A Plea for the Unacted Drama

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

AN article by an eminent scholar in a recent number of the Atlantic, in which the closet-drama is assailed with a vigor characteristic of the writer and a severity peculiar to the times, moves me to say a word in defense of that most hapless and friendless of discredited types.

If we define a drama as a composition intended for performance at a theatre, it is easy to draw the inference that a composition not so designed is no genuine drama; but the chain of reasoning does nothing more than lead us, through a narrow and vicious circle, to a conclusion as worthless as it is incontestable. The propriety of the dialogue-form — by which I mean the virtual restriction of the text to a succession of speeches with the speakers’ names prefixed — in non-theatrical and non-dramatic literature is established by the Gorgias, the De Senectute, the Imaginary Conversations, and the Ethics of the Dust; no one could think of withholding from the closet-drama a privilege which is conceded without question to things so infinitely farther removed from the stage as philosophy, criticism, politics, and science. The right to divide a closet-drama into sections and subsections can hardly be impugned, when the same right is granted to the novel and the history; and the right to call these divisions acts and scenes, though perhaps a little less evident, is a matter of verbal propriety rather than of literary conduct, and is strongly countenanced, moreover, by the analogy of words like lyric, canto, tragedy, comedy, in which musical terms are confidently applied to poems whose connection with music is obsolete or nominal.

When we have put on one side what is unimportant or indisputable, the real question may be stated thus: Is the summary and vital portrayal of action and passion, familiar to all upon the stage, legitimate and proper in a work designed merely for the study ? Or, in other words, Is it proper for a work to possess the psychological quality and the literary technique of a stage-play without possessing also its theatrical technique? The presumption is clearly in favor of the affirmative decision. Morality apart, the right of literature to adopt any form or material which it can render interesting to its readers is incontestable. In writing for the closet, moreover, the dramatist is appealing to no sequestered or specialized audience; he addresses the common, the conceded, the universal audience, the audience that is open to everything and everybody, the audience sought by historians and journalists and novelists and philosophers. Why should one man forfeit his normal and inherent right of writing for the study only, because another man chooses to write for the stage instead of the study, and a third man chooses to write for the stage and the study alike ? Why assert that a thing is unauthorized to perform one function because it is incompetent to perform another ? Why claim that a work is unlawful in the closet because it is useless on the stage ? What really invites question, though I myself do not question it, is the propriety of adapting a literary work, not to the established literary audience and literary practice, but to a medley of men two-thirds of whom stand outside of the proper constituency of literature, and to a form of presentation under which the materials are certain to be narrowed and liable to be depraved.

A dramatic performance, like the cuts in a book, is nothing more than a means of interpreting and illustrating a written composition; and it is just as illogical to limit the portrayal of action and passion in literature to those forms which are susceptible of reproduction on the stage as it would be to limit its portrayal of landscape to those forms which are capable of reproduction by drawing. Shall we affirm that nothing is right in one art which is incapable of effective translation into another ? Because all poetry was originally sung, and because “ Sweet and Low” and “Crossing the Bar” have been felicitously set to music, shall we declare that no poetry shall be written which is insusceptible of conversion into song ? As well say that no English shall be written which is incapable of adequate translation into French.

I have defined the essence of dramatic work to consist in the summary and vital portrayal of action and passion. One is prompted to ask if there is anything in these qualities of compression and vigor, or anything in the choice of action and passion as materials, which is inconsistent with the ends or spirit of pure or “mere” literature, anything which pure or “mere” literature, in other forms of work than the drama, has not often sought to its credit, and found to its advantage. I do not hesitate to record my belief that if by some unkindness of destiny — say, for instance, the inability of the human voice to be heard farther than a dozen feet — the theatre had become impossible, the pressure of human nature and the evolution of literature along its own lines, would have developed a form corresponding in essentials to the existent literary drama. Would any one have questioned the propriety of a form so developed ? Would any one have contended that the transformation of narrative into literary drama was the result of anything more, or anything worse, than the lawful exercise of that faculty of exclusion and selection which is the condition and foundation of literature? There remains only the plain question, Does the existence of the stage render unlawful a form which, in the absence of the stage, would be legitimate ?

If any one supposes that the literary technique of the drama is of no value aside from its theatrical technique, — in other words, if he fancies that the dramatist who does not write for the stage might as well write novels, — I have only to ask him to make a simple experiment: let him imagine the shudder with which he would recoil from the proposition to transform into novels the great plays which he has never seen, never expects to see, and perhaps does not even want to see, represented behind footlights.

The opponents of the closet-drama would probably contend that the reader is as much interested as the spectator in the suppression of the obnoxious form; in other words, that adaptation to the stage is the condition of adaptation to the study. How far is such a contention valid ? The stage excludes what is dull and flat; and if it excluded only what was dull and flat, the obligation to conform to its will might be a wholesome, though I should still hold that it was an arrogant and arbitrary, restraint on the liberty of authorship. But the stage is not satisfied with rejecting the tedious and the pointless. It must shut out everything, interesting or dull, powerful or weak, which cannot be instantly comprehended by a person of average or less than average intelligence; it must shut out everything, interesting or dull, powerful of weak, which cannot be expressed in words or action; and it must shut out everything, of any grade of force or interest, which runs counter to the prejudices of an unreasoning audience. Standards of this kind necessitate the rejection of matter that is interesting and powerful; and the extinction of this interest and power is the consequence and the penalty of the dictum that nothing is fit for the library which is not also fit for the theatre. If the standards of dramative effectiveness for the study and the stage are diverse, if each has its peculiar power and beauty, why should not each have its own plays, its own public, and its own writers ? From this point of view, the closet-drama becomes no longer a licensed bystander or tolerated supernumerary, but an active and needful coadjutor in the rounding out of a complete psychology and literature, a necessary supplement and counterpoise to the rigid and remorseless exclusiveness of an institution as hostile to some forms of stimulus and power as to every form of feebleness and torpor.

There are persons, no doubt, who will refuse to believe that a play unfit for the stage can possess any real dramatic virtue. It may be good narrative, good poetry, good pleasantry, good philosophy; but it cannot be a drama if it will not act. Let us look at one or two instances. Le Gendre de M. Poirier — I am indebted for this illustration to the learned article which inspired this protest — failed in England and America; The Duchess of Malfi and The Silent Woman are no longer successful upon the English stage. No one, I imagine, would deny the dramatic quality to any one of these eminent productions; they were all successful in the right environment. The source of the failures has been in the first case a local, in the second and third a temporal, disability; that is, a want of adaptation to place or time. Now if a local or temporal disability may prevent the success, in certain quarters or periods, of a genuine and powerful drama, why may not a technical disability operate to the same effect, without restriction of time or place, on a drama equally genuine and powerful ?

The stage asks for so much besides dramatic power that the absence of dramatic power cannot reasonably be inferred from the failure of a work to suit the stage. The theatre demands that a work shall occupy so many hours, that it shall contain so many acts, that it shall be adapted to a stage of given size and shape, that its action shall be straitened to fit the poverty, or stretched to meet the affluence, of the costumer’s or scene-painter’s resources, that comic relief shall be provided, that a dozen or score of requirements shall be met which have no connection with the real dramatic virtue of the work. Does the possession of the faculty of dramatic insight, or the gift of racy dialogue, presuppose a willingness to comply with these requirements ? May there not exist a class of authors endowed with the dramatic faculty, by which I mean the instinct which seizes and records the stronger emotions evoked by the interaction of human beings, to whom the overcoming of such technical disabilities may seem an office at once too laborious and too trifling to attract or to requite the bestowal of their power? Do such men cease to be dramatists in refusing to become playwrights ?

I have left myself no space for the discussion with which a treatment of the subject should properly close, — a review of the actual value and achievement of the closet-drama. There is only room to remark that, drawing examples from English literature alone, a list of plays beginning with Comus and ending with Atalanta in Calydon would afford some employment to the objector.