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dramatic may rouse the same, allied, or even contrasting emotions in an onlooker.

Nor need the emotion roused in an audience by actor or author be exactly the same in amount. The actress who abandons herself to the emotions of the part she is playing soon exhausts her nervous vitality. It would be the same if audiences listening to the tragic were permitted to feel the scenes as keenly as the figures of the story. On the other hand, in some cases, if the comic figure on the stage felt his comicality as strongly as the audience which is speechless with laughter, he could not go on, and the scene would fail. Evidently, an audience may be made, as the dramatist wills, to feel more or less emotion than the characters of the play. That it is duplication of emotion to the same, a less, or a greater extent or the creation of contrasting emotion which underlies all drama, from melodrama, riotous farce and even burlesque to high-comedy and tragedy, must be firmly grasped if a would-be dramatist is to steer his way clearly through the many existing and confusing definitions of dramatic. For instance, Brunetière said, "Drama is the representation of the will of man in contrast to the mysterious powers of natural forces which limit and belittle us; it is one of us thrown living upon the stage, there to struggle against fatality, against social law, against one of his fellow mortals, against himself, if need be, against the emotions, the interests, the prejudices, the folly, the malevolence of those around him." That is, by this definition, conflict is central in drama. But we know that in recent drama particularly, the moral drifter has many a time aroused our sympathy. Surely inertness, supineness, stupidity, and even torpor may be made to excite emotion in an audience. Conflict covers a large part of drama but not all of it.

Mr. William Archer, in his Play-Making, declares that

1 Etudes Critiques, vol. vii, p. 207.

"a crisis" is the central matter in drama, but one immediately wishes to know what constitutes a crisis, and we have defined without defining. When he says elsewhere that that is dramatic which "by representation of imaginary personages is capable of interesting an average audience assembled in a theatre," he almost hits the truth. If we rephrase this definition: "That is dramatic which by representation of imaginary personages interests, through its emotions, an average audience assembled in a theatre," we have a definition which will better stand testing.

Is all dramatic material, theatric? No, for theatric does not necessarily mean sensational, melodramatic, artificial. It should mean, and it will be so used in this book, adapted for the purpose of the theatre. Certainly all dramatic material, that is, material which arouses or may be made to arouse emotion, is not fitted for use in the theatre when first it comes to the hand of the dramatist. Undeniably, the famous revivalists, Moody, J. B. Gough, Billy Sunday, have worked from emotions to emotions; that is, they have been dramatic. Intentionally, feeling themselves justified by the ends obtained, they have, too, been theatric in the poor and popular sense of the word, namely, exaggerated, melodramatic, sensational. Yet theatric in the best sense of the word these highly emotional speakers, who have swept audiences out of all self-control, have not been. They worked as speakers, not as playwrights. Though they sometimes acted admirably, what they presented was in no sense a play. To accomplish in play form what they accomplished as speakers, that is, to make the material properly theatric, would have required an entire reworking. From all this it follows that even material so emotional in its nature as to be genuinely dramatic may need careful reworking if it is to succeed as a play, that is, if it is to become properly theatric. Drama, then, is pres

1 Play-Making, p. 48. William Archer. Small, Maynard & Co., Boston.

entation of an individual or group of individuals so as to move an audience to responsive emotion of the kind desired by the dramatist and to the amount required. This response must be gained under the conditions which a dramatist finds or develops in a theatre; that is, dramatic material must be made theatric in the right sense of the word before it can become drama.

To summarize: accurately conveyed emotion is the great fundamental in all good drama. It is conveyed by action, characterization, and dialogue. It must be conveyed in a space of time, usually not exceeding two hours and a half, and under the existing physical conditions of the stage, or with such changes as the dramatist may bring about in them. It must be conveyed, not directly through the author, but indirectly through the actors. In order that the dramatic may become theatric in the right sense of the word, the dramatic must be made to meet all these conditions successfully. These conditions affect action, characterization, and dialogue. A dramatist must study the ways in which the dramatic has been and may be made theatric: that is what technique means.

CHAPTER III

FROM SUBJECT TO PLOT. CLEARING THE WAY

A PLAY may start from almost anything: a detached thought that flashes through the mind; a theory of conduct or of art which one firmly believes or wishes only to examine; a bit of dialogue overheard or imagined; a setting, real or imagined, which creates emotion in the observer; a perfectly detached scene, the antecedents and consequences of which are as yet unknown; a figure glimpsed in a crowd which for some reason arrests the attention of the dramatist, or a figure closely studied; a contrast or similarity between two people or conditions of life; a mere incident — noted in a newspaper or book, heard in idle talk, or observed; or a story, told only in the barest outlines or with the utmost detail. "How do the ideas underlying plays come into being? Under the most varying conditions. Most often you cannot tell exactly how. At the outset you waste much time hunting for a subject, then suddenly one day, when you are in your study or even in the street, you bring up with a start, for you have found something. The piece is in sight. At first there is only an impression, an image of the brain that wholly defies words. If you were to write out exactly what you feel at the moment - provided that were at all possible - it would be exceedingly difficult to indicate its attractiveness. The situation is similar to that when you dream that you have discovered an idea of profound significance; on awaking you write it down; and on rereading perceive that it is commonplace or stale. Then you follow up the idea; it tries to escape, and when captured at last, still resists, ceaselessly changing form. You wish to write a comedy; the idea cries, 'Make a tragedy

of me, or a story-play.' At last, after a struggle you master the idea." 1

Back of La Haine of Sardou was the detached thought or query: "Under what circumstances will the profound charity of woman show itself in the most striking manner? In the preface to La Haine, Sardou has told how his plays revealed themselves to him. "The problem is invariable. It appears as a kind of equation from which the unknown quantity must be found. The problem gives me no peace till I have found the answer.""2 Maeterlinck wrote several of his earlier plays, The Intruder, Princess Maleine, The Blind, to demonstrate the truth of two artistic theories of his: that what would seem to most theatre-goers of the time inaction might be made highly dramatic, and that partial or complete repetition of a phrase may have great emotional effect. Magda (Heimat) of Sudermann was written to illustrate the possible inherent tragedy of Magda's words: "Show them [people thoroughly sincere and honest but limited in experience and outlook] that beyond their narrow virtues there may be something true and good." In Le Fils Naturel of Dumas the younger, the illegitimate son, till late in the play, believes his father to be his uncle. "The logical development would seem to be obvious: father and son falling into each other's arms. Dumas, on the contrary, arranged that the son should not take the family name, and that the play should end with the following dialogue:

The Father. You will surely permit me, when we are alone together, to call you my son.

The Son. Yes, uncle.

It seems that Montigny, Director of the Gymnase Theatre, was shocked by the frigidity of this dénouement. He said to

1 Auteurs Dramatiques, Pailleron. A. Binet and J. Passey. L'Année Psychologique, 1894, pp. 98-99.

2 Sardou and the Sardou Plays, p. 127. Jerome A. Hart. J. B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia.

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