The Theory of the Theatre | Page 3

would
require an extraordinary nicety of ear, and might easily be led astray, in
one direction or the other, by the reading of the actors. The rhetoric of
Massinger must have sounded like poetry to an Elizabethan audience
that had heard the same performers, the afternoon before, speaking
lines of Shakespeare's. If Mr. Forbes-Robertson is reading a
poorly-written part, it is hard to hear that the lines are, in themselves,
not musical. Literary style is, even for accomplished critics, very
difficult to judge in the theatre. Some years ago, Mrs. Fiske presented
in New York an English adaptation of Paul Heyse's Mary of Magdala.
After the first performance--at which I did not happen to be present--I
asked several cultivated people who had heard the play whether the
English version was written in verse or in prose; and though these
people were themselves actors and men of letters, not one of them
could tell me. Yet, as appeared later, when the play was published, the
English dialogue was written in blank verse by no less a poet than Mr.
William Winter. If such an elementary distinction as that between verse
and prose was in this case inaudible to cultivated ears, how much
harder must it be for the average audience to distinguish between a
good phrase and a bad! The fact is that literary style is, for the most
part, wasted on an audience. The average auditor is moved mainly by
the emotional content of a sentence spoken on the stage, and pays very

little attention to the form of words in which the meaning is set forth.
At Hamlet's line, "Absent thee from felicity a while"--which Matthew
Arnold, with impeccable taste, selected as one of his touchstones of
literary style--the thing that really moves the audience in the theatre is
not the perfectness of the phrase but the pathos of Hamlet's plea for his
best friend to outlive him and explain his motives to a world grown
harsh.
That the content rather than the literary turn of dialogue is the thing that
counts most in the theatre will be felt emphatically if we compare the
mere writing of Molière with that of his successor and imitator,
Regnard. Molière is certainly a great writer, in the sense that he
expresses clearly and precisely the thing he has to say; his verse, as
well as his prose, is admirably lucid and eminently speakable. But
assuredly, in the sense in which the word is generally used, Molière is
not a poet; and it may fairly be said that, in the usual connotation of the
term, he has no style. Regnard, on the other hand, is more nearly a poet,
and, from the standpoint of style, writes vastly better verse. He has a
lilting fluency that flowers every now and then into a phrase of golden
melody. Yet Molière is so immeasurably his superior as a playwright
that most critics instinctively set Regnard far below him even as a
writer. There can be no question that M. Rostand writes better verse
than Emile Augier; but there can be no question, also, that Augier is the
greater dramatist. Oscar Wilde probably wrote more clever and witty
lines than any other author in the whole history of English comedy; but
no one would think of setting him in the class with Congreve and
Sheridan.
It is by no means my intention to suggest that great writing is not
desirable in the drama; but the point must be emphasised that it is not a
necessary element in the immediate merit of a play as a play. In fact,
excellent plays have often been presented without the use of any words
at all. Pantomime has, in every age, been recognised as a legitimate
department of the drama. Only a few years ago, Mme. Charlotte Wiehe
acted in New York a one-act play, entitled La Main, which held the
attention enthralled for forty-five minutes during which no word was
spoken. The little piece told a thrilling story with entire clearness and
coherence, and exhibited three characters fully and distinctly drawn;
and it secured this achievement by visual means alone, with no

recourse whatever to the spoken word. Here was a work which by no
stretch of terminology could have been included in the category of
literature; and yet it was a very good play, and as drama was far
superior to many a literary masterpiece in dialogue like Browning's In a
Balcony.
Lest this instance seem too exceptional to be taken as representative, let
us remember that throughout an entire important period in the history
of the stage, it was customary for the actors to improvise the lines that
they spoke before the audience. I refer to the period of the so-called
_commedia dell'arte_, which flourished all over Italy throughout the