Dramatic Technique Part 39

And when she thought herself alone, or while she lay in her sleep, I should be always stealthily spying for that dreadful look upon her face, and I should find it again and again as I see it now--the look which cries out so plainly "Profligate! you taught one good woman to believe in you, but now _she knows you!_" No, no--no, no! (_He drains the contents of the tumbler._) The end--the end. (_Pointing towards the clock._) The hour at which we used to walk together in the garden at Florence--husband and wife--lovers. (_He pulls up the window-blind and looks out._) The sky--the last time--the sky. (_He rests drowsily against the piano._) Tired--tired. (_He walks rather unsteadily to the table._) A line to Murray. (_Writing._) A line to Murray--telling him--poison--morphine--message--(_The pen falls from his hand and his head drops forward._) The light is going out. I can't see. Light--I'll finish this when I wake--I'll rest. (_He staggers to the sofa and falls upon it._) I shall sleep tonight. The voice has gone.

Leslie--wife--reconciled--

(_Leslie enters softly and kneels by his side._)

_Leslie._ Dunstan, I am here. (_He partly opens his eyes, raises himself, and stares at her; then his head falls back quietly. Leslie's face averted._) Dunstan, I have returned to you. We are one and we will make atonement for the past together. I will be your Wife, not your Judge--let us from this moment begin the new life you spoke of.

Dunstan! (_She sees the paper which has fallen from his hand, and reads it._) Dunstan! Dunstan! No, no! Look at me! Ah! (_She catches him in her arms._) Husband! Husband! Husband![22]

It is of course true, as M. Brieux maintains in regard to the two endings of his early play, _Blanchette_,[23] that sometimes more than one ending may be made plausible. Consequently he changed a tragic close to something more pleasing to his audience. Belief grows, however, that when a play has been begun and developed with a tragic ending in mind, this cannot with entire convincingness be changed to something else unless the play is rewritten from the start. There is inevitableness in the conduct on the stage of the creatures of our brains even as with people of real life. So strongly does Sir Arthur Pinero feel this as the result of his long experience that, though he changed the ending of _The Big Drum_ in 1915 in accordance with public demand, he restored the original version when printing the play. He says in his Preface:

_The Big Drum_ is published exactly as it was written, and as it was originally performed. At its first representation, however, the audience was reported to have been saddened by its "unhappy ending."

Pressure was forthwith put upon me to reconcile Philip and Ottoline at the finish, and at the third performance of the play the curtain fell upon the picture, violently and crudely brought about, of Ottoline in Philip's arms.

I made the alteration against my principles and against my conscience, and yet not altogether unwillingly. For we live in depressing times; and perhaps in such times it is the first duty of a writer for the stage to make concessions to his audience and, above everything, to try to afford them a complete, if brief, distraction from the gloom which awaits them outside the theatre.

My excuse for having at the start provided an "unhappy" ending is that I was blind enough not to regard the ultimate break between Philip and Ottoline as really unhappy for either party. On the contrary, I looked upon the separation of these two people as a fortunate occurrence for them both; and I conceive it as a piece of ironic comedy which might not prove unentertaining that the falling away of Philip from his high resolves was checked by the woman he had once despised and who had at last grown to know and to despise herself.

But comedy of this order has a knack of cutting rather deeply, of ceasing, in some minds, to be comedy at all; and it may be said that this is what has happened in the present instance. Luckily it is equally true that certain matters are less painful, because less actual, in print than upon the stage. The "wicked publisher"

therefore, even when bombs are dropping round him, can afford to be more independent than the theatrical manager; and for this reason I have not hesitated to ask my friend Mr. Heinemann to publish _The Big Drum_ in its original form.[24]

What Ibsen thought of the ultimate effect of changing an ending to accord with public sentiment, these words about _A Doll's House_ show:

At the time when _A Doll's House_ was quite new, I was obliged to give my consent to an alteration of the last scene for Frau Hedwig Niemann-Raabe, who was to play the part of Nora in Berlin. At that time I had no choice. I was entirely unprotected by copyright law in Germany, and could, consequently, prevent nothing. Besides, the play in its original, uncorrupted form was accessible to the German public in a German edition which was already printed and published. With its altered ending it had only a short run. In its unchanged form it is still being played.[25]

Dumas fils was even more severe in his strictures:

If at the second performance you are ready to modify your central idea, your development or your conclusion to please the public whom the night before you were pretending to teach something fresh, you may be, perhaps, an ingenious worker in the theatre, an adroit impresario, a facile inventor; you will never be a dramatist. You can make mistakes in details of execution; you have no right to make a mistake in the logic of your play, its correlations of emotions and acts, and least of all, in their outcome.[26]

Characterization, then, should be watched carefully in its fundamentals, all changes, and especially for its logical outcome. Long ago, Diderot summed up the subject thus:

One can form an infinitude of plans on the same subject and developed around the same characters. But the characters being once settled, they can have but one manner of speaking. Your figures will have this or that to say according to the situation in which you may have placed them, but being the same human beings in all the situations, they will not, fundamentally, contradict themselves.[27]

How may we know whether our motivation is good or not? First of all, it must be clear. If an audience cannot make out why one of our characters does what he is doing, from that moment the play weakens. It is on this ground that William Archer objected to the _Becket_ of Tennyson:

"Some gents," says the keeper, in _Punch_, to the unsuccessful sportsman, "goes a-wingin' and a-worritin' the poor birds; but you, sir--you misses 'em clane and nate!" With the like delicate tact criticism can only compliment the poet on the "clane and nate" way in which he has missed the historical interest, the psychological problem, of his theme. What was it that converted the Becket of Toulouse into the Becket of Clarendon--the splendid warrior-diplomatist into the austere prelate? The cowl, we are told, does not make the monk; but in Lord Tennyson's psychology it seems that it does. Of the process of thought, the development of feeling, which leads Becket, on a.s.suming the tonsure, to break with the traditions of his career, with the friend of his heart and with his own worldly interest--of all this we have no hint. The social and political issues involved are left equally in the vague. Of the two contending forces, the Church and the Crown, which makes for good, and which for evil? With which ought we to sympathize? It might be argued that we have no right to ask this question, and that it is precisely a proof of the poet's art that he holds the balance evenly, and does not write as a partisan. But as a matter of fact this is not so. The poet is not impartial; he is only indefinite. We are evidently intended to sympathize, and we _do_ sympathize, with Becket, simply because we feel that he is staking his life on a principle; but what that principle precisely is, and what its bearings on history and civilization, we are left to find out for ourselves. Thus the intellectual opportunity, if I may call it so, is missed "clane and nate."[28]

Contrast the third, fourth, and fifth acts of _Michael and His Lost Angel_[29] with the first and second. So admirable is the characterization of Acts I and II that a reader understands exactly what Audrie and Michael are doing and why. In the other acts, though what they are doing is clear, why the Audrie and Michael of the first two acts behaved thus is by no means clear and plausible. Indeed, plausibility and clearness go hand in hand as tests of motivation.

Accounting for the deeds of any particular character is easy if the conduct rests on motives which any audience will immediately recognize as both widespread and likely to produce the situation. It is just here, however, that national taste and literary convention complicate the work of the dramatist. An American, watching a performance of _Simone_[30] by M. Brieux, hardly understood the loud protests which burst from the audience when the heroine, at the end of the play, sternly denounced her father's conduct. To him, it seemed quite natural that an American girl should a.s.sume this right of individual judgment. The French audience felt that a French girl, because of her training, would not, under the circ.u.mstances, thus attack her father. M. Brieux admitted himself wrong and changed the ending. It is this fact, that conduct plausible for one nation is not always equally plausible for another, which makes it hard for an American public to understand a goodly number of the masterpieces of recent Continental dramatic literature.

What literary convention may do in twisting conduct from the normal, the pseudo-cla.s.sic French drama of Corneille and Racine, and its foster child, the Heroic Drama of England, ill.u.s.trate. Dryden himself points out clearly the extent to which momentary convention among the French deflected the characters in their tragedies from the normal:

The French poets ... would not, for example, have suffer'd Cleopatra and Octavia to have met; or, if they had met, there must only have pa.s.sed betwixt them some cold civilities, but no eagerness of repartee, for fear of offending against the greatness of their characters, and the modesty of their s.e.x. This objection I foresaw, and at the same time contemn'd; for I judg'd it both natural and probable that Octavia, proud of her new-gain'd conquest, would search out Cleopatra to triumph over her; and that Cleopatra, thus attack'd, was not of a spirit to shun the encounter: and 'tis not unlikely that two exasperated rivals should use such satire as I have put into their mouths; for, after all, tho' the one were a Roman, and the other a queen, they were both women.

Thus, their Hippolytus is so scrupulous in point of decency that he will rather expose himself to death than accuse his stepmother to his father; and my critics I am sure will commend him for it: but we of grosser apprehensions are apt to think that this excess of generosity is not practicable, but with fools and madmen. This was good manners with a vengeance; and the audience is like to be much concern'd at the misfortunes of this admirable hero; but take Hippolytus out of his poetic fit, and I suppose he would think it a wiser part to set the saddle on the right horse, and choose rather to live with the reputation of a plain-spoken, honest man, than to die with the infamy of an incestuous villain. In the meantime we may take notice that where the poet ought to have preserv'd the character as it was deliver'd to us by antiquity, when he should have given us the picture of a rough young man, of the Amazonian strain, a jolly huntsman, and both by his profession and his early rising a mortal enemy to love, he has chosen to give him the turn of gallantry, sent him to travel from Athens to Paris, taught him to make love, and transformed the Hippolytus of Euripides into Monsieur Hippolyte.[31]

One of the chief elements in the genius of Shakespeare is his power to transcend momentary conventions, fads, and theories, and to discern in his material, whether history or fiction, eternal principles of conduct.

Thus he wrote for all men and for all time. In _Love's Labor's Lost_ he wrote for a special audience, appealing to its ideas of style and humor.

In _Twelfth Night_ he let his characters have full sway. Which is the more alive today?

Nor is it only the literary conventions of an audience which affect the problem of plausibility set an author. The French public of 1841 which came to the five-act play of Eugene Scribe, _Une Chaine_,[32] asked, not a convincing picture of life, but mere entertainment. Therefore they accepted insufficient motivation and artificiality in handling the scenes. Louise, the wife, discovering from words of her husband as she enters the room that her former lover, Emmeric, now prefers Aline to her, sits down and dashes off a signed letter releasing him. Just why is not clear. In order that she may do this writing un.o.bserved of her husband, two characters must, for some time, be so managed as to stand between him and her. In order that the husband may never know she has been in love with Emmeric, the letter must be kept out of his hands, and read only by the guardian of Aline, Clerambeau. All this requires constant artifice. Sidney Grundy made a one-act adaptation of _Une Chaine_ called _In Honor Bound_.[33] In this, Lady Carlyon, waking from sleep on the divan in her husband's study, hears, un.o.bserved by Philip and Sir George, the young man's admission that he no longer cares for her. When her cry reveals her, Sir George, her husband, thinking her unwell, goes to bring her niece, Rose, to her aid. Lady Carlyon learns promptly from Philip that the guardian of the girl he is engaged to demands a letter releasing him from any former entanglement. Lady Carlyon, to cover her chagrin, with seeming willingness writes and signs a letter. Thus the writing takes place when the husband is off stage, and the evident chagrin of Lady Carlyon motivates it better. The relation of the husband to the letter is also handled better than in the original. He, unlike St. Geran, strongly suspects that his wife has cared for the younger man. Lady Carlyon is unaware that Sir George is the guardian in question and that the girl is her niece, Rose.

Consequently she lets slip that Philip possesses the desired letter. Sir George demands it as his right, noting her disturbance when she learns that her husband is involved in the situation. When Philip refuses to surrender the letter, Sir George courteously permits him to read it aloud. Just before the signature is reached, he stops Philip, asking him if the letter is signed. When Philip admits that it is, Sir George insists on having the letter, then, without looking at it, burns it at the lamp with words of sympathy for the writer. All this turns the husband in this scene from a mere lay figure into a character, and greatly lessens the artificiality of the original. By means of better characterization a motivation fundamentally more plausible is provided.

Why? Because an English audience of 1880-90 expected much more probability in a play than did a French or English audience of 1841.

Of course, conduct initially unconvincing may be so treated as to become entirely satisfactory. One of the delights in characterization is so preparing for an exhibition of character likely to seem unreal of itself that when it is presented it is accepted either at once or before the scene closes. Any motive which a dramatist can make acceptable to his audience is ultimately just as good as one accepted unquestioningly.

Shylock's demand for the pound of flesh is in itself unplausible enough--the act of one demented or insane. But Shakespeare's emphasis on his racial hate lends it possibility. His presentation of the other people in the play as accepting the bond with the minimum of question makes it seem probable. If a would-be dramatist were to rule out as material not to be treated whatever at the outset seems improbable or impossible, think what our drama would lose: such plays as _Faust_, _Midsummer Night's Dream_, _The Blue Bird_, and even _Hamlet_.

Repeatedly in treating plausibility it has been implied or stated that what is said or done must be "in character." This suggests another test of good motivation. What happens must be plausible, not only in that it accords with known human experience, but with what has been done by the character in preceding portions of the play. In _The Masqueraders_, when Sir Brice and David stake Dulcie and her child against the fortune of the latter, and let all turn upon a game of cards, a reader is skeptical, for even if it be admitted that Sir Brice might do this, it does not accord with what we know of David from the earlier scenes of the play.

(_Exit Dulcie. The two men are left alone. Another slight pause. Sir Brice walks very deliberately up to David. The two men stand close to each other for a moment or two._)

_Sir Brice._ You've come to settle your little account, I suppose?

_David._ I owe you nothing.

_Sir Brice._ But I owe you six thousand pounds. I haven't a penny in the world. I'll cut you for it, double or quits.

_David._ I don't play cards.

_Sir Brice._ You'd better begin. (_Rapping on the table with the cards._)

_David._ (_Very firmly._) I don't play cards with _you_.

_Sir Brice._ And I say you shall.

_David._ (_Very stern and contemptuous._) I don't play cards with you.

(_Going towards door; Sir Brice following him up._)

_Sir Brice._ You refuse?

_David._ I refuse.

_Sir Brice._ (_Stopping him._) Once for all, will you give me a chance of paying back the six thousand pounds that Lady Skene has borrowed from you? Yes or no?

_David._ No.

_Sir Brice._ No?

_David._ (_Very emphatically._) No. (_Goes to door, suddenly turns round, comes up to him._) Yes. (_Comes to the table._) I _do_ play cards with you. You want my money. Very well. I'll give you a chance of winning all I have in the world.

_Sir Brice._ (_After a look of astonishment._) Good. I'm your man. Any game you like, and any stakes.

_David._ (_Very calm, cold, intense tone all through._) The stakes on my side are some two hundred thousand pounds. The stakes on your side are--your wife and child.

_Sir Brice._ (_Taken aback._) My wife and child.

_David._ Your wife and child. Come--begin! (_Points to the cards._)

_Sir Brice._ (_Getting flurried._) My wife and child? (_Puts his hand restlessly through his hair, looks intently at David. Pause._) All right. (_Pause. Cunningly._) I value my wife and child very highly.