ABSTRACT
EACH WINTER AT THE beginning of the theatre season I fall prey to the same thoughts. A hope springs up in me, and I tell myself that before the first warmth of summer empties the playhouses, a dramatist of genius will be discovered. Our theatre desperately needs a new man who will scour the debased boards and bring about a rebirth in an art degraded by its practitioners to the simple-minded requirements of the crowd. Yes, it would take a powerful personality, an innovator’s mind, to overthrow the accepted conventions and finally install the real human drama in place of the ridiculous untruths that are on display today. I picture this creator scorning the tricks of the clever hack, smashing the imposed patterns, remaking the stage until it is continuous with the auditorium, giving a shiver of life to the painted trees, letting in through the backcloth the great, free air of reality. Unfortunately, this dream I have every October has not yet been fulfilled, and is not likely to be for some time. I wait in vain, I go from failure to failure. Is this, then, merely the naive wish of a poet? Are we trapped in today’s dramatic art, which is so confining, like a cave that lacks air and light? Certainly, if dramatic art by its nature forbids this escape into less restricted forms, it would indeed be vain to delude ourselves and to expect a renaissance at any moment. But despite the stubborn assertions of certain critics who do not like to have their standards threatened, it is obvious that dramatic art, like all the arts, has before it an unlimited domain, without barriers of any kind to left or right. Inability, human incapacity, is the only boundary to an art. To understand the need for a revolution in the theatre, we must establish clearly where we stand today. During our entire classical period tragedy ruled as an absolute monarch. It was rigid and intolerant, never granting its subjects a touch of freedom, bending the greatest minds to its inexorable laws. If a playwright tried to break away from them he was condemned as witless, incoherent and bizarre; he was almost considered a dangerous man. Yet even within the narrow formula genius did build its monument of marble and bronze. The formula was born during the Greek and Latin revival; the artists who took it over found in it a pattern that would serve for great works. Only later, when the imitators – that line of increasingly weaker and punier disciples – came along, did the faults in the formula show up: outlandish situations, improbabilities, dishonest uniformity, and uninterrupted, unbearable declaiming. Tragedy maintained such a sway that two hundred years had to pass before it went out of date. It tried slowly to become more flexible, but without success, for the authoritarian principles in which it was grounded formally forbade any
concession to new ideas, under pain of death. Just when it was trying to broaden its scope, it was overturned, after a long and glorious reign. In the eighteenth century romantic drama was already stirring inside tragedy. On occasion the three unities were violated, more importance was given to scenery and extras, violent climaxes were now staged, where formerly they had been described in speeches so that the majestic tranquillity of psychological analysis might not be disturbed by physical action. In addition, the passion of the grande époque was replaced by commonplace acting; a grey rain of mediocrity and staleness soaked the stage. One can visualize tragedy, by the beginning of this century, as a long, pale, emaciated figure without a drop of blood under its white skin, trailing its tattered robes across a gloomy stage on which the footlights had gone dark of their own accord. A rebirth of dramatic art out of a new formula was inevitable. It was then that romantic drama noisily planted its standard in front of the prompter’s box. The hour had come; a slow ferment had been at work; the insurrection advanced on to terrain already softened-up for the victory. And never has the word insurrection seemed more apt, for romantic drama bodily seized the monarch tragedy and, out of hatred for its impotence, sought to destroy every memory of its reign. Tragedy did not react; it sat still on its throne, guarding its cold majesty, persisting with its speeches and descriptions. Whereas romantic drama made action its rule, excesses of action that leapt to the four corners of the stage, hitting out to right and left, no longer reasoning or analysing, giving the public a full view of the blood-drenched horror of its climaxes. Tragedy had chosen antiquity for its setting, the eternal Greeks and Romans, immobilizing the action in a room or in front of the columns of a temple; romantic drama chose the Middle Ages, paraded knights and ladies, manufactured strange sets with castles pinnacled over sheer gorges, armories crowded with weapons, dungeons dripping with moisture, ancient forests pocked with moonlight. The war was joined on all fronts; romantic drama ruthlessly made itself the armed adversary of tragedy and assaulted it with every method that defied the old formula. This raging hostility, which characterized the romantic drama at its high tide, needs to be stressed, for it o»ers a precious insight. The poets who led the movement undoubtedly talked about putting real passion on stage and laying claim to a vast new realm that would encompass the whole of human life with its contradictions and inconsistencies; it is worth remembering, for example, that romantic drama fought above all for a mixture of laughter and tears in the same play, arguing that joy and pain walk side by side on earth. Yet truth, reality, in fact counted for little – even displeased the innovators. They had only one passion, to overthrow the tragic formula that inhibited them, to crush it once and for all under a stampede of every kind of audacity. They did not want their heroes of the Middle Ages to be more real than the heroes of tragic antiquity; they wanted them to appear as passionate and splendid as their predecessors had appeared cold and correct. A mere skirmish over dress and modes of speech, nothing more: one set of puppets at odds with another. Togas were torn up in favour of doublets; a lady, instead of addressing her lover as ‘My lord’, called him ‘My lion’. After the transition fiction still prevailed; only the setting was di»erent. I do not want to be unfair to the romantic movement. Its e»ect has been outstanding and unquestionable; it has made us what we are: free artists. It was, I repeat, a necessary revolution, a violent struggle that arose just in time to sweep away a tragic convention that had become childish. Still, it would be ridiculous to arrest the evolution of dramatic art at romanticism. These days,
especially, it is astounding to read certain prefaces in which the 1830 movement is announced as the triumphal entry into human truth. Our forty-year distance is enough to let us see clearly that the alleged truth of the romanticists is a persistent and monstrous exaggeration of reality, a fantasy that has declined into excesses. Tragedy, to be sure, is another type of falseness, but it is not more false. Between the characters who pace about in togas, endlessly discussing their passions with confidants, and the characters in doublets who perform great feats and flit about like insects drunk with the sun, there is nothing to choose; both are equally and totally unacceptable. Such people have never existed. Romantic heroes are only tragic heroes bitten by the mardi gras bug, hiding behind false noses, and dancing the dramatic cancan after drinking. For the old sluggish rhetoric the 1830 movement substituted an excited, full-blooded rhetoric, and that is all. Without believing that art progresses, we can still say that it is continuously in motion, among all civilizations, and that this motion reflects di»erent phases of the human mind. Genius is made manifest in every formula, even in the most primitive and innocent ones, though the formulas become transmuted according to the intellectual breadth of each civilization; that is incontestable. If Aeschylus was great, Shakespeare and Molière showed themselves to be equally great, each within his di»ering civilization and formula. By this I mean that I set apart the creative genius who knows how to make the most of the formula of his time. There is no progress in human creation but there is a logical succession to the formulas, to methods of thought and expression. Thus, art takes the same strides as humanity, is its very language, goes where it goes, moves with it towards light and truth; but for that, we could never judge whether a creator’s e»orts were more or less great, depending on whether he comes at the beginning or end of a literature. In these terms, it is certain that when we left tragedy behind, the romantic drama was a first step in the direction of the naturalistic drama, towards which we are now advancing. The romantic drama cleared the ground, proclaimed the freedom of art. Its love of action, its mixture of laughter and tears, its research into accuracy of costume and setting show the movement’s impulse towards real life. Is this not how things happen during every revolution against a secular regime? One begins by breaking windows, chanting and shouting, wrecking relics of the last regime with hammer blows. There is a first exuberance, an intoxication with the new horizons faintly glimpsed, excesses of all kinds that go beyond the original aims and degenerate into the despotism of the old, hated system, those very abuses the revolution has just fought against. In the heat of the battle tomorrow’s truths evaporate. And not until all is calm and the fever has abated is there any regret for the broken windows, any understanding of how the e»ort has gone awry, how the new laws have been prematurely thrown together so that they are hardly any improvement over the laws that were destroyed. Well, the whole history of romantic drama is there. It may have been the formula necessary for its time, it may have had truthful intuitions, it may have been the form that will always be celebrated because a great poet used it to compose his masterpieces. At the present time it is, none the less, a ridiculous, outdated formula, with a rhetoric that o»ends us. We now wonder why it was necessary to push in windows, wave swords, bellow without a break, to go a scale too shrill in sentiment and language. All that leaves us cold, it bores and annoys us. Our condemnation of the romantic formula is summed up in one severe remark: To destroy one rhetoric it was not necessary to invent another. Today, then, tragedy and romantic drama are equally old and worn out. And that is hardly to the credit of the latter, it should be said, for in less than half a century it has fallen into the
same state of decay as tragedy, which took two centuries to die. There it lies, flattened in its turn, overwhelmed by the same passion it showed in its own battle. Nothing is left. We can only guess at what is to come. Logically all that can grow up on that free ground conquered in 1830 is the formula of naturalism.
