atmosphere wherein the characters live, move, and have their being, the more harmonious the performance is with the pure fancy which inspired these two delightful pieces, then the more truly successful is the achievement of the stage-manager.
IV
On the other hand, of course, the scenic accompaniment of a poetic play, whether tragic or romantic or comic, must never be so scant or so barren as to disappoint the spectators. The stage-accessories must be adequate and yet subordinate; they ought to resemble the clothes of a truly well-dressed woman, in that they never call attention to themselves altho they can withstand and even reward intimate inspection. This delicate ideal of artistic stage-setting, esthetically satisfying, and yet never flamboyant, was completely attained in the production of 'Sister Beatrice,' at the New Theater, due to the skill and taste of Mr. Hamilton Bell. The several manifestations of the supernatural might easily have been over-emphasized; but a fine restraint resulted in a unity of tone and of atmosphere, so subtly achieved that the average spectator carried away the memory of more than one lovely picture without having let his thoughts wander away to consider by what means he had been made to feel the presence of a miracle.
The special merit of this production of 'Sister Beatrice' lay in the delicate art by which more was suggested than could well be shown. In the theater, more often than not, the half is greater than the whole, and what is unseen is frequently more powerful than what is made visible. In Mr. Belasco's 'Darling of the Gods,' a singularly beautiful spectacle, touched at times with a pathetic poetry, the defeated samurais are at last reduced to commit hara-kiri. But we were not made spectators of these several self-murders; we were permitted to behold only the dim cane-brake into which these brave men had withdrawn, and to overhear each of them call out his farewell greetings to his friends before he dealt himself the deadly thrust. If we had been made witnesses of this accumulated self-slaughter we might have been revolted by the brutality of it. Transmitted to us out of a vague distance by a few scattered cries, it moved us like the inevitable close of a truly tragic tale.
In the 'Aiglon' of M. Rostand, Napoleon's feeble son finds himself alone with an old soldier of his father's on the battle-field of Wagram; and in the darkness of the night, and in the turmoil of a wind-storm the hysteric lad almost persuades himself that he is actually present at the famous fight, that he can hear the shrieks of the wounded, and the groans of the dying, and that he can see the hands and arms of the dead stretched up from the ground. This is all in the sickly boy's fancy, of course, and yet in Paris the author had voices heard, and caused hands and arms to be extended upward from the edge of the back drop, thus vulgarizing his own imaginative episode by the presentation of a concrete reality. Not quite so inartistic as this, and yet frankly freakish was the arrangement of the closet scene between Hamlet and his mother, when Sarah-Bernhardt made her misguided effort to impersonate the Prince of Denmark. On the walls of the room where Hamlet talks daggers to the queen there were full-length, life-sized portraits of her two successive husbands, and when Hamlet bids her look on this picture, and on this, the portrait of Hamlet's father became transparent, and in its frame the spectators suddenly perceived the ghost. This is an admirable example of misplaced cleverness, of the search for novelty for its own sake, of the sacrifice of the totality of impression to a mere trick.
'Hamlet' is the most poetic of plays, and the 'Aiglon' does its best to be poetic, and therefore the less overt spectacle there may be in the performance of these dramas the easier it will be for the spectator to focus his attention on the poetry itself. Even more pretentiously poetic than the 'Aiglon' is 'Chantecler,' upon which the ambitious author has also lavished a great variety of stage-effects—as tho he were not quite willing to rely for success upon his lyrical exuberance. In M. Rostand's 'Aiglon' and 'Chantecler,' as in Sarah-Bernhardt's 'Hamlet,' there was to be observed a frequent confusion of the merely theatric with the purely dramatic—a confusion to be found forty years ago in Fechter's 'Hamlet.' That picturesque French actor made over the English tragedy into a French romantic melodrama; he kept the naked plot, and he cut out all the poetry. He lowered Shakspere's play to the level of the other melodramas in which he had won success—for instance, 'No Thorofare,' due to the collaboration of Dickens and Wilkie Collins, or the earlier 'Fils de la Nuit,' acted in Paris long before Fechter appeared on the English-speaking stage.
The 'Son of the Night' was a pirate bold, personated, of course, by Fechter, and in one act his long, low, rakish craft with its black flag flying, skimmed across the stage, cutting the waves, and dropping anchor close to the footlights. The surface of the sea was represented by a huge cloth, and the incessant motion of the waves was due to the concealed activities of a dozen boys. The play had so long a run that the sea-cloth was worn dangerously thin. At last at one performance, a rent spread suddenly and disclosed a disgusted boy, just as the pirate ship with the Son of the Night on its deck was preparing to come about. Fechter was equal to the emergency. "Man overboard!" he cried, and, leaning over the bow of the boat, he grabbed the boy by the collar and pulled him on deck. Probably very few of the spectators noticed the mishap, and if they had all observed it, what matter? A laugh or two, more or less, during the performance of a prosaic melodrama, is of little or no consequence. A disconcerting accident like this in a play like the 'Son of the Night' does not cut any vital current of sympathy, for this is a quality to which the piece could make no claim. But in a truly poetic play a mishap of this sort would be a misfortune in that it might precipitate the interest and interrupt the harmony of attention demanded by the imaginative drama itself.
(1912.)
III
A MORAL FROM A TOY THEATER
A MORAL FROM A TOY THEATER
I
In 1881, when William Ernest Henley was hard put to it to make a living, Sir Sidney Colvin kindly recommended him for the editorship of the monthly Magazine of Art. Among the contributors whom the new editor called to his aid was Robert Louis Stevenson, and among the contributions the latter made to the former's magazine was the highly characteristic and self-revelatory essay, entitled 'A Penny Plain and Two Pence Colored,' now included in the volume called 'Memories and Portraits.' In this playful paper Stevenson makes one of his many returns to his boyhood, whose moods he could always recapture at will with the assistance of that imaginative memory which was one of his special gifts, and he was able to replevin from the dim limbo of things half forgotten his longing delight in the toy theater, the scenes for which and the necessary properties and the several characters themselves in their successive dresses were to be procured printed on very thin cardboard, so that the proud possessor might cut them out at will. If the youthful capitalist had accumulated twopence, he could acquire these treasures already resplendent in their glowing hues; and yet Stevenson held that the lad was happier who parted with only a single penny, reserving the half of his fortune for the purchase of the paints wherewith he might himself vivify this scenery and these properties, and so cause his characters to start to life, emblazoned in the bold colors which please the puerile mind.
These sheets of thin cardboard, with thin little pamphlets containing the text of the pieces to be performed in the toy theater, were originally known as Skelt's Juvenile Drama; and one Skelt seems to have been its originator, probably in the early part of the nineteenth century. Apparently he parted with his precious stock in trade to one Park, who passed it on in due season to one Webb, who transmitted it to one Redington, until at last it descended to its present owner, one B. Pollock, of 73 Hoxton Street, London, N. Stevenson affected to think that Skelt's Juvenile Drama had "become, for the most part, a memory"; yet it survives now in the second decade of the twentieth century as Pollock's Juvenile Drama, and Mr. Pollock proclaims that he has republished some score plays, and that he keeps them always in print, plain and colored. He offers, furthermore, to supply "Drop Scenes, Top Drops, Orchestras, Foot and Water Pieces, Single Portraits, Combats—Fours, Sixes, Twelves, Sixteens—Fairies, Horse Soldiers, Clowns, Rifles, Animals, Birds, Butterflies, Houses, Views, Ships, &c., plain and colored,½d sheet plain, 1d sheet colored."
Конец
