DRAMATIC VALUES.*
Tnz people of Manchester have now got, in the Gaiety Theatre which is controlled by Miss Horniman, the kind of theatre they have been taught to desire, and among their teachers no one has played a more dramatic part, so to speak, than the author of this little book. If cities have the theatres they deserve there must be some unusually deserving quality in Manchester. It has a theatre that appears to have the advantages of a State-endowed institution without question- able economics and without the sometimes barren influence of l'art administratif. No doubt even a very rich person might be disheartened, if not ruined, by putting down enough money to carry on such a theatre. The public must respond, must like the kind of play which drives the "ordinary playgoer" to the music-hall ; and the fact appears to be that Manchester responds sufficiently. "The theatre is irresistible ; organize the theatre," Matthew Arnold used to say, after Madame Sarah Bernhardt; and perhaps Manchester has the beat organization yet produced in this imperfectly organized
world. Thus we come back to Mr. Montague, who is one of several writers—the late Mr. W. T. Arnold was another—who for years have pointed out why this play was good and that bad. They brought to the business an„Ilellenio
• Drainotio Yaws. By C. E. Tdcatagne. London : Methuen amid Co. N.3 '
mind and a hand that did not shrink from using a sharp knife. The latest example of the eupeptic drama in London, which had successfully soothed tens of thousands of well-dined citizens into ample good humour, would be sliced up by the scalpel awaiting it at Manchester if it did not satisfy the critics of the Manchester Guardian. This kind of thing may have been often thought arbitrary, very severe, or out of proportion. For what should the drama do but entertain you after dinner ? Well, Mr. Montague answers that question. Enough to say now that you must first be sure of what you mean by being entertained. But the years have brought the vindication; they have created a taste, and there must be a large number of people in Manchester now—a proportionately larger number than in London—who could not sit soothed and peaceful, however good their dinner, in the presence of a play that would have served the purposes of digestion well enough twenty years ago.
We have indicated an achievement and a service. But Mr. Montague is much more than an expositor who convinces his readers with plain sincerity that what they want is the best. He is a critic of deep penetration who is gifted with a demonic felicity of phrase. We all know that a matchless statue resides in every block of marble ; all you have got to do is to knock away the superfluous bits of marble till only the statue remains. All Mr. Montague's writing reminds us of that process. He chips and chips away. You can almost hear him chipping. We do not suppose that there is a word in this book about which he has not asked himself twice whether he could sacrifice it. The result is something extra- ordinarily clean, polished, and soigné. Of course we may not .always agree with his selection or rejection. Truth to tell, the very exactingness of his taste occasionally puts a tax on his reader, who, even while he admires the flashing happiness of the words chosen, feels that he would welcome a bundle of current phrases as a sort of resting place. But Mr. Montague is an athlete who has no sympathy with your want of train- ing. He goes for the highest peaks of metaphor. We breathe heavily sometimes, but cannot help following on, panting.
Some of the things in this book are put with such superlative vividness that no other critic of plays could have written them. 'Like this passage on Coquelin's acting, for example:—
" Coquelin's acting was nothing but acting ; unfortified by any separable thrill or lure of beauty, sex or intellectual ascendency, his power was simply the sum of the three strict elements of great acting—a plastic physical medium, a finished technical cunning, and a passion of joy in the thought of the character acted. For the first of these, Coquelin's face was the true comic mask ; the volu- minous, mobile chin ; the long upper lip that at will would let down like a drop curtain or curl back over the teeth in every width of smile or grin from Tartuffe's to a yokel's; the tilted, sensitive nose —it seemed to flick like a terrier's ; the eyes, surrounded, as those of some orators are, with concentric folds and radiating spokes of working muscle, every twitch a unit in a code of symbols waiting for the executant purpose to combine and recombine them into rich and curious significances ; the voice, not sweet, but ringing, pene- trating, supple, and, at need, megaphonic, or rushing and soaring up rocket-wise, as Mr. Henry James has described it, to the hushed dome of the theatre. And then the execution. It was said he would eat his way slowly into a part in the first weeks he played it, working down to the character's soul through his own first ten- tative expression of it, just as some writers and painters can think and feel best through words and paint ; they need the quickened apprehension that comes with the intellectual stir of a technical effort. In this exploratory stage he would slowly be perfecting, too, the external mould of the character, working it out, as if in wet clay, in the ductile, malleable flesh. Finished, the cast would dry ; after twenty years' disuse it could be taken out and reassumed with not a lineament blurred."
It must not be supposed that Mr. Montague's taste in acting is so austere as to blind him to good acting which is put to second-best or even lower uses. He says of Mr. George Robey's art that within its limits it is "not to be surpassed in its gleaming, elliptical terseness, the volumes it speaks in some instants, its suddenness, fire and zest."
One of the commonest and most distressing phenomena of English acting is the disparity between the beat and worst members in a company. It is to be feared that this is because the head of the comet likes being the head. The experience of the last few years has shown, however, that the tail can be tidied up, and that the whole company might glow with some- thing like a uniform brilliance. The ruck of English actors may have little imagination, but it seems that they shape very well under careful schooling. This is what they have too seldom received. Mr. Montague says of the company from the Abbey Theatre in Dublin:—
" So eaoli part is played, in a sense, by them all. One day Miss Allgood, the company's best tragedian, is out of the oast; her part is played by another. You find, to your wonder, how little is matters, and how much of what -seemed the actress's poignancy lay in the way the rest looked at her, from simple, held-in attitudes of wonder and apprehension. The substitute, looked at in that way, seems almost as tragic. The actors give you the force of one character through its impression on others, as Homer expressed Helen's beauty through its effect on the aged men, and as Thackeray tells you what every one did when Beatrix entered a playhouse:' We must not forget to mention the witty papers on "The Well-made Play" and "The Wholesome Play," and the paper called "On the Actual Spot," which says some very true things about pageants and such like. When Mr. Montague s W Mr. F. R. Benson act "on the actual spot" at Flint Castle, he found that the two rival sets of conditions—the theatrical s rid ,ne natural—hindered and defeated one another. You cannot add unlikes together and produce a unity any more than you can add the information (according to the famous prescription) contained in the article on China in the "EncyclopLsdia Britan- nica" to the information in the article on Metaphysics in order to produce an article on Chinese metaphysics. As for the "wholesome play," Mr. Montague, in his crushing attack, does not, we fear, answer the valid objections to some of the plays which may be set in contradistinction to the futile stuff that passes for "wholesome." He disavows all wish to epater le bourgeois. Very good; we believe it. But there is a more moderate motive of the same kind which seems to us too often to demand applause for offensive stuff. We mean the desire to prove one's intellectual emancipation, and a certain tacit sense of being superior to the Philistines. This ac- counts for the paradox of many earnest people of advanced thought, and good ideals, the genuineness of which we need not doubt, finding artistic satisfaction in morbid and perverted performances. They do not particularly want to shock the bourgeois, but they do find a fearful joy in feeling that they are not shocked themselves. Mr. Montague is not in the least like this himself ; but if there were not a good many people seriously interested in the theatre who are like this, there would be fewer playgoers who feel that the only alternative from the " wholesome " play, which, as Mr. Montague easily shows, is often immoral enough, is something of which the licence is even worse, because more strange and curious.
We must say how deeply instructive are all Mr. Montague's discussions of the construction of plays. We notice with interest that he has abandoned what used to be an axiom—the doctrine that the playwright must keep no secrets from his audience. In declaring that he no longer finds that curiosity can thrive in an audience only when the audience beholds the characters struggling blindly with a set of conditions on which the audience itself is already perfectly informed, he must have felt as though he were parting with a limb. But he has made the sacrifice generously. Incidentally we think he has not hit Mr. Yeats hard enough—or indeed hit him at all— for his misleading plea for " natural " behaviour on the stage. If Mr. Yeats's argument were logically accepted, the foundation on which all these essays rest would disappear. Let us make it plain, in conclusion, that no one interested in our modern drama can afford to disregard this little book.
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