To a chemist there is nothing impure on earth. The writer should be just as objective as the chemist; he should liberate himself from everyday subjectivity and acknowledge that manure piles play a highly respectable role in the landscape and that evil passions are every bit as much a part of life as good ones.
3. Writers are men of their time; and so, like the rest of the public, they must submit to the external conditions of life in society. There is therefore no question but what they must keep within the bounds of decency. That is all we have a right to demand of the realists. But since you have nothing to say against the execution or form of [the short story] “Mire,” I must have remained within the bounds.
4. I must admit I rarely consult my conscience as I write. This is due to habit and the trivial nature of my work. Gonsequendy, whenever I expound one or another view of literature, I always leave myself out of consideration.
3.3.2 Konstantin Stanislavsky, An Actor Prepares
Translated by Elizabeth Hapgood
‘“You may play well or you may play badly; the important thing is that you should play truly,” wrote Shchepkin to his pupil Shumski.
‘To play truly means to be right, logical, coherent, to think, strive, feel and act in unison with your role.
‘If you take all these internal processes, and adapt them to the spiritual and physical life of the person you are representing, we call that living the part. This is of supreme significance in creative work. Aside from the fact that it opens up avenues for inspiration, living the part helps the artist to carry out one of his main objectives. His job is not to present merely the external life of his character. He must fit his own human qualities to the life of this other person, and pour into it all of his own soul. The fundamental aim of our art is the creation of this inner life of a human spirit, and its expression in an artistic form.
‘That is why we begin by thinking about the inner side of a role, and how to create its spiritual life through the help of the internal process of living the part. You must live it by actually experiencing feelings that are analogous to it, each and every time you repeat the process of creating it.’
[…]
‘From what you have said I gather that to study our art we must assimilate a psychological technique of living a part, and that this will help us to accomplish our main object, which is to create the life of a human spirit,’ Paul Shustov said.
‘That is correct but not complete,’ said Tortsov. ‘Our aim is not only to create the life of a human spirit, but also to “express it in a beautiful, artistic form”. An actor is under the obligation to live his part inwardly, and then to give to his experience an external embodiment. I ask you to note especially that the dependence of the body on the soul is particularly important in our school of art. In order to express a most delicate and largely subconscious life it is necessary to have control of an unusually responsive, excellently prepared vocal and physical apparatus. This apparatus must be ready instantly and exacdy to reproduce most delicate and all but intangible feelings with great sensitiveness and directness. That is why an actor of our type is obliged to work so much more than others, both on his inner equipment, which creates the life of the part, and also on his outer physical apparatus, which should reproduce the results of the creative work of his emotions with precision.
‘Even the externalizing of a role is greatly influenced by the subconscious. In fact no artificial, theatrical technique can even compare with the marvels that nature brings forth.’
[…]
‘We find innumerable objectives on the stage and not all of them are either necessary or good; in fact, many are harmful. An actor must learn to recognize quality, to avoid the useless, and to choose essentially right objectives.’
‘How can we know them?’ I asked.
‘I should define right objectives as follows,’ said he:
‘(1) They must be on our side of the footlights. They must be directed toward the other actors, and not toward the spectators.
‘(2) They should be personal yet analogous to those of the character you are portraying.
‘(3) They must be creative and artistic because their function should be to fulfil the main purpose of our art: to create the life of a human soul and render it in artistic form.
‘(4) They should be real, live, and human, not dead, conventional or theatrical.
‘(5) They should be truthful so that you yourself, the actors playing with you, and your audience can believe in them.
‘(6) They should have the quality of attracting and moving you.
‘(7) They must be clear cut and typical of the role you are playing. They must tolerate no vagueness. They must be distincdy woven into the fabric of your part.
‘(8) They should have value and content, to correspond to the inner body of your part. They must not be shallow, or skim along the surface.
‘(9) They should be active, to push your role ahead and not let it stagnate.
‘Let me warn you against a dangerous form of objective, purely motor, which is prevalent in the theatre and leads to mechanical performance.
‘We admit three types of objectives: the external or physical, the inner or psychological, and the rudimentary psychological type.’
[…]
‘Dostoyevski was impelled to write The Brothers Karamazov by his lifelong search for God. Tolstoy spent all of his life struggling for self-perfection. Anton Chekhov wresded with the triviality of bourgeois life and it became the leitmotive of the majority of his literary productions.
‘Can you feel how these larger, vital purposes of great writers have the power to draw all of an actor’s creative faculties to absorb all the details and smaller units of a play or part?
‘In a play the whole stream of individual, minor objectives, all the imaginative thoughts, feelings and actions of an actor, should converge to carry out the super-objective of the plot. The common bond must be so strong that even the most insignificant detail, if it is not related to the super-objective, will stand out as superfluous or wrong.
‘Also this impetus towards the super-objective must be continuous throughout the whole play. When its origin is theatrical or perfunctory it will give only an approximately correct direction to the play. If it is human and directed towards the accomplishment of the basic purpose of the play it will be like a main artery, providing nourishment and life to both it and the actors.
‘Naturally, too, the greater the literary work, the greater the pull of its super-objective.’
[…]
‘Perhaps it would be mote graphic if I made a drawing for you.’
This is what he drew:
‘All the minor lines are headed towards the same goal and fuse into one main current,’ he explained.
‘Let us take the case, however, of an actor who has not established his ultimate purpose, whose part is made up of smaller lines leading in varying directions. Then we have:
‘If all the minor objectives in a part are aimed in different directions it is, of course, impossible to form a solid, unbroken line. Consequently the action is fragmentary, uncoordinated, unrelated to any whole. No matter how excellent each part may be in itself, it has no place in the play on that basis.
‘Let me give you another case. We have agreed, have we not, that the main line of action and the main theme are organically part of the play and they cannot be disregarded without detriment to the play itself. But suppose we were to introduce an extraneous theme or put what you might call a tendency into the play. The other elements will remain the same but they will be turned aside, by this new addition. It can be expressed this way:
‘A play with that kind of deformed, broken backbone cannot live.’
4 BERNARD SHAW
Apart from short articles on individual plays (the first being Edmund Gosse’s reviews of Ibsen’s Poems followed by Peer Gynt in 1872), the earliest analysis in English of Ibsen’s drama was Bernard Shaw’s 1891 book, The Quintessence of Ibsenism (a collection of the
lectures previously given to the Fabian Society). Widely read and hotly discussed, it made Ibsen a rallying point for progressive forces throughout the English-speaking world. It also provides a signal example of the impact of Ibsen’s plays – even simply as dramatic texts: at the time none had yet been staged in England – in their effect on Shaw himself. His lectures on Ibsen marked Shaw’s switch from novel-writing to drama. The Fabian origins of the Quintessence demonstrates the link between Naturalism and socialist politics; and the qualities Shaw highlighted in his discussion of each of Ibsen’s plays (to that point) are precisely those that formed the basis of his own early plays. The extent of the parallel can be indicated by Shaw’s defence of Arms and the Man, “A Dramatic Realist to his Critics”:
Stage life is artificially simple and well understood by the masses; but it is very stale … Real life, on the other hand, is so ill understood, even by its clearest observers, that no sort of consistency is discoverable in it; there is no ‘natural justice’ corresponding to that simple and pleasant concept ‘poetic justice’.
As a realist dramatist… it is my business to get outside these systems [the ethical systems to which the classifications of saint and sinner belong].
(The New Review, July 1894)
The extract from the Quintessence focuses on qualities perceived by Shaw in Ibsen’s drama, that reappear in his own plays. These are the moral challenge inherent in the accurate and objective depiction of social life at the core of Naturalism, as well as picking out the attack on idealism as Ibsen’s major theme – Ibsen’s response to Brandes’ 1871 lecture – and the naturalistic emphasis on women’s experience.
The centrality of the political emphasis, posited by Shaw, in the wider reception of naturalistic drama is illustrated by a contemporary commentary from one of the earliest books to use the title “Modern Drama”. This was by the American anarchist and feminist, Emma Goldman, whose view of naturalistic drama was heavily influenced by Shaw.
Art for art’s sake presupposes an attitude of aloofness on the part of the artist toward the complex struggle of life: he must rise above the ebb and tide of life. He is to be merely an artistic conjurer of beautiful forms, a creator of pure fancy.
That is not the attitude of modern art, which is preeminently the reflex, the mirror of life. The artist being part of life cannot detach himself from the events and occurrences that pass panorama-like before his eyes, impressing themselves upon his emotional and intellectual vision.
The modern artist is, in the words of August Strindberg, ‘a lay preacher popularizing the pressing questions of his time’ … Ibsen, Strindberg, Hauptmann and a host of others mirror in their work as much of the spiritual as social revolt as is expressed by the most fiery speech of the propagandist. And more important still, they compel far greater attention. Their creative genius, imbued with the spirit of sincerity and truth, strikes root where the ordinary word often falls on barren soil…
Ibsen, Strindberg, Hauptmann, Tolstoy, Shaw, Galsworthy and the other dramatists contained in this volume represent the social iconoclasts of our time. They know that society has gone beyond the stage of patching up, and that man must throw off the dead weight of the past, with all its ghosts and spooks, if he is to go free of foot to meet the future.
This is the social significance which differentiates modern dramatic art from art for art’s sake. It is the dynamite which undermines superstition, shakes the social pillars, and prepares men and women for the reconstruction.
(The Social Significance of Modern Drama, 1914)
3.4.1 Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1891
Ibsen had now written three immense dramas [Brand, Peer Gynt, Emperor and Galilean] all dealing with the effect of idealism on individual egotists of exceptional imaginative excitability. This he was able to do whilst his intellectual consciousness of his theme was yet incomplete, by simply portraying sides of himself. He has put himself into the skin of Brand, of Peer Gynt, and of Julian; and these figures have accordingly a certain direct vitality which belongs to none of his subsequent creations of the male sex. There are flashes of it in Relling, in Lövborg, in Ellida’s stranger from the sea; but they are only flashes: henceforth all his really vivid and solar figures are women. For, having at last completed his intellectual analysis of idealism, he could now construct methodical illustrations of its social working, instead of, as before, blindly projecting imaginary personal experiences which he himself had not yet succeeded in interpreting. Further, now that he understood the matter, he could see plainly the effect of idealism as a social force on people quite unlike himself: that is to say, on everyday people in everyday life – on ship-builders, bank managers, parsons, and doctors, as well as on saints, romantic adventurers, and emperors. With his eyes thus opened, instances of the mischief of idealism crowded upon him so rapidly that he began deliberately to inculcate their moral by writing realistic prose plays of modern life, abandoning all production of art for art’s sake. His skill as a playwright and his genius as an artist were thenceforth used only to secure attention and effectiveness for his detailed attack on idealism. No more verse, no more tragedy for the sake of tears or comedy for the sake of laughter
[…]
A typical Ibsen play is one in which the “leading lady” is an unwomanly woman, and the “villain” an idealist. It follows that the leading lady is not a heroine of the Drury Lane type; nor does the villain forge or assassinate, since he is a villain by virtue of his determination to do nothing wrong. Therefore readers of Ibsen – not playgoers – have sometimes so far misconceived him as to suppose that his villains are examples rather than warnings, and that the mischief and ruin which attend their actions are but the tribulations from which the soul comes out purified as gold from the furnace.
[…]
In following this sketch of the plays written by Ibsen to illustrate his thesis that the real slavery of to-day is slavery to ideals of virtue, it may be that readers who have conned Ibsen through idealist spectacles have wondered that I could so pervert the utterances of a great poet. Indeed I know already that many of those who are most fascinated by the poetry of the plays will plead for any explanation of them rather than that given by Ibsen himself in the plainest terms through the mouths of Mrs Alving, Relling, and the rest. No great writer uses his skill to conceal his meaning.
[…]
The statement that Ibsen’s plays have an immoral tendency, is, in the sense in which it is used, quite true. Immorality does not necessarily imply mischievous conduct: it implies conduct, mischievous or not, which does not conform to current ideas. Since Ibsen has devoted himself almost entirely to shewing that the spirit or will of Man is constantly outgrowing his ideals, and that therefore conformity to them is constantly producing results no less tragic than those which follow the violation of ideals which are still valid, the main effect of his plays is to keep before the public the importance of being always prepared to act immorally to remind men that they ought to be as careful how they yield to a temptation to tell the truth as to a temptation to hold their tongues, and to urge upon women that the desirability of their preserving their chastity depends just as much on circumstances as the desirability of taking a cab instead of walking. He protests against the ordinary assumption that there are certain supreme ends which justify all means used to attain them; and insists that every end shall be challenged to shew that it justifies the means. Our ideals, like the gods of old, are constantly demanding human sacrifices. Let none of them, says Ibsen, be placed above the obligation to prove that they are worth the sacrifices they demand; and let every one refuse to sacrifice himself and others from the moment he loses his faith in the reality of the ideal. Of course it will be said here by incorrigibly slipshod readers that this, so far from being immoral, is the highest morality; and so, in a sense, it is; but I really shall not waste any further explanation on those who will neither mean one thing or another by a word nor allow me to do so. In short, then, among those who are not
ridden by current ideals no question as to the morality of Ibsen’s plays will ever arise; and among those who are so ridden his plays will seem immoral, and cannot be defended against the accusation.
There can be no question as to the effect likely to be produced on an individual by his conversion from the ordinary acceptance of current ideals as safe standards of conduct, to the vigilant open-mindedness of Ibsen. It must at once greatly deepen the sense of moral responsibility.
[…]
I have a word or two to add as to the difficulties which Ibsen’s philosophy places in the way of those who are called on to impersonate his characters on the stage in England. His idealist figures, at once higher and more mischievous than ordinary Philistines, puzzle by their dual aspect the conventional actor, who persists in assuming that if he is to be selfish on the stage he must be villainous; that if he is to be self-sacrificing and scrupulous he must be a hero; and that if he is to satirize himself unconsciously he must be comic. He is constantly striving to get back to familiar ground by reducing his part to one of the stage types with which he is familiar, and which he has learnt to present by rule of thumb. The more experienced he is, the more certain is he to de-Ibsenize the play into a melodrama or a farcical comedy of the common sort. […] If an actress of established reputation were asked to play Hedda Gabler, her first impulse would probably be not only turn Hedda into a Brinvilliers, or a Borgia, or a “Forget-me-not,” but to suppress all the meaner callosities and odiousnesses which detract from Hedda’s dignity as dignity is estimated on the stage. The result would be about as satisfactory to a skilled critic as that of the retouching which has made shop window photography the most worthless of the arts. The whole point of an Ibsen play lies in the exposure of the very conventions upon which are based those by which the actor is ridden. […] He has not only made “lost” women lovable; but he has recognized and avowed that this is a vital justification for them, and has accordingly explicitly argued on their side and awarded them the sympathy which poetic justice grants only to the righteous. He has made the terms “lost” and “ruined” in this sense ridiculous by making women apply them to men with the most ludicrous effect. Hence Ibsen cannot be played from the conventional point of view: to make that practicable the plays would have to be rewritten. In the rewriting, the fascination of the parts would vanish, and with it their attraction for the performers. A Doll’s House was adapted in this fashion, though not at the instigation of an actress; but the adaptation fortunately failed. Otherwise we might have to endure in Ibsen’s case what we have already endured in that of Shakespear, many of whose plays were supplanted for centuries by incredibly debased versions, of which Cibber’s Richard III. and Garrick’s Katharine and Petruchio have lasted to our own time.
A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre Page 9
