Brander Matthews

“ At first sight it may seem as if one of Fanny Kemble's assertions—that no woman can be a dramatist because of her inevitable ignorance of life and of the experiences of existence from which she is debarred—is disproved by the undeniable triumphs of women in acting, and by the indisputable victories won by women in the field of prose fiction, achieved in spite of these admitted limitations. But on a more careful consideration it will appear that as an actress woman is called upon only to embody and to interpret characters conceived by man with the aid of his wider and deeper knowledge of life. ”

“ The apprentice dancer can never omit a single day of hard and uninteresting toil. Incessant application, during all the long years of youth, is the price the ambitious beginner must pay for the mastery of her art. She can have no vacations; she can have few relaxations; she must keep herself constantly in training; she must be prepared to surrender many of the things which make life worth living. And it is no wonder that so few have the courage to persevere, and that there is only one Rosita Mauri, only one Adeline Genée, and only one Anna Pavlova in a quarter of a century. ”

“ It is only by conceiving of every one of his successive experiments as a play, complete in itself and governed by the inexorable laws of the drama, that the magician can rise to the summit of his art. He is a conjurer and a comedian at the same time, making his dexterity the servant of his drama, and never for a single moment allowing this dexterity to force itself upon the attention of the audience. Indeed, the one thing he ought to conceal is his possession of any special gift in manipulation. He should keep his audience ever guessing as to the method of his apparent miracles. ”

“ To the realistic imagination of the boy, Huck, the circus was a fleeting spectacle of beauty; and to the romantic imagination of the girl, Rose, it lingered long as a dream of poetry. Young Americans, both of them, living in these modern days when the human form, male and female, is decorously dissembled and disguised by ugly and complicated garments, they had been allowed by the exceptional freedom of the circus to recapture something of the frank and innocent delight of the Greeks in the beauty of the body, in its beauty merely as a body, and not as the habitation of the mind and the soul. ”

“ One of the specialties of the sole surviving puppet-show of this sort in the Champs-Elysées is the performance of a juggler who tosses aloft and catches in turn a number of glittering balls. The delicate balancing of the tight-rope walker, with her frequent pirouettes on her toes, and with her surprising summersets, is also one of the exhibitions in which the puppet can defy the rivalry of any living executant, however skilful in the art. At the circus we feel that the tightrope dancer might fall, whereas at the puppet-show we know with certainty that any fatal mishap is impossible. ”

“ Henry James once pointed out, whereas "the play consents to the logic of but one way, mathematically right, and with the loose end as gross an impertinence on its surface and as grave a dishonor as the dangle of a snippet of silk or wool on the right side of a tapestry." The action of a story may be what its writer pleases, and he can reduce it to a minimum or embroider it at will with airy arabesques of incessant digression; but the plot of a play must be a straight line, the shortest distance between two points, the point of departure and the point of arrival. ”

“ The connection of the drama with the show business is intimate, and it always has been. In the long history of the theater there is no period without its successful pieces, the appeal of which was mainly sensuous—to the eye and to the ear, rather than to the emotions and to the intellect. While the drama is an art, and perhaps the loftiest of the arts, the show business is a trade. ”

“ No art can justify itself for a moment unless we are willing to admit the essential conventions which alone permit it to exist.
Tolstoy might as well have pointed out that sculpture is ridiculous, since no human being is ever all of one color, body and clothes, as a statue must be, whether it is made of marble or of bronze. He could have declared that painting is equally untrue to the mere facts of life, since it represents nature absolutely without motion, as when it depicts a field of waving corn which does not really wave but stands fixed forever. ”

“ These acrobats, slim and handsome, as Huck Finn found them, in their "shirts and drawers," may display their daring and their grace, standing on a circling steed or swinging from a flying trapeze, revolving on a horizontal bar or building themselves up into human pyramids on the bark of the arena; but, except for the sake of variety, the way in which they may choose to exhibit their skill and to show themselves is unimportant. ”

“ Few competent critics would dispute the assertion that the drama, if not actually the noblest of the arts, is at all events the most comprehensive, since it can invoke the aid of all the others without impairing its own individuality or surrendering its right to be considered the senior partner in any alliance it may make. Poetry, oratory, and music, painting, sculpture, and architecture, these the drama can take into its service, with no danger to its own control. Yet even if the drama may have the widest range of any of the arts, none the less are its boundaries clearly defined. ”

“ A novel may please long, and please many when it is only a study of character, like the 'Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard' of M. Anatole France, or when it is only the record of a series of adventures and misadventures passing before the eyes of the chief personage, like the 'Huckleberry Finn' of Mark Twain. A play, on the other hand, is likely to fail to please audiences in the theater unless it sets before the spectators a clearly defined struggle, a conflict of desires, a stark assertion of the human will. That is to say, the drama must deal with a struggle, and the novel need not. ”

“ Any one who walks thru the Italian quarter of New York City in the evening may notice over a doorway an illuminated sign, 'Theater of Marionettes.' If his curiosity tempts him inside, into the low room crowded with enthusiastic spectators, he will see, on a rude stage, a group of puppets almost as large as life, representing knights and ladies, acting out a little drama in response to the jerking of strings fastened to their arms, and of iron rods firmly fixed in their heads. ”

“ So strong is the popular appreciation of spectacle that the drama, the true theater as distinguished from the mere show business, has always to fight for its right to exist, and to hold its place in competition with less intellectual and more sensational entertainments. The playhouses of any American city are likely to have a lean week whenever the circus comes to town, and perhaps the chief reason why the most of them now close in summer is to be sought not so much in the frequent hot spells, as in the irresistible attraction exerted by the base-ball games. ”

“ A perfectly equipped engine stands in every newspaper office, with the steam always up, which can be manned in nine seconds and rushed to the first theater where there is the slightest danger of drama within five minutes; and the combined efforts of these tremendous machines can pour a concentrated deluge of cold water upon a play which will put out anything of the kind at once. ”

“ If we apply this moral standard to the play of Punch and Judy, then that play must be dismissed as profoundly and hopelessly immoral, carrying ethical infection to all who are so unfortunate as to be spectators at its performance. And more particularly, it is an absolutely unfit piece for the young, whose immature minds need to be guarded against everything which might tend to confuse the delicate distinctions between right and wrong. ”

“ Now, it is not unfair to say that no one of the performers of these so-called classic dances had undergone this severe schooling. No one of them had the lightness, the ease, the perfect mastery of method, the floating grace of the true dancer, who has been taught from childhood, until all the tricks of the craft are second nature. Without this arduous training any one who attempts an ambitious display can scarcely fail to reveal instantly the lamentable fact that she is not mistress of the technic of the art she has undertaken to practise. She does not know how to get her effects ”

“ He is a joke, and we know that he is a joke, and all the children know that he is only a joke. Even the youngest child is never tempted to believe in his existence and to be moved to follow his example or to imitate his dark deeds. The proof of the pudding is in the eating; and the proof of a play is in the effect it produces upon the spectators. We may question whether any one of the millions of performances of the lamentable tragedy of Mr. Punch has suggested to a single father the fatal neglect of his offspring or to a single husband the possibility of wife-murder. ”

“ Here we find added evidence in support of Herbert Spencer's invaluable principle of Economy of Attention, which he himself applied only to rhetoric, but which is capable of extension to all the other arts—and to no one of them more usefully than to the drama. At any given moment a spectator in the theater has only so much attention to bestow upon the play being presented before his eyes, and if any portion of his attention is unduly distracted by some detail—like either the limpness or the fluttering of a flag—then he has just so much less to give to the play itself. ”

“ It matters not whether this entertainment is proffered by Barnum and Bailey, or by Weber and Fields, by Sophocles or by Ibsen, by Shakspere or by Molière, by Wagner or by Gilbert and Sullivan, it is grouped with the rest of the amusements. And this is not so illogical as it may seem, since the primary purpose of all the arts is to entertain, even if every art has also to achieve its own secondary aim. Some of these entertainments make their appeal to the intellect, some to the emotions, and some only to the nerves, to our relish for sheer excitement and for brute sensation ”

“ The play-reviewing of the daily journal is akin in aim to the book-reviewing, which has for its purpose the swift consideration of the volume in vogue at the moment. In our morning and evening papers the book-reviewing and the play-reviewing are both of them necessarily up-to-date, in fact, up-to-the-last-minute. To be contemporaneous, instantly and necessarily and inexorably, is their special quality and their immediate purpose; it is the reason for their existence and the excuse for their being. ”

“ The literary critic, and even the ordinary book-reviewer, never spends his time in considering dime novels—whereas the dramatic critic is now called upon to waste many evenings in beholding a play which is only the theatrical equivalent of a dime novel. The immediate result of this futile and fatiguing expenditure of energy is likely to be discouraging and even enervating. If the dramatic critic could be totally relieved from all contact with the show business when the show business has only a casual connection with the drama, it would tend to keep him fit for his essential task. ”

“ Nothing is cheaper, and nothing is in worse taste, than for the performer to make personal remarks about any member of his audience or to hold any one of the spectators up to ridicule. The conjurer is a comedian playing the part of a modern magician, but he is not a low-comedian, ready to get a laugh at any price and at the cost of any one else. He may be as pleasant as he can, and even as humorous, but he can preserve his own self-respect only by having due regard to the self-respect of all those who have gathered to enjoy his performance. ”