Page:EB1911 - Volume 08.djvu/498

 DRAMA (literally “action,” from Gr. , act or do), the term applied to those productions of Art which imitate or, to use a more modern term, “represent” action by introducing the personages taking part in them as real, and as employed in the action itself. There are numerous varieties of the drama, differing more or less widely from one another, both as to the objects imitated and as to the means used in the process. But they all agree in the method or manner which is essential to the drama and to dramatic art, namely, imitation in the way of action. The function of all Art being to give pleasure by representation (see ), it is clear that what is distinctive of any one branch or form must be the manner in which this function is performed by it. In the epos, for instance, the method or manner is narrative, and even when Odysseus tells of his action, he is not acting.

 

The first step towards the drama is the assumption of character, whether real or fictitious. It is caused by the desire, inseparable from human nature, to give expression to feelings and ideas. These man expresses not only by sound and gesture, like other animals, and by speech significant by its delivery as well as by its purport, but also by imitation superadded to these. To imitate, says Aristotle, is instinctive in man from his infancy, and no pleasure is more universal than that which is given by imitation. Inasmuch as the aid of some sort of dress or decoration is usually at hand, while the accompaniment of dance or song, or other music, naturally suggests itself, especially on joyous or solemn occasions, we find that this preliminary step is taken among all peoples, however primitive or remote. But it does not follow, as is often assumed, that they possess a drama in germ. Boys playing at soldiers, or men walking in a pageant—a shoemaker’s holiday in ribbons and flowers, or a Shetland sword-dance—none of these is in itself a drama. This is not reached till the imitation or representation extends to action.

An action which is to present itself as such to human minds must enable them to recognize in it a procedure from cause to effect. This of course means, neither that the cause suggested must be the final cause, nor that the result shown forth need pretend to be the ultimate result. We look upon an action as ended when the purpose with which it began is shown to have been gained or frustrated; and we trace the beginning of an action back to the human will that set it on foot—though this will may be in bondage to a higher or stronger will, or to fate, in any or all of its purposes. Without an action in the sense stated—without a plot, in a word—there can be no drama. But the very simplest action will satisfy the dramatic test; a mystery representing the story of Cain and Abel without a deviation from the simple biblical narrative, a farce exhibiting the stalest trick played by designing sobriety upon oblivious drunkenness, may each of them be a complete drama. But even to this point, the imitation of action by action in however crude a form, not all peoples have advanced.

But after this second step has been taken, it only remains for the drama to assume a form regulated by certain literary laws, in order that it may become a branch of dramatic literature. Such a literature, needless to say, only a limited number of nations has come to possess; and, while some are to be found that have, or have had, a drama without a dramatic literature, it is quite conceivable that a nation should continue in possession of the former after having ceased to cultivate the latter. It is self-evident that no drama which forms part of a dramatic literature can ignore the use of speech; and however closely music, dancing and decoration may associate themselves with particular forms or phases of the drama, their aid cannot be more than adventitious. As a matter of fact, the beginnings of dramatic composition are, in the history of such literatures as are well known to us, preceded by the earlier stages in the growth of the lyric and epic forms of poetry, or by one of these at all events; and it is in the continuation of both that the drama in its literary form takes its origin in those instances which lie open to our study.

While the aid of all other arts—even, strictly speaking, the aid of the literary art—is merely an accident, the co-operation of the art of acting is indispensable to that of the drama. The dramatic writer may have reasons for preferring to leave the imagination of his reader to supply the absence of this co-operation; but, though the term “literary drama” is freely used of works kept away from the stage, it is in truth either a misnomer or a self-condemnation. It is true that the actor only temporarily interprets, and sometimes misinterprets, the dramatist, while occasionally he reveals dramatic possibilities in a character or situation which remained hidden from their literary inventor. But this only shows that the courses of the dramatic and the histrionic arts do not run parallel; it does not contradict the fact that their conjunction is, on the one side as well as on the other, indispensable. No drama is more than potentially such till it is acted.

To essay, whether in a brief summary or in more or less elaborate detail, a statement of the main laws of the drama, has often been regarded as a superfluous, not to say, futile effort. But the laws of which it is proposed to give some indication here are not so much those which any particular literature or period has chosen to set up and follow, as those abstracted by criticism, in pursuit of its own free comparative method, from the process that repeats itself in every drama adequately meeting the demands upon it. Aristotle, whom we still justly revere as the originator of the theory of the drama, and thus its great , was, no doubt, in his practical knowledge of it, confined to its Greek examples, yet his object was not to produce another generation of great Attic tragedians, but rather to show how it was by following the necessary laws of their art that the great masters, true to themselves and to their artistic ends, had achieved what they had achieved. Still more distinctly was such the aim of the greatest modern critical writer on the drama, Lessing, whose chief design was to combat false dramatic theories and to overthrow laws demonstrated by him to be artificial inventions, unreal figments. He proved, what before him had only been suspected, that Shakespeare, though in hopeless conflict with certain rules dating from the siècle de Louis XIV, was not in conflict with those laws of the drama which are of its very essence, and that, accordingly, if Shakespeare and the rules in question could not be harmonized, it was only so much the worse for the rules. To illustrate from great works, and expound with their aid, the organic processes of the art to which they belong, is not only among the highest, it is also one of the most useful functions of literary and artistic criticism. Nor is there, in one sense at least, any finality about it. Neither the great authorities on dramatic theory nor the resolute and acute apologists of more or less transitory phases of the drama—Corneille, Dryden and many later successors—have exhausted the statement of the means which the drama has proved, or may prove, capable of employing. The multitude of technical terms and formulae which has gathered round the practice of the most living and the most Protean of arts has at no time seriously interfered with the operation of creative power. On the other hand, no dramaturgic theory has (though the attempt has been often enough made) ever succeeded in giving rise to a single dramatic work of enduring value, unless the creative force was there to animate the form.

It is therefore the operation of this creative force which we are chiefly interested in noting; and its task begins with the beginning of the dramatist’s labours. He must of course start with the choice of a subject; yet it is obvious that the subject is merely the dead material out of which is formed that living something, the action of a play; and it is only in rare instances—far rarer than might at first sight appear—that the subject is as it were self-moulded as a dramatic action. The less experienced a playwright, the more readily will he, as the phrase is, rush at his subject, more especially if it seems to him to possess prima facie dramatic capabilities; and the consequence will be that which usually attends upon a precipitate start. On the other hand, while the quickness of a great dramatist’s apprehension is apt to suggest