Men and Letters

THE HEW PATHOS.

IT would be a curious study that should trace in detail the changing form of pathos in English fiction of the past fifty years. To state the case summarily, the novelist who, in his pathetic moods, used to be effusive, demonstrative, and melodramatic, jealous lest one tearful touch should escape the reader, has become restrained, epigrammatic, almost symbolic in his rendering of the sorrowful. Dickens’s ostentatious making ready of the handkerchief set our fathers all sniveling, as they now indignantly assure us, skeptics that we are. But his pathos leaves the modern reader, if not “ most unusual cam ” along with Pet Marjorie, with quite other emotions than the tragic ; whatever feeling of depression it produces relates more to the author himself, his taste and that of his contemporaries, than to the long-drawn sufferings of Little Nell and the others. Thackeray did his weeping more quietly. He had his moments of oh-ing and ah-ing, but his supreme strokes of pathos were the silent and controlled quivering of a strong man under a grievous blow. He could leave George Osborne lying dead on his face, with a bullet through his heart, on the field of Waterloo, without so much as an exclamation point to remind the reader that here was the place for moist eyes. Colonel Newcome’s Adsum gets only one sentence of comment. This is one of the qualities in which Thackeray anticipated the taste of a coming generation ; certainly, in this particular of conveying poignantly the smart and despair of life he still beats Dickens off the earth in a way to satisfy Mrs. Carlyle.

There evidently was a powerful literary tradition leading writers of a halfcentury ago to think that grief must be made luxuriously expansive. Charlotte Brontë is a good example of the spell which this tradition laid upon a novelist of even her strength and poise. She was far from being a deliquescent and hysterical female ; yet read such sentences as the following from Villette, really intended to make people weep : —

“ Proof of a life to come must be given. In fire and blood, if needful, must that proof be written. In fire and blood do we trace the record throughout nature. In fire and in blood does it cross our own experience. Sufferer, faint not through terror of this burning evidence. Tired wayfarer, gird up thy loins ; look upward, march onward. Pilgrims and brother mourners,”etc.

Is this Charlotte Brontë or Marie Corelli ?

It surely has rained since then, as the Spaniards say. Something has happened to make the pathos of Dickens seem absurd, though our tears still flow for those who know the way to their fountain. Ian Maclaren is a very specialist in pathos ; he is all a-drip with it. Often you wish he were not quite so insistent upon it; that the hortatory instinct of his calling, or something else, did not lead him to “ improve ” his pathetic situations so faithfully. Yet through it all he is, by comparison, swift, condensed, reserved. But it is, of course, to Barrie that one must turn for a master in this kind. He marks the extreme yet attained in the passing from the exuberant and iterative woe of Dickens. “ Let it be told in the fewest words,” he himself writes when coming to the heart-break at the end of Margaret Ogilvy. It is pathos reduced to its lowest terms in point of language ; made intense only by the event, by a look or gesture, changing cheek or trembling lip. The old luxury of grief, the cries, the beating of the breast, are gone. The sky does not turn black, — we have got beyond that “ pathetic fallacy.” The writer neither lectures nor nudges you ; he puts the uncolored fact before you, lets the rest be silence, and turns away that he may not seem to be curiously looking for your tears — if you have any.

Does all this argue that manners have really changed, as well as literary taste? Do we take our sorrows more stoically than our grandfathers did ? That depends upon who we are and who our grandfathers were. The unconventional classes in society are now what they have always been. Having emotions of any kind, why should they conceal them ? Children of nature, their grief is as immoderate as their laughter. Sorrow which did not shriek, lie on its back and kick, with a plucking of hair in its hand as certificate of sincerity, would be looked on with suspicion by them. It is, in part at least, a social convention which leads to the heart putting its own bitterness under lock and key. It is not good form to display powerful emotion of any kind. Now, fifty years have undoubtedly extended outwards and downwards the sway of social conventions. So it would be true that many more people nowadays feel the weary weight of the unintelligible world upon them without crying out so unguardedly; and in this sense it may be said that manners have really undergone a transformation.

Thus there would be reason for assorting that the new pathos in fiction is more realistic than the old ; it sees and sets forth the fact more accurately. But it may well be that there is a larger truth to be considered ; that novelists have, perhaps, not simply become more closely observant, have not merely disciplined their style and cut away the verbiage, but have been gradually emancipating themselves from a literary tradition imposed upon English literature from without. Classic grief was wonderfully expansive. Homer’s heroes groaned and raved and wept as freely as a modern football captain or prizefighter in defeat. The Greek chorus appealed for tears in the frankest manner. So of the great historic literatures of the south of Europe; their pathos was as unrestrained and expressive as the emotional life of the men and women from whom they drew their ideas of it. That is the point: Greek and Latin pathos, Italian and Spanish and French pathos, was wordy, passionate, uncontrolled. But it was realistic. It came from the life. It flung off all measure and restraint, because those meridional peoples were fluent and demonstrative. and without a thought of concealment in their sorrows. May not this idea of pathos have passed into English as a part of the great literary tradition taken over ? May it not be that its incongruity with our cold, secretive northern strain has only of late been more clearly perceived ? Whatever be said to this, the process of change in our treatment of the pathetic seems easy to establish. The old manner of first-rate writers is now seen only in writers of the second or third class. The masters no longer think that if they wish to see their readers weep, they must do a good deal of conspicuous blubbering themselves. The new pathos is that of the sigh, the averted gaze, the tender touch; not the loud asseveration of anguish too great to be borne.

Rollo Ogden.

PLAYS AND NOVELS.

ONE marked characteristic of the present drama, here in America at least, is that so many plays are founded upon novels. Twenty years ago playwrights were all for adaptations from the French or German. That sort of thing is now uncommon ; the present fashion is to dramatize novels.

Seeing plays and reading about them, talking them over and being with persons who are interested in such things, one may easily be led to think the new fashion an advance on the old. True, a dramatic hack will perhaps make a mediocre play from a good novel, just as, twenty years ago, he could “ adapt ” a fair play from something in French or German. If the novel be popular, people may go to see the play whether it be good or bad, just because they like to see characters they have read about. But most things have their drawbacks; there are some points in the present vogue that seem rather good.

Professor W. L. Phelps remarks in a recent article that “ this copying of the Elizabethan method of translating novels into plays is almost ideally bad.” The closer and more intimate “ relation between these two forms of art ” will be, he thinks, “ very unfortunate for both.” Mr. Phelps does not profess to discuss the question at length ; he touches it only so far as it concerns his more general subject. Looking into the matter more closely, one sees some aspects of the case that he did not consider.

One point that is not ideally bad is the use in the drama of material already familiar to the audience. A man who is making a play out of a popular novel has a really fine opportunity, — an opportunity which has been seized by almost all the great dramatists of the world. It is not copying the Elizabethan method, merely (and I should call it very unconscious copying in any case) ; it is copying the Greek tragedians as well, it is copying Goethe and Racine, it is copying almost every great dramatist before the year 1800. In comedy, originality of plot would seem of advantage: such at least was probably the opinion ot Aristotle, and such was certainly the usage of Aristophanes and Molière, of Goldsmith and Sheridan. But in tragedy, or in many powerful plays which, though we hesitate to call them tragic, are yet not comedies, there is something in having, as the great dramatists always have had, material well known to the audience. It may well be that the modern spur to originality, or rather to novelty, has been really a drawback to the English drama ; at any rate, Shelley in The Cenci, Coleridge in Revenge, Browning in A Blot in the ’Scutcheon, Tennyson in The Cup, did not have the advantage of familiar material.

It is true that Ibsen, Sudermann, Echegaray, Pinero, among contemporary dramatists, follow the habit of our time, and so did Victor Hugo and Dumas fils. “ During this century,” says Mr. Phelps, " unless the contrary was distinctly stated, the playwright was supposed to have created plot as well as dialogue : hence, originality, particularly desirable in the depressed condition of our stage, has been at a premium.” Certainly, the present habit in literature does demand, as a rule, originality of motive. This may well come from the preëminence of the novel. In poetry we do not always demand it. Browning generally conceived his plots, but Tennyson, in the Idylls, chose a familiar legend-cycle. Rossetti was original in theme, but William Morris usually chose old subjects. In the closet-drama of our century, novelty of plot has not been a sine qua non. In this respect, Atalanta in Calydon has only followed Prometheus Unbound and Samson Agonistes.

Mr. Phelps remarks that Shakespeare’s motive in making plays out of novels “ was simple and blameless : he selected this material, not because it was popular, but because it was convenient.”But without blaming Shakespeare (just noting that he was not above working over old plays according to the theatrical demand of the moment), it may easily be held that one great reason why such material was convenient was just because it was popular. Familiar material has advantages for author, audience, and critic. It relieves the dramatist from the temptation to push “ originality ” to extremes, — a temptation which not long ago led our playwrights to all kinds of extravagance in “ realistic ” situation. It relieves the audience of the mere curiosity to see how the play will turn out, and enables it to appreciate, or even to perceive, interesting matters which might otherwise pass unnoticed. It gives the critic certain bases for comparison, and for consideration of true dramatic effect.

It is true that a number of the recent dramatizations have been worth very little. The Seats of the Mighty (a singularly undramatic story as a whole) was a failure, and Trilby, doubtless, was carried by no especial excellence of its own. But not all recent dramatizations are of popular novels. Two good plays of this season were Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Romola ; both novels are well known, but hardly popular. Last season there were Carmen and Cavalleria Rusticana. Recently written, though not yet on the stage, are Henry Esmond and The Master of Ballantrae. This is not hurrying to make money out of the popular whim : it is doing the same thing that Mr. Comyns Carr did in King Arthur, or Mr. Gilbert when he wrote Gretchen; it is taking advantage of an opportunity that has always been open to the dramatist.

There are certainly some directions in which the present custom is really an advantage to those who like to appreciate a play in its strictly dramatic power. There have been, of late, some curiously excellent opportunities for speculation as to what we mean by the expression “strictly dramatic.” Mr. Hamilton’s play of Carmen at once challenges comparison with the opera and the story. Such a triple presentation is not very common ; it occurred a little while ago in the case of Cavalleria Rusticana, when Signora Duse, for the moment, put in the shade the work of Mascagni and of Verga. Generally, however, we have to content ourselves with comparing an opera and a play, or a play and a novel. This play was immensely interesting; it seems inferior to the opera, because in the opera no Carmen has been able to avoid giving us drama as well as music. And in the opera we are apt not to discriminate between musical effects and dramatic effects, as in the final moments of The Huguenots and of Cavalleria Rusticana, which are not musical at all. Musical effect aside, the play of Carmen is beyond comparison better. In the first and second acts one is haunted by a longing for the music ; in the third and fourth one shakes the feeling off, and sees that the dramatic power alone is sufficiently absorbing.

Of course a man who makes a play from a story need not be a mere adapter. He need not follow his story slavishly ; in some cases it is better not to do so. Mr. Shipman brings The Master of Ballantrae to an end with the duel between the brothers ; and rightly, because there ends the really dramatic part of the story. Mr. Stoddard, on the other hand, clinging closely to the text of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, ends with a scene at Stonehenge which is a horrible drop from the scene before.

Rather the best acting seen in New York last winter was that of Mrs. Fiske in this very Tess, and yet I suppose three persons out of four, in talking of the play afterward, said, “ But not my idea of Tess.” Nor was it Mr. Hardy’s, for Mrs. Fiske gave an intellectualized Tess that the novelist had not in mind, nor, in all probability, the dramatist. In other words, just as Mr. Stoddard, taking well known material, fashioned a play, so Mrs. Fiske, taking the play, fashioned a character. She made, perhaps, the only character she could have made ; one cannot easily imagine her the Tess of the novelist. So the question as to the actor’s right to change the conception comes down, in this case, to the dilemma that Mrs. Fiske must either make a new Tess, or have nothing to do with the character. This question of the right of the interpreter is carried a stop farther by Mr. Daly’s version of The Tempest, of which one of the papers remarked, “If we have not The Tempest of Shakespeare, we have at least a superb representation built upon it.” Mr. Daly is not an actor ; but such a manager is in a sense more than an actor, for he conceives a whole play as an actor conceives a single part.

The casuistries thus arising are many, but of course they are matters to be discussed by two or three friends before the fire or in a club corner. In print they become dull. It is worth noting, however, that these questions as to the dramatic character, as to the rights and responsibilities of the playwright, the actor, the manager, are aroused by the present fashion of making plays from novels. They show that there is some life in the dramatic world, and after all that is what we want. Just now we have not in America an Ibsen, nor even a Pinero. Still, it is something to be alive. People who are alive are often ridiculous, often vulgar, often ignorant. It is bad to be ignorant, ridiculous, vulgar, but the evil is sometimes outgrown. The important thing is that here we have a popular tendency. A popular tendency is a thing to reckon with: we cannot merely decry it out of hand ; we must ask ourselves whether it stifles artistic work or offers it opportunity. In the present case, in spite of inartistic accompaniment, there is certainly an opportunity for any one who can understand it.

Edward E. Hale, Jr.