In the brilliant essay on the Comédie-Française which Henry James wrote forty years ago [1876], and which had for its text the series of critical analyses of the histrionic attainments of the chief performers at the House of Molière, then recently put forth by Francisque Sarcey, the American critic declared that the French critic was so predominant in the Parisian press that he held “in his hand the fortune of a play” and that if he “devoted an encouraging line and a half to a young actress, mademoiselle immediately had a career.” This may be an overstatement, but it can hardly be called a misstatement. For the final thirty years of the nineteenth century Sarcey was the most influential of all the theatrical reviewers of France, even if he could not actually make or unmake a new play or a new player.
Henry James analized the reasons for Sarcey’s enviable influence and for the weight of his words. Sarcey was “sternly incorruptible;” he had “a religious respect for his theme;” he had a habit of taking the theater seriously, with “unwearying attention to detail;” he had “the scenic sense, the theatrical eye;” he was “shrewd and sagacious, and almost tiresomely in earnest.” And now that nearly a score of years have past since Sarcey ceased to contribute to the Temps his weekly review of the passing show, a later generation has ratified the praise, even if not a few latterday critics are disposed to see Sarcey’s limitations with a disenchanted eye. M. Gustave Lanson, for example, in his inestimable history of French literature, holds that Sarcey’s theory of the theater was somewhat too narrow and that it was sometimes too rigidly enforced.
But no one of the younger generation has denied that Sarcey had a theory of the theater, that this theory has left its impress upon the contemporary French drama, and that it has been developed by Sarcey himself as the immediate consequence of his immense experience and his indefatigable attendance in the playhouse. Sarcey’s opinions about the art of the drama were the direct result of his observations in the theater itself,—just as were the opinions of Aristotle and of Lessing. He had no kinship with the erudite Italian theorists of the Renascence who evolved their dramatic dogmas from their inner consciousness, being deprived of the privilege of persistent playgoing and having occasion only sporadically to see a good play well acted.
Sarcey was continually seeing good plays well acted; he was continually analizing his own impressions at these performances, and he was continually investigating the impressions made upon his fellow-playgoers. As a result of this relentless inquiry, pursued for two score years, he discovered for himself certain of the principles of the drama,—just as Lessing had discovered them in like manner a century earlier. For Lessing, Sarcey had ever an exalted respect, as a critic of the keenest acumen and as a constant playgoer of alert intelligence. He said to me once that when he chanced to find in Lessing’s ‘Hamburg Dramaturgy’ an opinion which he had already arrived at by his own reflexion, he felt encouraged and confirmed in his belief that his own view was sound.
When we compare Sarcey as a dramatic critic with a predecessor like Jules Janin or with a contemporary like Jules Lemaitre we cannot help noting that however inferior he may be in wit, in felicity of phrase, in charm of style, he is superior in his possession of a compact body of doctrine about the drama, which might be a little too systematic at times, but which sustained and supported his judgments upon the plays of the moment and which gave to these judgments a validity and a significance often absent from the sparkling effusions of Janin and Lemaitre, neither of whom took the theater very seriously and both of whom now and then yielded to the temptation of accepting the play they were supposed to be criticizing either as a peg on which to hang pretty garlands of figures of speech or as a springboard from which to dive off into philosophical disquisition.
Sarcey might on occasion apply his code too rigorously; but at least he had a code to apply. He might be over-emphatic at times in declaring the rigid limits of the drama and in insisting upon the futility of well meant efforts to enlarge its scope, to broaden its mission, to bestow upon it a more significant message; but he was inexorably honest in setting forth these opinions of his, and they were founded upon an intimacy with the theater possest by none of his opponents. As to his critical insight and his integrity there is no room for dispute; and not a few of the principles Sarcey insisted upon, either first declared by him or by him more clearly formulated, are now among the commonplaces of dramatic criticism, employed incessantly by writers often unfamiliar with his name.
In his weekly articles Sarcey frequently mentioned the book which he proposed to devote to the ‘History of Theatrical Conventions’; but he never wrote it,—and perhaps he never really intended to write it. Thirty years ago when I askt him when this long awaited volume was to appear, he laught and responded, “If I ever do write it, what shall I have left to fill up those long columns of my weekly article in the Temps?” Yet he had at least made a beginning of this book in a series of more or less connected articles publisht weekly in the Temps in the summer and fall of 1876, when there happened to be only a few new plays demanding critical consideration.
After Sarcey’s death in May, 1899, there was an immediate demand for a collection of his theatrical reviews. This demand had been heard during his lifetime and he had always resisted it, on the ground that his articles contributed to a daily paper and dealing with the plays of the day, were too journalistic in tone and in temper, too temporary in their illustrations and allusions, to warrant their reproduction in a series of volumes aspiring to the dignity and permanence of literature. Other Parisian dramatic reviewers, Jules Janin and Théophile Gautier, August Vitu and Jules Lemaitre, might garner their newspaper sheaves and strive to rescue their hebdomadal effusions from the swift oblivion of the back number; but Sarcey resolutely refused to be tempted by the lure of this fleeting immortality.
What he had declined to do himself his son-in-law, Adolphe Brisson, piously undertook after his death; and in 1900 Brisson issued the first volume of ‘Quarante ans de Théâtre,’ followed in rapid succession by six other volumes, in which selections from Sarcey’s weekly articles were classified under various heads. The first volume dealt with the Comédie-Française, always the center of Sarcey’s solicitude; and it contained also his discussion of the principles of dramatic criticism. More valuable than this discussion was the group of successive articles written in 1876 in which he considered the fundamental basis of the art of the theater, in which he dealt with the necessity of conventions in the drama (as in all the other arts), and in which he discust the separation of species, the setting off of the tragic from the comic.
It is a selection from this series of papers which is here translated, with many excisions and suppressions, due to the desire to present sarcey’s views in a form easy of apprehension by readers not so familiar with the French stage as were the subscribers to the Temps forty years ago. The excisions have been made so as to sharpen Sarcey’s points without in any way modifying or obscuring his views; and the passages selected for presentation here adequately reveal his method, which was closely akin to the method of Aristotle and to the method of Lessing. They disclose also his manner, his intellectual integrity, his playful common sense, his total absence of pedantic pretentiousness.
This inquiry into the esthetic of the theater seems to be only a portico to an edifice which was never erected; and yet even if it is but a beginning, it sets forth sound doctrine about the drama. It contains at least the outline of his opinions in regard to theatrical conventions; and it is greatly to be regretted that he never resumed the articles and that he never supported these opinions by the host of illustrations he employed in later years in dealing with the drama of the day.
Perhaps it may be well here to supplement the condensed statement of the necessary conventions of the drama which Sarcey made in the articles in the Temps from which these selections have been taken, and to amplify the theory he laid down. He began by declaring that the drama, like all the other arts exists and can exist only by departing from the mere facts; and he had no difficulty in showing that the painter is also forced to express the essential truth of nature by suppressing or altering reality. The late John La Farge, in his very suggestive essay on ‘Ruskin, Art and Truth,’ made a similar declaration of principles:—
“When I work as an artist I begin at once by discarding the way in which things are really done, and by translating them at once into another material. Therein consists the pleasure that you and I take in the work of art,—perhaps a new creation between us. The pleasure that such and such reality gives me and you has been transposed. The great depth and perspective of the world, its motion, its never resting, I have arrested and stopt upon a little piece of flat paper. That very fact implies that I consider the flatness of my paper a fair method of translating the non-existence of any flatness in the world that I look at. If I am a sculptor I make for you this soft, moving, fluctuating, colored flesh in an immovable hard, rigid, colorless material; and it is this transposition which delights you, as well as me in a lesser degree who have made it. Therefore at the very outset of my beginning to affect you by what is called the record of a truth, I am obliged to ask you to accept a number of the greatest impossibilities, evident to the senses, and sometimes disturbing when the convention supposed to be agreed upon between you and myself is understood by only one of the two parties in the carrying out of the matter.”
In other words, the art of the painter is possible only when there is a convention, an implied contract, between the artist and his public, that he can translate and transpose in contradiction to the facts, and that he is permitted to represent as motionless (for the chosen moment) that which is in reality never still. So the art of the sculptor is based on a tacit agreement, which permits him to represent in clay or marble or bronze, in hard monochrome, that which in fact is soft and multicolored. So the art of the drama is possible only when the convention is accepted that the playwright may condense his story and omit all the needless details and all the extraneous particularities which would in real life delay and dilute the action.
The dramatist has to accept the condition that his plays are to be performed, by actors, in a theater and before an audience. The actor departs from the fact, and must so depart, when he makes love in tones that reach clearly to the last row of seats in the topmost gallery. The theater can present a forest with growing trees only by the aid of painted canvas, which we must accept in accordance with our agreement. And the audience has only a limited time and a limited understanding, so that the story must move swiftly and must be made transparently clear by artifices of exposition.
The convention underlying the modern problem-play in prose is that all the characters say what they have to say in the fewest possible words and that what they say is understood by all the other characters at the first hearing. The convention underlying the comedy of Molière is that all the characters belong to a race of beings, whose native and necessary speech is the rimed french alexandrine. In Shaksperian tragedy this native and necessary speech is English blank verse. In pantomime it is gesture; and in opera it is song.
When Tolstoy, in his misguided attempt to ascertain ‘What is Art’ objected to a dying tenor in silk tights singing with his last breath, he was simply refusing to be a party to the convention by which alone can opera exist. This refusal was of course within Tolstoy’s right; but by it he deprived himself of the specific pleasure which only the art of the modern music-drama can bestow.
In all the forms of the drama, comedy and tragedy, problem-play, pantomime and opera, the audience gladly permits departures from the facts of life, if this departure is for its pleasure and for its profit. In reality Othello and Desdemona talkt to each other in Italian, yet as few of us are familiar with any tongue but our own, we are glad to have them speak English. But if we wish to enjoy a performance by two great actors of different races, Othello by Salvini and Iago by Booth, we must extend the license we have granted by our implied contract and permit Othello to use the language which he would have used in real life while Iago and all the others to use the language which they would not have used but which is more satisfactory to us.
Probably this theory of the conventions by which alone the drama is made possible had been suggested by one or another of Sarcey’s predecessors,—altho I have failed to find anything of the kind in all my reading in the history of theatrical theory. Even if suggested by one or another of the earlier critics, the theory owes its general acceptance today to the sharpness which which Sarcey seized it, to the clearness which which he set it forth, and to the frequency with which he insisted on it.
Another theory of Sarcey’s, not so important, perhaps, and yet as useful, is that which asserts that there are in every story suitable for the stage certain interviews, certain moments, certain scenes, which the dramatist must show us in action, which he cannot merely relate, and which must not happen between the acts. Sarcey called these the scènes à faire, the scenes which must be dealt with by the dramatist, and which can be omitted only at the risk of dumbly disappointing the spectators. Mr. William Archer has accepted this theory, and has suggested that we should term the scènes à faire, the Obligatory Scenes.
Unfortunately M. Brisson has not replevined for us any one of Sarcey’s articles in which this theory is stated. Therefore it has seemed best to devote the second half of these selections to Sarcey’s characteristically logical discussion of the artistic advisability of separating the comic and the tragic. Even if Sarcey’s argument is not altogether convincing to us of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, it is one which it is wise for us to consider carefully and to weigh cautiously. Attention should also be called to the fact that altho Sarcey was here setting forth a dogma strenuously insisted upon by the Italian promulgators of the classicist code, he did not support it by the argument they derived from their study of Greek and Latin drama, in which they discovered that there were no humorous passages in tragedy and no strongly dramatic passages in comedy. Sarcey was consistent in basing his contention upon his analysis of the attitude of the audience, on his observation of the difficulty experienced by Parisian playgoers when they were confronted by the necessity of changing abruptly from the mood of tears to the mood of laughter.
Brander Matthews.
(April, 1916.)
No comments:
Post a Comment