Faust) with powerful effect, be left to the imagination; but to substitute for it a deliberate blank is to leave the action incomplete, and the drama a fragment ending with a—possibly interesting—confession of incompetence.
The action of a drama, besides being one and complete in itself, ought likewise to be probable. The probability or necessity (in the Aristotelian sense of the terms) required of a drama is not that of actual or historical experience—it is a conditional probability, or in other words an internal Probability
of action.consistency between the course of the action and the conditions under which the dramatist has chosen to carry it on. As to the former, he is fettered by no restrictions save those which he imposes upon himself, whether or not in deference to the usages of certain accepted species of dramatic composition. Ghosts seldom appear in real life or in dramas of real life; but the introduction of supernatural agency is neither enjoined nor prohibited by any general dramatic law. The use of such expedients is as open to the dramatic as to any other poet; the judiciousness of his use of them depends upon the effect which, consistently with the general conduct of his action, they will exercise upon the spectator, whom other circumstances may or may not predispose to their acceptance. The Ghost in Hamlet belongs to the action of the play; the Ghost in the Persae is not intrinsically less probable, but seems a less immediate product of the surrounding atmosphere. Dramatic probability has, however, a far deeper meaning than this. The Eumenides is probable, with all its mysterious commingling of cults, and so is Macbeth, with all its barbarous witchcraft. The proceedings of the feathered builders of Cloudcuckootown in the Birds of Aristophanes are as true to dramatic probability as are the pranks of Oberon’s fairies in Midsummer Night’s Dream. In other words, it is in the harmony between the action and the characters, and in the consistency of the characters with themselves, in the appropriateness of both to the atmosphere in which they have their being, that this dramatic probability lies. The dramatist has to represent characters affected by the progress of an action in a particular way, and contributing to it in a particular way, because, if consistent with themselves, they must be so affected, and must so act.
Upon the invention and conduct of his characters the dramatist must therefore expend a great proportion—even a preponderance—of his labour. His treatment of them will, in at least as high a degree as his choice of subject, conception of action, and method of construction, determine the effect which Character-ization.his work produces. And while there are aspects of the dramatic art under which its earlier phases already exhibit an unsurpassed degree of perfection, there is none under which its advance is more notable than this. Many causes have contributed to this result; the chief is to be sought in the multiplication of the opportunities for mankind’s study of man. The theories of the Indian critics on the subject of dramatic character are little more than an elaborate scaffolding.Advance of the drama in this respect. Aristotle’s remarks on the subject are scanty; nor indeed is the strength of the dramatic literature from whose examples he abstracted his maxims to be sought in the fulness or variety of its characterization. This relative deficiency was beyond doubt largely caused by the outward conditions of the Greek theatre—the remoteness of actor from spectator, and the consequent necessity for the use of masks, and for the raising, and consequent conventionalizing, of the tones of the voice. Later Greek and Roman comedy, unable or unwilling to resist the force of habit, limited their range of characters to an accepted gallery of types. Nor is it easy to ignore the fact that the influence of these classical examples, combined with that of national tendencies of mind and temperament, have all along inclined the dramatists of the Romance nations to attach less importance to characterization of a closer and more varied kind than to interest of action and effectiveness of construction. The Italian and the Spanish drama more especially, and the French during a great part of its history, have in general shown a disposition to present their characters, as it were, ready made—whether in the case of tragic heroes and heroines, or in that of comic types, often moulded, as in the commedia dell’ arte “and beyond,” according to a long-lived system of local or national selection. These types, expanded, heightened and modified, are recognizable in some of the triumphs of comic characterization achieved by the Germanic drama, and by its master, Shakespeare, above all; but this fact must not obscure one of more importance than itself. In the matter of comic as well as of serious characterization—in the individualizing of characters and in evolving them as it were out of the progress of the action—the modern drama has not only advanced, but in a sense revolutionized, the dramatic art, as inherited from its ancient masters.
Yet, however the method and scope of characterization may vary under the influence of different historical epochs and different tendencies or tastes of races or nations, the laws of this branch of the dramatic art remain based on the same essential requirements. What interests us in Requisites
of character. a man or woman in real life, or in the impressions we form of historical personages, is that which seems to us to give them individuality. A dramatic character must therefore, whatever its part in the action, be sufficiently marked by features of its own to interest the imagination; with these features its subsequent conduct must be consistent, and to them its participation in the action must correspond. In order to achieve such a result, the dramatist must have, in the first instance, distinctly conceived the character, however it may have been suggested to him. His task is, not to paint a copy of some contemporary or “historical” personage, but to conceive a particular kind of man, acting under the operation of particular circumstances. This conception, growing and modifying itself with the progress of the action, also invented by the dramatist, will determine the totality of the character which he creates. The likeness which the result bears to an actual or historical personage may very probably, from secondary points of view, affect the immediate stage success of the creation; upon its dramatic result this likeness can have no influence whatever. In a wider sense than that in which Shakespeare denied the charge that Falstaff was Oldcastle, it should be possible to say of every dramatic character which it is sought to identify with an actual personage, “This is not the man.” The mirror of the drama is not a photographic apparatus; and not even the most conscientious combination of science and art can bring back even a “phase” of the real Napoleon.
Distinctiveness, as the primary requisite in dramatic characterization, is to be demanded in the case of all personages introduced into a dramatic action, but not in all cases in an equal degree. Schiller, in adding to the dramatis personae of his Fiesco superscriptions of their chiefDistinct-iveness.characteristics, labels Sacco as “an ordinary person,” and this, no doubt, suffices for Sacco. But with the great masters of characterization a few touches, of which the true actor’s art knows how to avail itself, distinguish even their lesser characters from one another; and every man is in his humour down to the “third citizen.” Elaboration is necessarily reserved for characters who are the more important contributors to the action, and the fulness of elaboration for its heroes. Many expedients may lend their aid to the higher degrees of distinctiveness. Much is gained by a significant introduction of hero or heroine—thus Antigone is dragged in by the watchman, Gloucester enters alone upon the scene, Volpone is discovered in adoration of his golden saint. Nothing marks character more clearly than the use of contrast—as of Othello with Iago, of Ottavio with Max Piccolomini, of Joseph with Charles Surface. Nor is direct antithesis the only effective kind of contrast; Cassius is a foil to Brutus, and Leonora to her namesake the Princess. But, besides impressing the imagination as a conception distinct in itself, each character Self-consistency.must maintain a consistency between its conduct in the action and the features it has established as its own. This consistency does not imply uniformity; for, as Aristotle observes, there are characters which, to be represented with uniformity, must be presented as uniformly un-uniform. Of such consistently complex characters the great critic cites no instances, nor indeed are they of frequent occurrence in Greek tragedy; in the modern drama Hamlet is their unrivalled
