To Hear is not To Read

How do we compose oral tales?

What Was Will Be Again

In ‘Tales of Future Past’ I gave the reasons why I think oral storytelling will come back to dominate tales. Radio will surpass television, audiobooks will be more popular than printed books.

But how do you compose for speech?

Radio

Radio tales still exist in recordings available on disk and online. If you want to write with radio in mind, all you need to do is listen to the old recordings and learn from those that strike you as the best.

Radio is a sort of drama played for the ears alone. A cast take different roles, dialogue predominates, exposition hides within dialogue. Music and sound effects round out the soundscape, with the possible addition of a Chorus in the form of a Host or Narrator who is usually confined to the general Introduction and Envoi or summing-up of the tale.

Audiobooks

Audiobooks have so far been readings from tales composed to be read. At most the current audiobooks are ‘composed for the medium’ when they are abridged; some abridgments call for additional words to cover what has been left out, and this is written with the audiobook in mind. For the rest, the audiobook is a printed text’s poor cousin.

Books today are composed to be read. Rare is the author who considers how his prose will sound if read aloud. Since almost all of his readers will read the text, and not hear it read out, this is the proper strategy of today’s author. It would be foolish of him, and bad for his talesmanship, if he were to compose with an alternate medium in mind.

Oral storytelling of tales still has a foothold in children’s books, especially those books aimed at the youngest children who don’t yet know how to read, and are learning. These books are meant to be read out loud by parents to their children. But because the books have the additional aim of teaching the child to read, children’s books are not wholly composed to be heard. They include pictures for the child to look at, and lay the page out so as to help the child pick out the words and connect them to the pictures. Words are chosen not only for their sound, but also for how easily the child will be able to spot them on the page; vocabularies are confined to what the child should learn to read and write. So children’s books are a step towards oral tales, but in the end, since they are meant, even they, to be seen on a page or screen, they don’t give us a good line on what oral storytelling should be. And of course, children’s books are meant for children and not the rest of us.

The True Oral Tale

There remains an oral tradition, that descends from the first talesmen more than 100,000 years ago, for us to learn from. Various ethnographic and folklore scholars have recorded oral tales from many cultures, and these should be studied. They are most valuable when they are least aware of tales written to be read, and innocent of the whole reading realm.

For the rest, we can start with a few basic observations.

Structure in an Oral Tale

The first thing to notice is that the paragraph has no meaning in an oral tale. The paragraph is a fairly recent invention; the medieval European manuscripts and first books printed in Europe had no paragraphs. Paragraphs were created to help the reader navigate through the sea of letters and words.

A paragraph in its ideal form should still have some meaning in oral tales. The paragraph that represents a complete subsection of the tale’s argument or progress still makes sense. But often enough the paragraph today exists simply for its original intended purpose, to guide the reader’s eye across the page and substitute in visual layout for the otherwise necessary words to make transitions and links.

Time is crucial to an oral tale, and absent from a tale to be read. The print-author can’t know how fast his readers will take in the text; some may skim, some may feast over every word and phrase. But the oral talesman has absolute control over the relative pace of his tale. (It is possible with digitally-recorded oral tales to play them back at different speeds, and compensate for the shift in pitch; so long as the playback speed is constant throughout, however, the relative pace will remain as it was first recorded.)

Thus we can say that the pauses that the oral talesman takes will stand in for such printed devices as the paragraph or the skipped-line ‘thought break.’

The chapter may or may not exist in the long oral tale. Most oral tales have been short stories, tales that could be told in no more than an hour or so. Longer epics and linked story cycles have existed, though, and were meant to be recited or told over a series of nights or story-sessions.

Since in the ‘future past’ we are imagining, there may well be such things as audiobooks or other recordings of the telling of oral tales, we have to ask whether it is better to break long audiobooks into separate, smaller files, which would serve as chapters, or to include chapter markers inside the one long file to serve as navigation guides, or to leave the tale as one long, unmarked reading.

Best to me seems the collection of smaller files. Worst of all would be the one long reading, though this could find its place under a device or software that would remember whatever place the reader/listener last got to — for example, audiotape players will stop reeling the tape across the playback heads and hold that position until the next time playback begins.

These smaller files (or chapters within a longer file) I think will take a different shape than most of today’s printed chapters. One of the aims of an author of printed text, when he designs his chapter breaks, is exactly not to give his readers a break or pause from reading. Though a chapter break may appear to offer the reader a spot at which he may put the book down, in fact the author designs the break so that the reader will find it hard to put the book down there, and will want to read on. ‘Just one more chapter,’ is what the author of a page-turner hopes all his readers will chant.

Instead of this, in the world of oral tales, each chapter should have its own complete action. It should complete some phase of the talesman’s argument or the progress of the tale’s journey.

I will have much more to say about all this, once I figure it out.

(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, May 7, 2008)

Tales of Future Past

Oral tales will come once more to dominate

Princes All

For the past 150 years, the middle class in the foremost of the developed nations have seen their lot rise, so that by 1900 they found themselves in a state that only the lower nobility could have enjoyed in pre-industrial times, and by 2000 they lived beyond the means of onetime kings and rajahs. It is true that they had to work, but their work consisted of that which formerly would have been the province of grand viziers, sitting around and making decisions for the rest of the world below them.

This age depended upon science, and the machines science invented and refined. Those machines in turn depended upon abundant and cheap energy. And the lifestyle of these newborn princes and viziers was further enriched by the plunder of the earth.

This age is now reaching its end. The earth’s bounty is near exhaustion, peak oil signals that energy going forward will not be abundant or cheap (unless significant advances are made in alternative forms of energy production — and unless the raw materials needed to manufacture these alternative sources are found and refined on a vast scale).

So we who were born as princes, rajahs and worked as viziers, will see the state of our fortunes recede backward along the same path we saw it rise. We will sink back into the nobility, we will fall farther into the lesser nobility, and then, maybe, we will live like peasants once more.

Work Work Work

The peasant does not work for wages. He works for his life, and gets no guarantees. He has no pension, no sick days with pay, no vacation days. There is always something else for him to do.

The peasant has little time for idle amusements such as tales. He has, however, no less a thirst for amusements and tales. For the most part, he cannot find time for them, unless he can enjoy them while doing something else at the same time.

All this occurred to me the other day, as I was repairing a screen door. The task is fairly thoughtless: it involves pressing a flexible spline into a groove along the door frame; the spline holds the screen in place. It was very slow going, partly because I had never done this before, and partly because the replacement screen was a good deal thicker than the screen the door was designed to hold, which meant that there was a lot more work involved in compressing the spline and shoving it down into the channel of the groove.

Seeing this would take some time, I though I would watch a movie in the meanwhile. I soon realized that even though repairing the screen took little enough thought (once I had settled upon a way of working it, and gotten the tools I needed) it still asked that I give it attention both with my hands and my eyes. I couldn’t watch the movie except to look up at it from time to time, which of course slowed down the work on the screen.

Attending a movie’s tale requires both the ears and the eyes. Reading a book requires eyes and hands. Neither of these forms of enjoying a tale will do for a man with a bit of a task on his hands.

Tales Told Anew

There is though one form of tale that a man can attend to while he does work such as peasants must do, and that is the oral tale. So long as the task at hand does not ask him to think deeply or figure things out, a man can do it tolerably quickly (and to his impression a lot faster) even while he hears a tale recounted orally.

Radio trumps television here. Audiobooks trump books that must be read.

The first form tales ever took, in other words, is the form they will take in future.

And so I believe every writer must learn how to tell his tales aloud, ought to compose them with such reading in mind, and ought to give first place to the oral recording of his tales, and let the text fall to second place.

(Composed on keyboard Tuesday, May 6, 2008)

The Sound and Color of Talk

Some words on the page are alive

Reading to Ourselves

‘Sub-vocalization’ is the practice of forming in the throat the rudiments of the words we read. It is frowned upon by those training in reading quickly, or ‘speed reading,’ because forming the words in the throat takes time. Even though we don’t actually speak the words, no one can make those movements as fast as he can understand the words on the page or screen. These he can pick up in a flash as whole words, phrases, sentences, even paragraphs.

I don’t know if sub-vocalizing is fundamental to the act of reading, something we all will do unless we are trained out of it, or if sub-vocalizing is something we just happen to pick up while we teach ourselves to read, sounding out each word, syllable by syllable, letter by letter even, as we go, or if sub-vocalizing is something we pick up when we ape our teachers who read to us, or tell us tales. I don’t know how many of us do it. But I think it’s pretty widespread.

Words Alive

The consequence of sub-vocalization is that different words seem to ‘speak’ themselves aloud to us. (It might be true even to those of us who have trained ourselves out of sub-vocalizing. It might even be true of those of us, if there are any, who have never sub-vocalized.)

For example, words that represent sounds, and if spoken would resemble the sounds they represent, have a ‘sound’ when we read them: Crash! Boom! Hiss! These will all leap off the page or screen with something like a sound; the block of text will take on life from them. But the dry exposition of the narrator describing a scene, or a character’s inner state, or a sequence of logical reasoning, seems to take place in a sort of vacuum where no sound is possible. And finally there is dialogue.

Dialogue has sound. Take that description of a scene, and put it into a character’s mouth, spoken aloud, and the words now have sounds. When we read it, we will feel we hear the character speaking the words out loud.

What Lives Moves

The liveliness of dialogue, and other text that seems to have sound, helps us read it faster. Either we read it faster in fact, or else it merely seems to go faster, as we entrance ourselves into the delusion of the scene taking place before us dramatically in our imagination.

In ‘Start Fast, Talk Fast’ I mentioned how Samuel Merwin and Henry Kitchell Webster in their 1904 yarn Calumet “K”, made the pace of the first third lightning-quick. There are three parts to their strategy:

1. Fast Start. In 1-1/2 pages the book gives us the problem and the hero committed to solving it. Description is held to a minimum, actions are given instead.
2. No Let-up. The events of the first third of the book happen almost without a break. Only a couple periods of a few hours each are passed over, but the consequence of the action carries us over these gaps. The hero, Charlie Bannon, must solve one problem after another in order to get the ‘cribbing’ lumber to the site of the grain elevator so he can start the next stage of construction. He does so in a continuous flow of purposeful activity. Scenes are kept brief and to the point.
3. Talk and More Talk. Dialogue predominates over description. Even though this means that some scenes go on longer than could be told in summary description, the scenes take on a liveliness that propels us through them.

The Color of the Page

There is another aspect of dialogue that helps it move, which has nothing to do with the ‘sound of talk.’ That is the amount of ‘white space’ on the typical page filled with dialogue. So long as the speeches are kept brief, dialogue will fill the page with many short lines. If we took a photograph of the page or screen, and kept the picture out of focus, it would appear as a blob of gray. A page with more letters filling its margins would appear as a darker shade of gray; a page with fewer letters, shorter lines, would appear as a lighter shade of gray. The ‘color’ of the page of dialogue is in general lighter than the color of a page of description.

This has a psychological effect on us readers. It makes the text feel ‘lighter’ in other ways than just the color of the page.

This also makes for faster reading in a simpler way: it makes for fewer words to read on a page.

(Composed on keyboard Monday, May 5, 2008)

Start Fast, Talk Fast

Diving into the tale; talk sounds fast

An Old Hack Novel

I’ve been rereading Calumet “K”, a 1904 yarn by Samuel Merwin and Henry Kitchell Webster. The opening is breathtakingly simple and fast off the marks; here it is:

The contract for the two million bushel grain elevator, Calumet K, had been let to MacBride & Company, of Minneapolis, in January, but the superstructure was not begun until late in May, and at the end of October it was still far from completion. Ill luck had attended Peterson, the constructor, especially since August. MacBride, the head of the firm, disliked unlucky men, and at the end of three months his patience gave out, and he telegraphed Charlie Bannon to leave the job he was completing at Duluth and report at once at the home office.

Rumors of the way things were going at Calumet under the hands of his younger co-laborer had reached Bannon, and he was not greatly surprised when MacBride told him to go to Chicago Sunday night and supersede Peterson.

At ten o’clock Monday morning, Bannon, looking out through the dusty window of the trolley car, caught sight of the elevator, the naked cribbing of its huge bins looming high above the huddled shanties and lumber piles about it. A few minutes later he was walking along a rickety plank sidewalk which seemed to lead in a general direction toward the elevator. The sidewalks at Calumet are at the theoretical grade of the district, that is, about five feet above the actual level of the ground. In winter and spring they are necessary causeways above seas of mud, but in dry weather every one abandons them, to walk straight to his destination over the uninterrupted flats. Bannon set down his hand bag to button his ulster, for the wind was driving clouds of smoke and stinging dust and an occasional grimy snowflake out of the northwest. Then he sprang down from the sidewalk and made his way through the intervening bogs and, heedless of the shouts of the brakemen, over a freight train which was creaking its endless length across his path, to the elevator site.

Here in a bit more than 300 words we get the problem to be solved, and the hero tasked with it. That’s about 1-1/2 pages in the standard manuscript. I note that the problem is what is introduced, not the character of the hero, Charlie Bannon. This is not to be a tale of character, but of events. It will tell of the effort to build that grain elevator on time, before January 1. When that effort succeeds or fails, the tale will be done.

The hero is introduced over the course of a few chapters as he tells various tales of his career. His primary introduction occurs a few pages later, and it is equally swift and sure:

Bannon, who, since the days when he was chief of the wrecking gang on a division of the Grand Trunk, had made a business of rising to emergencies, was obviously the man for the situation. He was worn thin as an old knife-blade, he was just at the end of a piece of work that would have entitled any other man to a vacation; but MacBride made no apologies when he assigned him the new task—“Go down and stop this fiddling around and get the house built. See that it’s handling grain before you come away. If you can’t do it, I’ll come down and do it myself.”

Bannon shook his head dubiously. “Well, I’m not sure—” he began. But MacBride laughed, whereupon Bannon grinned in spite of himself. “All right,” he said.

Outside In

The whole tale is told in the same brusque, almost breathless note. It perfectly captures the race against time that the job entails. I just picked it up and started reading; next thing I knew it was over an hour later and I was more than 1/4 through it.

What can we learn from this?

First, that action takes precedence over everything. By ‘action’ I don’t mean fist fights, races, car chases, or explosions, which is what ‘action’ means today in movies (it wasn’t always so, not even in movies) — I mean activities that advance toward the goal. Here ‘action’ is the opposite of ‘reflection’ and ‘description.’

So if the talesman just tells us ‘what happened’ with as little analysis as he can, he gives us a very fast-moving tale. And we, hearing or reading only of ‘what happened’ are focused on the events, on ‘what happens next?’

Second, dialogue reads faster than narration. There’s a lot more dialogue in the book than narration. The authors might have given us Bannon’s career in terms of narration, but instead they had him tell others in dialogue. Since Bannon is the only one on scene who knows his past, he’s the only one who can tell it; this does bring up the problem of making Bannon seem a bit of a braggart. The authors try to cover this up by having him seem to be complaining most of the times he tells these tales, and by having Bannon the talesman also confine his tales to ‘what happened.’ Here’s an example to give you a taste of how they did it, in which Bannon tells about a little task he was given in between the ‘Duluth job’ he had just about finished, and the Calumet elevator. (My apologies for the ugly word Bannon gives out.)

“Well, the dinner was all right. But I wish you had a bigger bed. I ain’t slept for two nights.”

“What was the matter?”

“I was on the sleeper last night; and I didn’t get in from the Duluth job till seven o’clock Saturday night, and Brown was after me before I’d got my supper. Those fellows at the office wouldn’t let a man sleep at all if they could help it. Here I’d been working like a nigger ’most five months on the Duluth house—and the last three weeks running night shifts and Sundays; didn’t stop to eat, half the time—and what does Brown do but— ‘Well,’ he says, ‘how’re you feeling, Charlie?’ ‘Middling,’ said I. ‘Are you up to a little job tomorrow?’ ‘What’s that?’ I said. ‘Seems to me if I’ve got to go down to the Calumet job Sunday night I might have an hour or so at home.’ ‘Well, Charlie,’ he says, ‘I’m mighty sorry, but you see we’ve been putting in a big rope drive on a water-power plant over at Stillwater. We got the job on the high bid,’ he says, ‘and we agreed to have it running on Monday morning. It’ll play the devil with us if we can’t make good.’ ‘What’s the matter?’ said I. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘Murphy’s had the job and has balled himself up.’”

By this time the two men had their coats on, and were outside the building.

“Let’s see,” said Bannon, “we go this way, don’t we?”

“Yes.”

There was still the light, flying flakes of snow, and the biting wind that came sweeping down from the northwest. The two men crossed the siding, and, picking their way between the freight cars on the Belt Line tracks, followed the path that wound across the stretch of dusty meadow.

“Go ahead,” said Peterson; “you was telling about Murphy.”

“Well, that was the situation. I could see that Brown was up on his hind legs about it, but it made me tired, all the same. Of course the job had to be done, but I wasn’t letting him have any satisfaction. I told him he ought to give it to somebody else, and he handed me a lot of stuff about my experience. Finally I said: ‘You come around in the morning, Mr. Brown. I ain’t had any sleep to speak of for three weeks. I lost thirty-two pounds,’ I said, ‘and I ain’t going to be bothered tonight.’ Well, sir, he kind of shook his head, but he went away, and I got to thinking about it. Long about half-past seven I went down and got a time-table. There was a train to Stillwater at eight-forty-two.”

“That night?”

“Sure. I went over to the shops with an express wagon and got a thousand feet of rope—had it in two coils so I could handle it—and just made the train. It was a mean night. There was some rain when I started, but you ought to have seen it when I got to Stillwater—it was coming down in layers, and mud that sucked your feet down halfway to your knees. There wasn’t a wagon anywhere around the station, and the agent wouldn’t lift a finger. It was blind dark. I walked off the end of the platform, and went plump into a mudhole. I waded up as far as the street crossing, where there was an electric light, and ran across a big lumber yard, and hung around until I found the night watchman. He was pretty near as mean as the station agent, but he finally let me have a wheelbarrow for half a dollar, and told me how to get to the job.

“He called it fifty rods, but it was a clean mile if it was a step, and most of the way down the track, I wheeled her back to the station, got the rope, and started out. Did you ever try to shove two five hundred foot coils over a mile of crossties? Well, that’s what I did. I scraped off as much mud as I could, so I could lift my feet, and bumped over those ties till I thought the teeth were going to be jarred clean out of me. After I got off the track there was a stretch of mud that left the road by the station up on dry land.

“There was a fool of a night watchman at the power plant—I reckon he thought I was going to steal the turbines, but he finally let me in, and I set him to starting up the power while I cleaned up Murphy’s job and put in the new rope.”

“All by yourself?” asked Peterson.

“Sure thing. Then I got her going and she worked smooth as grease. When we shut down and I came up to wash my hands, it was five minutes of three. I said, ‘Is there a train back to Minneapolis before very long?’ ‘Yes,’ says the watchman, ‘the fast freight goes through a little after three.’ ‘How much after?’ I said. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘I couldn’t say exactly. Five or eight minutes, I guess.’ I asked when the next train went, and he said there wasn’t a regular passenger till six-fifty-five. Well, sir, maybe you think I was going to wait four hours in that hole! I went out of that building to beat the limited—never thought of the wheelbarrow till I was halfway to the station. And there was some of the liveliest stepping you ever saw. Couldn’t see a thing except the light on the rails from the arc lamp up by the station. I got about halfway there—running along between the rails— and banged into a switch—knocked me seven ways for Sunday. Lost my hat picking myself up, and couldn’t stop to find it.”

Peterson turned in toward one of a long row of square frame houses.

“Here we are,” he said. As they went up the stairs he asked: “Did you make the train?”

“Caught the caboose just as she was swinging out. They dumped me out in the freight yards, and I didn’t get home till ’most five o’clock. I went right to bed, and along about eight o’clock Brown came in and woke me up. He was feeling pretty nervous. ‘Say, Charlie,’ he said, ‘ain’t it time for you to be starting?’ ‘Where to?’ said I. ‘Over to Stillwater,’ he said. ‘There ain’t any getting out of it. That drive’s got to be running tomorrow.’ ‘That’s all right,’ said I, ‘but I’d like to know if I can’t have one day’s rest between jobs—Sunday, too. And I lost thirty-two pounds.’ Well, sir, he didn’t know whether to get hot or not. I guess he thought himself they were kind of rubbing it in. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘are you going to Stillwater, or ain’t you?’ ‘No,’ said I, ‘I ain’t. Not for a hundred rope drives.’ Well, he just got up and took his hat and started out. ‘Mr. Brown,’ I said, when he was opening the door, ‘I lost my hat down at Stillwater last night. I reckon the office ought to stand for it.’ He turned around and looked queer, and then he grinned. ‘So you went over?’ he said. ‘I reckon I did,’ said I. ‘What kind of a hat did you lose?’ he asked, and he grinned again. ‘I guess it was a silk one, wasn’t it?’ ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘a silk hat—something about eight dollars.’”

“Did he mean he’d give you a silk hat?” asked Peterson.

“Couldn’t say.”

I’ve taken the text from the http://www.gutenberg.org edition, available online at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/18154

(Composed on keyboard Sunday, May 4, 2008)

Laughs That Won’t Go Away

Another reason to beware of mixing heart with laughs

The One Goal

Francisque Sarcey in his ‘Treatise on the Theater’ or Essai d’une Esthétique de Théâtre (a series of columns he wrote in the summer of 1876) was adamant that tragedy and comedy do not mix in the theater. Thus if a playwright’s aim was pity, fear, or tears, let him not seek to inspire laughs except briefly; if his aim was laughter, let him not try for pathos unless it be pleasant and sweet, such as the (assuredly temporary) parting of lovers. In his columns, Sarcey admitted of several exceptions, which had the effect of diluting his position to the notion that a play ought not be equally balanced between tears and laughs. All the same, when it came to comedy, he was strongly of the opinion that a wise playmaker would follow Molière’s example and go for laughs from the rising of the curtain to its final falling.

My Own Addition

Sarcey wrote from first principles, and the columns he left us in this series can only serve as the general introduction of the much-longer work he would have given us had he treated the matter seriously. Instead he merely filled in the weeks between new plays of any note, in the summer doldrums of the year 1867, with this columns, and as soon as new plays opened in September he was back on his regular beat reviewing. This is most unfortunate, since it means Sarcey never got round to detailing the specific observations he had made, such as ‘les scènes à faire,’ and other more technical matters, which are so specific that they would have filled the later heart and end of whatever tome he might have produced.

This note of mine may have been something Sarcey had noted; it is possible that the comedies of Sarcey’s time were not so parodic, satiric, or postmodern that the notion would have occurred to him. It certainly would have occurred to him had he written in 1976 or later.

The idea is this:

When a talesman gets his audience to laughing, it is hard to get them to take anything seriously.

This of course implies that the way the talesman has got his audience to laughing, is laughing at the situation before them, and not with the characters (at least not with most of them).

Once he has won his audience to that point, should the talesman then present them with any serious matter whatsoever, which he himself takes seriously, as do the characters themselves, the audience will not take them seriously. Not at first. At first we will be looking for the moment when the tenderness, the grief, will be undermined by a pratfall, something that robs the characters of their dignity. In short we won’t know how to take it … what’s this, something serious and heartfelt? Nah, must be just a setup for a fart, belch, stumble, or fraud.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, May 3, 2008)

Sarcey - Treatise on the Theater - Notes by Brander Matthews

Francisque Sarcey (1827–1899) was a graduate of the Ecole Normale, having as classmates, Taine, Edmont About and Prévost-Paradol. In his ‘Souvenirs de Jeunesse’ (1844), of which there is a translation in English, he has left an amusing account of his student years. Upon his graduation he was duly appointed as a professor of French literature in one of the smaller cities of France. Those were the most dismal and depressing days of the Second Empire; and Sarcey’s frankness in expressing his liberal opinions rendered it certain that he could not hope for promotion. In 1858 Edmond About persuaded him to drop teaching for journalism,—just as Jules Lemaitre was to do a quarter of a century later.

At first Sarcey was a journalistic free lance, writing in all the periodicals, daily or weekly, which he could persuade to accept his articles and writing on all sorts of subjects, literary and linguistic, social and political. It was only after several years of this miscellaneous newspaper hackwork, that he began to specialize as a theatrical reviewer; and he attracted little attention until 1867 when he was appointed dramatic critic of the Temps, then as now the most reputable and the most dignified of Parisian dailies. Thereafter for forty-two years he contributed to the Temps every Sunday afternoon a dramatic criticism, which came speedily to possess an indisputable authority.

In 1878 he began a series of studies of the actors and actresses of the Comédie-Française and of the other important theaters of Paris,—‘Comédiens et Comédiennes.’ He continued to contribute to various newspapers articles on topics of contemporary interest, social and political. He became a frequent lecturer; and in his ‘Souvenirs d’Age Mur’ (1892), also translated into English, he analized with his characteristic acuteness the principles of public speaking. He refused regretfully an invitation to become a member of the French Academy, fearing that he would not be free to express his opinions frankly and fully. He declined also the cross of the Legion of Honor; and he declared that all he wanted upon his tombstone was the record that he had been both “Professor and Journalist.”

At the beginning of the first volume of ‘Quarante Ans de Théâtre,’ the editor printed a selection from the many warmly appreciative articles which appeared in the French press immediately after Sarcey’s death in 1899. Noteworthy among these were the tributes of Jules Claretie, Jules Lemaitre and Emile Faguet. Jules Lemaitre had earlier publisht in the second volume of his ‘Contemporains’ a characteristically clever study of Sarcey. The article by Henry James, (to which reference is made in the Introduction) is entitled the ‘Théâtre Français’; and it is included in his volume on ‘French Poets and Novelists’ (1878).

The essential point of Sarcey’s attempt to formulate a theory of the theater is that all the laws of the drama are the result of the fact that every play is intended to be performed before an audience, and that therefore the desires, the opinions, and the prejudices of the spectators must always be taken into account. No one has declared this undeniable truth so completely as Sarcey. Yet other French critics have set forth similar views. In his lectures on the ‘Epochs of the French Theater’ Ferdinand Brunetière pointed out that altho men of letters in France between 1550 and 1600 were trying to write plays, there were then no professional actors, no regular theater, and therefore no public before which plays could be performed:—“Now a play does not begin to exist as a play except before the footlights, by virtue of the collaboration and of the complicity of the public, without which a play never has been, and never can be, anything more than a mere literary exercise.”

In Jules Lemaitre’s ‘Corneille et la Poétique d’Aristote’ there is an account of the vain struggles of Corneille against the rigors of the classicist code which the Italian critics had elaborated from their misreading of Aristotle; and Lemaitre quoted Corneille’s plea for permission to employ a neutral ground, not specifically anywhere, in which all the characters of a tragedy might be supposed to meet. Corneille defined this as a “theatrical fiction,” akin to the legal fictions accepted by lawyers; and Lemaitre commented that the theatrical fictions which Corneille askt the privilege of using are simply what we now know as the conventions of the drama:—

“If the characters of tragedy speak in verse,—that is a convention. If they meet every time they have something to say to one another,—that is a convention. If they talk aloud when they are alone,—that is a convention. If the poet develops under our eyes a single action, altho there are are none in real life not tangled up with a host of others,—that is a convention. He who seeks to abolish conventions can only change them. The alleged Rules of the unity of Time and the unity of Place had for their purpose, as Corneille admits, to suppress certain conventions, which were, however, easily acceptable; and then, to obey these Rules, Corneille invents conventions of his own, far less simple and far more difficult to accept,” (pp. 67–68).

In the preface to his ‘Etrangère,’ the younger Dumas with his customary incisiveness lends his support to Sarcey, altho without mentioning him:—“In all the arts there is a share, larger or smaller but indispensable, which must be left to convention. Sculpture lacks color; painting lacks relief; and they are rarely, either the one or the other, of the dimensions of the object they represent. The more richly you bestow on a statue the colors of life. . . . Nature is the basis, the means of art, it is not the aim of art. . . . Whether he wields the mallet, the pen or the brush, the artist really merits the name only when he can give a soul to the things of matter and a form to the things of the soul, when, in a word, he idealizes the real he sees and realizes the ideal he feels.”

B. M.

Sarcey - Treatise on the Theater V - French

LE TON PROPRE DE LA COMÉDIE ET L’UNITÉ D’IMPRESSION

Ceux qui ont lu avec quelque attention les feuilletons précédents n’auront pas de peine à comprendre pourquoi cette altération de la comédie nous semble fâcheuse et comment il se fait qu’elle ait été si longue à se produire sur notre théâtre.

Songez qu’il faut arriver jusqu’au milieu du dix-huitième siècle pour trouver chez nous une seule comédie, où la situation, tournant au pathétique, soit traitée de façon à tirer les larmes des yeux.

Ce n’est pas sans doute que les fondateurs de notre théâtre et avant tous l’immortel Molière n’eussent fait cette remarque fort simple, qu’il arrivait souvent dans la vie que les événements les plus gais faisaient tout à coup volte face et changeaient la joie en désespoir. Vous vous embarquez avec des camarades, après un bon dîner, sur un canot pour faire une partie de pêche. Les têtes sont un peu montées par le vin; on commet des imprudences. Un seul a conservé son sang-froid et représente le danger que l’on court. On ne l’écoute pas; on le crible de quolibets; on pâme de rire; lui-même se laisse aller à la gaieté générale; il rit comme les autres et de bon cœur. Voilà qu’un coup de vent prend le bateau en travers; il chavire; tout ce monde tombe à l’eau. Deux ou trois y restent et ne sont repêchés que le lendemain.

Y a-t-il un fait divers plus commun? c’est le terrible et le pathétique qui, brusquement font invasion, imposant silence au rire et le changent en pleurs. Cela se voit tous les jours, c’est le train quotidien de la vie humaine.

Si les maîtres du théâtre qui n’avaient pas manqué de faire cette observation si simple ont écrit cependant comme si elle eût été ignorée d’eux, c’est apparemment qu’ils n’avaient pas pour unique but de transporter la réalité telle qu’elle est sur la scène, c’est qu’ils se proposaient un autre objet, qui était de la montrer sous un certain jour à douze cents personnes réunies, et de produire sur l’âme multiple de public une certaine impression.

Ils s’étaient dit ou plutôt ils avaient senti d’instinct que toute sensation est d’autant plus forte qu’elle se prolonge, sans être contrariée par aucune autre; que l’homme et à plus forte raison le public ne passe pas aisément du rire aux larmes pour revenir ensuite des larmes au rire, qu’il est tout entier à l’impression première, que si on l’en retire violemment, pour le jeter dans un sentiment contraire, il sera presque impossible de l’y ramener ensuite; ces soubresauts continuels risqueront de lui gâter son plaisir, et ils auront surtout le tort de l’avertir qu’au théâtre tout est faux, les événements aussi bien que l’éclairage, de lui ravir ainsi son illusion.

Comme en effet on ne passe pas subitement du rire aux larmes, pour revenir aussitôt, ou presque aussitôt des larmes au rire; comme la pointe de ces changements, si brusques qu’ils soient est amortie par des intervalles de temps plus ou moins considérables, que les écrivains ne sauraient garder au théâtre, la rapidité même de ces mouvements, outre qu’elle fatigue l’âme du public, a cet inconvénient curieux, qu’en prétendant nous rendre la vie dans toute sa réalité, ils nous ôtent tout illusion sur cette réalité même.

Vous pouvez courir tout Molière, tout Regnard, tout Dufressy, tout Dancourt et la plupart des écrivains dramatiques du commencement du dix-huitième siècle, sans y rencontrer une scène qui ne relève pas du ton propre à la comédie. Toutes ne sont pas comiques, toutes au moins sont aimables et riantes. C’est ainsi que vous y trouverez souvent des conversations tendres entre amoureux, des jalousies, des amours contrariés par les parents, mais ces sortes de scènes ne présentent à l’esprit que des images aimables de jeunesse et d’espérance. S’il s’y mêle quelque ombre de tristesse, c’est un chagrin qui n’est pas sans douceur, et le sourire y est tout près des larmes comme dans cet admirable récit des adieux d’Hector à Andromaque, qui est resté l’immortel exemple de ces sentiments mêlés de pluie et de soleil.

Jamais nos écrivains dramatiques de l’ancien temps ne poussent dans la comédie plus loin que cette émotion tempérée et douce, jamais ils ne vont jusqu’à la douleur profonde et vraie. Molière à cet égard est un modèle: il n’y a guère de pièces (sauf les farces) où il n’ait eu l’occasion de glisser dans le pathétique; il s’est toujours discrètement arrêté sur le bord.

C’est même un des torts de notre esprit moderne de nous obstiner à fouiller et à mettre en plein vent le drame que recèle chacune de ces comédies. Vous savez que l’on a cherché à faire de l’Arnolphe de l’École des femmes un être profondément ulcéré, et versant sur son impuissance à se faire aimer des larmes de sang, que l’on a essayé d’assombrir le Tartuffe en le tournant au mélodrame.

Je ne sais si l’on a essayé le même système sur le Misanthrope, rien ne serait pourtant plus facile que de nous apitoyer sur le destin de ce malheureux Alceste, si grand, si bon, si noble, joué par une coquette méprisable qui lui torture le cœur. Soyez tranquilles: si cette interprétation n’a pas encore été tentée, elle le sera un jour. Le goût du temps y porte. Mais ce sera une trahison.

Molière n’a jamais écrit ni voulu écrire que des comédies, qui restassent comédies, d’un bout à l’autre. Et si vous remontez à l’antiquité classique, vous verrez qu’il n’a rien innové. Trouvez-moi dans Plaute un endroit où larmoyer; Térence lui-même se tient dans cette gamme de sentiments tempérés où les larmes, si elles perlent quelquefois au bord des paupières, ne tombent jamais de lœil et s’éclairent aussitôt d’un sourire.

Nous ne savons pas grand’chose de la comédie des Grecs, car les pièces d’Aristophane sont d’un genre particulier et n’ont pas d’équivalent dans les autres littératures. On a longuement disserté sur les comédies de Ménandre; ce que nous en savons de plus positif, c’est encore ce que nous en pouvons voir à travers les imitations de Térence.

Partout le propre de la comédie au beau temps où elle fleurit dans toute sa pureté c’est d’être comique.

Et même aujourd’hui, voyez les pièces vraiment dignes de ce nom depuis celles d’Augier jusqu’à ces merveilleuses bouffonneries du Palais-Royal qu’ont signé les Labiche, les Meilhac et les Gondinet; est-ce qu’il s’y trouve aucun mélange de pathétique? Est-ce que l’unité d’impression est dérangée par un scène larmoyante? Vous imaginez-vous aisément dans Célimare le Bien-aimé une situation qui tire les larmes des yeux? ou dans les Effrontés? ou dans le Testament de César Girodot? ou dans les Faux-Bonshommes? ou dans le Gendre de M. Poirier? ou dans Mercadet.

Je prends à dessein pour exemple des œuvres très diverses de ton et de style pour montrer que cette grande loi de l’unité d’impression, sans laquelle il n’y a pas pour un public de douze cents personnes possibilité d’illusion, a été observé d’instinct par tous les écrivains qui étaient vraiment doués du génie comique.

Et cependant la comédie larmoyante est encore à la mode; elle a eu ses chefs-d’œuvre, et elle a sur la foule quand elle est bien traitée une action incontestable.

On en fait remonter l’invention à La Chaussée, qui fut maudit en son temps pour cette innovation, que tout le monde trouvait malheureuse. Vous vous rappelez toute la fameuse épigramme de Piron qui reconnaît qu’il y avait deux muses comiques: l’une qui marchait au grand soleil, les pieds nus; l’autre qui avait cru devoir chausser le cothurne à l’un de ses pieds et Piron s’écriait gaiement:

Honneur à la belle aux pieds nus
Et nargue de la Chaussée

Mais La Chaussée n’était qu’un faiseur de théories (la pire espèce des mortels ennuyeux qui soit au monde) et je ne crois pas qu’il ait exercé une influence très sensible sur l’art de son temps. L’homme qui a fait cette révolution c’est Diderot et à sa suite Sedaine. A eux deux, ils ont créé ce genre bâtard de la comédie larmoyante ou du drame domestique.

Ce genre-là, quoique adultéré et à mon avis très inférieur, ne répugne cependant à aucun des principes admis par nous. Son essence est de se tenir sur la limite des sentiments moyens. Il n’y a donc pas à proprement parler rupture de l’unité d’impression. C’est quelque chose de doux qui incline avec une égale facilité au rire pâle ou à l’attendrissement béat. Le public n’est donc pas violemment jeté d’un sentiment à l’autre, puisqu’il confine sans cesse à tous les deux.

Ce genre compte dans l’histoire deux chefs-d’œuvre: le premier est le Philosophe sans le savoir, et le second Misanthropie et Repentir qui ont tous deux de leur temps fait couler des torrents de larmes douceâtres. Encore y a-t-il un art exquis et un puissant intérêt d’observation dans la première de ces deux pièces, qui est un joli Greuze. Mais la seconde! C’est un mélange fade de niaiseries souriantes et de larmoyantes sensibleries.

Je ne conteste pas le mérite extrême de l’homme qui a écrit cet ouvrage. Ce n’est pas peu de chose que d’avoir trouvé cette donnée, de l’avoir développée, d’avoir mis la main juste sur les situations par où elle se révèle, d’avoir touché les points les plus sensibles de la fibre lacrymale. Mérite de second ordre, après tout.

Et cela est si vrai, que ce drame, il faut tous les vingt ans, quand on veut le remettre à la scène, en donner une traduction nouvelle en harmonie avec le goût du jour. Les mêmes phrases, sur qui nos grands’mères ont versé des fleuves de larmes feraient éclater de rire leurs arrière-petites-filles. Ce sont les situations qui remuent cette vase de sentimentalité bête qui clapote au fond de tout public peu instruit et le fait jaillir en pleurs.

Il n’y a guère de genre moins estimable et plus facile. Il suffit pour s’en convaincre de voir ceux qui y réussissent. Rappelez-vous le Miss Multon de Belot. Y a-t-il œuvre plus franchement médiocre? Et cependant que de larmes n’a-t-elle pas fait couler?

Les procédés en sont si connus. Tenez, un exemple: poussez sur la scène deux enfants, l’un de dix ans, l’autre de douze; mettez la mère dans une situation à les presser sur son cœur, en s’écriant: O mes enfants! mes pauvres enfants! Toute la salle fondra en larmes, si l’artiste a du talent. Eh bien! après? Y a-t-il rien de plus aisè?

Ah! comme il est plus difficile, ainsi que le constatait Molière, de faire rire les honnêtes gens et de les faire rire d’un bout à l’autre du drame, de ne pas rompre une seule fois l’unité d’impression et, si l’on module vers des sentiments plus tendres, de revenir tout de suite au ton principal! Comme il est plus difficile de prendre les chose tristes et répugnantes de la vie, d’en exprimer le ridicule qu’elles contiennent et de le jeter sur la scène! Mais aussi comme le succès est plus grand et la gloire plus haute!

C’est que l’on est resté fidèle à la grande loi du théâtre, l’unité d’impression, sans laquelle il n’est pas d’illusion forte et longue. C’est que, quoi qu’on en dise, la discussion des genres n’est pas du tout une invention des lettrés; elle a ses racines profondes dans la définition même que nous avons donnée du théâtre et qui nous a été imposée par les faits.

11 septembre 1876.