It has often been remarkt that laughter persists long after the causes have ceased, just as tears continue to flow after the arrival of the good news which should have dried them immediately. The human soul is not flexible enough to pass readily from one extreme of sensation to the contrary one. These sudden jolts overwhelm it with painful confusion.
From this reflexion, of which no one, I believe, will dispute the justice, we may conclude that when a man is a prey to grief if he is diverted by an idea which inclines him to laughter, he is borne suddenly far from his sorrow and a certain lapse of time and a certain effort of will are necessary for him to return to it.
What is true of one man is even more true of a crowd. We have seen that the peculiar characteristic of an audience is that it feels more keenly than the individuals composing it. It enters more impetuously into the reasons for weeping that the poet gives it; the grief that it experiences is more intense, the tears are readier and more abundant.
I forget what tyrant it was of ancient Greece to whom massacres were every-day affairs, but who wept copiously over the misfortunes of a heroine in a tragedy. He was audience; and for the one evening clothed himself in the sentiments of the public.
It is also more difficult for an audience to return to an impression from which it has been diverted by an accident of some sort. How many performances have been interrupted, how many plays failed the first night, because of a ludicrous slip by an actor or a piquant jest shouted from the gallery. All the house bursts out laughing. At once it becomes impossible for it to recover its equilibrium. It is now launcht on another tack. The most touching scenes will be turned into ridicule. The play is lost.
In real life, this mixing of laughter and tears, this difficulty of returning to your grief after having left it, has no such disadvantage. As we have already said repeatedly; nature is indifferent and so also is life. You weep; it is well. You laugh afterwards, as you please. You laugh when you should weep; you weep when it would be better to laugh. That is your affair. You may weep with one eye and laugh with the other as the weeping and laughing Jean of the legend. It makes little difference to us.
In the theater it is not the same. The author who brings upon the stage the events of life and who naturally desires to make them interesting to his audience, must find means to heighten and render more vivid and more enduring the impression he wishes to create.
If his intention is to provoke laughter, he will be led by that alone to guard against every incident that might induce sadness in his audience; and if, on the other hand, his purpose is to compel tears, he will discard resolutely the circumstances which, by giving rise to laughter, might tend to counteract the emotion he wishes to arouse. He is not concerned in the least to know whether in reality laughter is mingled with tears. He does not seek to reproduce the truth, but to give the illusion of truth to the twelve hundred spectators:—a very different matter. When these twelve hundred spectators are entirely overwhelmed with grief they cannot believe that joy exists; they do not think about it; they do not wish to think about it; it displeases them when they are torn suddenly from their illusion in order to be shown another aspect of the same subject.
And if you do show it to them against their will, if you force them to change abruptly from tears to laughter, and this last impression once becomes dominant, they will cling to it and a return to the mood they have abandoned will be almost impossible. In life minutes are not counted, and we have all the time we need to bring about the transition from one sentiment to the other. But in the theater where we have at our disposal at most only four hours to exhibit all the series of events composing the action, the changes must take place swiftly and, so to speak, on the minute. This a man would resist if he were by himself; all the more will he resist it when he is one of a crowd.
To be strong and durable an impression must be single. All dramatists have felt this instinctively; and it is for this reason that the distinction between the comic and the tragic is as old as art itself.
It would seem that when drama came into being the writers of ancient times would have been led to mingle laughter with tears, since drama represents life, and in life joy goes hand in hand with grief, the grotesque always accompanying the sublime. And yet the line of demarcation has been drawn from the beginning. It seems that, without realizing the philosophic reasons we have just set forth, the dramatic poets have felt that in order to sound the depths of the soul of the audience they must strike always at the same spot; that the impression would be stronger and more enduring in proportion as it was unified.
Do you find the least little word to excite laughter in the grand conceptions of Aeschylus or the simple and powerful dramas of Sophocles? It is true that in Sophocles the characters of humble condition express themselves in familiar language which may seem comic to those of us who have been nourisht in the tradition of a necessary dignity in tragedy. But this style has nothing of the comic in itself, no more, for example, than the chattering of the Nurse in Shakspere’s ‘Romeo and Juliet.’
These characters speak as they would speak naturally; but what they say does not alter in any way the impression of sadness that is to result from the whole. They do not give a turn to the events different from what the author intended. They do not divert the attention of the audience either to themselves or to ludicrous incidents. They contribute in the measure of their ability, with the qualities peculiar to their minds and their temperaments to the general impression. We hardly find except in Euripedes, innovator and decadent genius, buffoonery deliberately mingled with drama, the grotesque invading tragedy. The drunken scene between Hercules and Admetus, who is mourning the death of Alcestis, is a celebrated example of this kind.
I need not say that with us more than with any other people this distinction of species has been markt from the beginning, until recent times. We have even carried it to the extreme, for we have an exaggerated love of logic.
In the ‘Malade Imaginaire,’ which is a comedy and which consequently should turn entirely on laugher, Argan stretches himself on his couch and pretends to be dead, and Angélique is told that she has lost her father. Angélique in tears throws herself beside her father whom she really believes to be dead. Suppose that Molière, forgetting that he was writing a comedy, had insisted on this situation, which after all is very touching. Suppose that he had prolonged it, that he had shown Angélique overcome with grief, ordering mourning, arranging for the funeral, and finally by dint of the tenderness exprest and the tears shed, wringing tears from the audience. He could have done it assuredly. It would not have been difficult for him to move the twelve hundred spectators with these displays of filial grief. And likewise in the scene in ‘Tartuffe,’ where Marianne kneels before her angry father to beg him to allow her to enter a convent.
If Molière had not restrained himself he might have committed the precise fault into which Shakspere, as I understand it, did not fall. He would have changed the aspect of events; I mean by this that he would have changed the mood in which he had led us to believe that the events would be treated. What was his intention? It was to show us, in contrast to Bélise punisht for her avarice, Angélique rewarded for her filial piety, and the audience roaring with laughter at the sight of her father raised from the dead to marry her to her lover.
It was an impression of gayety that he sought. He would have destroyed this impression had he dwelt too long on the grief of the young girl. From the same events he had meant to make use of in arousing laughter he could have extracted tears and the audience would no longer be in the mood for laughter at the proper moment. The shock would have been too strong for the transition to be made easily.
Try to recall your past theatrical experience; you will find that in all the melodramas, in all the tragedies, whether classic or romantic, into which the grotesque has crept, it has always been obliged to take an humble place, to play an episodic part; otherwise it would have destroyed the unity of impression which the author always strives to produce. Wherever this does not hold, it is because it was the secret design of the author to extract mirth from a situation which is sad in appearance. Thus in ‘La Joie Fait Peur’; it is true that the situation in this play is that of a young man mourned by his mother, his fiancée, his sister, his friends, and his old servant. But the action is arranged in such a way that the entire audience is admitted at once to the secret that the young man is not dead. Everybody finally discovers this,—except the mother who remains disconsolate till the very end.
But who does not see that the joy of the others is one of the important elements in this amusing play, that it consequently occupies an important place in the mind of the audience and adds a certain mysterious savor of humor to the tears shed by the poor mother. The impression here then remains single, since far from being spoiled by the laughter which it arouses on its way the dramatic quality of the situation is really heightened. The principle is this: The impression must be single; any mingling of laughter and tears tends to destroy this. It is better therefore to avoid it. There is nothing more legitimate than the absolute distinction of the comic from the tragic, of the grotesque from the sublime. Yet nowadays every rule is subject to many exceptions. It is an exception when the playwright feels himself strong enough to subordinate particular impressions to the general impression, when he can so control the temper of his spectators as to turn them all at once from laughter to tears, when the public he is seeking to please is capable of passing easily from one attitude to another, because of its advanced civilization, its racial instincts, its prejudices due to its education.
It depends on whether the author believes himself able to subordinate the particular to the general impression which he wishes to produce, whether he is sufficiently master of the psychology of his audience to transport them by a single stroke from laughter to tears, and on whether the audience to which he addresses himself is, by reason of the state of civilization at which it has arrived, either by prejudice of education or instinct of race, likely to pass easily from one sentiment to the other.
The rule remains intact. The impression must be single; and it cannot be this if the characters brought in for the comic scenes are anything more than episodic, if their pleasantries are anything more than accessories which can be easily supported.
Nature itself and life are impartial in the presence of joy and sorrow, laughter and tears, and pass with perfect indifference from one sentiment to the other but to have demonstrated this, as did Victor Hugo in the admirable passage which we cited above, proves nothing; since a play is not a reproduction of life but an aggregate of conventions designed to produce upon the spectators the illusion of life; and they cannot have this illusion if the author disconcerts them by changing the sentiments which he inspires, if he disarranges their pleasure.
No comments:
Post a Comment