TO THE MOON. Θέστυλι, ταὶ κύνες ἄμμιν ἀνὰ πτόλιν ὠρύονται THEOCRITUS (Idyll II. 35, 36). Now maddens the slumbering shepherd in thy sheen; From revel, sedulous to cheat the days, No happier race in thy bleached bosom thou bearest; TO A BEAUTIFUL JEWESS. The faithful Eliezer, at the well, Saluted thee; smooth Jacob, in the field; For thee unhappy Abner's fate was sealed, And stern Ahasuerus owned thy spell; Before thy Child the Median sages fell, And shining hosts of heaven his birth revealed And if our greedy race charge thine with greed, JOHN DAVIDSON LONG before he had gravitated to London, long before he had made himself a name, Mr. Davidson, in his Scottish wander-years, had written, and even published, five poems in dramatic form, which he afterwards collected in one volume under the title of Plays. The first, An Unhistorical Pastoral, is dated "Glasgow 1877," the last, Scaramouch in Naxos, "Crieff 1888"; so that for eleven years, it would seem, Mr. Davidson gave the best part of his thoughts to dramatic composition. Yet he cannot be said, in all this time, to have invented a single plot, and scarcely to have created a character. He poured forth enough pure poetry to have made him a reputation twice over, but he showed no comprehension of the most rudimentary exigencies of the particular form he had adopted. I do not merely mean that his plays were totally unsuited to the existing stage; that might be more of a reproach to the stage than to them. What I mean is that he had as yet no inkling of the essential nature of drama, but used the form merely as a vehicle for uncontrolled fantasy, lyrism, and rhetoric. This is not a question of pitting one convention or one technique against another, and arbitrarily declaring this one excellent, that condemnable. It is not bad technique, but no technique that we find in Mr. Davidson's early plays. Technique, in drama, means the prevision of your audience, and nice adjustment of every stroke of your work towards the compassing of the desired effect; just as, in painting, technique means a perfect understanding of the relation between the medium and the percipient eye. The dramatist, of course, can choose his own audience, which may be an absolutely ideal one. But there is one condition from which he cannot escape, one characteristic which the ideal audience shares with the most commonplace pit and gallery to wit, ignorance of what the dramatist has to tell them. This ignorance may be total or only partial. In the case of the Greek tragedy, founded on national legend, or the Elizabethan chronicle-play, founded on national history, the audience might be assumed to know in advance the main outline of the action to be presented. What the dramatist had in this case to impart was a superior knowledge, a novel divination and interpretation of the characters involved. But in the best, the most artistic, examples of both Greek and English national drama, it will be found, I think, that the poet relies but little on previous knowledge of legend or history on the part of his audience, telling his story as clearly and as carefully as though it were entirely his own invention. Be this as it may, in the vast majority of modern plays the assumption is and must be that the dramatist knows everything about his characters and their fortunes, while the audience (whether real or ideal) knows nothing. The problem of the technician, then, is to find the best way, in relation to a given audience, of imparting his omniscience; the best way being that which awakens interest earliest, sustains it most evenly, and involves no more than a pleasurable effort of attention and thought. It makes no essential difference whether the play be primarily one of plot or of character. In either case the business of the dramatist is, in the last analysis, the wellordered impartment of knowledge. It is like the pouring of a liquid from a full vessel into an empty one: the method must be carefully adapted to the configuration of the vessel |