PANTOMINE AND DRAMA.

Waikato Times, Volume 97, Issue 15272, 23 June 1923, Page 18 (Supplement)

PANTOMINE AND DRAMA.

A NEW VIEW OF SHAKESPEARE There was held recently at Oxford a conference on New Ideas in Education, at which the initial address was delivered by Dr. L. P. Jacks, Principal of Manchester College, on “The Philosophy of Freedom” (says a writer m the London Times). It appeared that the first question which “philosophical educationists” had to solve was one between East and West. The watchword of Western civilisation had been government, and government of course was an interference with freedom, whereas the watchword of Eastern civilisation had been culture. ... I think (with all respect) of the burntcork humourist, Mr Frank Tinney, who was wont to take the, orchestra conductor into his confidence. “Ernest,” he would say familiarly (whether the conductor’s name was Ernest or not), “ I’m geeting deep." I feel that the Principal of Manchester College is getting deep. That, no doubt, is my fault for not being a philosophical educationist.

But the Principal went on to a topic wherein I feel a little less at sea. “Referring to the drama” (I quote the report of our Oxford correspondent), “he said its earliest form was pantomime. Words were not spoken, but pieces were simply acted. In a later stage of development drama began to make use of speech, but it still remained true to its original form of pantomime.” No exception can be taken to that statement, which of course is by no means new. Diderot, who, though not a philosophical educationist, was a man of philosophic mind, was perpetually insisting-upon the supreme dramatic importance of pantomime. “My dear master,” he wrote to Voltaire after a performance of “Tancred,” “if you could have seen Clairon passing across the stage, her knees bending under her, her eyes closed, her arms falling stiff by her side as if they were dead; if you heard the cry that she uttered when she perceived Tancred, you would remain more convinced than ever that silence and pantomime have sometimes a pathos- that all the resources of speech can never approach.” And he tells us how he used to go to the highest seats in the house, thrust his lingers into'his ears, and then, to the astonishment of his neighbours, watch the performance with the sharpest interest. "They could not refrain from hazarding questions, to which I' answered coldly, ‘that everybody had his own way of listening, and that iny way was to stop my ears, so as to understand better’ —laughing within myself at the talk to which my oddity gave rise, and still more so at the simplicity of some young people who also put their fingers into their ears to hear after my fashion, and were quite astonished that the plan did hot succeed.”

In short, Diderot realised, like Dr. jacks, that the drama is, above ail, something to be acted, and that it is also something to be spoken was a secondary consideration. But hereupon Dr. Jacks introduces a new distinction. "The highest truths of drama lay not in the speaking but in tire acting. Truths which could not be spoken could be acted. Nobody would believe the highest truth until somebody had acted it.” Here I begin to rub my eyes. Is it the function of dramatic art (or for.that matter of any art) to inculcate truths? Truths of course may be inferred from drama or from anything else in .the Cosmos. But Dr. Jacks speaks of the “truths of drama” as though it were the prime business of drama to impart truths. Is it not rather to kindle sympathy; "through pity and fear affecting the proper purgation of these emotions,” as Aristotle observed; to .work on our feelings, as we should say now; to excite interest? Dr. Jacks seems to -be of the same mind as Audrey when she asked Touchstone if “poetical” was a true thing. One would have to go back to the obsolete philosophy of the eighteenth century to match this confusion between aesthetics and ethics, between beauty and higher or lower truths. And the last sentence I have quoted, that nobody would believe the highest truth until somebody had acted it, reveals, I suspect, a still stranger confusion—between acting on the stage and acting in real life, between art or the expression of willless intuitions and fact or the sign of the human will at work. This suspicion is confirmed by what follows. “Take out of religion the acting part and leave only the speaking part, and what would it be worth? The acting part was the life.” I suppose that, like a certain divine in “Tom Jones,” when Dr. Jacks says religion he means the Christian religion; Buddhists might consider the question a litle differently. ■ (I take leave to instance them, as illustrating that Eastern civilisation whose watchword is culture.) Anyhow, what has the acting part of religion to do with the acting of stage-players? But let Dr. Jacks continue. “Why did Shakespeare put the problem of Hamlet in a play rather than in a philosophical treatise? The answer was that his plays were dealing with one or other of those highest truths which could not be spoken, but could be acted, and which, when acted, were a thousand times more convincing than was talk or- argument or reading in an armchair. Duty was among the chief of the highest truths, and could not be spoken but could be acted.” I confess this passage takes my breath away. Does Dr. Jacks seriously put forward the theory that Shakespeare, finding himself filled with certain truths of high importance, deliberately looked-round the various means of imparing truths (philosophical treatises, sermons, the Sisters Three, and other branches of learning) and singled out the drama as the best, becuse it used acting, which is the only way of telling “truths that could not be spoken”? Has it not occurred to him that Shakespeare wrote plays because he could, because he liked writing plays, without giving a thought to the truths, higher or lower, that might be inferred from them by people who cared more for such inferences than for the plays as such? That he didn’t put the problem of Hamlet into a philosophical treatise for the simple reason that he was Shakespeare and not Bacon? And why this perpetual talk, not merely from Dr. Jacks, but from many others, about the “problem” of Hamlet? Thdt, problem has been made by commentators. What Shakespeare made was a play, a drama of dramatic interest, interesting for its story, for its various characters, and, yes, for its speeches. And it was all the product, the expression, of one man’s mind, imagining things sometimes as things done and sometimes as things said, as they happened to come to him, and never from any consciously selective principle about higher and lower truths. But, Dr. Jacks may reply, there’s a divinity which shapes our ends, the higher and lower truths may be distributed as I’ve been suggesting, all the same. In which case, I think 1 cannot do better than observe the discreet silence with which Ernest invariably received Frank’s confidence about getting deep.