Étrangère,' or Augier's 'Effrontés' we cannot
+fail to find a striking similarity of structure. Set even 'A Doll's
+House' by the side of any one of a dozen contemporary French comedies,
+and it is easy to understand why Sarcey declared that play to be
+Parisian in its construction,--up to the moment of _Nora's_ revolt and
+self-assertion, so contrary to the social instinct of the French. And
+this explains also why it was that Ibsen, as Herr Lindau has told us,
+made little or no impression on the German dramatists until after the
+appearance of 'Ghosts,' altho the preceding plays had been acted
+frequently in the German theaters. The scenes of these early plays are
+laid in Norway, it is true, and the characters are all Norwegian, and
+altho it is easy enough for us, to-day, with our knowledge of what Ibsen
+has become, to find in them the personal equation of the author, still
+he was then frankly continuing the French tradition of stage-craft, with
+a willing acceptance of the formula of the "well-made play" and with no
+effort after novelty in his dramaturgic method. Not until he brought
+forth the 'Ghosts' is there any overt assertion of his stalwart and
+aggressive personality.
+
+In the beginning Ibsen was no innovator. So far at least as its
+external form is concerned, the kind of play he proffered at first was
+very much what actors and audiences alike had been accustomed to,--a
+kind of play perfectly adjusted to the existing customs of the stage.
+What he did was to take over the theater as a going concern, holding
+himself free to modify the accepted formula only after he had mastered
+it satisfactorily. Considering Ibsen's inexperience as a writer of
+prose-plays dealing with contemporary life, the 'League of Youth' is
+really very remarkable as a first attempt. Indeed, its defects are those
+of its models; and it errs chiefly in its excess of ingenuity and in the
+manufactured symmetry of the contrivance whereby the tables are turned
+on _Stensgard_, and whereby he loses all three of the women he has
+approached.
+
+As Lowell has said: "It is of less consequence where a man buys his
+tools than what use he makes of them"; but it so happened that Ibsen
+acquired his stage-craft in the place where it is most easily attained,
+in the place where Shakspere and Molière had acquired it,--in the
+theater itself. In 1851, when he was only twenty-three, he had been
+appointed "theater-poet" to the newly opened playhouse in Bergen; and
+after five years there he had gone to Christiania to be director of a
+new theater, where he was to remain yet another five years. In this
+decade of his impressionable and plastic youth Ibsen had taken part in
+the production of several score plays, some of them his own, others also
+original in his native tongue by Holberg and Öhlenschläger, and many
+more translated from Scribe, from Scribe's collaborators and from
+Scribe's contemporaries. In his vacation travels, to Copenhagen and to
+Dresden, he had opportunity to observe a wider variety of plays; but
+even in these larger cities the influence of Scribe was dominant, as it
+was all over the civilized world in the mid-years of the century.
+
+As Fenimore Cooper, when he determined to tell the fresh story of the
+backwoods and the prairies, found a pattern ready to his hand in the
+Waverley novels, so Ibsen availed himself of the "well-made play" of
+Scribe when he wrote the 'League of Youth,' which is his earliest piece
+in prose presenting contemporary life and character in Norway. There is
+obvious significance in the fact that of all Ibsen's dramas, those which
+have won widest popularity in the theater itself are those which most
+frankly accept the Gallic framework,--the 'Pillars of Society,' the
+'Doll's House,' and 'Hedda Gabler.' Yet it is significant, also, that
+even in the least individual of Ibsen's earlier pieces, the action is
+expressive of character; and we cannot fail to see that Ibsen's
+personages control the plot; whereas, in the dramas of Scribe, the
+situations may be said almost to create the characters, which, indeed,
+exist only for the purposes of that particular story.
+
+
+IV
+
+In spite of Ibsen's ten years of apprenticeship in two theaters, in
+daily contact with the practical business of the stage, it was not with
+prose-dramas of contemporary life that he first came forward as a
+dramatist. In fact, his juvenile 'Katilina' (1850) was written when he
+was but just of age, before he was attached to the theater
+professionally, before he had read any dramatists except Holberg and
+Öhlenschläger, and before he had had the chance to see much real acting
+on the stage itself. It was while he was engaged in producing the plays
+of others that he brought out also his own 'Mistress Inger at Ostraat'
+(1855), and the 'Vikings at Helgeland' (1858), both of them actable and
+often acted. They are romanticist in temper, suggesting now Schiller and
+now Hugo.
+
+'Mistress Inger' is a historical melodrama, with a gloomy castle,
+spectral pictures and secret passages, with shifting conspiracies,
+constant mystery-mongering and contorted characters. The inexpert
+playwright uses soliloquy not merely to unveil the soul of the speaker
+(its eternally legitimate use), but also to convey information to the
+audience as to the facts of the intrigue (an outworn expedient Ibsen
+never condescended to use in the later social dramas). The plot of
+'Mistress Inger' is not veracious or convincing or even plausible; and
+the play lacks the broad simplicity of story to be found in the later
+'Vikings,' a saga-like drama, a tale of blood and fate, which recalls
+Wagnerian opera in its primitive massiveness, in the vigor of its
+legend, in its tragic pathos, and in its full-blooded characters larger
+than life and yet pitifully human. Power again there is in a third drama
+dealing with the historic past of Norway, the 'Pretenders' (1864), which
+has a savage nobility of spirit. It is true that the masterful figure of
+_Bishop Nicholas_ is enigmatic enough to have stalked out of one of
+Hugo's lyrical melodramas, but to counterbalance this there is a pithy
+wisdom in the talk of the _Skald_ which one would seek in vain in the
+French romanticist drama.
+
+Nowadays many of us are inclined to regard the historical drama as a
+bastard form and to agree with Maeterlinck in dismissing even the most
+meritorious attempts as "artificial poems that arise from the impossible
+marriage of past and present." Already between the 'Vikings' and the
+'Pretenders' had Ibsen undertaken a play dealing with contemporary
+social usages. 'Love's Comedy' (1862) made its way on the stage; and it
+has found an English translator. But in this rendering it reveals itself
+as an attempt to commingle romance and satire; it appears to us as
+hopelessly unfunny; and there is an artistic inconsistency between a
+stern realism seeking to handle actual life with rigorous tensity and a
+soaring idealism which keeps obtruding itself.
+
+'Love's Comedy' is in verse, irregular and rimed, well-nigh impossible
+to render satisfactorily into another tongue. Ibsen never again
+undertook to use rime or even meter in handling the manners of his own
+time. "I cannot believe that meter will be employed to any considerable
+extent in the drama of the near future, for the poetic intentions of the
+future cannot be reconciled with it," so Ibsen declared in 1883, thus
+passing judgment on 'Love's Comedy.' And he added that he had written
+scarcely any verse for years but "had exclusively cultivated the
+incomparably more difficult art of writing in the even, beautiful idiom
+of real life."
+
+It was in 1857 that Björnson had put forth 'Synnöve Solbakken,' a mere
+novelet, it is true, but still the firstling of a native Norwegian
+literature, reproducing the very accent of the soil; and here we have
+once more an example of the way in which the novel is now continually
+affecting the development of the drama, as the play has in the past
+influenced the evolution of prose-fiction. For more than ten years Ibsen
+failed to see how much it would profit him to follow Björnson's lead.
+Between 'Love's Comedy' and the 'League of Youth' he put forth his two
+great dramatic poems, 'Brand' (1866) and 'Peer Gynt' (1867); and even
+after the 'League of Youth' (1869) had opened the series of modern
+social dramas, he published 'Emperor and Galilean' (1873) before
+resuming his incisive study of the life that lay around him.
+
+The career of Julian the Apostate is sketched in what must be termed a
+chronicle-play, in two parts and in ten acts, a broadly brushed panorama
+of antique life, displaying Ibsen's abundant invention, his ability to
+handle boldly a large theme, his gift of putting characters erect on
+their feet with a few swift strokes. Altho 'Emperor and Galilean,' like
+'Brand' and like 'Peer Gynt' was intended for the closet only, and not
+for the stage itself, it proves its author to be a true dramatist,
+centering the interest of his story on an essential struggle and keeping
+in view always the pictorial aspects of his action.
+
+In this chronicle-play, as in his two greater dramatic poems, Ibsen
+reveals his perfect understanding of the practical necessities of the
+playhouse, even tho he did not choose always to conform to them. Then
+he turned his back on antiquity and faced the present in the series of
+prose-plays by which he is most widely known to actual playgoers. He
+found his characters and his themes in modern life and in his native
+land; and the social dramas followed one another in steady
+succession,--'Pillars of Society' (1877), 'A Doll's House' (1879),
+'Ghosts' (1881), 'An Enemy of the People' (1882), the 'Wild Duck'
+(1884), 'Rosmersholm' (1886), the 'Lady from the Sea' (1888), 'Hedda
+Gabler' (1890), the 'Master-Builder' (1892), 'Little Eyolf' (1894),
+'John Gabriel Borkman' (1896) and 'When We Dead Awaken' (1899).
+
+As we look down this list, we see that it is perhaps unfair to class all
+the later plays as social dramas. Some of them, more especially the
+latest of them all, 'When We Dead Awaken,' seem to be symbolical rather
+than social, allegorical in intent even if they remain realistic in
+treatment. Brandes long ago declared that Ibsen had had a Pegasus killed
+under him; but when we consider the 'Lady from the Sea' and 'When We
+Dead Awaken' and perhaps one or two other of their later companions, we
+may well believe that the winged steed was not actually slain. Wounded
+it may have been, only to recover its strength again and to proffer its
+back once more for the poet to bestride.
+
+
+V
+
+These more poetic of Ibsen's plays in prose seem at times almost
+surcharged with a meaning which is nevertheless often so mockingly
+intangible and evasive, that we dare to wonder at last whether the
+secret they persist in hiding in this tantalizing fashion would really
+reward our efforts to grasp it; and we find comfort in Lowell's apt
+saying that "to be misty is not to be mystic." Ibsen is mystic, no
+doubt, but on occasion he can be misty also. And not only the plays that
+are merely misty but even those that are truly mystic, are less likely
+than the plainer-spoken social dramas to hold our attention in the
+theater itself, where the appeal is to the assembled multitude, and
+where all things need to be clearly defined so that the spectators can
+follow understandingly every phase of the changing action.
+
+In the most of his social dramas Ibsen makes his meaning transparently
+clear; and there is never any undue strain on the attention of the
+average playgoer. Especially is he a master of the difficult art of
+exposition. It is the plain duty of the playwright to acquaint the
+audience with the antecedent circumstances upon which the plot is
+based,--to inform the spectators fully as to that part of the story
+which has gone before and which is not to be displayed in action on the
+stage,--to explain the relation of the several characters to each
+other,--and to arouse interest in what is about to happen. Scribe, than
+whom no one ever had a wider knowledge of the necessities of the
+theater, held the exposition to be so important that he often sacrificed
+to it the whole of his first act, introducing his characters one by one,
+setting forth clearly what had happened before the play, and sometimes
+postponing the actual beginning of the action to the end of the first
+act, if not to the earlier scenes of the second. Scribe seems to have
+believed that it did not matter much how dull the first act might be,
+since the spectators had paid their money and would not abandon hope
+until they had seen at least the second act, in which he sought always
+to grip their interest.
+
+In the 'League of Youth,' the earliest of his social dramas, Ibsen
+follows in Scribe's footsteps; and the first act is little more than a
+preparatory prolog. In this play the whole story is set forth in action
+in the play itself; but in the following dramas, 'Pillars of Society'
+and 'A Doll's House' Ibsen reveals his tendency to deal with the results
+of deeds which took place before he begins the play itself. In other
+words, he suppresses his prolog, preferring to plunge at once into his
+action; and this forces him to modify Scribe's leisurely method. He does
+not mass his explanations all in the earlier scenes; he scatters them
+thruout the first act, and sometimes he even postpones them to the
+later acts. But he is careful to supply information before it is needed,
+adroitly letting out in the first scene what is required for the
+understanding of the second scene, and artfully revealing in the second
+scene what must be known before the third scene can be appreciated.
+
+This method is less simple than Scribe's; it is not only more difficult,
+it may be dangerous; but when it is managed successfully it lends to the
+drama a swift directness delightful to all who relish a mastery of form.
+In 'Ghosts,' for example, the play which is acted before us is little
+more than a long fifth act, in three tense scenes; and the knowledge of
+what had happened in the past is ingeniously communicated to the
+audience at the very moment when the information is felt to be most
+significant. But in 'Rosmersholm,' strong as the drama is and fine as
+its technic is, Ibsen's method seems to be at fault in that we learn too
+late what it would have interested us greatly to know earlier. It is
+only at the end almost that we are allowed to perceive what were
+_Rebecca West's_ real intentions in coming to Rosmersholm and how the
+influence of the house itself has transformed her. When the curtain
+rises she is presented to us already a changed woman; and we are at a
+loss to understand her motives for the evil deeds she has wrought, until
+we are told at last that she once was far different from what she now
+is. Here Ibsen loses more than he gains by abandoning the simpler method
+of massing his exposition in the earlier scenes of the play. Anything
+which confuses the spectator, which leaves him in doubt, which keeps him
+guessing, is contrary to Spencer's principle of "economy of attention,"
+as important in the other arts as it is in rhetoric.
+
+Altho he is ever seeking to awaken curiosity, to arouse the interest of
+expectancy, and to excite in the spectators a desire to see the thing
+through, Ibsen refrains from any mere mystery-mongering for its own
+sake. He wishes his audience to give attention not so much to the bare
+happenings of his story, however startling they may be in themselves, as
+to the effect which these happenings are certain to have on the
+characters. He is abundant in inventive ingenuity and in devising
+effective situations; and the complications of the plot of the 'Pillars
+of Society' would probably have hugely pleased Scribe. But he has also
+the larger imagination which can people situation with character and
+which can make situation significant as an opportunity for character to
+express itself. Ingenious as he is in plot-building, with him character
+always dominates situation. To Ibsen character is destiny, and the
+persons of his plays seem to have created, by their own natural
+proceeding, the predicaments in which they are immeshed.
+
+Ibsen is particularly happy in the subordinate devices by which he
+reveals character,--for example, _Maia's_ taking off the green shade
+when the _Master-Builder_ enters the room. And another device, that of
+the catchword, which he took over from Scribe and the younger Dumas, and
+which, even in his hands, remains a mere trick in the early 'League of
+Youth,' is so delicately utilized in certain of the later
+plays--witness, the "vine-leaves in his hair" of 'Hedda Gabler' and the
+"white horses" in 'Rosmersholm'--that these recurrent phrases are
+transformed into a prose equivalent of Wagner's leading-motives. So,
+too, Ibsen does without the _raisonneur_ of Dumas and Augier, that
+condensation of the Greek chorus into a single person, who is only the
+mouthpiece of the author himself and who exists chiefly to point the
+moral, even tho he may sometimes also adorn the tale. Ibsen so handles
+his story that it points its own moral; his theme is so powerfully
+presented in action that it speaks for itself.
+
+It must also be noted that Ibsen, like all born playwrights, like Scribe
+and Dumas and Augier, like Sophocles and Shakspere and Molière, is well
+aware of the double aspect of the theater, in that the stage can rise to
+the loftiest heights of philosophic poetry and that it can fall also to
+the lowest depths of the show-business. An audience has ears, but the
+spectators who compose it have eyes also; and the born playwright never
+fails to provide the picturesqueness and the visible movement which
+satisfy the senses, whatever may be the more serious appeal to the mind.
+In the modern theater the stage is withdrawn behind a picture-frame; and
+it is the duty of the dramatist to satisfy our demand for a
+stage-setting pictorially adequate. The sets of Ibsen's plays have
+evidently been sharply visualized by him; they are elaborately
+described; and they lend themselves effectively to the art of the
+scene-painter. Sometimes they are beautiful in themselves, novel and
+suggestive; always are they characteristic of the persons and of the
+underlying idea of the play.
+
+
+VI
+
+When we examine carefully the earlier of his social dramas we discover
+Ibsen to be a playwright of surpassing technical dexterity, whose work
+is sustained and stiffened and made more valuable and more vital by the
+coöperation of the philosopher that Ibsen also is, a philosopher who is
+a poet as well and who helps the playwright to find the stuff he
+handles, the raw material of his art, in the naked human soul, in its
+doubts and its perplexities, in its blind gropings and in its
+ineffectual strivings. But in considering the later plays we are forced
+to wonder whether the philosopher has not gained the upper hand and
+reduced the playwright to slavery.
+
+It was of Ibsen, no doubt, that M. Maeterlinck was thinking when he
+asserted that "the first thing which strikes us in the drama of the day
+is the decay, one might almost say, the creeping paralysis, of external
+action. Next, we note a very pronounced desire to penetrate deeper into
+human consciousness, and to place moral problems on a high pedestal."
+And there is no denying that Ibsen's interest in moral problems has
+grown steadily in intensity, and that he has sought to penetrate deeper
+and deeper into human consciousness. His latest play, 'When We Dead
+Awaken,' altho adjusted to the conditions of the modern theater and
+altho perfectly actable, seems to be intended rather more for the reader
+than for the spectator. Essentially dramatic as it is, its theatric
+realization is less satisfactory--as tho Ibsen was chafing against the
+restraints of the actual theater, restraints which are an integral
+element of its power as a form of expression.
+
+In the same suggestive essay, M. Maeterlinck remarked on the steady
+decline of the taste for bald theatrical anecdotes,--the taste which
+Scribe and Sardou were content to gratify; and he declared that "mere
+adventures fail to interest us because they no longer correspond to a
+living and actual reality." And yet no one has more sharply proclaimed
+the sovran law of the stage than the Belgian critic-poet; no one has
+more sympathetically asserted that "its essential demand will always be
+_action_. With the rise of the curtain, the high intellectual desire
+within us undergoes transformation; and in place of the thinker,
+psychologist, mystic, or moralist, there stands the mere instinctive
+spectator, the man electrified negatively by the crowd, the man whose
+one desire is to see something happen." In his later and more poetic
+plays Ibsen seems to be appealing more especially to the mystic and the
+moralist; whereas in the earlier social dramas he was able to grip the
+attention of the mere instinctive spectator, while also satisfying the
+unexprest desires of the thinker.
+
+The sheer symbolism of the poet-philosopher is powerfully suggestive,
+and these later plays have an interest of their own, no doubt; but it is
+in the earlier social dramas that Ibsen most clearly reveals his
+dramaturgic genius,--in the 'Pillars of Society,' and the 'Doll's
+House,' in 'Ghosts' and in 'Hedda Gabler.' Dennery might envy the
+ingenuity with which _Consul Bernick_ is tempted to insist on the fatal
+order that seems for a season to be the death-sentence of his own son;
+and Sardou would appreciate the irony of _Nora's_ frantic dance at the
+very moment when she was tortured by deadly fear. But these theatric
+devices, in Dennery's hands or in Sardou's, would have existed for their
+own sake solely; but in Ibsen's, effective as they are, they have a
+deeper significance. He is able to avail himself of the complicated
+machinery of the "well-made play," to flash a piercing light into the
+darker recesses of human nature. However clever he may be in his
+handling of these scenes, his cleverness is a means only; it is not an
+end in itself. He never gives over "his habit of dealing essentially
+with the individual caught in the fact,"--to borrow an apt phrase from
+Mr. Henry James. The mechanism may be almost as elaborate as it is in a
+play of Scribe's, wherein there is ultimately nothing but ingenuity of
+invention and adroitness of construction; but it is never allowed to
+crush or to keep out human nature.
+
+_Consul Bernick_ is one of Ibsen's most veracious characters, with his
+cloaking morality, his unconscious egotism, and his unfaltering
+selfishness, disclosed so naïvely and so naturally. Less boldly drawn
+but not the less truthful is _Helmer_, that inexpugnable prig, with his
+shallow selfishness, his complacent conceit, and his morality for
+external use only. Ibsen is never happier, and never is his scalpel more
+skilful, than when he is laying bare the hollowness of shams like these.
+Never is his touch more delicate or more caressing than when he is
+delineating a character like _Bernick's_ sister _Martha_, with her
+tender devotion and her self-effacing simplicity. Not even _Helmer's_
+wife, _Nora_, is more truthfully conceived. _Nora_ is veraciously
+feminine in never fathoming _Dr. Rank's_ love for her, or at least in
+her refusal to formulate it, content to take his friendship and ask
+herself no questions. Truly womanly again is her attitude when he speaks
+out at last and thrusts upon her the knowledge of his passion,--her
+shrinking withdrawal, her instant ordering in of the lights, and her
+firm refusal then, in her hour of need, to profit by the affection he
+has just declared.
+
+It must be regretted that Ibsen does not dismiss either _Nora_ or
+_Bernick_ with the final fidelity that might have been expected.
+_Bernick's_ unexpected proclamation of his change of heart, so contrary
+to his habits, is a little too like one of those fantastic wrenchings of
+veracity of which Dickens was so often guilty in the finishing chapters
+of his stories. Character is never made over in the twinkling of an eye;
+and this is why the end of the 'Doll's House' seems unconvincing.
+_Nora_, the morally irresponsible, is suddenly endowed with clearness
+of vision and directness of speech. The squirrel who munches macaroons,
+the song-bird who is happy in her cage, all at once becomes a raging
+lioness. And this is not so much an awakening or a revelation, as it is
+a transformation; and the _Nora_ of the final scenes of the final act is
+not the _Nora_ of the beginning of the play. The swift unexpectedness of
+this substitution is theatrically effective, no doubt; but we may doubt
+if it is dramatically sound. Ibsen has rooted _Nora's_ fascination, felt
+by every spectator, in her essential femininity, only at the end to send
+her forth from her home, because she seemed to be deficient in the most
+permanent and most overpowering of woman's characteristics--the maternal
+instinct. It may be that she did right in leaving her children; it may
+even be that she would have left them; but up to the moment when she
+declared her intention to go, nothing in the play has prepared the
+spectator for this strange move. Ibsen has failed to make us feel when
+the unexpected happened that this, however unforeseen, was exactly what
+we ought to have expected.
+
+No fault of this kind can be found with 'Ghosts,' that drastic tragedy
+of a house built on the quicksands of falsehood, that appalling modern
+play with the overwhelming austerity of an ancient tragic drama, that
+extraordinarily compact and moving piece, in which the Norwegian
+playwright accomplished his avowed purpose of evoking "the sensation of
+having lived thru a passage of actual life." A few years only before
+Ibsen brought forth his 'Ghosts,' Lowell had asserted that "That Fate
+which the Greeks made to operate from without, we recognize at work
+within, in some vice of character or hereditary disposition"; and Greek
+this play of Ibsen's is in its massive simplicity, in the economy of its
+bare structure with five characters only, with no change of scene, with
+no lapse of time, and with an action that rolls forward irresistibly
+with inevitable inexorability. As there was something Æschylean in
+'Brand' so there is something Sophoclean in 'Ghosts'; altho Ibsen lacks
+the serenity of the great Greek and Sophocles had a loftier aim than
+that of evoking "the sensation of having lived thru a passage of actual
+life." There is no echo in 'OEdipus' of the cry of revolt which rings
+thru 'Ghosts,' and yet there was a strange similarity in the impression
+made on at least one spectator of the actual performances of these
+tragedies, the ancient and the modern, the one after the other, at a few
+days' interval here in New York,--an impression of deepening horror that
+graspt the throat and gript the heart with fingers of ice.
+
+The most obvious resemblance between the Greek tragedy and the
+Scandinavian social drama is in their technic, in that the two austere
+playwrights have set before us the consequences of an action, rather
+than the action itself. Here Ibsen has thrown aside the formula of the
+"well-made play," using the skill acquired by the study of Scribe in
+achieving a finer form than the French playwright was capable of, a form
+seemingly simple but very solidly put together. The structure of
+'Ghosts' recalls Voltaire's criticism of one of Molière's plays that it
+seemed to be in action, altho it was almost altogether in narrative.
+Ibsen has here shown a skill like Molière's in making narrative vitally
+dramatic. Ibsen has none of Molière's breadth of humor, none of his
+large laughter, none of his robust fun; indeed, Ibsen's humor is rarely
+genial; grim and almost grotesque, it is scarcely ever playful; and
+there is sadly little laughter released by his satiric portrayals of
+character. But the Scandinavian playwright has not a little of the great
+Frenchman's feeling for reality, and even more of his detestation of
+affectation and his hatred of sham. The creator of _Tartuffe_ would have
+appreciated _Pastor Manders_, an incomparable prig, with self-esteem
+seven times heated, engrossed with appearances only and ingrained with
+parochial hypocrisy.
+
+But we may be assured that Molière, governed by the social instinct as
+he was, would never have shared Ibsen's sympathy for the combatant hero
+of his next play, that 'Enemy of the People,' with the chief figure of
+which the dramatist has seemed willing for once to be identified. We may
+even incline to the belief that Molière would have dismist _Dr.
+Stockman_ as lacking in common-sense, and in the sense of humor, and
+also as a creature both conceited and self-righteous, pitiably
+impractical and painfully intolerant. And we are quite at a loss even to
+guess what the French playwright-psychologist, who has left us the
+unforgetable figure of _Célimène_ would have thought of _Hedda Gabler_,
+that strangest creation of the end of the century, anatomically
+virtuous, but empty of heart and avid of sensation.
+
+In 'Hedda Gabler' as in the 'Enemy of the People' Ibsen gives up the
+Sophoclean form which was exactly appropriate for the theme of 'Ghosts.'
+With admirable artistic instinct the playwright returns to the framework
+of the "well-made play" or at least to that modification of the Scribe
+formula which Augier and Dumas _fils_ had devised for their own use. The
+action has not happened before the curtain rises on the first act; it
+takes place in the play itself, in front of the spectators, just as it
+does in the 'Demi-monde.' The exposition is contained in the first act,
+clearly and completely; the characters are all set in motion before us,
+_Hedda_ and her husband, _Mrs. Elvsted_ and _Eilert_, and the sinister
+figure of _Inspector Brack_ in the background. This first act, even to
+its note of interrogation hung in the air at the end, might have been
+constructed by Augier,--just as the scene in the second act between
+_Hedda_ and _Brack_ recalls the manner of the younger Dumas, even in its
+lightness and its wit. Yet we may doubt whether any of the modern French
+playwrights could have lent the same curt significance to this
+commonplace interview between a married _demi-vierge_ and an
+_homme-à-femmes_;--of their own accord these French terms come to the
+end of the pen to describe these French types.
+
+Interesting as 'Hedda Gabler' is on the stage and in the study,
+suggestive as it is, it cannot be called one of Ibsen's best-built
+plays. Technically considered it falls below his higher level; it does
+not sustain itself even at the elevation of the 'Demi-monde' or of the
+'Effrontés.' It does not compel us to accept its characters and its
+situations without question. It leaves us inquiring, and, if not
+actually protesting, at least unconvinced. We might accept the heroine
+herself as an incarnate spirit of cruel curiosity, inflicting
+purposeless pain, and to be explained, even if not to be justified, only
+by her impending maternity,--which she recoils from and is unworthy of.
+But I, for one, cannot help finding _Hedda_ inconsistent artistically,
+as tho she was a composite photograph of irreconcilable figures. For
+example, she shrinks from scandal, yet she burns _Eilert's_ manuscript,
+she gives him one of her pistols, and finally she commits suicide
+herself, than which nothing could more certainly provoke talk. The
+pistols themselves seem lugged in solely because the playwright needed
+to have them handy for two suicides,--just as _Brack_ walks into
+_Hedda's_ house in the early morning, not of his own volition, but
+because the playwright insisted on it. So at the end _Mrs. Elvsted_
+could not have had with her all the notes of _Eilert's_ bulky book, tho
+she might have had a rough draft; and she would never have sat down
+calmly to look over these notes instead of rushing madly to the hospital
+to _Eilert's_ bedside. Again, _Inspector Brack_, when he hears of
+_Eilert's_ death, has really little or no warrant in jumping to the
+conclusion that _Hedda_ is an accessory before the fact; and even if she
+was, this would not give him the hold on her which she admits too
+easily. More than once, we find a summary swiftness in the motives
+alleged, for things done before the spectators have time to grasp the
+reasons for these deeds, which therefore appear to be arbitrary. There
+is a hectic flush of romanticism in this play, not discernible in any
+other of Ibsen's social dramas, a perfervidness, an artificiality,
+which may not interfere with the interest of the story but which must
+detract from its plausibility at least and from its ultimate value.
+
+
+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
+'OEdipus,' 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 manoeuver 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.
+
+     (1903.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
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