National drama

“ And finally, the public, who resorted to the imperfect entertainments offered them, if they had not determined what kind of drama should become national, had yet decided that a national drama should be formed, and that it should be founded on the national character and manners. ”

“ Those old plays, such as they were, with their rude, bold attempts to combine religion and mirth, instruction and sport, may almost be described as having been the nerves upon which the whole mental character of the nation formed itself. The spirit which began so early to work in them kept on asserting itself more and more strongly from age to age, till the Drama became emphatically a popular passion; as indeed must always be the case before any thing deserving the name of a National Drama can possibly arise. ”

“ But if anyone will take the trouble to examine the leading English plays of the last ten years, and will compare them with the serious plays of our country during the last three centuries, I shall be mistaken if he will not find evidence of the beginnings, the first shoots of an English drama of greater import and vitality and of wider aim than any school of drama the English theatre has known since the Elizabethans. The brilliant Restoration comedy makes no pretence to be a national drama: neither do the comedies of Sheridan and Goldsmith. ”

“ It is safe to say that scarcely a single storm of national strife has burst upon the land without leaving in some way an impress upon these grey stone walls, and during a period of many centuries there was scarcely one single actor of eminence in the national drama who did not leave, in some form or other, a record imperishably graven here behind him. ”

“ For ten years the English theatre-going public had been led to take an increasing interest in their national drama,—I mean the drama as a picture of life in opposition to a funny theatrical entertainment,—and during those ten years that drama had grown in strength of purpose, in largeness of aim, in vividness of character-painting, in every quality that promised England a living school of drama. ”

“ As our experimental theatres increase in number—and they are increasing—it will probably play its part, and perhaps no insignificant a part, in the development of a national drama through the development of a local drama and the cultivation of a taste for self-expression in various communities. It is only when these experimental theatres are sufficient in number, and the amateur spirit has been sufficiently aroused in various communities, that the commercial theatre of tradition will be seriously influenced. ”

“ Why shall that encouragement be left to the caprice of managers, to the finances of struggling establishments, or to the tastes of theatres, forced by their poverty to pander to the rabble. Why should not the mischievous performances of those theatres be put down, and dramas, founded on the higher principles of our nature, be the instruments of putting them down? Why should not heroism, honour, and patriotism, be taught on the national stage, as well as the triumphs of the highroad, laxity among the higher ranks, and vice among all? The drama has been charged with corruption. ”

“ The drama is the flower of national life; you sought to convert it into its seed and root. On some occasions you have even gone the length of considering it the fruit and the object of national life. You cared more for the ideal reflection than for the real action which was to be reflected. It has often made me smile to hear your æsthetical patriots clamour for a German fleet or a German emperor, for no other reason but because these two ‘properties’ would do an immense deal of good to the drama ”

“ The hundred and one springs of local and sectional life must have time to furrow their common channel into the seething sea of life at large, and social questions and problems make themselves felt, if not crystallized, before the throbbing pulse of the big national heart can find its reflex in a great literature—and specifically in the drama—of a social character. ”

“ The essentials of its literary form, its length conditioned by the time of the performance, the division into acts, scenes, or parts, and the growing importance of dialogue, have all been dependent on theatrical conditions. The characteristic qualities of national dramas have been in some measure the products of the national theatres, and only through the growing similarity of stage conditions are we likely to attain agreement in regard to the forms of drama. ”

“ Therefore, America could not so far produce its own social drama. But in proportion as the crystallization progresses, and sectional and national questions become clarified as fundamentally social problems, the drama develops. ”

“ So long, as in Elizabeth's time, as the class which supported the stage also represented the strongest aspirations of the period, and a marked national sentiment, the drama could embody a marked national sentiment. When the unity was broken up and the court is opposed to the strongest current of political sentiment, the players still adhere to their patron. The drama comes to represent a tone of thought, a social stratum, which, instead of leading, is getting more and more opposed to the great bulk of the most vigorous elements of the society. ”

“ The examples of England, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, all tend to prove that for the creation of a drama it is necessary that the condition of national activity should be combined with the condition of a national audience—not an audience of courtiers or critics or learned persons. ”

“ The movement was thought to be killed, but it was only scotched; and whatever beauty there is in English interiors, whatever advance has been made in decorating our homes, is due to that movement. Again, to compare small things with great, in the recent attempt to give England a living national drama, we have been judged not upon the essence of the matter, but upon certain extravagances and side-tendencies. The great public got a notion into its head that a set of gloomy, vicious persons had conspired to corrupt the youth of our nation by writing immoral plays. ”

“ It fixed the practice and traditions of the national theater. It decided that the drama was to deal with the whole of life, the real and the ideal, tragedy and comedy, prose and verse, in the same play, without limitations of time, place, and action. It decided that the English play was to be an action, and not a dialogue, bringing boldly upon the mimic scene feasts, dances, processions, hangings, riots, plays within plays, drunken revels, beatings, battle, murder, and sudden death. ”

“ The production that derides all stereotype—all the ridiculous and mossy rubber-stamps—is in turn derided. The actor or actress who essays to filter a rôle through the mind of a human being instead of through the mind of a rouged marionette is made mock of. Here, the playgoing public finds its leaders in three-fourths of the newspaper reviewing chairs, chairs influenced, directly or indirectly, by an intrinsic inexperience and ignorance, or by an extrinsic suggestion of “policy.”
The American theatre and drama have long suffered from being slaves to the national hypocrisy. ”

“ Without taking into account this process by which the organ of the nation gradually became transformed into the organ of the class which was entirely alienated from the general body of the nation, it is, I think, impossible to understand clearly the transformation of the drama. It illustrates the necessity of accounting for the literary movement, not only by intellectual and general causes, but by noting how special social developments radically alter the relation of any particular literary genus to the general national movement. ”

“ It was on the stage and through the literature of the stage that, during the most brilliant era of its intellectual activity, the genius of the English people, for the most part, sought expression. The drama thus became the representative and the embodiment of all that was strongest and most characteristic 127in the national life. In it we find the great mental and moral movements of the time gathered up and made vocal; to it we turn for the fullest and richest manifestation of the national mind. ”

“ We have arrived at a period of prosperity when we have time, at last, to pay attention to the arts, and especially the last to be developed, the dramatic art. We are uneasy over the conditions in our theaters today.
Vaguely the people as a whole are feeling around for one means or another to correct these conditions, to create a great national art and to restore drama to her proper place among the arts. ”

“ But in order to be read, a play should be really written. The drama, then, had to become literary. As yet it is literary only in a moderate degree. I began with the question: Is there a living English drama at the present moment? To be living it is necessary that it should express the ideas and the passions of the time, and to be English it should be a faithful likeness, a complete synthesis of all the elements of the national character. The drama, from various causes, was behind the times. ”

“ Perhaps a survey of the drama of the last century on the continent would result in a more sanguine view of the development of the principles of dramatic art freed from the temporalities of theatrical fashion. There is probability in Professor Brander Matthews's suggestion that in our growing cosmopolitanism national divergencies in content will exist with a growing agreement in form. ”

“ Already, in 1885, he had claimed energetically for the drama the right to deal with any subject, even with religious subjects. Elsewhere, he declared that the theatre was one of the organs of the national life, and one of its essential organs; that one could no more imagine England without the theatre, than England without the press and the platform.
He seems to say—and this boldness does not displease in a man of talent—“We want liberty. Free our hands; give us permission to produce [Pg 237] masterpieces, and the masterpieces will not be delayed.” ”

“ The stage is now seen to be an elevating instead of a lowering influence on national morality, and actors and actresses receive in society, as do the members of other professions, exactly the treatment which is earned by their personal conduct. ”

“ A civic theater cannot be created by money, although it requires it. Intelligence demands, therefore, when we say 'Civic Theater,' that we think at once and foremost of these other more vital ways of support.
Fortunately we can appeal to historic life for light on these other and more vital ways of support by city or community. Historic life can show us well-ascertained facts concerning drama that has been supported by the civic life of its whole people, and expresses, in consequence, the life of its men of genius, and of its interpretative artists and artisans, along with its racial genius. ”

“ In England we might learn something from the theatrical regulations of France. The trampling of our crowds at the doors of theatres, the occasional losses of life and limb, and the general inconvenience and confusion of the entrance on crowded nights, might be avoided by the were adoption of French order.
But why should not higher objects be held in view? The drama is a public necessity; the people will have it, whether good or bad. Why should not Government offer prizes to the best drama, tragic or comic? ”

“ And before a dramatic audience the safety of a state is merged or ignored in the superior interest felt in the personation of some emotion more ardent than any state interest, and only more ardent because universal amongst mankind in all states and all times. If the domestic interest be the strongest of which the drama is capable, it is because it is the interest in which the largest number of human breasts can concur, and in which the poet who creates it can most escape from particulars into generals. ”

“ All these ceremonies and many more not only signify the wide usage of this art in every age and every part of the world, but also unfold tremendous possibilities for future pageant, play, and pantomime among country people. If civilization’s sense of appreciation could be aroused to see the hidden beauties of field and forest and stream—of God’s great out of doors—men and women and children would flock to the countryside. The drama is one of the many agencies which seeks to stimulate this sense of appreciation. It deals with human problems by means of appeals to the emotions. ”

“ It exhibits always a conflict between the individual revolutionist and the communal conservatives, and expresses the growing tendency of these opposing forces to adjust themselves to equilibrium.
Thus considered, the modern social drama is seen to be inherently and necessarily the product and the expression of the nineteenth century. Through no other type of drama could the present age reveal itself so fully; for the relation between the one and the many, in politics, in religion, in the daily round of life itself, has been, and still remains, the most important topic of our times. ”

“ But all Americans do not find intellectual contentment in this paternal and protecting British attitude; and those who are interested in our native drama and who have paid money for the Britannica on the strength of its exorbitant and unsustainable claims, have just cause for complaint in the scanty and contemptuous way in which American letters are treated.
As I have already noted, the American drama is embodied in the article on the English Drama, and is given less space than a column. Under American Literature there is nothing concerning the American stage and its writers ”

“ A second illustration: the equivocation to the effect that drama, being a democratic art, may not properly be evaluated in terms of more limited, and aristocratic, taste. It seems to me, at least, an idiotic assumption that drama is a more democratic art than music. ”