Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/411

Rh 

    RAMA (from opdw) signifies action. The term is applied to compositions which imitate action by re presenting the personages introduced in them as real and as employed in the action itself. The varieties of the drama differ more or less widely, both as to the objects imitated and as to the means used in the imitation. But they all agree as to the method or manner which is essential to the dramatic art, viz., imitation in the way of action.

The desire to give expression to feelings and conceptions is inseparable from human nature. Man expresses his thoughts and emotions by gesture and by speech, or by a combination of both ; and these expressions he soon learns in the society of other men and more especially on joyous or solemn occasions to vary or regulate in dance and song. Another way of expression, often combined with the other, is imitation. To imitate, says Aristotle, is instinctive in man from his infancy ; and from imitation all men naturally receive pleasure. Gesture and voice are means of imitation common to all human beings ; and the aid of some sort of dress and decoration is generally within the reach of children, and of the childhood of nations. The assumption of character, whether real or fictitious, is there fore the earliest step towards the drama. But it is only a preliminary step ; nor is the drama itself reached till the imitation extends to action. Action, which man is not wont to attribute (except figuratively) to any but members of his own species and to the superior Being or beings in whose existence and power he believes, implies an operation of the will and an execu tion of its resolution, whether or not amounting to a fulfil ment of its purpose. It implies a procedure from cause to result. Action must therefore present itself to the human mind as having its source in a human or superhuman will. Every imitation of action by action is in germ a drama. But to this point not all nations have advanced.

After this step has been taken, it only remains for the drama to assume a form regulated by literature, of which art it thus becomes a branch. We may then speak of a dramatic literature ; but this only a limited number of nations has come to possess. A nation may, however, have a drama without a dramatic literature ; it may even continue in possession of the former after having ceased to cultivate the latter. On the other hand, both before and after the drama of a nation has assumed a literary. form, it may allow one or more of its adventitious elements music, dancing, decoration predominantly to assert themselves, and thus eventually to bring about the formation of new, or the revival of disused, dramatic species. But as a branch of literature the drama necessarily includes speech among its means of imitation ; and its beginnings as such are accordingly, in the history of all literatures known to us, preceded by the beginnings at least of other forms of poetic composition, the lyric and the epic, or by those of one of these forms at all events. It is in the combination of both that the drama in its literary form takes its origin in the case of all national civilizations in which it has found a place and with which we are more than superficially acquainted.

The art of acting is the indispensable adjunct of the dramatic art, while the aid of all other arts is merely an accident. But though really inseparable from one another, the courses of the dramatic and the histrionic arts do not at all times run parallel. The actor is only the temporary interpreter of the dramatist, though he may occasionally be left to supply some of the proper functions of his text- giver. On his side, the dramatist may in practice, though he cannot in theory, dispense with the actor s interpreta tion ; but though the term literary drama is sometimes used of works kept apart from the stage, it is in truth a misnomer, since, properly speaking, no drama is such till it is acted.

The whole body of the laws and rules of the drama, could it be written down with completeness, would indicate, together with the ends proper to the art, the means by which it is able to accomplish them. But neither the great authorities of dramatic theory an Aristotle or a Lessing nor the resolute apologists of more or less transitory fashions a Corneille or a Dryden have exhausted the exposition 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 art has at no time seriously interfered with the operation of creative power, whose inventive activity the existence of accepted systems has frequently in the Greek drama, for instance, and in the Spanish served to stimulate. On the other hand, it is self-evident that no dramaturgic theory has ever given rise to a single dramatic work of enduring value, unless the creative force was there to animate the form.

The task of this creative force begins with the beginnings of the dramatist s labours. For it is in the dramatic idea that the germ of the action of a play lies not in the subject, which is merely its dead material. The story of the Scottish thane as it stood written in the chronicle, is the subject, not the action, of Macbeth. To convert a subject whatever its kind or source into the action or fable of a play is the primary task, which in its progressive development becomes the entire task, of the dramatist ; and though the conception may expand or modify itself wi r .h the execution, yet upon the former the latter depends. The range of subjects open to a dramatist may be wide as the world itself, or it may be limited by usage, by imperious fashion, by the tastes and tendencies of a nation or an age, by the author s own range of sympathies, by a thousand restrictions of an historical, moral, or sesthetical origin ; it may be virtually confined (as with the earlier Greek tragedians) to a body of legend, or (as with the English comedians of the llestoration) to the social experiences of a particular epoch. But in all cases the transformation of the subject into the action is equally indispensable ; and an imperfect transformation is (as in the old Chronicle Histories) the work of a rude, or (as in ninety- nine out of a hundred modern plays &quot; founded upon fact &quot;) that of a careless method of dramatic production.

What, then, are the laws which determine the nature of all actions properly such, however they may vary either in subjects or in form? In the first place, a dramatic action must possess unity and this requirement at once distin guishes it from the subject which has suggested its idea. The events of real life, the facts of history, the incidents of narrative fiction, are like the waves of a ceaseless flood ; that which binds a group or body of them into a single action is the bond of the dramatic idea, and this it is which the dramatist has to supply. Within the limits of a dramatic action all its parts claim to be connected together as contributions to a single stream ; and upon the degree in which they are true to this purpose their primary dramatic significance depends. The unity of action which a drama should possess, therefore, means that everything in it should form a link in a single chain of cause and effect. This law is incumbent upon every kind of drama alike upon the tragedy which solves the problems of a life, 