The Theory of the Theatre | Page 7

all dynamic
characters is the preponderance within them of the element of will; and
the persons of a play must therefore be people with active wills and
emphatic intentions. When such people are brought into juxtaposition,
there necessarily results a clash of contending desires and purposes;

and by this fact we are led logically to the conclusion that the proper
subject-matter of the drama is a struggle between contrasted human
wills. The same conclusion, as we shall notice in the next chapter, may
be reached logically by deduction from the natural demands of an
assembled audience; and the subject will be discussed more fully
during the course of our study of The Psychology of Theatre Audiences.
At present it is sufficient for us to note that every great play that has
ever been devised has presented some phase or other of this single,
necessary theme,--a contention of individual human wills. An actor,
moreover, is always more effective in scenes of emotion than in scenes
of cold logic and calm reason; and the dramatist, therefore, is obliged to
select as his leading figures people whose acts are motivated by
emotion rather than by intellect. Aristotle, for example, would make a
totally uninteresting figure if he were presented faithfully upon the
stage. Who could imagine Darwin as the hero of a drama? Othello, on
the other hand, is not at all a reasonable being; from first to last his
intellect is "perplexed in the extreme." His emotions are the motives for
his acts; and in this he may be taken as the type of a dramatic character.
In the means of delineating the characters he has imagined, the
dramatist, because he is writing for actors, is more narrowly restricted
than the novelist. His people must constantly be doing something, and
must therefore reveal themselves mainly through their acts. They may,
of course, also be delineated through their way of saying things; but in
the theatre the objective action is always more suggestive than the
spoken word. We know Sherlock Holmes, in Mr. William Gillette's
admirable melodrama, solely through the things that we have seen him
do; and in this connection we should remember that in the stories by Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle from which Mr. Gillette derived his narrative
material, Holmes is delineated largely by a very different method,--the
method, namely, of expository comment written from the point of view
of Doctor Watson. A leading actor seldom wants to sit in his
dressing-room while he is being talked about by the other actors on the
stage; and therefore the method of drawing character by comment,
which is so useful for the novelist, is rarely employed by the playwright
except in the waste moments which precede the first entrance of his
leading figure. The Chorus Lady, in Mr. James Forbes's amusing study
of that name, is drawn chiefly through her way of saying things; but

though this method of delineation is sometimes very effective for an act
or two, it can seldom be sustained without a faltering of interest
through a full-grown four-act play. The novelist's expedient of
delineating character through mental analysis is of course denied the
dramatist, especially in this modern age when the soliloquy (for reasons
which will be noted in a subsequent chapter) is usually frowned upon.
Sometimes, in the theatre, a character may be exhibited chiefly through
his personal effect upon the other people on the stage, and thereby
indirectly on the people in the audience. It was in this way, of course,
that Manson was delineated in Mr. Charles Rann Kennedy's The
Servant in the House. But the expedient is a dangerous one for the
dramatist to use; because it makes his work immediately dependent on
the actor chosen for the leading role, and may in many cases render his
play impossible of attaining its full effect except at the hands of a
single great performer. In recent years an expedient long familiar in the
novel has been transferred to the service of the stage,--the expedient,
namely, of suggesting the personality of a character through a visual
presentation of his habitual environment. After the curtain had been
raised upon the first act of The Music Master, and the audience had
been given time to look about the room which was represented on the
stage, the main traits of the leading character had already been
suggested before his first appearance on the scene. The pictures and
knickknacks on his mantelpiece told us, before we ever saw him, what
manner of man he was. But such subtle means as this can, after all, be
used only to reinforce the one standard method of conveying the sense
of character in drama; and this one method, owing to the conditions
under which the playwright does his work, must always be the
exhibition of