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 PN 2039 
 
 THE JOY OF THE 
 
 ATRE 
 
Class ?N 2 039 
 
 Book •Sts.'L 
 
 Copyright N° 
 
 COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 
 
FELLOWSHIP BOOKS 
 
 hEte^GvfJMani Stratton 
 
 THE JOY OF THE 
 THEATRE 
 
 COPYRIGHT 1913 
 
 BY e. p. DUTTON & CO. 
 
 t 
 

 THE JOY OF THE 
 THEATRE 
 
 13t£ GiWert Cannon 
 
 L$dttitm^Gm£antiMw)b 
 
 DCI.A350437 
 
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 IN writing of the theatre of our time he 
 who would choose such a title might 
 fairly be suspected of irony, for in what 
 theatre in England or the English-speaking 
 world shall joy be found? Yet a sturdy hope 
 weaves the two words into one sentence on 
 the threshold of a book, that they may meet 
 again in men's minds and, in due course, bring 
 the things themselves together. Men create 
 everything in their own image and always get 
 exactly what they deserve, neither more nor 
 less. The sins of the fathers are visited upon 
 the children in art as in everything else, and 
 the English nation deserves the English 
 
 i % theatre. 
 
theatre. That, however, is no reason why 
 such a theatre should be endured, and there 
 are signs that it will not much longer be 
 suffered to continue unchanged. All over the 
 world it is being discovered that what was 
 good enough for the fathers is not good enough 
 for the children, and a generation is springing 
 into manhood which demands the right to 
 examine its heritage and to discard everything 
 that it finds to be worthless, useless and injuri- 
 ous. This generation is discovering that it 
 is possible to rebel against the sins of its for- 
 bears and it is rebelling with all its might. 
 If in the delighted excitement of the struggle 
 it rebels also against their virtues, experience 
 will bring wisdom and keener perception, and 
 the very violence of the revolt will clear the 
 air and leave the next generation and the next 
 and the next more free for constructive 
 action. Meanwhile there has been and is per- 
 ception enough to see that the life of men can- 
 not be changed until a change has been 
 wrought in their minds, and to bring this about 
 2 
 
there is no other instrument than art. Re- 
 ligion without art is like a ship without sails. 
 Education is the preparation of the human 
 mind for the understanding of art and, 
 through art, of life. Art is devised for the 
 correction of those errors into which a man's 
 senses lead him, errors which, uncorrected, 
 gather into a crust upon his soul and prevent 
 his entering into communication with his 
 fellow-men. Good art dissolves such errors; 
 bad art multiplies them. Bad art has always 
 been used as an escape from life; good art 
 admits of no escape and forces a man to see 
 himself in a glass clearly. A bad man likes 
 bad art, for good art shows him to himself as 
 grotesque, and he flies from the reflection and 
 does his best to procure the suppression of the 
 artist, and fees unscrupulous men to show him 
 a lying and flattering reflection. Fortunately 
 there are no absolutely bad men, and the great 
 secret society of the artists, the most powerful 
 secret society in the world, because it is open 
 and the master of time and death, has been 
 3 ^s able 
 
able wisely and surely to organize so that 
 good art survives, while bad art is borne away 
 on the backward movement of time. There 
 is a constant succession of men bad enough — 
 snobs, arrivists, speculators, egoists — to hold 
 up the lying mirror of bad art, but ever the 
 true mirror of good art wins more to turn to it 
 and to see, as they gaze, all that they thought 
 hash and pitiless and cruel melt away to leave 
 an image of pure beauty. This change is not 
 in the mirror but in the minds of those who 
 look, and once it has been brought about, they 
 can no more fall back into those errors of the 
 senses, towards deliverance from which the 
 whole activity of mankind has from the very 
 beginning been directed, and they move into 
 the vanguard of the march towards the im- 
 mortality of the free spirit of man. The con- 
 structive work of the world is directed by the 
 artists. Scientists, inventors, engineers, manu- 
 facturers, organizers, even wholesale grocers, 
 do their bidding, though they have no taste 
 for poetry or painting or music or sculpture 
 4 
 
and believe that the laws which govern their 
 success or failure are purely economic. The 
 business is always the outcome of the dream. 
 % There was bound to come a point in human 
 progress when the dream and the business 
 should of moral necessity begin to approach 
 each other more nearly, when such a degree of 
 material liberty should be reached as would 
 be intolerably empty without its complement 
 of spiritual liberty, without, that is, the joy 
 which is the outcome of those two liberties. 
 It is of small immediate consequence to the 
 man who is the slave of the business whether 
 the dream be true or no. He had liefer be 
 drugged with lies than made to see and feel 
 his slavery, be it in poverty or in wealth. So 
 long as a man is the victim of the tyranny of 
 the necessary material work of the world, he 
 cannot have the energy to desire the truth, and 
 to appease the restricted and small appetite 
 of his mind the sweetmeats of untruth will 
 seem to suffice, though such debauchery must 
 bring its inevitable consequence of atrophy 
 5 ^s and 
 
and spiritual death. On the other hand it is 
 rarely that the diseased appetite is so far gone 
 as to be beyond cure, and, outside the deliber- 
 ate exploiters of humanity, there can be very 
 few men who are impervious to the truth of 
 art and the truth of life. 
 $K Now, for the organization of the forces 
 of truth there is one machine to hand, the 
 theatre, in which, properly controlled, all the 
 arts can find the freedom and the strength of 
 co-operation. There is no other machine. 
 The Churches long ago adopted the methods 
 of the theatre in the performance of a series 
 of symbolic plays, in which audience and 
 actors, or congregation and priests, collabo- 
 rate in worship of the Universal Presence. 
 These performances, these symbolic plays, 
 however, have become poisoned with dogma 
 mechanically and unintelligently repeated, 
 politics crystallized and formulated, and fixed 
 ethical ideas. They have been debased, and 
 not the Universal Presence but the symbol 
 is worshipped, and, for long enough, there has 
 6 
 
been no room in the Church for art, and such 
 art as has been able to creep in has been 
 screwed down to fit the Church's formula. 
 *% Neither for long enough, and for similar 
 reasons, has there been room for art in the 
 theatre, where also the machinery consists of 
 collaboration between audience and perform- 
 ers in worship, i. e. the creation of joy in the 
 Universal Presence. In the theatre as in the 
 Church the machinery is abused, and not joy, 
 but animal laughter or sentimental tears only 
 are created. The use of the machinery of 
 both Church and theatre is inartistic and 
 therefore irreligious. The one begets un- 
 wholesome fear and dread, the other frivolity 
 and a spirit of mockery; and fear and mockery 
 make of human beings an easy prey to the 
 forces of evil. 
 
 % In the present state of society everybody, 
 except a few artists, is both exploiter and 
 exploited, so that the energy of the human 
 race runs in a vicious circle and is hardly at all 
 productive of sound achievement; profits are 
 7 % estimated 
 
estimated only in terms of money and every 
 standard is falsified. The majority of men 
 are mimetic and slaves, where they should be 
 free and creative of love, joy, affection and 
 friendship, of which great things, in their 
 fight against evil, art is the by-product and 
 undying memorial. The standards natural to 
 mankind, the standards of our inborn joy, can 
 only be restored by the artists, and by the 
 artists in co-operation and in possession of 
 an integral part of the social machine — either 
 the Church or the theatre, or both. Social 
 evolution follows the evolution of art. 
 Hitherto it has followed at a distance, at the 
 distance of several generations; but a great 
 change has come over the world. Hopes, be- 
 liefs, prejudices, ideas, that once sufficed for 
 a whole generation, are now exhausted in five 
 years. Men are excited, restless, busy, per- 
 turbed, certain of new conquests, yet impatient 
 to appraise their value. We have entered the 
 Promised Land. The great men of the Vic- 
 torian Age had a vision of it from Mount 
 
Nebo. We are still too thrilled with the de- 
 light and novelty of it all. We have re- 
 nounced their vision and are occupied with 
 detail, with the gardens, and the vineyards, 
 and the partition of the land; we are bewil- 
 dered too to find that the processes of our exist- 
 ence are going on unchanged, bringing the 
 same satisfactions and the same complications, 
 the same joys and sorrows, as in the wilderness. 
 We had hoped to find ourselves different and 
 lo! we are the same, only with a more urgent 
 need of authority, a more imperative and 
 crushing desire to discover the truth of our- 
 selves, the extent of our capacity, and our 
 exact relation to the powers that brought us to 
 such might and dominion. We are being 
 forced to admit the authority and the divine 
 truth of art, to perceive that the inspiration of 
 Beethoven, for instance, is no less authentic 
 than that of Jesus of Nazareth and His 
 Apostles. In such necessity, we can no longer 
 be content with a social evolution remotely de- 
 pendent upon the evolution of art through the 
 o % scattered 
 
scattered efforts of artists working in isolation 
 and wretchedness. We are forced to turn to 
 them for joy and enlightenment and disci- 
 pline, for all that feeds and sustains our imag- 
 ination. It is not enough for us to turn 
 individually, each man seeking out this book 
 or that picture. We live in herds; our joy 
 must be collective, and collectively we must 
 turn to those men in whom joy is strongest, 
 those men who have the art to share their joy 
 with us. 
 
 % This desire, this impulse of ours, will meet 
 the desire and the impulse of the artists in the 
 theatre and we shall make of it a place of 
 worship, of worship delightful and amusing 
 and joyous and various, so that it will become 
 the very heart and centre of human society, 
 from which all our activities will radiate. 
 Just as the heart renews and purifies the blood, 
 so will the theatre renew and purify human 
 energy. Pure in its source, human energy is 
 contaminated and clogged by fixed ideas, the 
 debased formulae of the Church, with its 
 10 
 
exaltation of fear, and the horrid, mocking 
 spirit of bad art, and therefore all its products 
 are impure. There is nothing invented or 
 contrived for the well-being of human kind 
 but it is instantly abused. Politicians, philos- 
 ophers, and reformers are for ever trying to 
 force systems of thought, of social existence, 
 of economics, upon human life from without, 
 only to see them absorbed and swept along by 
 the circular stream of exploitation. Purifica- 
 tion can only come from within. 
 
 II 
 
 % IT is the artists who have led us to this 
 Promised Land of the twentieth century, the 
 artists who have landed us in this chaos where- 
 in heatedly we talk of wars and industrial 
 strife and social injustice, the artists who step 
 by step have dragged us up from brutal ac- 
 ceptance of the world's extremities of heat and 
 cold and hunger and thirst, to the confused 
 civilization which is the delight of the eco- 
 nomic mind. There is no reason to doubt 
 ii ^3 that 
 
that they will lead us further yet and give us 
 the reality rather than the dream of human 
 brotherhood. In the meantime we have the 
 right to ask and we do ask for as much fun by 
 the way as can be procured. We look to the 
 artists not only for vision but for amusement. 
 We are so eager for it that we are over-tolerant 
 and suffer the charlatan to deceive us rather 
 than discard anything that is presented to us 
 for delight. The food of our minds is more 
 adulterated than the food of our bodies. Our 
 large acceptivity makes it always difficult for 
 the artist to establish his ascendancy over us, 
 but only so and not otherwise can the artist 
 obtain the fierce conflict within himself which 
 shall forge his dream and his delight into such 
 a form that it shall pass into the world's cur- 
 rency. Once his ascendancy is established we 
 accept the artist's vision and have it stated and 
 restated in a thousand different forms by 
 minor artists and ephemeral amuseurs until, 
 in the course of social evolution, we outgrow 
 it, and turn to a vision greater still, or, at least, 
 12 
 
to a vision set forth in terms more intelligible 
 to our new temper. 
 
 % We have outgrown the vision by which 
 we lived in the wilderness. We are looking 
 for new vision in everything. As we have 
 found none in the theatre, it has lost its im- 
 portance for us, even as a place of light amuse- 
 ment. The anarchy of the theatre has been 
 the opportunity of the music-hall, which, dur- 
 ing the last ten years, has been organized, 
 rudely but generously, so that it has become, 
 after a fashion, the vehicle of expression of 
 the untempered genius of the race. All the 
 best and most spontaneous acting in England 
 is to be found in the music-hall, where the 
 people can see the wonder of their own de- 
 light in material things. You shall see the 
 First and Second Grave-digger in the music- 
 halls, but in that air Hamlet cannot breathe. 
 There is no space for brooding here, nor in 
 these vast vulgar palaces can the spirit of 
 tragedy or the spirit of comedy have its dwell- 
 ing. It is the renown more than the art of 
 13 tifc Sarah 
 
Sarah Bernhardt that fills the Coliseum. An 
 audience is easily hypnotized by a reputation, 
 as easily as the possessor of it. To the music- 
 hall the people bring all their naive credulity, 
 all their prejudice, all their superstition, and 
 these receive good measure of fun and pathos' 
 pressed down and brimming over. 
 ^t The theatre cannot compete with the music- 
 hall. It must give its audiences finer fare, 
 the food without which the race and its civil- 
 ization must perish, the food of the imagi- 
 nation. The imagination's appetite is not 
 touched by the music-hall. It is the privilege 
 of refined and disciplined artists to satisfy it. 
 It is the highest of all human privileges, for, 
 without imagination, a man cannot live; he 
 can only play at living, a game which, as it 
 may last for sixty years, is apt to become tedi- 
 ous and to lead to agonies of satiety, exhaustion 
 and profound dissatisfaction. The theatre, 
 like the music-hall, must give pleasure, but a 
 finer, a higher, and a keener pleasure. It has 
 only the same machinery to hand — that can 
 
be developed but not altered — but it must use 
 it with more subtlety and with greater skill 
 and cunning: it must be under the control of 
 finer brains. To draw a rough distinction — 
 the machinery of the music-hall may use its 
 men, but the men of the theatre must use its 
 machinery. The music-hall asks for no 
 vision in its artists, who will remain carica- 
 turists ; the theatre, if it is to live, must have 
 the service of men with vision, men with the 
 power beautifully to share their vision with 
 their audiences, whose spirit during the per- 
 formance will be set free by the dissolution 
 of their prejudices and superstitions, led for 
 the space of a few hours to forgetfulness of 
 self and sent back into life enriched by imag- 
 inative experience, in courage renewed, and 
 therefore more capable of facing and grap- 
 pling with life's responsibilities. In this 
 sharing in a vision of beauty, in this communal 
 confirmation of the instinctive knowledge of 
 • truth that lies deep in the heart of every 
 human being, consists the joy of the theatre. 
 15 %It 
 
It is this joy that, most often subconsciously, 
 every unspoiled and unsophisticated playgoer 
 looks for, hopes for, and thrills to as he settles 
 in his seat, and already, before the curtain 
 rises, begins, out of the information supplied 
 on the programme, to create for himself the 
 wonderland story in which marvellously he is 
 to live and sutler and rejoice. It is this joy 
 that for one reason or another — (a study of 
 the newspapers will supply them) — he is most 
 often denied either wholly or in part. If the 
 theatre is a place of art, as not even the most 
 fashionable actor dares deny that it should be, 
 it is its function to present a picture, as it were, 
 in the round, not of that life which the play- 
 goer can see in the streets or the law-courts or 
 his own or his friends' houses, but an abstrac- 
 tion, a sublimation of life, which shall delight 
 him first of all by intensely amusing him and 
 then, by confirming his instinctive knowledge 
 of life, giving the lie to the impression he has 
 of it through his senses and his limited capac- 
 ity for experience. — (The average man's 
 16 
 
existence does not express his vitality; the 
 artist furnishes him with another sphere in 
 which to live, in which also to correct the 
 mischances and distortions of his mind.) — 
 The theatre must not be like "life": it must 
 be like the theatre, that is, like the ideal the- 
 atre, or as near to it as the limitations of the 
 artists in control of it will allow. In any case 
 it should always transcend the limitations of 
 its audience. 
 
 Ill 
 
 % IT is often objected that the theatre cannot 
 have the standards of the other arts since in 
 its collective appeal it is dependent for its 
 existence upon the capricious approbation of 
 the public, and that it is unreasonable to ex- 
 pect any large body of men to understand and 
 appreciate a work of art until it is a little 
 swathed about with tradition and toned down 
 with the dust of time. But it is precisely in 
 the theatre that a work of art can be most 
 nearly approached by the ordinary mind, be- 
 17 % cause 
 
cause it is most fondly familiar with the 
 theatre and is there fortified by the presence 
 of other ordinary minds all concentrated on 
 the same object. For this reason, if the artist's 
 vision be translated into terms of the theatre, 
 into a fable, into symbols capable of treat- 
 ment by the machinery of the theatre there 
 will be nothing or little in it that cannot be 
 apprehended through the emotional response 
 of the audience. For the artist of the theatre 
 the essential is that he should trust his audi- 
 ence, as Shakespeare trusted his, and as smaller 
 writers for the stage do not trust theirs. It is 
 only in such trust that drama in all its degrees 
 and forms, from tragedy down to farce and 
 burlesque, can be created; without it there 
 can be nothing but the ingenious manipulation 
 of tricks and common-form situations and 
 characters, eked out with resplendent trim- 
 mings, as in one school in the modern theatre, 
 or, as in another, with exposition of irrelevant 
 ideas or criticisms of the accidental and pass- 
 ing phenomena of existence. In either case 
 18 
 
there must be in the audience so dealt with a 
 sense of disproportion, for the machinery of 
 the theatre, the vitality and mental energy in 
 an audience, are much too great to be used for 
 anything save the purposes of drama, which is 
 the creation of another life beyond life and 
 yet of it, informing it, casting back a radiance 
 upon it and revealing, if not its purpose, at 
 least its force and intensity. Failing, under 
 pressure of divers necessities, to perceive this 
 purpose, or to move towards it, the directors 
 of the modern theatres have come to a sort of 
 compact with their indulgent and ever-chang- 
 ing public, that the theatre shall be used only 
 for laughter, in season and out. That were 
 well enough if such laughter were provoked 
 honestly and in sheer fun, but in the decadent 
 theatre of London, New York and Paris real 
 fun is far to seek and there is a grim trade in 
 laughter, in joyless mirth, relieved only here 
 and there by the native drollery of some indi- 
 vidual performer, who, relying solely upon 
 his own personality, fighting against the soul- 
 19 %less 
 
less organization which brings him into the 
 public view, is soon exhausted and brought 
 either to impotence or to a dull conventional- 
 ization of his humour. And so it is with all 
 talent, of actors and dramatists alike; it is 
 sacrificed to this base compact and trade in 
 laughter. And yet there comes to the theatre 
 a succession of new generations of playgoers, 
 audiences potentially fine and alert, bringing 
 to their pleasure a naive and almost joyous 
 quality, believing in the heroes and heroines, 
 being hypnotized by the charm and glitter of 
 the machinery and not at all critical of the use 
 of it that they find, finally suffering disillusion 
 and turning away to the music-hall and to 
 literature and the other arts. Not yet has 
 there arisen in the theatre an artist or a band 
 of artists strong enough to meet a new genera- 
 tion of playgoers and to whip their enthusiasm 
 and delight, their desire for joy into joy, upon 
 the wave of which both can be carried to 
 higher and yet higher and more magnificent 
 achievement. Not yet. . . . But there is con- 
 20 
 
tinual effort and continual striving, a steady 
 stream of hope and desire. More ; there is in 
 many hearts and minds the faith that such a 
 thing will be, faith that, once springing forth 
 in mind and heart, never yet failed to find its 
 way into the world of form. We are only at 
 the beginning. We have only just entered the 
 new region of the mind. Consider our habits, 
 how we live. Rightly or wrongly — (and 
 when all is told, will it not be seen to be 
 right?) — we have gathered ourselves into 
 great cities and huge companies of men, where 
 we live under a constant stress and pressure 
 of circumstances and hurried human contact, 
 and we are engaged, each of us, in work so 
 specialized that we cannot perceive its effect 
 upon the whole, or, indeed, its effect upon our 
 own existence, save that it procures us bread 
 and living; we have made it easy to pass out 
 of these cities, to move from one to the other, 
 and we have established communications with 
 all parts of the world; our life reacts upon 
 the lives of the nations our neighbours, upon 
 21 %the 
 
the lives of nations once thought of dimly as 
 barbarians, and therefore hardly kin with us 
 at all; each day the new facts, the events of 
 the world are presented to us; the life of the 
 individual touches the life of humanity at so 
 many points as to make selection and action 
 well-nigh impossible except through habit and 
 under the constraint of the general action. 
 Such an existence has produced excitement, a 
 desire to know more, an appreciation of the 
 relation of the individual to the race, and an 
 eagerness for better fellowship — in fine, curi- 
 osity; instinct urging every individual to for- 
 tify himself for the larger life which dimly he 
 perceives to be opening up before him. In- 
 stinct lands the individual in strange places, 
 but always he is seeking one thing only — 
 vitality, with which to withstand the strain of 
 his existence. He is seeking genius, and he 
 welcomes everything that helps or seems to 
 help him to understand it and make some of 
 it his own. There is professorial authority 
 for saying that no man destitute of genius 
 
 22 
 
could live for a day. It should not be neces- 
 sary to back such a statement with authority, 
 professorial or other, so evident is its truth 
 from each man's knowledge of himself. Yet 
 the word "genius" has been so misappropriated 
 and abused by quacks and charlatans that the 
 busy layman starts from it, for he is "once bit- 
 ten, twice shy" and is fearful of spontaneity 
 in all its forms, fearful, while, in spite of 
 himself, he craves for it. "Genius is spon- 
 taneity, the life of the soul asserting itself 
 triumphantly in the midst of dead things." 
 Vision is as much a natural function of man 
 as digestion; vision is that function which 
 raises a man above the rest of creation, and, if 
 it be not exercised, produces the most disas- 
 trous results upon the health of body and mind. 
 Artists are those who, by fidelity to their 
 genius, their vision, preserve their health, and, 
 in so doing, help to maintain the health of the 
 body politic and give it a standard of health. 
 An artist is not a creature apart; he is a hu- 
 man being who is human. He lives by cour- 
 23 %age 
 
age where others live by fear. His free 
 genius — free in articulation — sounds the cry 
 of "Onward! Upward!" to the stifled and over- 
 laid genius in common men. 
 4% Above all things men desire health. Only 
 genius can give it them. The peasant, the 
 savage existence affords no sufficient expres- 
 sion for a man's power of life or his religious 
 aspiration. Genius has led him to civiliza- 
 tion, made life a finer instrument for the ex- 
 pression of the reality from which it springs, 
 but has not yet taught him how to use it, how 
 even to use that which he has so that he may 
 not be defeated by that which he shall have 
 hereafter, or how to make his own small life 
 harmonious with the great Being of which it 
 is a part. 
 
 $ts Ordinary men are deluged day by day with 
 facts. They need a touchstone which can en- 
 dow them with meaning, kindle them, make 
 them pregnant with significance for each man 
 according to his needs. To such a state of 
 mind no man can be brought except in that 
 24 
 
mood and condition of pleasure which de- 
 lights him into receptivity and pure accept- 
 ance, that mood in which he feels "smil- 
 ingly from top to toe," an easy, delicious, 
 soaring ecstasy. That he can only come by 
 under the powerful and rare domination of 
 art, and such domination is most easily estab- 
 lished over him in the theatre where he is, so 
 to speak, abstracted from his everyday exist- 
 ence and forced to concentrate his mind and 
 his senses upon one object. 
 $k Without knowing it, the modern impulse 
 of exfoliation is taking men towards the 
 theatre. Faith will not admit of doubt that, 
 when they come to it, they will find it equipped 
 and all prepared to give them the joy that they 
 have come to seek. 
 
 % Life, that succession of opportunities, has 
 brought us to a greater opportunity than has 
 ever been offered to us before. We shall not 
 fail in it or to turn it to account, though we 
 may fail in much that we seem to perceive in 
 our excited dreams, for always we cast our 
 25 % thoughts 
 
thoughts beyond what we can perform, be- 
 yond what it is meet that we should do. Ever 
 at the extremity of our thoughts there lies a 
 thought that we cannot interpret, though, with- 
 out its light, our own do but intensify our 
 darkness. Only through the refinement and 
 discipline of our thoughts in art can we ap- 
 proach it. In the effort to procure this refine- 
 ment and this discipline lies the health that all 
 men desire. 
 
 IV 
 % ASSUMING then that the tremendous 
 energy now manifesting itself in human affairs 
 is purposeful, assuming that we are something 
 more than the victims of a blind force in 
 eruption, that we are capable of translating 
 into our own terms something at least of the 
 intentions of the Contriver of the Universe, 
 and have organized the humbler processes of 
 life in order that we may live it with more 
 profit to ourselves and greater usefulness to 
 the general plan of which we are and must 
 26 
 
ever remain in ignorance; assuming that in 
 this impulse there is evidence of a general 
 desire in the civilized world to use the theatre 
 as a place of delight and harmony and order, 
 what is there being done in the theatre 
 to meet that desire? If the audiences are 
 emerging, are the artists prepared? Are they 
 preparing? Is the potential desire of the au- 
 diences attaining consciousness in them? . . . 
 The answer to all these questions is, I think, 
 that in the few great dramatists of genius, 
 in Shakespeare, Sophocles, Euripides, Aris- 
 tophanes, Ibsen, Moliere, Lope da Vega, 
 Tschekov, Synge, consciousness has been 
 reached and expressed in form, while the 
 theatre has always been so disorganized as 
 never to give the work of any of them full 
 value in performance. For generations now 
 in his own country the plays of Shakespeare 
 have been made as dull as his own Polonius ; 
 under Irving a pageant with a strange, 
 interesting, and romantic figure wandering 
 through it; under his followers and imitators, 
 27 tifca 
 
a pageant. It is probable that the English 
 theatre will not be able to exercise its real 
 function until these, the greatest plays in the 
 world, are released from the bad tradition 
 with which they are encrusted, and already, 
 under pressure from Russia and Germany, 
 efforts are being made in London towards 
 this achievement, and as the dramatist is liber- 
 ated, so will the actor be thrust from the place 
 he has usurped in the theatre's economy, from 
 which he has checked and repressed all de- 
 velopment even in his own branch of the art. 
 In the theatre the interpreters have dominated 
 the creators to such an extent that really crea- 
 tive men have not been suffered to enter it 
 and for many years now only those men have 
 written plays who have been content to trim 
 their work to fit the personal and technical 
 limitations of the modish actors of the mo- 
 ment, with the result that the actors have be- 
 come indolent and incapable of loyalty even 
 to those writers whom they have consented to 
 employ. The best acting is that which most 
 28 
 
loyally serves the dramatist and the better the 
 dramatist the better will the acting be. 
 ^fe The indolence of the actor has brought 
 about decay and an inevitable reaction, from 
 which has arisen a functionary called the pro- 
 ducer, whose duty it is to impose discipline 
 upon the performance of the play, to grasp the 
 play's imaginative idea and rhythm and to see 
 to it that nothing in the work of actors or de- 
 signers impedes its free action upon the minds 
 of the audience. Unfortunately so many 
 modern plays have neither imaginative idea 
 nor rhythm that the producer is often forced 
 to concern himself with elaboration of detail 
 and the contrivance of "business" or mechan- 
 ical devices to disguise the poverty of the ac- 
 tion. The producer should simplify; under 
 modern conditions, as a rule, he does but com- 
 plicate by sacrificing the will of the dramatist 
 to the will of the actors, or, again, where the 
 producer becomes sufficiently powerful, he 
 subordinates the will of both dramatist and 
 actor to his own conception and concentrates, 
 29 %oa 
 
on spectacle. It is conceivable that the pro- 
 ducer himself might be a dramatist, capable 
 of using the elements of the art of the theatre 
 ■ — sound, light, and movement — to create a 
 drama, employing his actors only as puppets 
 and dispensing with the written drama alto- 
 gether. It is conceivable, it is desirable, and 
 there is no reason why such a drama should not 
 coexist with the drama that is conceived and 
 elaborated in the study and translated into 
 terms of the theatre through the work of pro- 
 ducer, actors and decorators. In the house 
 of art there are many mansions and there is 
 room for every kind of work, for every com- 
 bination of author, producer and actor, except 
 that which delivers the theatre into the hands 
 of the actor, and on condition that every effort 
 be directed towards service of the dramatic 
 idea. Where the producer dispenses with the 
 dramatist, it is, or should be, only because he 
 himself is a dramatist; but such a producer 
 will be very rare. It might be said that an 
 actor like Irving was his own dramatist and 
 30 
 
there would be some truth in it. Every good 
 music-hall comedian — Mr. Harry Lauder or 
 Mr. George Formby — is his own dramatist, 
 as Irving was, but such men have no medium 
 save their own personalities and cannot there- 
 fore both be themselves and not themselves, 
 cannot use a play or other material except as 
 an adjunct to themselves and cannot there- 
 fore use the machinery of the theatre to 
 create an artistic whole. For such men the 
 machinery of the music-hall has been evolved. 
 They can charm their audiences, hypnotize 
 them, but they cannot give them joy except 
 their charm be brought into relation quite 
 clearly with the dramatic idea, which is a 
 play. 
 
 $fc The machinery of the modern music-hall 
 has been created for those artists who can 
 work only in the medium of their own 
 personalities acting directly upon the minds 
 of their audiences without reference to any- 
 thing else or to anything larger than them- 
 selves. From such men the theatre will soon 
 31 <%be 
 
be entirely delivered by the music-hall, which 
 not only offers them greater rewards but 
 relieves them of responsibility and gives them 
 a more effective method of attack for their 
 purposes. Relieved of these men, the theatre, 
 if it is to live at all, must be served by drama- 
 tists and producers and producer-dramatists 
 who do not themselves appear upon the stage 
 but use it to express the ideas by which they 
 are possessed. So conducted and only so can 
 the theatre meet the demands made on it by 
 J. M. Synge in his preface to The Tinker's 
 Wedding: 
 
 %, "The drama is made serious — in the 
 French sense of the word — not by the degree 
 in which it is taken up with problems that 
 are serious in themselves, but by the degree 
 in which it gives the nourishment, not very 
 easy to define, on which our imaginations 
 live. We should not go to the theatre as we 
 go to a chemist's or a dram-shop, but as we 
 go to a dinner, where the food we need is 
 taken with pleasure and excitement. 
 32 
 
'% "The drama, like the symphony, does not 
 teach or prove anything. Analysts with their 
 problems and teachers with their systems are 
 soon as old-fashioned as the pharmacopoeia 
 of Galen — look at Ibsen and the Germans — 
 but the best plays of Ben Jonson and Moliere 
 can no more go out of fashion than the black- 
 berries on the hedges. 
 
 % "Of the things which nourish the imagi- 
 nation, humour is one of the most needful, 
 and it is dangerous to limit or destroy it." 
 % To handle serious drama at all, to present 
 it so that there shall be no discord between 
 the dramatic idea and its interpretation, a 
 theatre should be as well-disciplined as a 
 ship, for a ship it is, indeed, one in which 
 wondrous voyages are taken out upon the 
 high seas of the mind. Every theatre should 
 be under the control of a director who is 
 familiar with every detail of its construction, 
 a man who, without being himself a creative 
 artist, is immediately and subtly responsive 
 to art. This director should be served by a 
 33 ^number 
 
number of highly trained producers, a suffi- 
 cient company of actors, designers, scene- 
 painters, machinists, dressmakers, all of 
 whom should, by competent work, be able to 
 earn a reasonably secure living, independ- 
 ently of the success of this or that perform- 
 ance, for, if he be harassed by financial 
 anxiety, no man can give of his best. 
 % Theatres roughly corresponding to these 
 requirements are beginning to spring up in the 
 provinces in England, in Manchester, Liver- 
 pool, Birmingham, also in Dublin, and there 
 will soon be no great industrial centre in the 
 country that has not its own theatre more or 
 less independent of the London commercial 
 traffic in entertainments; Russia has an ad- 
 mirable Art Theatre in Moscow, and in 
 Germany they are building in many towns 
 small theatres for modern realistic plays and 
 larger houses for classic and poetic drama; 
 there are Little Theatres in Chicago and New 
 York holding out ambitious programmes; 
 order is beginning to shine through chaos, 
 34 
 
but still the workers in the theatre are under 
 the tyranny of the old superstitions, still 
 lacking courage and clear perception of the 
 new — the age-old — spirit, still inclined to be 
 content with success, and, when they have 
 won it, be fearful of losing it by carrying 
 the idea any further — the old trouble of each 
 revolutionary leader desiring the revolution 
 to end in himself, so that Danton must gobble 
 up Mirabeau, Marat Danton, Robespierre 
 Marat, and so on, until a master comes whose 
 tyranny may be worse than the old. The 
 trouble in the theatre is that each ambitious 
 revolutionary specializes and admits to his 
 theatre only a special audience, by his fanat- 
 icism holds the general audience at arm's 
 length, wastes energy, and in the end destroys 
 his own usefulness by raging against the 
 barrier of his own erection, the barrier be- 
 tween himself and his own vision and work. 
 And meanwhile the old enemy of artistic en- 
 thusiasm, the spirit of mockery inherent in 
 human nature, enters into the fray and com- 
 35 ^spletes 
 
pletes the work of destruction. It has been 
 so in every effort of the human race to rise 
 to a higher level of existence. Perhaps it is 
 inevitable, a necessary limitation and check, 
 a precaution to ensure that each generation 
 shall have its allotted task and shall not find 
 it too easy. All human activity seems to run 
 in cycles — a romantic period of huge en- 
 deavour, a classic period of fruitfulness and 
 peace, and a period of decadence when the 
 race descends from its high achievement and 
 plunges down into the lower air, only to rise 
 to achievement higher yet. In the theatre 
 we are at the beginning of a romantic period. 
 The time is passing when even men of in- 
 telligence and culture will tolerate in the 
 theatre blunders and stupidities which would 
 not for a moment be endured in any other 
 art. The time is coming when the theatre 
 will be a place of art, an exchange of ideas, 
 the subtlest and finest engine of society, the 
 first to feel, to express and to inform new de- 
 sire, new vision, new impulse and new hope. 
 
 36 
 
V 
 % THERE is nothing new under the sun, 
 but if the world be clearly envisaged, every- 
 thing in it appears eternally new, wonderful 
 and lovely. The future can only be built up 
 on the present as the present is built up on 
 the past. The difficulty in discussing any 
 change, particular or general, is that, if the 
 arguments for it be presented so persuasively 
 as to carry conviction, those who are con- 
 vinced begin at once to ask and to look for 
 concrete, shapely results, and they are disap- 
 pointed if there do not immediately arise a 
 new heaven and a new earth, entirely differ- 
 ent in quality and substance from the old, 
 and, these never being forthcoming, they 
 lose heart if they are told that they will be 
 lucky to have the change becoming per- 
 ceptible in their grandchildren. This diffi- 
 culty is very great in dealing with the theatre, 
 which has fallen into such contempt that even 
 the best of those who work in it hardly be- 
 lieve in it at all, and certainly have no con- 
 37 % fidence 
 
fidence in the possibility of such audiences as 
 would make a real theatre feasible. When 
 the enthusiast upholds a glowing picture of 
 the future of the theatre, and informs his 
 thrilling auditors that it is a matter of many 
 generations, then their hearts sink and they 
 look back and say: "Yes, but look at all the 
 movements of the past thirty years. They 
 have all ended in the very thing they set out 
 to destroy, the substitution of the standards 
 of success for the standards of art. They 
 have all ended by being concerned, not with 
 the theatre, but only with its appendages and 
 trimmings, with its outward aspect. You 
 may change the outward aspect of a rotten 
 thing, you have to change it for each genera- 
 tion, but what is the use of dragging in ideals 
 and dreams and other irrelevancies, if the 
 thing itself remains always the same? And 
 after all, if things never change, is it worth 
 all this talk and all this effort to which you 
 are trying to lead us?" . . . To which the 
 reply is this: "Things always remain the 
 
 38 
 
same until we change, and that we cannot 
 help doing. The spirit in which we ap- 
 proach the world and all in it is for ever chang- 
 ing as we change and grow and develop new 
 powers of life, clearer vision, and more of 
 what Matthew Arnold called 'sweetness and 
 light.' " Every new development that takes 
 place within us is infallibly expressed in every 
 one of our institutions and in the use we make 
 of them. Not for nothing do we have men 
 of genius. Nor for nothing have we had 
 Blake, Whitman, Nietzsche, and, in the 
 theatre, Shakespeare, Wagner, Ibsen. Each 
 of these men has found new joys in life and 
 by his work has made the world free of them, 
 at the cost of effort, a small effort compared 
 with the mighty struggles that first wrested 
 these joys from life. The spirit of bold and 
 courageous and imaginative development 
 that animates all men of genius no more ends 
 than it begins with them. It is as old as hu- 
 manity. Through the ages it has gathered 
 consciousness in our minds and hearts, but 
 39 % only 
 
only here and there has it found full expres- 
 sion. Our institutions are for ever being 
 adapted to give it freer scope, but they are 
 never adapted without pain and suffering, 
 without injury to our habits or damage to 
 vested interests. To this spirit, to the genius 
 of the human race, the theatre has for genera- 
 tions been closed. Folly and cowardice and 
 egoism and vanity have barred the doors 
 against it, and, for want of it, the theatre has 
 been stricken with a sickness that seems mor- 
 tal. Its old small function of giving light 
 amusement has been taken from it. It is 
 stretching its limbs for the exercise of its 
 higher function of giving serious, i.e. imagi- 
 native amusement. It is still under the stress 
 of revolt, so that it is difficult to see the gleams 
 of that joy which is seeking expression in it. 
 Hardly in Europe is there a single artist of 
 the theatre devoted to sane, secure, delighted 
 and delightful achievement in his art; very 
 few are there indeed who are beginning to 
 shake free of the realism which for the last 
 40 
 
 
fifty years has seemed to kill the joy of all 
 the arts, while in truth it has been riddling 
 and scattering the false joy of the academies, 
 and leaving art at rest for a long period of 
 incubation. All art is a matter of convention, 
 of agreement between artist and public as to 
 the meaning of certain symbols. When the 
 current symbols grow debased and lose their 
 shining and luminous quality, honest artists 
 return from their art to life, investigate it, 
 analyse it, mark its progress, to discover why 
 the old symbols have lost their meaning. 
 Such a period is a kind of winter: plays, nov- 
 els, pictures, music, are used as a sort of seed- 
 bed, in which hundreds and thousands of 
 germs are planted from which in the spring — 
 the new growth of art — only the healthiest 
 stocks will be selected. It has been finely 
 said: "Why weep over the ruins of art? 
 They are not worth it. Art is the shadow 
 man casts on nature. . . . From time to time, 
 a genius, in passing contact with the earth, 
 suddenly perceives the torrent of reality over- 
 41 % flowing 
 
flowing the continents of art. The dykes 
 crack for a moment. Nature creeps in 
 through a fissure. But at once the gap is 
 stopped up. It must be done to safeguard the 
 reason of mankind. It would perish if its eyes 
 met the eyes of Jehovah. Then once more 
 it begins to strengthen the walls of its cell, 
 which nothing enters from without except it 
 have first been wrought upon." . . . Just as 
 without habit a man cannot but go mad, so 
 without convention an artist cannot shape his 
 inspiration into a definite image for the minds 
 of his audience, and just as a man becomes 
 the slave of his habits, so an artist may become 
 the slave of his conventions, and his work, 
 reaching the other extremity, becomes mean- 
 ingless. In revolt against the tyranny of old 
 conventions an artist is too much beset by 
 moods of self-distrust to be able to win 
 through to the mood of serenity in which 
 works of art alone are possible. But, in the 
 force of his revolt, he may achieve works 
 valuable in destructive quality, or in the 
 42 
 
marshalling of detail, or even in the opening 
 up of some new way along which the mind 
 can travel; yet all such work cannot be pre- 
 sented to a general audience, for it has not 
 the basis of trust and confidence upon which 
 artists and audiences can meet. Such work 
 will often achieve a sort of success of fashion, 
 but it can never achieve the success of art, 
 which has hardly a worse enemy than fashion 
 with its snobbism and sheepish insincerity. 
 Whether it succeeds or no, sincere work is 
 always valuable, and in the European theatre 
 there is abundance of such busy, sincere, in- 
 telligent work as to justify the most ardent 
 hopes that at last the sleeping giant of the 
 drama is stirring to his waking hour. 
 % The French are a great analytical people, 
 the testers of ideas and inspirations. It was 
 a Frenchman, Edouard Manet, who began 
 the liberation of modern painting from the 
 dominion of the conventions of the schools. 
 It was a Frenchman, Villiers de l'lsle Adam, 
 who was the greatest and most vigorous of 
 43 % the 
 
the early deliverers of the drama from its 
 captivity. It was a Frenchman also in whom 
 the impulse that has found its expression in 
 the dancing of Isadora Duncan, the Russian 
 Ballet, and the Eurhythmies of M. Jacques 
 Dalcloze, first reached consciousness. The 
 intellectual force of the one, the instinctive 
 and emotional force of the other, have pro- 
 duced two great streams of activity in the 
 theatre, the realistic and the spectacular, both 
 of which are at present engaging the atten- 
 tion of Mr. Granville Barker in London, 
 Herr Max Reinhardt in Berlin, M. Rouche 
 in Paris, and, the greatest of all, Stanislawski 
 in Moscow. In the English-speaking world 
 the dramatic work of Mr. Bernard Shaw, 
 Mr. John Galsworthy and Mr. Granville 
 Barker, fortified by the Irish school inspired 
 by Yeats and Synge, has led to the establish- 
 ment of Repertory Theatres in the English 
 provinces, and of Little Theatres in New 
 York and Chicago. The Art Theatre in 
 Moscow is devoted chiefly to the production 
 44 
 
of realistic plays, like those of Tschekov and 
 Gorky, but this theatre has also the distinc- 
 tion of being the first to have a Shakespearean 
 production by Mr. Gordon Craig, with his 
 newest ideas and his screens. Germany is^ 
 perhaps better equipped than any country in 
 the number of its advanced theatres and in 
 their scientific erection and their furnishing 
 to meet modern requirements. 
 % Still, with all this business, with all these 
 manifestations of vitality, the theatre is only 
 on the point of emerging. It is still far from 
 taking its rightful place in the life of the 
 civilized world. Its art is still, as it were, 
 suspended between life and the old conven- 
 tions of the theatre. The dramatists are still 
 too timid, too self-conscious, to stand on 
 their own feet as dramatists, to do their work 
 for its own sake, and, with the exception of 
 a few young men who are groping their way 
 to a poetic drama, they seek to fortify their 
 plays by writing them with reference to the 
 problems and the passing ideas and excite- 
 45 % ments 
 
ments of the day, and to each and every sug- 
 gestion for the amelioration of life, without 
 considering whether these things tend to the 
 improvement of their art. The intellectual 
 position of the artist is and will be for many 
 years too perilous for him to take the salto 
 mortal e beyond thought and beyond analysis 
 up to the region in which works of art spring 
 into being, and in his immediate predecessors 
 there has not been any achievement solid 
 enough to have laid the suspicions of the 
 public and dissipated his own distrust of him- 
 self and so with irresistible force to urge him 
 with easy, confident mastery of himself to 
 mould his material into form. In the theatre 
 proper in this country there has as yet been 
 no work done that can be regarded as free 
 of the defects inevitable in a period of attack 
 and reconstruction, — want of form, want of 
 humour, want of serenity — no work that really 
 reaches and feeds the imagination of the 
 people and gives them both a feeling of 
 security and a footing in the new world of 
 
 4 6 
 
art, to the opening up of which so many good 
 lives have been given. From the opera, how- 
 ever, from the opera turning to spectacle, 
 has come work which really is achievement, 
 work in which the modern impulses have had 
 the freest play to create in the theatre, in 
 artists and audience, the nearest approach to 
 the joy of the world's seeking that has yet 
 been forthcoming. Painting and music are 
 without doubt the healthiest of the arts in 
 modern Europe. In the Russian Ballet, these 
 two arts, at their most advanced, have been 
 admitted to the theatre and turned most 
 richly to account in the service of its idea, 
 its purpose. Not all the productions of 
 the Russians have been satisfying, but in 
 Petrouchka, thanks to the genius of Stravinsky 
 and Fokin, painting and music, interpreting 
 and being interpreted by dancing and mim- 
 ing, have been led in marvellous proportion 
 to serve the central dramatic idea. In 
 Petrouchka everything serves, nothing im- 
 pinges upon the effect of the whole. It is 
 47 ^shapely, 
 
shapely, clear, forceful and dynamic. It 
 shows, better than any other piece of work of 
 the last ten years, the capacity of the theatre 
 as an instrument of art, and, also, in its almost 
 perfection, how near we are to reaping the 
 fruits of the efforts of those who have devoted 
 their energies to the theatre's redemption. 
 Most usefully might Petrouchka be com- 
 pared to Coppelia. Each is excellent of its 
 kind, but there is as much difference between 
 them as there is between Gluck and Offen- 
 bach, or between a magnificently ordered din- 
 ner and a meal of sweetmeats. The one 
 inspires, the other charms. The one exists 
 by its own inspiration, the other is referable 
 back to other works of art in the same kind. 
 Both are the histories of dolls, but Petrouchka 
 gains in intensity as a criticism of life by so 
 being; the other is not far from remaining al- 
 together in the world of inanimate and con- 
 trived things. The one deals with life at 
 first hand, translating it almost perfectly into 
 symbols, while the other deals with symbols 
 
so familiar that their power to reflect life is 
 dimmed. 
 
 ^fc The Russian Ballet, passing from capital 
 to capital, has given the workers in the theatre 
 the inspiration and the revelation that they 
 needed to lift them beyond their experiments 
 in realism and analysis, and it has given a 
 new zest to the public by providing them with 
 a pleasure keener than any that has been 
 known in the theatre for generations, a 
 pleasure so keen that critics and public are 
 beginning a little unjustly to ask if there is 
 really any greater merit in the politico-intel- 
 lectual realism of the modern school than in 
 the clever trickery of Scribe and Sardou. 
 But, after a period of decadence and inani- 
 tion, art must force its way back to life before 
 it can be infused with the vitality necessary 
 for its new flight towards the truth. It can 
 only do so slowly, laboriously, painfully, 
 forcing its way through or under the thou- 
 sand and one obstacles, often taking the most 
 surprising turns and using the most unex- 
 49 % pec ted 
 
pected means. Art, like life, is not reason- 
 able. Like life, it turns even decay to profit. 
 Through the most devious ways the art of 
 the theatre has forced its way back from exile 
 into the theatre, bringing with it colour and 
 music and painting and dancing, intelligence, 
 proportion, imagination, poetry, the coura- 
 geous desire and hope of all artists to serve 
 the drama and to assist in laying before the 
 world such a feast of joy and loveliness as 
 men have hardly ventured to dream of before. 
 Best of all is the knowledge through the Rus- 
 sian Ballet that the world is prepared to re- 
 joice in the feast and to ask for more and more 
 of it, all as rich and varied and life-giving as 
 possible. 
 
 % At the risk of being tiresome, it must be 
 repeated that the feast will not, cannot, be 
 new in substance. The human race has many 
 thousands of years yet to live before it can 
 reach a spirit, a quality of genius, higher than 
 that of Shakespeare or Sophocles or any man 
 of supremity, but, whereas, in the past, the 
 50 
 
feast of art has been spread out over immense 
 spaces of time, often over many generations, 
 now, since a larger proportion of men are ad- 
 mitted to art, there will be in any one genera- 
 tion sufficient desire, sufficient aspiration and 
 ardour, for the whole feast to be laid before 
 them. That there will be sufficient articulate 
 genius to supply the demand cannot be 
 doubted, for there is enough unexplored and 
 uninterpreted genius in Shakespeare alone to 
 keep many generations in active delight. But 
 the seeming swifter passage of time — (due to 
 life's greater fullness) — must necessitate in 
 the theatre finer efficiency and skill in those 
 men of talent whose work it is to state and re- 
 state in a thousand different forms the divina- 
 tion and the achievement of genius. It is this 
 greater efficiency in the men of talent, in 
 their more sensitive response to the animat- 
 ing spirit of the art they serve, — the actors, . 
 the producers, the decorators — that will make 
 the most obvious difference between the new 
 theatre and the old, for in their harmonious 
 51 % co-operation 
 
co-operation they will bring forth the joy 
 that is now latent in the theatre, the joy that 
 is in every good play, every sincere piece of 
 acting, every genuine design, the joy which 
 unfortunately is now obscured by the dis- 
 location of the theatre's machinery, as the 
 result of which nothing is ever placed or ever 
 wrought to its finest form, and everything is 
 sacrificed to individual caprice or commercial 
 rapacity. For all that, there is so little be- 
 tween the theatre as it is and the theatre as 
 it might be, that a puff of wind, a favourable 
 accident, a sudden turn of popular favour 
 could at any moment cause it to veer round 
 and show its true face to the world. Until 
 that has happened, in spite of all the honest 
 endeavour and earnest effort of the workers 
 in it, the theatre can only continue to live 
 the stealthy and rather parasitical life to 
 which it has been condemned by modern civ- 
 ilization. 
 
 52 
 
VI 
 
 % THE art of the theatre is a combination 
 of many arts fused by the dramatic sense, 
 without which the result of combination can 
 only be a compromise as dull as that of any 
 club or society of men which has lost all per- 
 ception and sense of the idea which originally 
 brought them together. Without the dra- 
 matic sense, the result of such combination of 
 the arts can only appear in something less than 
 each art separately; like a committee, the in- 
 telligence of which is that of its least intelli- 
 gent member divided by the number of its 
 constituents. Not every artist has the dra- 
 matic sense, which I can but roughly define 
 as an instinctive power to divine and lead 
 and merge into one entity, through the delight 
 his skill can give to their senses, the collective 
 vitality of an audience. He is a man of the 
 theatre in whom this power is sufficiently de- 
 veloped for him to use and control it to do his 
 will. To such a man nothing is necessary 
 save a stage and an audience. What he puts 
 53 % upon 
 
upon the stage, whatever combination of 
 sound, light and movement, will be so manipu- 
 lated as to be recognizably a play, that is, a 
 microcosm altogether separate from the uni- 
 verse outside and yet containing in its essence, 
 distilled and concentrated, all that the human 
 mind can perceive of the wonder, the power, 
 and the glory of the mysterious authority that 
 lies at the heart of all things. If the artist 
 in the theatre has not this sense, he can de- 
 velop a sense of the theatre and learn dexter- 
 ously to fob his audience off with tricks and 
 to lead them to find amusement in solemn trav- 
 esty. Between these two processes there is be- 
 coming ever more apparent a differentiation 
 as sharp and yet as difficult to define as that 
 between journalism and literature. These 
 two processes can hardly avoid being hostile 
 to each other, but, within the theatre, there 
 should soon be an end of stupid quarrels as to 
 what kind of play is best and right, and we 
 should attain a generous temper to admit that 
 all kinds of play are good, if only they be well 
 54 
 
written, well produced, well acted. Good 
 plays make good actors and good audiences. 
 When an audience rises from a good play, 
 it always declares that it is the best play it 
 has ever seen. Dramatists should see to it 
 that there is rather more than less truth in this 
 impression. Audiences never know whether 
 they have been delighted with the play or 
 with the acting; they do not know where one 
 ends and the other begins, and there is no rea- 
 son why they should. They go to the theatre 
 to procure delight; if they get it in any con- 
 siderable quantity, they go again. If not, not. 
 It is an old saying that all things are possible 
 for the man who does not ask for credit or 
 rewards for what he does. This is true, and 
 the theatre will not be restored to health 
 until dramatists and actors are content to 
 take the fun of their work as its chief re- 
 ward. 
 
 % The theatre is the creation of the story- 
 telling instinct joining hands with the rhyth- 
 mic instinct out of which came the dance. 
 55 *The 
 
The ordinary mind approaches art through 
 story-telling and seeks to attach a story to 
 every picture, every piece of music, that 
 pleases it. If the theatre is to live in a demo- 
 cratic community it must be prepared to meet 
 the ordinary mind in this way. In the theatre 
 pictures, music, dancing, as many arts as can 
 be usefully employed, are attached to a story 
 and woven into it to give to the mind of the 
 spectator a glorification of his own visions of 
 and emotions concerning life. At its barest, 
 the theatre shows the common man his own 
 vision familiarly, without elevation or depth. 
 — (The corner-shop widow finds melodrama 
 "true to life.") — But the story- telling instinct 
 seeks something beyond experience, always 
 something marvellous; it seeks experience 
 kindled by imagination. It is because of this 
 constant demand for imagination and the re- 
 jection of everything that falls short of it that 
 the best plays survive, while ingenious con- 
 trivances masquerading as plays are like the 
 fashion upon which they come into being — 
 
 56 
 
they live but for a day and thereafter cannot 
 escape ridicule. 
 
 % The essential in the theatre is that dramatic 
 unity which can only be achieved by dignity 
 and sincerity resulting in the simplicity which 
 is the stamp of art. Once this unity has been 
 perceived, once the joy of it has been tasted, 
 no man can be content with anything that falls 
 short of it, or at least of aiming at it. It is 
 precisely in the theatre that this joy can be 
 made accessible to all men. 
 % The conclusion of the matter is this, that 
 out of the confusion of the theatre the drama 
 is beginning to emerge. In England we have 
 the finest drama in the world upon which to 
 build. By the activity of the theatre in 
 Europe, in almost every country, we are be- 
 ing forced to take stock of our heritage and 
 to rescue it from the accumulation of false 
 tradition beneath which we have allowed it 
 to be buried. Much of the work of excava- 
 tion has been done, and it will soon be pos- 
 sible to create a drama and a theatre worthy 
 57 % of 
 
 8S86 66 
 
of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Congreve and 
 Sheridan, a theatre which shall give back to 
 the world in masterpieces old and new the 
 joy from which, in its fear and shame, it has 
 for too long turned away. Through this joy 
 there shall breathe again such a spirit of de- 
 light as shall at last justify the great democ- 
 racies of the modern world. The theatre 
 which in the past has, in Shelley, Browning, 
 Dickens, Meredith, rejected so much genius, 
 will become the home of genius, the temple 
 to which men of genius and talent, whatever 
 their craft, may turn in the certain hope of 
 finding a welcome and freedom and space in 
 which to work in their task of revealing the 
 world in all its glory to their fellow-men. 
 
 E pur si muove. 
 
 58 
 
$