In proportion as this horrible domestic institution is broken up by the active social circulation of the upper classes in their own orbit, or its stagnant isolation made impossible by the overcrowding of the working classes, manners improve enormously. In the middle classes themselves the revolt of a single clever daughter (nobody has yet done justice to the modern clever Englishwoman’s loathing of the very word “home”), and her insistence on qualifying herself for an independent working life, humanizes her whole family in an astonishingly short time; and the formation of a habit of going to the suburban theatre once a week, or to the Monday Popular Concerts, or both, very perceptibly ameliorates its manners. But none of these breaches in the Englishman’s castle-house can be made without a cannonade of books and pianoforte music. The books and music cannot be kept out, because they alone can make the hideous boredom of the hearth bearable. If its victims may not live real lives, they may at least read about imaginary ones, and perhaps learn from them to doubt whether a class that not only submits to home life, but actually values itself on it, is really a class worth belonging to. For the sake of the unhappy prisoners of the home, then, let my plays be printed as well as acted.
But the dramatic author has reasons for publishing his plays which would hold good even if English families went to the theatre as regularly as they take in the newspaper. A perfectly adequate and successful stage representation of a play requires a combination of circumstances so extraordinarily fortunate that I doubt whether it has ever occurred in the history of the world. Take the case of the most successful English dramatist of the first rank, Shakespear. Although he wrote three centuries ago, he still holds his own so well that it is not impossible to meet old playgoers who have witnessed public performances of more than thirty out of his thirty-seven reputed plays, a dozen of them fairly often, and half a dozen over and over again. I myself, though I have by no means availed myself of all my opportunities, have seen twenty-three of his plays publicly acted. But if I had not read them as well as seen them acted, I should have not merely an incomplete, but a violently distorted and falsified impression of them. It is only within the last few years that some of our younger actor-managers have been struck with the idea, quite novel in their profession, of giving Shakespear’s plays as he wrote them, instead of using them as a cuckoo uses a sparrow’s nest. In spite of the success of these experiments, the stage is still dominated by Garrick’s conviction that the manager and actor must adapt Shakespear’s plays to the modern stage by a process which no doubt presents itself to the adapter’s mind as one of masterly amelioration, but which must necessarily be mainly one of debasement and mutilation whenever, as occasionally happens, the adapter is inferior to the author. The living author can protect himself against this extremity of misrepresentation; but the more unquestioned is his authority on the stage, and the more friendly and willing the co-operation of the manager and the company, the more completely does he get convinced of the impossibility of achieving an authentic representation of his piece as well as an effective and successful one. It is quite possible for a piece to enjoy the most sensational success on the basis of a complete misunderstanding of its philosophy: indeed, it is not too much to say that it is only by a capacity for succeeding in spite of its philosophy that a dramatic work of serious poetic import can become popular. In the case of the first part of Goethe’s “Faust” we have this frankly avowed by the extraction from the great original of popular entertainments like Gounod’s opera or the Lyceum version, in which the poetry and philosophy is replaced by romance, which is the recognized spurious substitute for both and is absolutely destructive of them. But the same thing occurs even when a drama is performed without omission or alteration by actors who are enthusiastic disciples of the author. I have seen some remarkably sympathetic stage interpretations of poetic drama, from the achievements of Mr. Charles Charrington with Ibsen, and Mr. Lugné Poe with Maeterlinck, under the least expensive conditions, to those of the Wagner Festival Playhouse at Bayreuth with the most expensive; and I have frequently assured readers of Ibsen and Maeterlinck, and pianoforte students of Wagner, that they can never fully appreciate the dramatic force of their works without sensing them in the theatre. But I have never found an acquaintance with a dramatist founded on the theatre alone, or with a composer founded on the concert room alone, a really intimate and accurate one. The very originality and genius of the performers conflicts with the originality and genius of the author. Imagine, for example, Shakespear confronted with Sir Henry Irving at a rehearsal of “The Merchant of Venice,” or Sheridan with Miss Ada Rehan at one of “The School for Scandal.” One can easily imagine the speeches that might pass on such occasions. For example: “As I look at your playing, Sir Henry, I seem to see Israel mourning the Captivity and crying, ‘How long, oh Lord, how long’? but I do not see my Shylock, whom I designed as a moneylender of strong feelings operating through an entirely commercial intellect. But pray dont alter your conception, which will be abundantly profitable to us both.” Or “My dear Miss Rehan, let me congratulate you on a piece of tragic acting which has made me ashamed of the triviality of my play, and obliterated Sir Peter Teazle from my consciousness, though I meant him to be the hero of the scene. I foresee an enormous success for both of us in this fortunate misrepresentation of my intention.” Even if the author had nothing to gain pecuniarily by conniving at the glorification of his play by the performer, the actor’s excess of power would still carry its own authority and win the sympathy of the author’s histrionic instinct, unless he were a Realist of fanatical integrity. And that would not save him either; for his attempts to make powerful actors do less than their utmost would be as impossible as his attempts to make feeble ones do more.
In short, the fact that a skilfully written play is infinitely more adaptable to all sorts of acting than ordinary acting is to all sorts of plays (the actual conditions thus exactly reversing the desirable ones) finally drives the author to the conclusion that his own view of his work can only be conveyed by himself. And since he cannot act the play single-handed even when he is a trained actor, he must fall back on his powers of literary expression, as other poets and fictionists do. So far, this has hardly been seriously attempted by dramatists. Of Shakespear’s plays we have not even complete prompt copies: the folio gives us hardly anything but the bare lines. What would we not give for the copy of Hamlet used by Shakespear at rehearsal, with the original “business” scrawled by the prompter’s pencil? And if we had in addition the descriptive directions which the author gave on the stage—above all, the character sketches, however brief, by which he tried to convey to the actor the sort of person he meant him to incarnate, what a light they would shed, not only on the play, but on the history of the sixteenth century! Well, we should have had all this and much more if Shakespear, instead of having merely to bring his plays to the point necessary to provide his company with memoranda for an effective performance, had also had to prepare them for publication in competition with fiction as elaborate as that of Balzac, for instance. It is for want of this process of elaboration that Shakespear, unsurpassed as poet, storyteller, character draughtsman, humorist, and rhetorician, has left us no intellectually coherent drama, and could not afford to pursue a genuinely scientific method in his studies of character and society, though in such unpopular plays as All’s Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida, we find him ready and willing to start at the nineteenth century if the seventeenth would only let him.
Such literary treatment is ten times more necessary to a modern author than it is to Shakespear, because in his time the acting of plays was very imperfectly differentiated from the declamation of verses; and descriptive or narrative recitation did what is now done by scenery and “business.” Anyone reading the mere dialogue of an Elizabethan play understands all but half a dozen unimportant lines of it without difficulty, whilst many modern plays, highly successful on the stage, are not merely unreadable but positively unintelligible without the stage
business. The extreme instance is a pure pantomime, like “L‘Enfant Prodigue,”e in which the dialogue, though it exists, is not spoken. If a dramatic author were to publish a pantomime, it is clear that he could only make it intelligible to a reader by giving him the words which the pantomimist is supposed to be uttering. Now it is not a whit less impossible to make a modern practical stage play intelligible to a reader by dialogue alone, than to make a pantomime intelligible without it.
Obvious as this is, the presentation of plays through the literary medium has not yet become an art; and the result is that it is very difficult to induce the English public to buy and read plays. Indeed, why should they, when they find nothing in them except a bald dialogue, with a few carpenter’s and costumier’s directions as to the heroine’s father having a grey beard, and the drawing-room having three doors on the right, two doors and an entrance through the conservatory on the left, and a French window in the middle? It is astonishing to me that Ibsen, who devotes two years to the production of a three act play, the extraordinary quality of which depends on a mastery of character and situation which can only be achieved by working out a good deal of the family and personal history of the individuals represented, should nevertheless give the reading public very little more than the technical memorandum required by the carpenter, the gasman, and the prompter. Who will deny that the result is a needless obscurity as to points which are easily explicable? Ibsen, interrogated as to his meaning, replies, “What I have said, I have said.” Precisely; but the point is that what he hasn’t said, he hasn’t said. There are perhaps people (though I doubt it, not being one of them myself) to whom Ibsen’s plays, as they stand, speak sufficiently for themselves. There are certainly others who could not understand them at any terms. Granting that on both these classes further explanations would be thrown away, is nothing to be done for the vast majority to whom a word of explanation makes all the difference?
Finally, may I put in a plea for the actors themselves? Born actors have a susceptibility to dramatic emotion which enables them to seize the moods of their parts intuitively. But to expect them to be intuitive as to intellectual meaning and circumstantial conditions as well, is to demand powers of divination from them: one might as well expect the Astronomer Royal to tell the time in a catacomb. And yet the actor generally finds his part full of emotional directions which he could supply as well or better than the author, whilst he is left quite in the dark as to the political, religious, or social beliefs and circumstances under which the character is supposed to be acting. Definite conceptions of these are always implicit in the best plays, and are often the key to their appropriate rendering; but most actors are so accustomed to do without them that they would object to being troubled with them, although it is only by such educative trouble that an actor’s profession can place him on the level of the lawyer, the physician, the churchman, and the statesman. Even as it is, Shylock as a Jew and usurer, Othello as a Moor and a soldier, Caesar, Cleopatra and Anthony, as figures in defined political circumstances, are enormously easier for the actor than the countless heroes as to whom nothing is ever known except that they wear nice clothes, love the heroine, baffle the villain, and live happily ever after.
The case, then, is overwhelming for printing and publishing not only the dialogue of plays, but for a serious effort to convey their full content to the reader. This means the institution of a new art; and I daresay that before these volumes are ten years old, the attempt that it makes in this direction will be left far behind, and that the customary, brief, and unreadable scene specification at the head of an act will by then have expanded into a chapter, or even a series of chapters, each longer than the act itself, and no less interesting and indispensable. No doubt one result of this will be the production of works of a mixture of kinds, part narrative, part homily, part description, part dialogue, and (possibly) part drama—works that can be read, but not acted. I have no objection to such works; but my own aim has been that of the practical dramatist; if anything my eye has been too much on the stage, though I have tried to put down nothing that is irrelevant to the actor’s performance or the audience’s comprehension of the play. I have of course been compelled to omit some things that a stage representation could convey, simply because the art of letters, though highly developed grammatically, is still in its infancy as a technical speech notation: for example, there are fifty ways of saying Yes, and five hundred of saying No, but only one way of writing them down. Even the use of spaced letters instead of italics for underlining, though familiar to foreign readers, will have to be learned by the English public before it becomes effective. But if my readers do their fair share of the work, I daresay they will understand nearly as much of the plays as I do myself.
Finally, a word as to why I have labeled the three plays in this first volume Unpleasant. The reason is pretty obvious; their dramatic power is used to force the spectator to face unpleasant facts. No doubt all plays which deal sincerely with humanity must wound the monstrous conceit which it is the business of romance to flatter. But here we are confronted, not only with the comedy and tragedy of individual character and destiny, but with those social horrors which arise from the fact that the average homebred Englishman, no matter however honorable and goodnatured he may be in his private capacity, is, as a citizen, a wretched creature who, whilst clamoring for a gratuitous millennium, will shut his eyes to the most villainous abuses if the remedy threatens to add another penny in the pound to the rates and taxes which he has to be half cheated, half coerced into paying. In “Widowers’ Houses” I have shewn middle class respectability and younger son gentility fattening on the poverty of the slum as flies fatten on filth. That is not a pleasant theme. In “The Philanderer” I have shewn the grotesque relations between men and women which have arisen under marriage laws which represent to some of us a political necessity (especially for other people), to some a divine ordinance, to some a romantic ideal, to some a domestic profession for women, and to some that worst of blundering abominations, an institution which society has outgrown but not modified, and which “advanced” individuals are therefore forced to evade. The scene with which “The Philanderer” opens, the atmosphere in which it proceeds, and the marriage with which it ends, are, for the intellectually and artistically conscious classes in modern society, typical; and it will hardly be denied, I think, that they are unpleasant. In “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” I have gone straight at the fact that, as Mrs. Warren puts it, “the only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her.” There are some questions on which I am, like most Socialists, an extreme Individualist. I believe that any society which desires to found itself on a high standard of integrity of character in its units should organize itself in such a fashion as to make it possible too for all men and all women to maintain themselves in reasonable comfort by their industry without selling their affections and their convictions. At present we not only condemn women as a sex to attach themselves to “breadwinners,” licitly or illicitly, on pain of heavy privation and disadvantage; but we have great prostitute classes of men: for instance, dramatists and journalists, to whom I myself belong, not to mention the legions of lawyers, doctors, clergymen, and platform politicians who are daily using their highest faculties to belie their real sentiments: a sin compared to which that of a woman who sells the use of her person for a few hours is too venial to be worth mentioning; for rich men without conviction are more dangerous in modern society than poor women without chastity. Hardly a pleasant subject this!
I must, however, warn my readers that my attacks are directed against themselves, not against my stage figures. They can not too thoroughly understand that the guilt of defective social organization does not lie alone on the people who actually work the commercial makeshifts which the defects make inevitable, and who often, like Sartorius and Mrs. Warren, display valuable executive capacities and even high moral virtues in their administration, but with the
whole body of citizens whose public opinion, public action, and public contribution as ratepayers alone can replace Sartorius‘sf slums with decent dwellings, Charteris’sg intrigues with reasonable marriage contracts, and Mrs. Warren’s profession with honorable industries guarded by a humane industrial code and a “moral minimum” wage.
Man and Superman and Three Other Plays Page 6