A Librarian's Open Shelf Part 18

Is there any chance of a movie masterpiece, anyway? Yes, but not in the direction that most producers see it. What Vach.e.l.l Lindsay calls "Splendor" in the movies is an interesting and striking feature of them--the moving of ma.s.ses of people amid great architectural construction--sieges, triumphs, battles, mobs--but all this is akin to scenery. Its movements are like those of the trees or the surf. One can not make a play entirely of scenery, though the contrary seems to be the view of some managers, even on the stage of the regular theatre. So far, the individual acting and plot construction in the great spectacular movies has been poor. It was notably so, it seems to me in the Birth of a Nation and not much better in Cabiria. Judith of Bethulia (after T.B.

Aldrich) is the best acted "splendor" play that I have seen. Masterpieces are coming not through spending millions on supes, and "real" temples, and forts; but rather by writing a scenario particularly adapted to film-production, hiring and training actors that know how to act for the camera, preferably those without bad stage habits to unlearn, cutting out all unreal scenery, costume and make-up and keeping everything as simple and as close to the actual as possible. The best movie play I ever saw was in a ten-cent theatre in St. Louis. It was a dramatization of Frank Norris's "McTeague." I have never seen it advertised anywhere, and I never heard of the actors, before or since. But most of it was fine, sincere work, and seeing it made me feel that there is a future for the movie play.

One trouble is that up to date, neither producers nor actors nor the most intelligent and best educated part of the audience take the movies seriously. Here is one of the marvels of modern times; something that has captured the public as it never was captured before. And yet most of us look at it as a huge joke, or as something intended to entertain the populace, at which we, too are graciously pleased to be amused. It might mend matters if we could have every day in some reputable paper a column of readable serious stuff about the current movie plays--real criticism, not simply the producer's "blurb."

Possibly, too, a partners.h.i.+p between the legitimate stage and the movie may be possible and I shall devote to a somewhat wild scheme of this sort the few pages that remain to me. To begin with, the freedom enjoyed by the Elizabethan dramatists from the limitations imposed by realistic scenery has not been sufficiently insisted upon as an element in their art. Theirs was a true _drame libre_, having its a.n.a.logies with the present attempts of the vers-librists to free poetry from its restrictions of rhyme and metre. But while the tendency of poetry has always been away from its restrictions, the _mise-en-scene_ in the drama has continually, with the attempts to make it conform to nature, tightened its throttling bands on the real vitality of the stage.

Those who periodically wonder why the dramatists of the Elizabethan age--the greatest productive period in the history of the English stage--no longer hold the stage, with the exception of Shakespeare, and who lament that even Shakespeare is yielding his traditional place, have apparently given little thought to this loss of freedom as a contributing cause. While the writers of _vers libre_ have so far freed themselves that some of them have ceased to write poetry at all, it is a question whether the scenic freedom of the old dramatists may not have played such a vital part in the development of their art, that they owed to it at least some of their pre-eminence.

Shakespeare's plays, as Shakespeare wrote them, read better than they act.

Hundreds of Shakespeare-lovers have reached this conclusion, and many more have reached it than have dared to put it into words. The reason is, it seems to me, that we can not, on the modern stage, enact the plays of Shakespeare as he intended them to be acted--as he really wrote them.

If we compare an acting edition of any of the plays with the text as presented by any good editor, this becomes increasingly clear. Shakespeare in his original garb, is simply impossible for the modern stage.

The fact that the Elizabethan plays were given against an imaginary back-ground enabled the playwright to disregard the old, hampering unity of place more thoroughly than has ever been possible since his time. His ability to do so, was the result not of any reasoned determination to set his plays without "scenery," but simply of environment. As the scenic art progressed, the backgrounds became more and more realistic and less and less imaginary. The imagination of the audience, however, has always been more or less requisite to the appreciation of drama, as of any other art.

No stage tree or house has ever been close enough to its original to deceive the onlooker. He always knows that they are imitations, intended only to aid the imagination, and his imagination has always been obliged to do its part. In Shakespeare's time the imagination did all the work; and as imaginary houses and trees have no weight, the services of the scene-s.h.i.+fter were not required to remove them and to subst.i.tute others.

The scene could be s.h.i.+fted at once from a battlefield in Flanders to a palace in London and after the briefest of dialogues it could change again to a street in Genoa--all without inconveniencing anyone or necessitating a halt in the presentation of the drama. Any reflective reader of Shakespeare will agree, I think, that this ability to s.h.i.+ft scenes, which after all, is only that which the novelist or poet has always possessed and still possesses, enables the dramatist to impart a breadth of view that was impossible under the ideas of unity that governed the drama of the Ancients. Greek tragedy was drama in concentration, a tabloid of intense power--a brilliant light focussed on a single spot of pa.s.sion or exaltation. The Elizabethan drama is a view of life; and life does not focus, it is diffuse--a congeries of episodes, successive or simultaneous--something not re-producible by the ancient dramatic methods.

Today, while we have not gone back to the terrific force of the Greek unified presentation, we have lost this breadth. We strive for it, but we can no longer reach it because of the growth of an idea that realism in _mise-en-scene_ is absolutely necessary. Of course this idea has been injurious to the drama in more ways than the one that we are now considering. The notable reform in stage settings a.s.sociated with the names of Gordon Craig, Granville Barker, Urban, Hume and others, arises from a conviction that _mise-en-scene_ should inspire and reflect a mood--should furnish an atmosphere, rather than attempt to reproduce realistic details. To a certain extent these reforms also operate to simplify stage settings and hence to make a little more possible the quick transitions and the play of viewpoint which I regard as one of the glories of the Elizabethan drama. This simplification, however, is very far from a return to the absolute simplicity of the Elizabethan setting. Moreover, it is doubtful whether the temper of the modern audience is favorable to a great change in this direction. We live in an age of realistic detail and we must yield to the current, while using it, so far as possible, to gain our ends.

This being the case, it is certainly interesting to find that, entirely without the aid or consent of those who have at heart the interests of the drama, a new dramatic form has grown up which caters to the utmost to the modern desire for realistic detail--far beyond the dreams of ordinary stage settings--and at the same time makes possible the quick transitions that are the glory of the Elizabethan drama. Here, of course, is where we make connection with the moving picture, whose fascinating realism and freedom from the taint of the footlights have perhaps been sufficiently insisted upon in what has been already said. In the moving picture, with the possibility of realistic backgrounds such as no skill, no money, no opportunity could build up on the ordinary stage--distant prospects, marvels of architecture, waving trees and moving animals--comes the ability of pa.s.sing from one environment to another, on the other side of the globe perhaps, in the twinkling of an eye. The transitions of the Elizabethan stage sink into insignificance beside the possibilities of the moving-picture screen. Such an alternation as is now common in the film play, where two characters, talking to each other over the telephone, are seen in quick succession, would be impossible on the ordinary stage. The Elizabethan auditor, if his imagination were vivid and ready, might picture such a background of castle or palace or rocky coast as no photographer could produce; but even such imagination takes time to get under way, whereas the screen-picture gets to the brain through the retina instantly.

It is worth our while, I think, to consider whether this kind of scenery, rich in detail, but immaterial and therefore devoid of weight, could not be used in connection with the ordinary drama. There are obstacles, but they do not appear insuperable. The ordinary moving-picture, of course, is much smaller than the back drop of a large stage. Its enlargement is merely a matter of optical apparatus. Wings must be reduced in number and provided each with its own projection-machine, or replaced with drops similarly provided. Exits and entrances must be managed somewhat differently than with ordinary scenery. All this is surely not beyond the power of modern stagecraft, which has already surmounted such obstacles and accomplished such wonders. The projection, it is unnecessary to say, must be from behind, not from before, to avoid throwing the actors'

shadows on the scenery. There must still, of course, be lighting from the front, and the shadow problem still exists, but no more than it does with ordinary scenery. Its solution lies in diffusing the light. No spotlight could be used, and its enforced absence would be one of the incidental blessings of the moving scene.

The advantages of this moving-picture scenery would be many and obvious.

Prominent among them of course are fidelity to nature and richness of detail. The one, however, on which I desire to lay stress here is the flexibility in change of scene that we have lost with the introduction of heavy material "scenery" on our stages. This flexibility would be regained without the necessity of discarding scenery altogether and going back to the Elizabethan reliance on the imagination of the audience.

Of course, moving scenery would not be required or desired in all dramatic productions--only in those where realistic detail combined with perfect flexibility and rapidity of change in scene seems to be indicated. The scenery should of course be colored, and while we are waiting for the commercial tri-chroic picture with absolutely true values, we may get along very well with the di-chroic ones, such as those turned out with the so-called Kinemacolor process. Those who saw the wonderful screen reproduction of the Indian durbar, several years ago, will realize the possibilities.

And more than all else, may we not hope that these new backgrounds may react on the players who perform their parts in front of them? Not necessarily; for we have seen that it does not always do so in the present movie play. But I am confident that the change will come. Little by little the necessities of the case are developing actors who act naturally. One may pose in a canoe on a painted rapid; but how can he do so in the real water course, where every att.i.tude, every play of the muscles must be adapted to the real propulsion of the boat?

In short, the movie may ultimately require its presenters to be real, and so may come a school of realism in acting that may have its uses on the legitimate stage also.

Who will be the first manager to experiment with this new adjunct to the art of the stage?

A WORD TO BELIEVERS[17]

[17] Address at the closing session of the Church School of Religious Instruction, St. Louis.

People may be divided into a great many different cla.s.ses according to their att.i.tude toward belief and beliefs--toward the meaning and value of belief in general--toward their own beliefs and those of their neighbors.

We have the man who does not know what "belief" means, and who does not care; the man whose idea of its meaning is perverse and wrong; the man who thinks his own beliefs are important and those of his neighbors are unimportant; the man who thinks it proper to base belief on certain considerations and not on others--the man, for instance, who will say he believes that two plus two equals four, but can not believe in the existence of G.o.d because the grounds for such belief can not be stated in the same mathematical symbols. These are only a few of the cla.s.ses that might be defined, using this interesting basis of cla.s.sification. But before we can take up the question of instruction in the church's beliefs, about which I have been asked to address you this evening, we must recognize the existence of these cla.s.ses, and possibly the fact that you yourselves are not all in accord in the way in which you look at the subject.

What I shall say is largely personal and you must not look upon me as representing anybody or anything. I may even fail to agree with some of the instruction that you have received in this interesting and valuable course. But I do speak, of course, as one who loves our church and as a loyal and I hope a thoughtful layman.

First, what is belief? We surely give the word a wide range of values. A man says that he believes in his own existence, which the philosopher Descartes said was the most sure thing in the world--"_Cogito, ergo sum_."

He also says that he believes it will rain to-morrow. What can there be in common between these two acts of faith? Between a certainty and a fifty per cent chance, or less? This--that a man is always willing to act on his beliefs; if not, they are not beliefs within the meaning of this address.

If you believe it will rain, you take an umbrella. Your doing so is quite independent of the grounds for your belief. There may really be very little chance of its raining; but it is your belief that causes your action, no matter whether it is justified or not. You could not act more decisively if you were acting on the certainty of your own existence. It is this willingness to act that unifies our beliefs--that gives them value. If I heard a man declare his belief that a fierce wild animal was on his track, and if I then saw him calmly lie down and go to sleep on the trail, I should know that he was either insane or a liar.

I have intimated above that belief may or may not be based on mathematical certainty. Fill up a basket with black and white pebbles and then draw out one. Let us create a situation that shall make it imperative for a person to declare whether a black or a white pebble will be drawn. For instance, suppose the event to be controlled by an oriental despot who has given orders to strike off the man's head if he announces the wrong color. Of course, if he has seen that only white pebbles went into the basket he says boldly "White." That is certainty. But suppose he saw one black pebble in the ma.s.s. Does he any the less say "White"? That one black pebble represents a tiny doubt; does it affect the direction of his enforced action? Suppose there were two black pebbles; or a handful.

Suppose nearly half the pebbles were black? Would that make the slightest difference about what he would do? If you judge a man's belief by what he does, as I think you should do, that belief may admit of a good deal of doubt before it is nullified. Are your beliefs all based on mathematical certainties? I hope not; for then they must be few indeed.

That many of our fellow men have a wrong conception of belief is a very sad fact. The idea that it must be based on a mathematical demonstration of certainty, or even that it must be free from doubt is surely not Christian. Our prayers and our hymns are full of the contrary. We are beset not only by "fightings" but by "fears"--"within; without;" by "many a conflict, many a doubt"; we pray to be delivered from this same doubt.

The whole body of Christian doctrine is permeated with the idea that the true believer is likely to be beset by doubts of all kinds, and that it is his duty, despite all this, to believe.

And yet there are many who will not call themselves Christians so long as they can not construct a rigid demonstration of every Christian doctrine.

There are many thoughtful men who call themselves Agnostics just because they can not be mathematically sure of religious truth. Some of these men are better Christians than many that are so named. That they hold aloof from Christian fellows.h.i.+p is due to their mistaken notion of the nature of belief. The more is the pity. Now let us go back for a moment to our basket of pebbles. We have seen that the action of the guesser is based to some extent on his knowledge of the contents of the basket. In other words, he has grounds for the belief by which his act is conditioned.

Persons may act without grounds; it may be necessary for them so to do.

Even in this case there may be a sort of blind subst.i.tute for belief. A man, pursued by a bear, comes to a fork in the road. He knows nothing about either branch; one may lead to safety and one to a jungle. But he has to choose, and choose at once; and his choice represents his bid for safety. There is plenty of action of this sort in the world; if we would avoid the necessity for it we must do a little preliminary investigation; and if we can not find definitely where the roads lead, we may at least hit upon some idea of which is the safest.

But with all our investigation we shall find that we must rely in the end on our trust in some person; either ourselves or someone else. Even the certainty of the mathematical formula depends on our confidence in the sanity of our own mental processes. The man who sees the basket filled with white pebbles must trust the accuracy of his eyesight. If he relies for his information on what someone else told him, he must trust not only that other's eyesight, but his memory, his veracity, his friendliness. And yet one may be far safer in trusting another than in relying on his own unaided powers. _Securus judicat orbis terrarum_, says the old Latin. "The world's judgment is safe." We have learned to modify this, for we have seen world judgments that are manifestly incorrect. The world thought the earth was flat. It thought there were witches, and it burned them. Here individuals simply followed one another like sheep; and all, like sheep, went astray. But where there is a real, independent judgment on the part of each member of a group, and all agree, that is better proof of its correctness than most individual investigations could furnish. My watch, of the best make and carefully regulated, indicates five o'clock, but if I meet five friends, each of whom tells me, independently, that it is six, I conclude that my watch is wrong. There was never a more careful scientific investigation than that by which a French physicist thought he had established the existence of what he called the "N ray"--examined its properties and measured its constants. He read paper after paper before learned bodies as his research progressed. He challenged the interest of his brother scientists on three continents. And yet he was entirely wrong: there never was any "N ray." The man had deceived himself. The failure of hundreds to see as he did weighed more than his positive testimony that he saw what he thought he saw. Here as elsewhere our view of what may be the truth is based on trust. If you trust the French physicist, you will still believe in the "N ray." Creeds we are told, are outworn, and yet we are confronted, from birth to death, with situations that imperiously require action of some sort. Every act that responds must be based on belief of some kind. Creeds are only expressions of belief. The kind of Creed that _is_ outworn (and this is doubtless what intelligent persons mean when they make this statement) is the parrot creed, the form of words without meaning, the statement of belief without any grounds behind it or any action in front of it. For this the modern churchman has no use.

And if he desires to avoid the parrot creed, he must surely inform himself regarding the meaning of its articles and the grounds on which they are held. More; he must satisfy himself of the particular meaning that they have for him and the personal grounds on which he is to hold them. This is the reason why such a course as that which you complete to-night is necessary and valuable. I have heard instruction of this kind deprecated as likely to bring disturbing elements into the mind. One may doubtless change from belief to skepticism by too much searching. It used to be a standing joke in Yale College, when I was a student there, that a well-known professor reputed to be an Atheist, had been perfectly orthodox until he had heard President Porter's lectures on the "Evidences of Christianity." But seriously, this objection is but another phase of the fallacy at which we have already glanced--that doubts are fatal to belief.

I am certain that the professor in question might have examined in detail every one of President Porter's "Evidences," and found them wanting, only to discover clearer and stronger grounds of belief elsewhere--in his mere confidence in others, perhaps. Or he might have turned pragmatist and believed in Christianity because it "worked"--a valid reason in this case doubtless, but not always to be depended on; because the Father of Lies sometimes makes things "work" himself--at least temporarily.

But if examining into the grounds of his belief makes a man honestly give up that belief, then I bid him G.o.d-speed. I may weep for him, but I cannot help believing that he stands better with his Maker for being honest with himself than if he had gone on with his parrot belief that meant absolutely nothing. I can not feel that the Aztecs who were baptized by the followers of Cortes were any more believers in Christianity after the ceremony than they were before. It seems to me, however that a Christian, examining faithfully the grounds of his belief, will usually have that belief strengthened, and that a churchman, examining the doctrines of the church will be similarly upheld.

Not that church instruction should be one-sided. The teaching that tends to make us believe that every intelligent man thinks as we do reacts against itself. It is like the unfortunate temperance teaching that represents the liking for wine as always acquired. When the pupil comes to taste wine and finds that he likes it at once, he concludes that the whole body of instruction in the physiology of alcohol is false and acts accordingly. When a boy is taught that there is nothing of value beyond his own church, or nothing of value outside of Christianity, he will think less of his church, and less of Christianity when he finds intelligent, upright, lovable outsiders. I look back with horror on some of the books, piously prepared under the auspices of the S.P.C.K. in London, that I used to take home from Sunday School. In them we were told that a good man outside the church was worse than a bad man in it. If that was not the teaching in the book, it was at least the form in which it took lodgment in my boyish brain. Thank G.o.d it never found permanent foothold there.

Instead, I hold in my memory the Eastern story of G.o.d's rebuke to Abraham when he expelled the Fire Wors.h.i.+pper from his tent. "Could you not bear with him for one hour? Lo! I have borne with him these forty years!"

I have always thought that a knowledge of what our neighbors believe is an excellent balance-wheel to our own beliefs and that our own beliefs, so balanced, will be saner and more restrained. It would be well, I think, if we could have a survey of the world's religions, setting down in parallel columns all the faiths of mankind. If this is too great a task we might begin with a survey of Christianity, set down in the same way. I believe that the results of such a survey might surprise us, showing, as I think it would do, the many fundamentals that we hold in common and the trivial nature of some of the barriers that appear to separate us.

In your course, just completed, you have had such a survey, I doubt not, of the beliefs of our own beloved church. Where her divines have differed, you have had the varying opinions spread before you. You have not been told that the mind of every churchman has always been a replica of the mind of every other churchman. Personally, I feel grateful that this has not been the case. As I say my creed and begin "I believe in G.o.d, the Father Almighty," I realize that the aspect of even such a basic belief as this, is the same in no two minds; that it s.h.i.+fts from land to land and from age to age. I know that G.o.d, as he is, is past human knowledge and that until we see Him face to face we can not all mean just the same thing when we repeat this article of belief. But I realize also that this is not due to the mutability of the Almighty but to man's variability. The G.o.ds of St. Jerome, of Thomas Carlyle and of William James are different; but that is because these men had different types of minds. Behind their human ideas stands G.o.d himself--"the same yesterday, to-day and forever." So we may go through the creed; so we may study, as you have been doing, the beliefs of the church. Everywhere we see the evidences of the working, upon fallible human minds of a dim appreciation of something beyond full human knowledge--

"That one far-off divine event Toward which the Whole Creation moves."

We have a wonderful church, my friends. It is a church to live with; a church to be proud of. Those who miss what we are privileged to enjoy are missing something from the fulness of life. We have not broken with the historic continuity of the Christian faith: there is no chasm, filled with wreckage, between us and the fathers of the church. Above all we have enshrined our beliefs in a marvellous liturgy, which is ever old and ever new, and which had the good fortune to be put into English at a day when the force of expression in our Mother tongue was peculiarly virile, yet peculiarly lovely. I know of nothing in the whole range of English literature that will compare with the collects as contained in our Book of Common Prayer, for beauty, for form, for condensation and for force. They are a string of pearls. And indeed, what I have said of them applies to the whole book. When I see Committees of well-meaning divines trying to tamper with it, I shudder as I might if I witnessed the attempt of a guild of modern sculptors to improve the Venus of Milo by chipping off a bit here and adding something there. Good reasons exist for changes, doubtless; but I feel that we have here a work of art, of divine art; and art is one of G.o.d's ways of reaching the human heart. We are proud that we have not discarded it from our church buildings, from our altars, from the music of our choirs. Let us treat tenderly our great book of Common Prayer, like that other great masterpiece of divine literary art, the King James version of the Bible. There are plenty of better translations; there is not one that has the same magic of words to fire the imagination and melt the heart.

These are all trite things to say to churchmen: I have tried, on occasion, to say them to non-churchmen, but they do not seem to respond. There are those who rejoice in their break with historic continuity, who look upon a written form of service with horror. It is well, as I have said, for us to realize that our friends hold these opinions. One can not strengthen his muscles in a tug of war unless some one is pulling the other way. The savor of religion, like that of life itself, is in its contrasts. I thank G.o.d that we have them even within our own Communion. We are high-church and low-church and broad-church. We burn incense and we wear Geneva gowns.

This diversity is not to be condemned. What is to be deprecated is the feeling among some of us that the diversity should give place to uniformity--to uniformity of their own kind, of course. To me, this would be a calamity. Let us continue to make room in our church for individuality. G.o.d never intended men to be pressed down in one mold of sameness. In the last a.n.a.lysis, each of us has his own religious beliefs.

The doctrines of our church, or of any church are but a composite portrait of these beliefs. But when one takes such a portrait throughout all lands and in all time, and the features keep true, one can not help regarding them as the divine lineaments.

This is how I would have you regard the beliefs of our church, as you have studied them throughout this course--as our particular composite photograph of the face of G.o.d, as He has impressed it on the hearts and minds of each one of us. I commend this view to those who have no reverence for beliefs, particularly when they are formulated as creeds.

These persons mean that they have no regard for group beliefs but only for those of the individual. Each has his own beliefs, and he must have confidence in them, for they are the grounds on which he acts, if he is a normal man. Even the faith of an Agnostic is based on a very positive belief. As for me, I feel that the churchman goes one step beyond him: he even doubts Doubt. Said Socrates: "I know nothing except this one thing, that I know nothing. The rest of you are ignorant even of this." Socrates was a great man. If he had been greater still, he might have said something like this: "I freely acknowledge that a mathematical formula can not satisfy all the cases that we discuss. But neither can it be stated mathematically that they are all unknowable. I am not even sure that I know nothing." Surely, under these circ.u.mstances, we may give over looking for mathematical demonstrations and believe a few things on our own account--that our children love us--that our eyes do not deceive us; that the soul lives on; that G.o.d rules all. We may put our faith in what our own church teaches us, even as a child trusts his father though he can not construct a single syllogism that will increase that trust.

This does not mean that we shall not benefit by examining the articles of our faith; by learning what they are, what they mean and what others have thought of them. The churchman must combine, in his mental habits, all that is best of the Conservative and the Radical. While holding fast that which is good he must keep an open mind toward every change that may serve to bring him nearer to the truth or give him a clearer vision of it.

How we can insure this better than by such an inst.i.tution as the Church School for Religious Instruction I am sure I do not see. May G.o.d guide it and aid it in its work!