Chapter IV: Part 4

Jane Austen spent her great gift on the carving of cherry-stones, laboring with exquisite art to lift into temporary importance the eternally unimportant; and Charlotte Bronte, in her ampler endeavor, was ever hampered by inadequacy of knowledge. George Eliot, with wider opportunity than either of these predecessors, profited by both of them and borrowed their processes in turn; she was broader than they were, and bolder in her attack on life; her effort is more strenuously intellectual than theirs, and therefore a little fatiguing, and this is perhaps why her vogue seems now to be evaporating slowly. And when all is said, no one of these clever story-tellers really attains to an altitude of accomplishment where she can fairly be considered as a competitor of the mighty masters of prose fiction. No woman novelist is to be ranked among the supreme leaders, worthy to stand by the side of Cervantes and Fielding, Balzac and Tolstoi. The merits of the women novelists are many and they are beyond cavil; but no one of them has yet been able to handle a large theme powerfully and to interpret life with the unhasting and unresting strength which is the distinguishing mark of the mightier masters of fiction.

III

Furthermore, we find in the works of female storytellers not only a lack of largeness in topic, but also a lack of strictness in treatment. Their stories, even when they charm us with apt portraiture and with adroit situation, are likely to lack solidity of structure. 'Castle Rackrent,' an illuminating picture of human nature in a special environment, is a straggling sequence of episodes; 'Pride and Prejudice' is almost plotless, when considered as a whole; and 'Romola' is ill-proportioned and misshapen. No woman has ever achieved the elaborate solidity of 'Tom Jones,' the superb structure of the 'Scarlet Letter,' or the simple unity of 'Smoke.' And here we come close to the most obvious explanation of the dearth of female dramatists--in the relative incapacity of women to build a plan, to make a single whole compounded of many parts, and yet dominated in every detail by but one purpose.

The drama demands a plot, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and with everything rigorously excluded which does not lead from the beginning thru the middle to the end. The novel refuses to submit itself to any such requirement; it can make shift to exist without an articulated skeleton. There is little or no plot, there is only a casual succession of more or less unrelated incidents in 'Gil Blas' and 'Tristram Shandy,' in the 'Pickwick Papers,' and in Huckleberry Finn.' The novel may be invertebrate and yet survive, whereas the play without a backbone is dead--which is biologic evidence that the drama is higher in the scale of creation than prose fiction.

"The novel, as practised in English, is the perfect paradise of the loose end," so Mr. Henry James once pointed out, whereas "the play consents to the logic of but one way, mathematically right, and with the loose end as gross an impertinence on its surface and as grave a dishonor as the dangle of a snippet of silk or wool on the right side of a tapestry." The action of a story may be what its writer pleases, and he can reduce it to a minimum or embroider it at will with airy arabesques of incessant digression; but the plot of a play must be a straight line, the shortest distance between two points, the point of departure and the point of arrival. And it is because of this imperative necessity for integrity of construction that the drama is more difficult than prose fiction. Since a part of our pleasure in any art is derived from our consciousness of the obstacles to be overcome by the artist, and from our recognition of the skill displayed by him in vanquishing them, we have here added evidence in behalf of the belief in the artistic superiority of the play over the novel merely as a form of expression.

The drama may be likened to the sister art of architecture in its insistent demand for plan and proportion. A play is a poor thing, likely to expire of inanition, unless its author is possessed of the ability to build a plot which shall be strong and simple and clear, and unless he has the faculty of enriching it with abundant accessories in accord with a scheme thought out in advance and adhered to from start to finish. With this constructive skill women seem to be less liberally endowed than men; at least, they have not yet revealed themselves as architects, altho they have won a warm welcome as decorators--a subordinate art for which they are fitted by their superior delicacy and by their keener interest in details. Much of the pervasive charm of many of the cleverest novels of female authorship lies in the persistent ingenuity with which the lesser points of character, of conduct, and of manners are presented. In Jane Austen, in Maria Edgeworth, and often also in George Eliot, we are delighted by little miracles of observation, and by little triumphs in the microscopic analysis of subtle and unsuspected motives. But in these very books, the story, however felicitously decorated, is not sustained by a severe architectural framework. And it is this firm certainty of structure that the drama imperatively demands.

In other words, women seem to be less often dowered than men with what Tyndall called "scientific imagination," with the ability to put together a whole in which the several parts are never permitted to distend a disproportionate space. This scientific imagination is essential to the playwright; and the novelist is fortunate if he also possesses it, altho it is not essential to him. A novel may be only a straggling succession of episodes; a play must have fundamental unity. A novelist may fire with a shot-gun and bring down his bird on the wing, whereas a playwright needs a rifle to arrest the charging lion.

It is a significant fact that only once was George Sand really triumphant as a dramatist, and that this single success was won by the secret aid of the cleverest of contemporary playwrights. She was passionately devoted to the theater; she had many intimate friends among the stage-folk; she delighted in private theatricals; and she wrote a dozen or more plays, several of them dramatized from her own stories. The sole play which held its own on the stage in rivalry with the best work of Augier and Dumas _fils_ was the 'Marquis de Villemer,' and it owed its more fortunate fate to the gratuitous and unacknowledged collaboration of Dumas _fils_.

For the author of the 'Mariage de Victorine,' the author of the 'Dame aux Camelias' had a high esteem, which he took occasion to express more than once in his critical papers; and she regarded him with semi-maternal affection, often inviting him to join the little parties at Nohant. On one of his visits he heard her say that she was intending to dramatize the 'Marquis de Villemer,' but that she did not quite see her way to compact its leisurely action in conformity with the rigid restrictions of the stage. That evening he borrowed a copy of the novel to take up to his own room; and the next morning when he came down to the late breakfast, he laid before her half a dozen sheets of paper, whereon she found a complete scenario for her guidance, an adroit division of her novel into acts and scenes, needing only to be clothed with dialog. With his intuitive understanding of the principles of play-making, and with his masterly power of construction, he had solved her problems for her and made it easy for her to write the play.

Here is an unexampled kind of collaboration, since the invention of the story, the creation of the characters, the dialog to be spoken--these were all due to George Sand alone; but the concentrating of the interest, the heightening of the personages of the narrative to adjust themselves to the perspective of the theater, the serried and irresistible momentum of the action--these were the contribution of Dumas, a freewill offering to his old friend. The piece that she wrote was hers and hers alone, and yet it had a dramatic vitality lacking in all her other plays, because a man had intervened at the right moment to provide the architectural framework which the woman could not have bestowed upon it, however felicitous she might be in the decoration.

IV

Thus it is that we can supply two answers to the two questions posed at the beginning of this inquiry: Why is it that there are so few women playwrights? And why is it that the infrequent plays produced by women playwrights rarely attain high rank? The explanation is to be found in two facts: first, the fact that women are likely to have only a definitely limited knowledge of life, and, second, the fact that they are likely also to be more or less deficient in the faculty of construction. The first of these disabilities may tend to disappear if ever the feminist movement shall achieve its ultimate victory; and the second may depart also whenever women submit themselves to the severe discipline which has compelled men to be more or less logical.

(1915.)

VIII

THE EVOLUTION OF SCENE-PAINTING

THE EVOLUTION OF SCENE-PAINTING

I

Only recently have students of the stage seized the full significance of the fact that dramatic literature is always conditioned by the circumstances of the special theater for which it was designed. They are at last beginning to perceive that they need to know how a play was originally represented by actors before an audience and in a theater to enable them to appreciate adequately the technical skill of the playwright who composed it. The dramatist is subdued to what he works in; and he can accomplish only that which is possible in the particular playhouse for which his pieces were destined. For the immense open air auditorium of ancient Athens, with its orchestra leveled at the foot of the curving hillside whereon thousands of spectators took their places, the dramatic poet had to select a simple story and to build massively. For the unadorned platform of the Tudor theater, with its arras pendent from the gallery above the stage, and with its restless groundlings standing in the yard, the playwright was compelled to heap up swift episodes violent with action. For the eighteenth-century playhouse, with its apron projecting far beyond the line of the curtain, the dramatist was tempted to revel in ornate eloquence and in elaborate wit. And nowadays the dramatic author utilizes skilfully all the manifold resources of the twentieth-century picture-frame stage, not only to give external reality to the several places where his story is supposed to be laid, but also to lend to these stage-sets the characteristic atmosphere demanded by his theme.

Merely literary critics, secluded in their studies, intent upon the poetry of a play and desirous of deducing its philosophy, rarely seek to visualize a performance on the stage, and they are, therefore, inclined to be disdainful of the purely theatrical conditions to which its author has had, perforce, to adjust his work. As a result they sometimes misunderstand the dramatic poet's endeavors, and they often misinterpret his intentions. On the other hand, purely theatrical critics may be inclined to pay too much attention to stage-arrangements, stage-business, and stage-settings, and even on occasion to disregard the dramatist's message and his power of creating character to consider his technic alone. And yet it can scarcely be denied that the theatrical critics are nearer to the proper method of approach than the literary critics who neglect the light which a careful consideration of stage-conditions and of stage-traditions may cast upon the masterpieces of the drama.

Since all these masterpieces of the drama were devised to be heard and to be seen rather than to be read, the great dramatic poets have always been solicitous about the visual appeal of their plays. They have ever been anxious to garnish their pieces with the utmost scenic embellishment and the utmost spectacular accompaniment of the special kind that a play of that particular type could profit by. In view of the importance of this scenic embellishment and of its influence upon the methods of the successive playwrights, there is cause for wonder that we have no satisfactory attempt to tell the history of the art of the scene-painter as this has been developed thru the long ages. The materials for this narrative are abundant, even if they still lie in confusion. Certain parts of the field have been surveyed here and there; but no substantial treatise has yet been devoted to this alluring investigation. The scholar who shall hereafter undertake the task will need a double qualification; he must master the annals of painting in Renascence Italy, and later in France and in England, and he must familiarize himself with the circumstances of the theater at the several periods when the art of the scene-painter made its successive steps in advance.

It is partly because we have no manual covering the whole field that we find so many unwarranted assertions in the studies of the scholars who confine their criticism to a single period of the development of the drama. Partly also is this due to the fact that we are each of us so accustomed to the theaters of our own century and of our own country that we find it difficult not to assume similar conditions in the theaters of other centuries and other countries. Thus the Shaksperian commentators of the early eighteenth century seem not to have doubted that the English playhouse in the days of Elizabeth was not unlike the English playhouse in the days of Anne; and as a result they cut up the plays of Shakspere into acts and into scenes, each supposed to take place in a different spot, in accord with the eighteenth-century stage practise, and absolutely without any justification from the customs of the Tudor theater. This was the result of looking back and of believing that the late sixteenth-century stage must have resembled the early eighteenth-century stage. We are now beginning to see that, in any effort to recapture the methods of the Elizabethan theater, we must first understand the customs of the medieval stage, and then look forward from that point. Of all places in the world the playhouse is, perhaps, the most conservative, and the most reluctant to relinquish anything which has proved its utility in the past and which is accepted by the public in the present; and many of the peculiarities of the Tudor theater are survivals from the medieval performances.

There are still to be found classical scholars who accept the existence of a raised stage in the theater of Dionysus at Athens, and even of painted scenery such as we moderns know; and they find support in the assertion of Aristotle that among the improvements due to Sophocles was the introduction of "scenery." But what did the Greek word in the text of Aristotle which is rendered into English as "scenery" really mean? At least, what did it connote to an Athenian? Something very different, we may be sure, from what the term "scenery" connotes to us. Certainly, the physical conditions of the stageless Attic theater precluded the possibilities of painted scenes such as we are now familiar with. That there were no methods of representing realistically, or even summarily, the locality where the action is taking place is proved by the detailed descriptions of these localities which the dramatic poet was careful to put into the mouths of his characters whenever he wished the audience to visualize the appropriate background of the action. We may be assured that the dramatists would never have wasted time in describing what the spectators had before their eyes. Ibsen and Rostand and d'Annunzio are poets, each in his own fashion, but their plays are devoid of all descriptions of the special locality where the action passes--that task has been spared them by the labors of the modern scene-painter working upon their specific directions.

As there was no scenery in the Greek theater so there was little or none in the Roman. M. Camille Saint-Saens once suggested that certain airy scaffoldings in the Pompeian wall-paintings were perhaps derived from scenic accessories. But this seems unlikely enough; and the surviving Latin playhouses have a wide and shallow stage closed in by a sumptuous architectural background, suggesting the front of a palace with three portals, often conveniently utilized as the entrances to the separate dwellings of the several characters. Again, we may infer the absence of scenery from the elaboration with which Plautus, for one, localizes the habitations of his leading characters. In Rome, as in Athens, some kind of a summary indication of locality, some easily understood symbol, may have been employed; but of scene-painting, as we moderns know the art, there is not a trace.

II

It is not until we come to the mysteries of the Middle Ages that we find the beginnings of the modern art, and even here it is only a most rudimentary attempt that we can discover. The mystery probably developed earliest in France, as it certainly flourished there most abundantly; and the French represented the dramatized Bible story on a long, shallow platform, at the back of which they strung along a row of summary indications of certain necessary places, beginning with Heaven on the spectator's left, and ending with Hell on his right, and including the Temple, the house of the high priest and the palace of Herod. These necessary places were called "mansions," and they served to localize the action whenever this was deemed advisable, the front of the platform remaining a neutral ground which might be anywhere. But these mansions do not prove the existence of scene-painters; they were very slight erections, a canopy over an altar serving to indicate the Temple, and a little portico sufficing to represent a palace; and they were probably built by house-carpenters and painted by housepainters, just as any boat which might be called for would be constructed by the shipwrights.

And as we need not assume the forming of a guild of scene-painters because of these mansions which performed some of the functions of our modern scenery, so also we must not assume it because the medieval artisans invented a variety of elaborate spectacular devices, flying angels, for example, and roaring flames from Hell-Mouth. Even in the stageless and sceneless Attic theater, there had been many mechanical effects of one kind or another, especially in the plays of Euripides--the soaring dragon-chariot of Medea, for instance, and the similar contrivance whereby a god might descend from the skies. Mechanical tricks even when they are most ingenious, do not imply the aid of the scene-painter; and even to-day they are the special task of the property-man, or of the master-mechanic, altho the scene-painter's aid may be invoked also to make them more effective. That there were property-makers in the Middle Ages admits of no doubt, and also highly skilled artificers delighting in the daring ingenuity of their inventions. There were abundant properties, it may be noted, on the Elizabethan stage, well-heads, thrones, and arbors; and Henslow's diary records payment for a variety of such accessories. But there is not in that invaluable document a single entry indicating any payment for anything equivalent to the work of the scene-painter.

Adroit as were the French mechanics who prepared the abundant spectacular effects of the medieval mysteries, they were surpassed in skill by the Italian engineers of the Renascence, who lent their aid to the superb outdoor festivals wherein the expanding artistic energy of the period was most magnificently displayed. Leonardo da Vinci did not disdain to design machines disclosing a surprising fertility of resource. It was from those outdoor spectacles of the Italians that the French court-ballets are directly descended, and also the English masks, which demanded the collaboration of Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson. But at first the Italians got along without the aid of the yet unborn scene-painter, and the inventions of the engineer were carried out by the mechanic and the decorator. Even as late as the seventeenth century a magnificent spectacle presented in the garden of the Pitti Palace in Florence relied mainly upon the ingenious engineer and scarcely at all upon the scene-painter. It seems probable that it is here in Italy in the Renascence, and at first as an accompaniment of the outdoor spectacle, or of its indoor rival, that the art of the actual scene-painter had its birth. The engineers required the aid of the artists--indeed, in those days, when there was little specialization of function, the engineers were almost always artists themselves, capable of their own decoration.

In time there would be necessary specialization, and after a while certain artists came to devote themselves chiefly to scene-painting, finding their immediate opportunity in the decoration of the operas, which then began to multiply. The opera has always been aristocratic, expensive, and spectacular, and it continued the tradition of the highly decorated open-air festivals. In fact, it improved upon this tradition, in so far as that was possible, and it achieved a variety of mechanical effects scarcely less complicated than those which charm our eyes to-day in 'Rheingold' and 'Parsifal.' Thirty years ago the late Charles Nuitter, the archivist of the Paris Opera and himself a librettist of wide experience, drew my attention to Sabbatini's 'Practica di fabricar scene e machini ne' teatri' (published in 1638), and he assured me that the resources of the Opera did not go beyond those which were at the command of the Italians three centuries earlier. "They could do then," he asserted, "almost everything that we can do now here at the Opera. For example, they could bring a ship on the stage under full sail. We have only one superiority over them: we have abundant light now, we have electricity, and they were dependent on candles and lamps."

Yet even in Italy in the Renascence the most popular form of the drama, the improvised play which we call the comedy-of-masks, was performed in a traditional stage-setting representing an open square, whereon only the back-cloth seems to have been the work of the scene-painter, the sides of the stage being occupied by four or more houses, two or three on each side, often consisting of little more than a practicable door with a practicable window over it, not made of canvas, but constructed out of wood by the carpenter, with the solidity demanded by the climbing feats of the athletic comedians and by their acrobatic agility. The traditional set of the comedy-of-masks conformed to that recommended for the comic drama by Serlio, in his treatise on architecture, published in 1545; but it may be noted also that Serlio's suggested set for the tragic drama was not dissimilar even if it were distinctly more dignified.

III

The opera seems to have been the direct descendant of the court-ballet, known in England as the mask, as that in its turn was derived from the open-air spectacle of the Italian Renascence, such as survived in Florence in the seventeenth century. In the beginning the court-ballets of France, like the masks of England, were not given in a theater with a stage shut off by a proscenium arch, but in the ball-room or banqueting-hall of a palace. One end of this spacious apartment, often but not always provided with a raised platform, served as the stage whereon one or more places, a mountain, for instance, and a grotto, were represented, at first by the decorated machines of the artistic engineers only, but afterward by the canvas frames of scene-painters. The action of the court-ballets or of the masks was not necessarily confined to this stage, so to call it. The spectators were ranged along the walls and under the galleries (if there were any), leaving the main part of the hall bare; and the performers descended frequently into this area, which was kept free for them, and which was better fitted for their dances and processions and other intricate evolutions than the scant and cluttered stage.

A twentieth-century analog to this sixteenth-century practise can be seen in the spectacle presented in our modern three-ringed circuses--the 'Cleopatra,' for example, which was the opening number on the Barnum and Bailey program not long ago, where the Roman troops and the Egyptian populace came down from the stage and paraded around the arena. Bacon in his essay on 'Masques,' used the word "scenery" as tho he meant only decorated scaffolds, perhaps movable; and his expression of desire for room "to be kept clear" implies the use of the body of the hall for the maneuvers of the performers. Ludovic Celler, in his study of 'Mise en scene au dix-septieme siecle' in France, shows that the action of the court-ballet was sometimes intermitted that the spectators could join in the dancing, as at an ordinary ball. In the earlier Italian open-air festivals, and in the earlier French court-ballets there was not even a proscenium sharply separating the stage from the rest of the hall; but in England by the time of Inigo Jones the advantage of a proscenium had been discovered, and we have more than one of the sketches which that skilful designer devised for his masks. But even then this proscenium was not permanent and architecturally conventionalized; it was invented afresh for every successive entertainment, and it was adorned with devices peculiar to that particular mask. Inigo Jones had also advanced to the use of actual scenery, that is to say, of canvas stretched upon frames and then painted. Mr. Hamilton Bell believes it possible that the invention of grooves to sustain wings and flats may be ascribed to Inigo or to his assistant and successor, Webb.

Even in the Italian opera, where all the scenery was due to the brush of the scene-painter, there was for a long while a formal and monotonous regularity. Whether the set was an interior or an exterior, a public place or a hall in a palace, the arrangement was rectangular, with a drop at the back and a series of wings on either side equidistant from one another. This stiff representation of a locality is preserved for us nowadays in the toy-theaters which we buy for our children, altho it is now seen on the actual stage only in certain acts of old-fashioned operas. It lingers also in the variety-shows, where it is the proper setting for many items of their miscellaneous programs.

Altho the Italians had discovered perspective early in the Renascence they utilized it on the stage timidly at first, bestowing this rectangular regularity upon all their sets, both architectural interiors or exteriors and rural scenes, in which rigid wood-wings receded, diminishing in height to a landscape painted on the drop at the back, thus leaving the whole stage free for the actors. Not until the end of the seventeenth century did an Italian scene-painter, Bibiena, venture to abandon the balanced symmetry of the square set, and to slant his perspective so as to present buildings at an acute angle, thereby not only gaining a pleasing variety, but also enlarging immensely the apparent spaciousness of the scene, since he was able to carry the eyes of the spectator into vague distances, and to suggest far more than he was able to display. This advance was accompanied by a more liberal use of stairways and platforms--"practicables" as the stage-phrase is--that is to say, built up by the carpenters so that the actors could go from one level to another. Hitherto flights of steps and balconies had been only painted, not being intended for actual use by the performers.

A similar development took place also in the landscape scenes; the foreground was raised irregularly, so that the persons of the play might climb up. Practicable bridges were swung across torrents, and the earlier formality of pastoral scenes began to disappear. Apparently the scene-painters were influenced at this time by the landscape-painters, more especially by Poussin. The interrelation of painting and scene-painting, each in turn affecting the other, is far closer than most historians of art have perceived. It is not unlikely, for example, that Gainsborough and Constable, who were the fathers of the Barbizon men, had been stimulated by the stage-pictures of De Lutherbourg. David Garrick profited by the innovating art of De Lutherbourg, a pupil of Vanloo, who came to England in 1771. Apparently it was De Lutherbourg who invented "raking-pieces"--as the scene-painters term the low fragments of scenery which mask the inclines of mounds. To him also is credited the first use of transparent scenes to reproduce the effect of moonlight upon water, and to suggest the flames of volcanoes. Thus to him must be ascribed the beginnings of that complicated realism by which our latter-day scene-painters are enabled to create an appropriate atmosphere for poetic episodes.

IV

The next step in advance, and one of the most important in the slow development of the scene-painter's art, took place in France early in the nineteenth century, and simultaneous with the romanticist movement, which modified the aims and ambitions of the artists as much as it did those of the poets. The severe stateliness of the stage-set which was adequate for the classicist tragedies of Racine and Voltaire, generally a vague interior of an indefinite palace, stiff and empty, was hopelessly unsuitable for the fiery dramas of Victor Hugo and the elder Dumas. An even greater opportunity for spectacular regeneration was afforded, in these same early decades of the nineteenth century, by the bold and moving librettos which Scribe constructed for Meyerbeer and Halevy at the Opera, and for Auber at the Opera-Comique. The exciting cause of the scenic complexities that we find in Wagner's music-dramas can be discovered in these librettos of Scribe's, from 'Robert the Devil' to the 'Africaine.' For one act of 'Robert the Devil,' that in which the spectral nuns dance among the tombs under the rays of the moon, Ciceri invented the most striking and novel setting yet exhibited on any stage--a setting not surpassed in poetic glamor by any since seen in the theater, altho its eery beauty may have been rivaled by one scene in the 'Source,' a ballet produced also at the Opera forty-five years ago--a moon-lit tarn in a forest-glade, with half-seen sylphs floating lightly over its silvered surface. This exquisitely poetic set was imported from Paris to New York and inserted in the brilliant spectacle of the 'White Fawn.'

The ample effect of these scenes was made possible only by the immense improvement in the illumination of the stage due to the introduction of gas. Up to the first quarter of the nineteenth century the stage-decorator had been dependent upon lamps--a few of these arranged at the rim of the curving apron which jutted out into the auditorium far beyond the proscenium, and a few more hidden here and there in the flies and wings. Early in the nineteenth century gas supplanted oil; and a little later than the middle of the century gas was powerfully supplemented by the calcium light. Toward the end of the century gas in its turn gave way to the far more useful electric light, which could be directed anywhere in any quantity, and which could be controlled and colored at will. It was Henry Irving, more especially in his marvelous mounting of a rather tawdry version of 'Faust,' who revealed the delicate artistic possibilities of our modern facilities for stage illumination.

In France the romanticist movement of Hugo was swiftly succeeded by the realistic movement of Balzac, who was the earliest novelist to relate the leading personages of his studies from life to a characteristic background and to bring out the intimate association of persons and places. From prose fiction this evocation of characteristic surroundings was taken over by the drama; and a persistent effort was made to have the successive sets of a play suggestive and significant in themselves, and also representative of the main theme of the piece. The actors were no longer dependent upon the "float," as the footlights were called; they did not need to advance out on the apron to let the spectators follow the changing expression of their faces, and in time the apron was cut back to the line of the proscenium, and the curtain rose and fell in a picture-frame which cut the actors off from their proximity to the audience--a proximity forever tempting the dramatic poet to the purely oratorical effects proper enough on a platform.

When the modern play calls for an interior this interior now takes on the semblance of an actual room. Apparently the "box-set," as it is called, the closed-in room with its walls and its ceiling, was first seen in England in 1841, when 'London Assurance' was produced; but very likely it had earlier made its appearance in Paris at the Gymnase. To supply a room with walls of a seeming solidity, with doors and with windows, appears natural enough to us, but it was a startling innovation fourscore years ago. When the 'School for Scandal' had been originally produced at Drury Lane in 1775, the library of Joseph Surface, where Lady Teazle hides behind the screen, was represented by a drop at the back, on which a window was painted, and by wings set starkly parallel to this back-drop and painted to represent columns. There were no doors; and Joseph and Charles, Sir Peter and Lady Teazle, walked on thru the openings between the wings, very much as tho they were passing thru the non-existent walls. To us, this would be shocking; but it was perfectly acceptable to English playgoers then; and to them it seemed natural, since they were familiar with no other way of getting into a room on the stage.

The invention of the box-set, of a room with walls and ceilings, doors and windows, led inevitably to the appropriate furnishing of this room with tangible tables and chairs. Even in the eighteenth century the stage had been very empty; it was adorned only with the furniture actually demanded by the action of the drama; and the rest of the furniture, bookcases and sideboards, chairs and tables, was frankly painted on the wings and on the back-drop by the side of the painted mantelpieces, the painted windows, and the painted doors. In the plays of the twentieth century characters sit down and change from seat to seat; but in the plays produced in England and in France before the first quarter of the nineteenth century all the actors stood all the time--or at least they were allowed to sit only under the stress of dramatic necessity--as in the fourth act of 'Tartuffe,' for instance. In all of Moliere's comedies there are scarcely half a dozen characters who have occasion to sit down; and this sitting-down is limited to three or four of his more than thirty pieces. Nowadays every effort is made to capture the external realities of life. Sardou was not more careful in composing his stage-sittings in his fashion than was Ibsen in prescribing the scenic environment that he needed. The author's minute descriptions of the scenes where the action of the 'Doll's House' and of 'Ghosts' passes prove that Ibsen had visualized sharply the precise interior which was, in his mind, the only possible home for the creatures of his imagination. And Mr. Belasco has recently bestowed upon the winning personality of his 'Peter Grimm' the exact habitation to which that appealing creature would return in his desire to undo after death what in life he had rashly commanded.

V

While the scene-painter of our time is most often called upon to realize the actual in an interior and to delight us with a room the dominant quality of which is that it looks as tho it was really lived in by the personages we see moving around in it, he is not confined to those domestic scenes. There are other plays than the modern social dramas; and these other plays make other demands upon the artist. On occasion he has to supply a gorgeous scenic accompaniment for the Roman and Egyptian episodes of 'Antony and Cleopatra,' to suggest the blasted heath where Macbeth may meet the weird sisters, and to call up before our delighted eyes the placid charm of the Forest of Arden. The awkward and inconsistent sky-borders, strips of pendent canvas wholly unsatisfactory as substitutes for the vast depths of the starry heavens, he is able to dispense with by lowering a little the hangings at the top edge of the picture-frame, and by thus limiting the upward gaze of the spectators, so that he can forgo the impossible attempt to imitate the changing sky. He can achieve an effect of limitless space, as in the last act of the 'Garden of Allah' (which brings before us the endless vision of Sahara), by the use of a cyclorama background, the drop being suspended from a semicircular rod which runs around the top of the stage, shutting in the view absolutely, and yet yielding itself to a representation of sand and sky meeting afar off on the faint horizon.

In the past half-century, and more especially since the improvement of the electric light, scene-painting has become very elaborate and very expensive. Instead of being kept in its proper place as the decoration of the drama, as a beautiful accessory of the action, it has often been pushed to the front, so as to attract attention to itself, and thereby to distract attention from the play which it was supposed to illuminate. Sometimes Shakspere has been smothered in scenery, and sometimes the art of the actor has been subordinated to the art of the scene-painter. Now, it must be admitted that nothing is too good for the masterpieces of the drama, and that Sophocles no less than Shakspere ought to be presented to the public with all the pomp that his lofty themes and his marvelous workmanship may demand. But the plays of the mighty dramatic poets ought not to be used merely as pegs on which to hang gorgeous apparel. After all, the play's the thing; and whenever the scene-painter and his invading partner, the stage-manager, are prompted to oust the drama from its pre-eminence, and to substitute an exhibition of their accessory arts, the result is a betrayal of the playwright.

A well-known British art critic once told me that when the curtain rose at a certain London revival of 'Twelfth Night,' and disclosed Olivia's garden, he sat entranced at the beauty of the spectacle before his eyes, with its subtle harmonies of color, so entranced, indeed, that he found himself distinctly annoyed when the actors came on the stage and began to talk. For the moment, at least, he wished them away, as disturbers of his esthetic delight in the lovely picture on which his eyes were feasting. But even a stage-setting as captivating as this might very well be justified if it had been employed to fill a gap in the action, and to buttress up the interest of an episode where the dramatist had allowed the appeal of his story to relax. Perrin, the manager of the Comedie-Francaise thirty years ago, declined to produce a French version of 'Othello' because he found a certain dramatic emptiness in the scenes at Cyprus at the opening of the second act, which he felt he would have to mask by the beauty of spectacular decoration, too costly an expedient in his opinion for the finances of the theater just then.

It was Perrin, however, who produced the French version of the 'OEdipus the King' of Sophocles, and who bestowed upon it a single set of wonderful charm and power, at once dignified, appropriate, and beautiful in itself. It represented an open space between a temple and the palace of the ill-fated OEdipus, with an altar in the center, and with the profile of another temple projected against the distant sky and relieved by the tall, thin outline of poplar-trees. The monotony of this rectangular architectural construction was avoided by placing all the buildings on a slant, the whole elevation of the temple being visible on the left of the spectators, whereas only a corner of the colonnade of the palace on the right was displayed. This set at the Theatre-Francais was the absolute antithesis of the original scenic surroundings in the theater of Dionysus more than two thousand years ago, when the masterpiece of Sophocles had been performed in the open-air orchestra, with only a hut of skins or a temporary wooden building to serve as a background for the bas-reliefs of the action.

So elaborate, complicated, and costly have stage-sets become in the past half-century, that there are already signs of the violent reaction that might be expected. Mr. Gordon Craig, an artist of remarkable individuality, has gone so far as to propose what is almost an abolition of scene-painting. He seeks to attain effects of massive simplicity by the use of unadorned hangings and of undecorated screens, thus substituting vast spaces for the realistic details of the modern scene-painter. No doubt, there are a few plays for which this method of mounting would be appropriate enough--M. Maeterlinck's 'Intruder,' for one, and his 'Sightless' for another, plays which are independent of time and space, and in which the action appears to pass in some undiscovered limbo. As yet the advanced and iconoclastic theories of Mr. Craig have made few adherents, the most notable being the German, "Professor" Reinhardt, who lacks Mr. Craig's fine feeling for form and color, and who is continually tempted into rather ugly eccentricities of design, being apparently moved by the desire to be different from his predecessors rather than by the wish to be superior to them.

VI

Interesting as are Mr. Craig's suggestions, and wellfounded as may be his protest against the excessive ornamentation to which we are too prone nowadays, there is no reason to fear that his principles will prevail. The art of the scene-painter is too welcome, it is too plainly in accord with the predilections of the twentieth century, for it to be annihilated by the fiat of a daring and reckless innovator. It will be wise if the producers should harken to Mr. Craig's warnings and curb their tendency to needless extravagance; but we may rest assured that a return to the bareness of the Attic theater or of the English theater in the time of the Tudors is frankly unthinkable now that the art of scene-painting has been developed to its present possibilities. In fact, the probability is rather that the scene-painters will continue to enlarge the boundaries of their territory and to discover new means and new methods of delighting our eyes by their evocations of interesting places.

Perhaps they would be more encouraged to go on and conquer new worlds if there was a wider recognition of the artistic value of their work. Altho De Lutherbourg and Clarkson Stanfield won honorable positions in the history of painting by their easel-pictures, the art of scene-painting does not hold the place in the public esteem that many of its practitioners deserve. Theophile Gautier, often negligible as a critic of the acted drama, was always worth listening to when he turned to pictorial art; and he was frequent in praise of the scene-painters of his time and of scene-painting itself as a craft of exceeding difficulty and of inadequate appreciation. Probably one reason why the scene-painter has not received his due meed of praise is because his work is not preserved. It exists only during the run of the play which it decorates. When the piece disappears from the boards, the scenes which adorned it vanish from sight. They linger only in the memory of those who happened to see this one play--and even then, in fact, only in the memory of such spectators as have trained themselves to pay attention to stage-pictures. For the scene-painter there is no Luxembourg; still less is there any Louvre. As Gautier sympathetically declared, "it is sad to think that nothing survives of those masterpieces destined to live a few evenings only, and disappearing from the washed canvas to give place to other marvels, equally fugitive. How much invention, talent, and genius may be lost--and not always leaving even a name!"

It is pleasant to know that at the Opera in Paris a formal order of the government has for now a half-century prescribed the preservation of the original models--the little miniature sets which the scene-painter submits for the approval of the manager and the dramatist before he begins work upon the actual scene. These models are always upon the same scale, and in the gallery connected with the library of the Opera a dozen of these models are set up to be viewed by visitors. Of course no tiny model, however cleverly fashioned, can give the full effect of the scene which has been conceived in terms of a huge stage; and yet the miniature reproductions do not betray the scene-painter as much as an engraving or a photograph often betrays the painter. Whatever its limitations, and they are obvious enough, the collection of models at the Opera is at least an attempt to retard the oblivion that Theophile Gautier deplored, and to provide for the scene-painter a substitute, however inadequate, for the Louvre and the Luxembourg.

(1912.)

IX

THE BOOK OF THE OPERA

THE BOOK OF THE OPERA

I

A few years ago _Punch_ had a satirical drawing representing a British matron conveying a bevy of youthful daughters to the French play in London. To a friend who called her attention to the rather risky atmosphere of the very Parisian comedy which they were about to behold, the worthy mother promptly explained that she was not bringing her daughters to see the play itself; she was bringing them to see only the acting. Probably a great many opera-goers would make a similar explanation if they were asked whether they were interested in the book of the opera or only in the music. They would be likely to protest that they cared little or nothing for the libretto, and that they were attracted solely by the score. But, as a matter of fact, the opera-goers who might make this reply would be self-deceived. Whether they are aware of it or not, they are unlikely to be attracted to any opera unless it happens to have an interesting story, built up into a coherent and captivating plot. When the libretto is unintelligible or uninteresting, the most delightful music fails to allure them into the opera-house. This is one of the reasons why the 'Magic Flute,' which contains much of Mozart's most beautiful melodic invention, is so rarely heard in our opera-houses, and why it is so sparsely attended when it is presented. The libretto of the 'Magic Flute' is dull and ineffective, and even Mozart's genius proved unable to overcome this initial handicap.

The ordinary opera-goer is likely to treat the libretto with calm contempt. He is prone to assert that nobody cares about the words, and he does not reflect that behind and beneath the words is the supporting structure of the story. After all, an opera is a play, it is a music-drama, and the plot is as important in a play the words of which are to be sung as in a play the words of which are to be spoken. True it is, of course, that in an opera the words may not be heard distinctly, and perhaps they need not be seized with certainty, since the emotion they set forth is more amply conveyed by the music. But the musician cannot express emotion musically, unless there is emotion for him to express, unless he has characters immeshed in a series of situations which evoke vivid and contrasting sentiments for him to translate into music. As the music-drama is a drama, it must obey the laws of the drama; it must represent a conflict of contending desires; it must be carried on by characters firm of purpose and resolute in achieving their several aims. These characters must be sharply individualized and boldly contrasted; and the story in which they take part must be at once strong and simple, calling for no elaborate explanation and moving forward steadily and irresistibly. It must have a lyric aspect, lending itself naturally to song; and it ought also to afford opportunity for the spectacular effects appropriate to the large stage of the opera-house.

So contemptuous of the libretto is the ordinary opera-goer that he rarely inquires as to the name of the author of the book, altho he is generally familiar with the name of the composer of the score. He may or he may not be aware that Wagner was his own librettist, and quite possibly he supposes that it is the ordinary custom of the composers to write the words for their own music. He knows that 'Carmen' was composed by Bizet, and that the 'Huguenots' was composed by Meyerbeer; but he would be greatly puzzled if he was asked to name the librettists of these two operas, the adroit playwrights who devised the skeletons of dramatic action which sustained the composers and provided them with ample opportunities for the exercise of their melodic gift. As a matter of fact, the book of 'Carmen' was written in collaboration by two of the most distinguished French dramatists of the nineteenth century, Meilhac and Halevy, the authors of 'Froufrou' and of the librettos of Offenbach's 'Belle Helene,' 'Grand Duchess of Gerolstein,' and 'Perichole.' And the book of the 'Huguenots' was the work of the master stage-craftsman, Scribe, the author of 'Adrienne Lecouvreur' and of the 'Ladies' Battle,' and of countless other plays performed in every modern language, and in all the countries of the world.

Bizet wrote other operas besides 'Carmen,' and if these other operas have vanished from the stage, the reason may be that the librettos to which they were composed were not as ingenious and not as interesting as the book of 'Carmen.' One of these forgotten operas of Bizet's was a dramatization of the 'Fair Maid of Perth,' and another was called the 'Pearl Fisher'; but neither of these books was devised by Meilhac and Halevy. And Scribe was not only the librettist of the 'Huguenots' and of the 'Africaine' for Meyerbeer; he also wrote the books of 'Fra Diavolo' and of 'Crown Diamonds' for Auber, the book of the 'Dame Blanche' for Boieldieu, and the book of the 'Juive' for Halevy. Indeed, it is evident that Wagner himself as a librettist must be considered as a direct disciple of Scribe; certainly his book of the 'Flying Dutchman' has its points of resemblance with the books Scribe invented for 'Robert the Devil,' and for the 'Prophet.' Even the libretto of Wagner's 'Master-Singers of Nuremberg,' altho it is far richer in tone than any of Scribe's librettos for Auber, is constructed in accord with principles already applied by the French playwright. In fact, the influence of Scribe is patent thruout the long history of opera in the nineteenth century; he was not only the most prolific of librettists himself, but the operatic formula he devised was borrowed by the best of the librettists who followed him. Scribe was not the writer of the books of 'Faust,' or of 'Romeo et Juliet,' or of 'Aida,' but all these librettos were carefully built in accord with the principles that he had practised for half a century.

II

Probably the average opera-goer is contemptuous of the libretto, because he thinks it is an easy task to write the mere words of an opera. To him, no doubt, the opera lives by its music, and by its music alone. But there is really no warrant for this uncomplimentary attitude. An opera is a music-drama, and if it is to achieve success, wide-spread and long-lasting, its drama must be as effective as its music. Experience proves that, so far from being as easy as it seems, the construction of a satisfactory libretto is really a difficult feat, to be achieved only by an expert in stage-craft. It is no task to be confided to an amateur play-maker, to a mere lyrist, ignorant of the art of the theater. First of all, a satisfactory book must contain the skeleton of a good play; and, second, this must be the special kind of play which will not only inspire the musician, but afford him a succession of special opportunities for the exercise of his own art. The book of an opera must be a good play; and more than once have we seen a libretto deprived of its music and written out again in prose for production in non-musical theaters. 'Carmen' is one example of this transformation. The late Sir Henry Irving was so taken with Wagner's 'Flying Dutchman' that he had it made over into a play for his own acting--'Vanderdecken.'