A Book About the Theater. Brander Matthews
a sea-captain condemned to eternal life until he can find a maiden willing to share his lot; and when at last he meets the heroine she has another lover, who is naturally jealous of the new aspirant to her hand. The young rival challenges Vanderdecken to a duel, and what Irving proposed was that the survivor of the fight should agree to throw the body of his rival into the sea, and that the waves should cast up the condemned Vanderdecken on the shore, since the ill-fated sailor could not avoid his doom by death at the hand of man. This was an appropriate development of the tale; it was really imaginative; and it would have been strangely moving if it had introduced into it a ballad on the old theme. But in a play performed before us in a theater its effect was not altogether what its proposer had hoped for, altho he presented it with all his marvelous command of theatrical artifice.
The stage-setting Irving bestowed upon this episode was perfectly in keeping with its tone. The spectators saw the sandy beach of a little cove shut in by cliffs, with the placid ocean bathed in the sunset glow. The two men crossed swords on the strand; Vanderdecken let himself be killed, and the victorious lover carried his rival's body up the rocks and hurled it into the ocean. Then he departed, and for a moment all was silence. A shuddering sigh soon swept over the face of the waters, and a ripple lapped the sand. Then a little wave broke on the beach, and withdrew, rasping over the stones. At last a huge roller crashed forward and the sea gave up its dead. Vanderdecken lay high and dry on the shore, and in a moment he staggered to his feet, none the worse for his wounds. But unfortunately the several devices for accomplishing this result, admirable as they were, drew attention each of them to itself. The audience could not help wondering how the trick of the waves was being worked, and when the Flying Dutchman was washed up by the water, it was not the mighty deep rejecting Vanderdecken, again cursed with life, that the spectators perceived, but rather the dignified Henry Irving himself, unworthily tumbled about on the dust of his own stage. In the effort to make visible this imaginative embellishment of the strange story, its magic potency vanished. The poetry of the striking improvement on the old tale had been betrayed by its translation into the material realities of the theater, since the concrete presentation necessarily contradicted the abstract beauty of the idea.
Here we find ourselves face to face with one of the most obvious limitations of the stage—that its power of suggestion is often greater than its power of actual presentation. There are many things, poetic and imaginative, which the theater can accomplish, after a fashion, but which it ventures upon only at imminent peril of failure. Many things which are startlingly effective in the telling are ineffective in the actual seeing. The mere mechanism needed to represent them will often be contradictory, and sometimes even destructive. Perhaps it may be advisable to cite another example, not quite so cogent as Irving's 'Vanderdecken,' and yet carrying the same moral. This other example will be found in a piece by Sardou, a man who knew all the possibilities of the theater as intimately as Irving himself, and who was wont to utilize them with indefatigable skill. Indeed, so frequently did the French playwright avail himself of stage devices, and so often was he willing to rely upon them, that not a few critics of our latter-day drama have been inclined to dismiss him as merely a supremely adroit theatrical trickster.
In his sincerest play, 'Patrie,' the piece which he dedicated to Motley, and which he seems himself to have been proudest of, Sardou invented a most picturesque episode. The Spaniards are in possession of Brussels; the citizens are ready to rise, and William of Orange is coming to their assistance. The chiefs of the revolt leave the city secretly and meet William at night in the frozen moat of an outlying fort. A Spanish patrol interrupts their consultation, and forces them to conceal themselves. A little later a second patrol is heard approaching, just when the return of the first patrol is impending. For the moment it looks as tho the patriots would be caught between the two Spanish companies. But William of Orange rises to the occasion. He calls on his "sea-wolves"; and when the second patrol appears, marching in single file, there suddenly spring out of the darkness upon every Spanish soldier two fur-clad creatures, who throttle him, bind him, and throw him into a hole in the ice of the moat. Then they swiftly fill in this gaping cavity with blocks of snow, and trample the path level above it. And almost immediately after the sea-wolves have done their deadly work and withdrawn again into hiding, the first patrol returns, and passes all unsuspecting over the bodies of their comrades—a very practical example of dramatic irony.
As it happened, I had read 'Patrie' some years before I had an opportunity to see it on the stage, and this picturesque scene had lingered in my memory so that in the theater I eagerly awaited its coming. When it arrived at last I was sadly disappointed. The sea-wolves belied their appetizing name; they irresistibly suggested a group of trained acrobats, and I found myself carelessly noting the artifices by the aid of which the imitation snowballs were made to fill the trapdoor of the stage which represented the yawning hole in the ice of the frozen moat. The thing told was picturesque, but the thing seen was curiously unmoving; and I have noted without surprise that in the latest revival of 'Patrie' the attempt to make this episode effective was finally abandoned, the sea-wolves being cut out of the play.
II
In 'Patrie' as in 'Vanderdecken' the real reason for the failure of these mechanical devices is that the plays were themselves on a superior level to those stage-tricks; the themes were poetic, and any theatrical effect which drew attention to itself interrupted the current of emotional sympathy. It disclosed itself instantly as incongruous, as out of keeping with the elevation of the legend—in a word, as inartistic. A similar effect, perhaps even more frankly mechanical, would not be inartistic in a play of a lower type, and it might possibly be helpful in a frankly spectacular piece, even if this happened also to be poetic in intent. In a fairy-play, a féerie, as the French term it, we expect to behold all sorts of startling ingenuities of stage-mechanism, whether the theme is delightfully imaginative, as in Maeterlinck's beautiful 'Blue Bird,' or crassly prosaic, as in the 'Black Crook' and the 'White Fawn.'
In picturesque melodrama also, in the dramatization of 'Ben Hur,' for example, we should be disappointed if we were bereft of the wreck of the Roman galley, and if we were deprived of the chariot race. These episodes can be presented in the theater only by the aid of mechanisms far more elaborate than those needed for the scenes in 'Vanderdecken' and 'Patrie'; but in 'Ben Hur' these mechanisms are not incongruous and distracting as were the simpler devices of 'Vanderdecken' and 'Patrie,' because the dramatization of the romanticist historical novel is less lofty in its ambition, less imaginative, less ethereally poetic. In 'Vanderdecken' and in 'Patrie' the tricks seemed to obtrude themselves, whereas in 'Ben Hur' they were almost obligatory. In certain melodramas with more modern stories—in the amusing piece called the 'Round Up,' for example—the scenery is the main attraction. The scene-painter is the real star of the show. And there is no difficulty in understanding the wail of the performer of the principal part in a piece of this sort, when he complained that he was engaged to support forty tons of scenery. "It's only when the stage-carpenters have to rest and get their breath that I have a chance to come down to the footlights and bark for a minute or two."
A moment's consideration shows that this plaintive protest is unreasonable, however natural it may be. In melodramas like the 'Round Up' and 'Ben Hur,' as in fairy-plays like the 'Blue Bird,' the acting is properly subordinated to the spectacular splendor of the whole performance. When we enter a theater to behold a play of either of these types, we expect the acting to be adequate, no doubt, but we do not demand the highest type of histrionic excellence. What we do anticipate, however, is a spectacle pleasing to the eye and stimulating to the nerves. In plays of these two classes the appeal is sensuous rather than intellectual; and it is only when the appeal of the play is to the mind rather than to the senses that merely mechanical effects are likely to be disconcerting.
Mr. William Archer has pointed out that Ibsen in 'Little Eyolf,' has for once failed to perceive the strict limitation of the stage when he introduced a flagstaff, with the flag at first at half-mast, and a little later run up to the peak. Now, there are no natural breezes in the theater to flutter the folds of the flag, and every audience is aware of the fact. This, then, is the dilemma: either the flag hangs limp and lifeless against the pole, which is a flat spectacle, or else its folds are made to flutter by some concealed pneumatic blast or electric fan, which instantly arouses the inquiring curiosity of the audience. Here we find added evidence in support of Herbert Spencer's invaluable principle of Economy of Attention, which he himself