Chapter 5

Nowhere in literature, perhaps, is art so obviously essential and naturalism so obviously fatal as in drama, for drama, by exhibiting life to us directly, quickens to its utmost whatever desire we have to see our fellows move on from their natural beginnings to some achievement or significant conclusion. Impulses, ideas, motives, prejudices, passions, and as we now say, complexes, are all natural forms of energy; in real life they weary us if they have only a lyric expression, and we wish they would get started into action. Their attempts toward action may be thwarted, and such a defeat may be tragically significant, but at least they should try, and if instead of trying they waste themselves in talk, they become not energies but nuisances. It is for this reason, we suppose, that Aristotle long ago cautioned us that tragedy, or all drama, is an imitation not of men but of an action, and that plot is the essential thing. He might have said that character may exist in a state of nature, but plot presupposes art in life, a selection from all other incidents of one succession of events which so selected have a meaning. What he did say was that without action there can be no drama, but there may be without character. Plot is a generalization of life, in which the actors may or may not be portrayed as individuals. The woman who lost the piece of silver, the good Samaritan, the mother of Œdipus, are clear enough in their universal relation to the story in which they appear; their personalities may be restated to suit our taste, or left undefined. We read in the newspaper that a man jumps into the river to save a drowning child, and having got to land, discovers that he has rescued his own son. We live in that drama without asking what was the character of the father or what was the psychology of the son.

It is remarkable how Shakespeare illustrates Aristotle’s doctrine, by showing his characters in action and by avoiding as far as possible an analysis of their motives, their instincts, their prejudices, their passions. Life with him finds expression in art or not at all. It is a mirror indeed which he applies to nature, not a microscope; in his glass we see the form of virtue and the features of vice, we know who are good and who are bad, at least as accurately as we form such judgments in life, but we do not know the motives of the good or the bad. What were Falstaff’s motives? Should he be acted as a comic or a tragic character? Why did Portia like Bassanio? Why did Cordelia take such an absolute stand with her father? What did Hero think of Claudio, or Hermione of Leontes, after the restoration to the jealous husband? Was Hamlet’s mother an accessory to the murder of his father, or did her conscience trouble her only because she had made a second marriage and in such haste? The profundity of Shakespeare’s art lies in his genius for representing the surface of action; in art as in ethics, life is chiefly conduct, and it is enough that behind conduct lies unprobed the same mystery that lies behind existence itself.

But since naturalism thinks otherwise, Shakespeare is no longer our example. Browning is more in our vein. For him the natural man, the raw material of each one of us, the hidden instincts and impulses, must be the whole subject, and action he finds useful only in the fragmentary incidents that must be premised before you can conclude anything even about instincts. Few verdicts in criticism are wider of the mark than the too familiar saying that Browning’s genius is Shakespearean. He is the opposite of Shakespeare. He is absorbed in what we call in a loose way psychology, in the original man apart from his conduct, or as far apart from it as you can separate him. To be so concerned about motives and instincts is to be a kind of inverted dramatist, moving back from action instead of toward it; it is no wonder, therefore, that Browning’s so-called dramas fail on the stage, since in that direct relation to the audience their static naturalness, their inability to live out a significance in conduct, is pitilessly revealed. Everybody examines himself and talks about himself, as God made him; nothing gets under way; the audience is finally delivered by the death of the soliloquizer, not in a zoo, but more politely, it may be, in a gondola. “Even if you string together a set of speeches expressive of character,” said Aristotle, “though well finished in diction and in thought, yet you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents.” To return to nature absolutely would be to return to silence. Short of silence, to return to nature in literature is to confess your private character in monologue. Browning is master in that kind. It would be untactful to name the writers today who share the mastery with him, and perhaps it is enough merely to suggest the idea. To save time we might prudently meditate rather upon the few poets and novelists remaining whose art gets further than monologue.

Meanwhile the universe marches on its secret errand, not altogether secret since it marches, and its art is slowly dramatized in its vast conduct. Art for art’s sake is a formula inspiring if taken in a noble sense, but in any sense it is intelligible as a programme deliberately chosen. To cultivate nature for nature’s sake is absurd. For nature is here without our aid, and to preserve it in what we call its pure state, we need cultivate nothing—unless it be a more animal contentedness to profit in indolence by the art of those who came before us.