CONCLUSION

From Gordian Plot

To obtain the nuances of the Thirty-Six Situations, I have had recourse almost constantly to the same method of procedure; for example, I would enumerate the ties of friendship or kinship possible between the characters; I would determine also their degree of consciousness, of free-will and knowledge of the real end toward which they were moving. And we have seen that when it is desired to alter the normal degree of discernment in one of the two adversaries, the introduction of a second character is necessary, the first becoming the blind instrument of the second, who is at the same time invested with a Machiavellian subtlety, to such an extent does his part in the action become purely intellectual. Thus, clear perception being in the one case excessively diminished, it is, in the other, proportionately increased. Another element for modifying all the situations is the energy of the acts which must result from them. Murder, for instance, may be reduced to a wound, a blow, an attempt, an outrage, an intimidation, a threat, a too-hasty word, an intention not carried out, a temptation, a thought, a wish, an injustice, a destruction of a cherished object, a refusal a want of pity, an abandonment, a falsehood. If the author so desires, this blow (murder or its diminutives) may be aimed, not at the object of hatred in person, but at one dear to him. Finally, the murder may be multiple and aggravated by circumstances which the law has foreseen. A third method of varying the situations: for this or that one of the two adversaries whose struggle constitutes our drama, there may be substituted a group of characters animated by a single desire, each member of the group reflecting that desire under a different light. There is, moreover (as I have already shown), no Situation which may not be combined with any one of its neighbors, nay, with two, three, four, five, six of them and more! Now, these combinations may be of many sorts; in the first case, the situations develop successively and logically one from another; in the second case they dispose themselves in a dilemma, in the midst of which hesitates the distracted hero; in the third case, each one of them will appertain to a particular group or a particular role; in the fourth, fifth, sixth cases, etc., they are represented according to two, or according to all three of the cases already brought together in one situation, and together they escape from it, but the majority of them fall therefrom into a position not less critical, which may even offer but a choice between two courses equally painful; after finding a way between this Scylla and Charybdis, the very leap by which they escape precipitates them into a final Situation resulting from the preceding ones, and which sweeps them all away together. . . . This, be it understood, is but one combination among a thousand, for I cannot here elaborate the system by which this study of the Thirty-Six Situations may be continued, and by means of which they may be endlessly multiplied; that-is a subject for a separate work upon the "Laws of Literary Invention."

The composition or arrangement of the chosen Situations—and at the same time of the episodes and characters introduced— may be deduced in a manner somewhat novel and interesting, from the same theory of the "Thirty-Six." Considering, in effect, that , "every dramatic situation springs from a conflict [ between two principal directions of effort" (whence at the same time comes our dread of the victor and our pity for the vanquished), we shall have to choose, at the rising of the curtain, between two beginnings; we must decide which of the two adversaries pre-exists. This leads us infallibly to make of the second the cause (innocent or responsible) of the drama, since it is his appearance which will be the signal for the struggle. The first, who especially enlists our attention, is the Protagonist, already present in the earliest Thespian tragedy, altogether lyric, descriptive and analytic; the second—the obstacle arising or supervening—is the Antagonist, that principle of the action which we owe to the objective and Homeric genius of jEschylus. One of two strongly opposing colors will thus dominate the entire work, according as we shall choose, near the beginning, which of the two parties shall possess the greater power, the greater chance of victory.

Aristotle has taught us to distinguish between "simple" tragedy (in which the superiority remains upon the same side until the end, and in which, consequently, there is no sudden change of fortune, no surprise) and "complex" tragedy (the tragedy of surprise, of vicissitude), wherein this superiority passes from one camp to the other. Our dramatists have since refined upon the latter; in those of their pieces which are least complicated, they double the change of fortune, thus leading ingeniously to the return of the opposed powers, at the moment of the spectator's departure, to the exact positions which they occupied when he entered the hall; in their plays of complicated plot, they triple, quadruple, quintuple the surprise, so long as their imaginations and the patience of the public will permit. We thus see, in these vicissitudes of struggle, the first means of varying a subject. It will not go very far, however, since we cannot, however great our simplicity, receive from the drama, or from life, more than one thousand three hundred and thirty-two surprises.—One thousand three hundred and thirty-two? —Obviously; what is any keen surprise if not the passing from a state of calm into a Dramatic Situation, or from one Situation into another, or again into a state of calm? Perform the multiplication; result, one thousand, three hundred and thirty-two.

Shall we now inquire whence arise these vicissitudes, these unexpected displacements of equilibrium? Clearly in some influence, proceeding from a material object a circumstance, or a third personage. Upon this Third Actor—whose introduction into the drama was the triumph of Sophocles—must rest what is called the Plot. He is the unforeseen element, the ideal striven for by the two parties and the surrounding characters; he is fantastically divided and multiplied, by two, by three, by ten, by even more, to the point of encumbering the scene; but he is always himself, always easily recognizable. Some of his fragments become "Instruments," some, "Disputed Objects," some, "Impelling Forces;" they range themselves sometimes beside the Protagonist, sometimes near the Antagonist, or, moving here and there, they provoke that downfall the incessant avoidance of which is called—for events as for mankind—Progress. In this way they clearly show their origin—that "Role-Lien" (Jocaste in "Seven Against Thebes," Sabine in "Horace") under which the Third Actor was germinating in iEschylean tragedy, without yet taking a positive part in the action.

It will be seen that the appearance of these figures of the second plan, these Choruses, Confidants, Crowds, Clowns, even Figurants re-enforced by those of the original groundwork, precursors whose importance ranges from Tiresias to the Messenger of "Oedipus the King," from prophet to porter, modifies most powerfully the effect of the ensemble, especially if we reflect that each one of these, considered separately, has his own especial motives for action, motives soon apparent in regard to the characters who surround him> in some dramatic situation subordinate to the dominant one, but none the less real; the turns and changes of the general action will affect him in some particular way, and the consequences, to him, of each vicissitude, of each effort, of each act and denouement, contribute to the spectator's final impression. If the Third Actor, for instance, be a Disputed Object, it becomes necessary to take into account his first and his last possessor, the diverse relations which he has successively had with them, and his own preferences. If he appear as Inspirer or Instigator, we must consider (aside from his degree of consciousness or unconsciousness, of frankness or dissimulation, and of Will proper) the perseverance which he brings to his undertaking; if he be unconscious, the discovery which he may make of his own unconsciousness; if he be a deceiver, the discoveries which others may make of his dissimulation ("others" here meaning perhaps a single character, perhaps the spectator). These remarks also apply to the "Instrumental" role; and not alone these remarks, but those also which concern the "Object," are applicable to the Role-Lien.

I have already observed that this last role, and the triple hypostasis of the Third Actor, may be reproduced in numerous exemplars within one play. On the other hand, two, three, or all four of them may be fused in a single figure, (Lien-Instrumental, Object Instigator, Instrument-Lien-Object, etc), combinations which present themselves, like the combinations of the Situations, already considered, in varied array. Sometimes the hero who unites in himself these divers roles plays them simultaneously— perhaps all of them toward an individual or group, perhaps one or several of them toward an individual or group, and another role wherein these roles mingle, toward some other individual or group; sometimes these various roles will be successively played toward the same individual or group, or toward several; sometimes, finally, the hero plays these roles now simultaneously, and again successively.

But it is not possible to detail in these pages, even if I so desired, the second part of the Art of Combination; that which we in France call by the somewhat feeble term (as Goethe remarked) "composition." All that I have here undertaken to show is, first, that a single study must create, at the same time, the episodes or actions of the characters, and the characters themselves; for upon the stage, what the latter are may be known only by what they do; next, how invention and composition, those two modes of the Art of Combination (not Imagination, empty word!) will, in our works to come, spring easily and naturally from the theory of the Thirty-Six Situations.

Thus, from the first edition of this little book, I might offer (speaking not ironically but seriously) to dramatic authors and theatrical managers, ten thousand scenarios, totally different from those used repeatedly upon our stage in the last fifty years * * *

• * * "The scenarios will be, needless to say, of a realistic and effective character. 1 will contract to deliver a thousand in eight days. For the production of a single gross, but twenty-four hours are required. Prices quoted on single dozens. Write or call, No. 19, Passage de l'Elysee des Beaux-Arts. The Situations will be detailed, act by act, and, if desired, scene by scene" * * *

But I hear myself accused, with much violence, of an intent to "kill imagination." "Enemy of fancy!" "Destroyer of wonders!" "Assassin of prodigy!" * * * These and similar titles cause me not a blush.

A singular history, in truth, is that of the "Imagination." Certainly no one in classic times thought of priding himself upon it. Far from it! Every novelty, on its first appearance, hastened to support itself by appeal to some antique authority. From 1830 dates the accession to the literary throne of this charlatanesque "faculty," analysis of which is, it would seem, eternally interdicted. The results of this new regime were not slow in appearing, and they may be seen, in their final decay, among the last successors of ultraromantic Romanticism. Mysterious crime, judicial error, followed by the inevitable love affair between the children of slayer and victim; a pure and delicate working-girl in her tiny room, a handsome young engineer who passes by; a kind-hearted criminal, two police spies, the episode of the stolen child; and in conclusion, for the satisfaction of sentimental souls, a double love-match at the very least, and a suicide imposed upon the villain—this, one year with another, is the product of the Imagination. For the rest, in the whole field of dramatic romanticism (which corresponds so well to the Carrache school of painting) Hugo alone has created, thanks to what?—to a technical process patiently applied to the smallest details,—the antithesis of Being and of Seeming.

Ore vigorous blow was, for the moment, given to this legend of the Imagination by Positivism, which asserted that this so-called creative faculty was merely the kaleidoscope of our memories, stirred by chance. But it did not sufficiently insist upon the inevitably banal and monotonous results of these chance stirrings, some of our memories—precisely those least interesting and least personal—repeating themselves a thousand times in our minds, returning mercilessly in all manner of methodless combinations. These souvenirs of innumerable readings of the products of imitation in our neo-classic and Romantic past, envelope and overwhelm us unless we turn to that observation of nature which was pointed out by the Naturalists' initiative as an element of renovation. Even the Naturalists themselves have too often viewed reality athwart their bookish recollections; they have estimated too highly the power of the artistic temperament, however vigorous it may be, in assuming that it could interpose itself, alone and stripped of all convention, by a simple effort of will, between Nature and the literary product to be engendered. Thus "La Bete Humaine" has repeated the "judicial error" in that special form which is as common in books as it is rare in life; thus the starting-point of "LCEuvre" is merely the converse of the "thesis" of the Goncourts and Daudet; thus reminiscences of "Madame Bovary" appear in many a study of similar cases, which should, nevertheless, remain quite distinct;—and thus has appeared, in the second generation of "naturalists," a new school of imitators and traditionalists.

And all the old marionettes have reappeared, inflated with philosophic and poetic amplifications, but too often empty of symbolism, as of naturalism and humanism.

As to the methods of the Art of Combining, the truth may be grasped by one bold look, one triumphant glance at all these phantoms of trite thought, as they stand in their respective places in the foregoing categories. Any writer may have here a starting-point for observation and creation, outside the world of paper and print, a starting-point personal to himself, original in short,—which does not in the least mean improbable or unconvincing, since many situations which have today an appearance of improbability have merely been disfigured by persons who, not knowing how to create new ones, have complicated the old, entangling themselves in their own threads,

Especially will the invention of an unusual story, the discovery of a "virgin field," (to use the naturalists' term) be made so easy as to be almost valueless. We are not unaware of the importance, in the perfecting of Greek art, of the fact that it was circumscribed and restricted to a small number of legends (GEdipus, Agamemnon,. Phaedra, etc.,), which each poet had in his turn to treat, thus being unable to escape comparison, step by step, with each of his predecessors, so that even the least critical of spectators could see what part his personality and taste had in the new work. The worst which may be said of this tradition is that it rendered originality more difficult. By a study of the Thirty-Six Situations and their results, the same advantage may be obtained without its accompanying inconvenience. Thenceforth Proportion alone will assume significance.

By proportion I mean, not a collection of measured formula which evoke familiar memories,—but the bringing into battle, under command of the writer, of the infinite army of possible combinations, ranged according to their probabilities. Thus, to make manifest the truth or the impression which, until now, has been perceptible to him alone, the author will have to overlook in a rapid review the field before him, and to choose such of the situations and such of the details as are most appropriate to his purpose. This method —or, if you will, this freedom and this power—he will use, not only in the choice, the limitation and fertilization of his subject, but in his observation and meditation. And he will no more run the risk of falsifying, through pre-conceived ideas, the vision of reality than does the painter, for example, in his application of laws equally general, and likewise controlled by constant experimentation,—the divine laws of perspective!

Proportion, finally realizable in the calm bestowed by complete possession of the art of combining, and recovering the supreme power long ago usurped by "good taste" and by "imagination," will bring about the recognition of that quality more or less forgotten in modern art,—"beauty." By this I mean, not the skillful selection of material from nature, but the skillful and exact representation—with no groping, no uncertainty, no retention of superfluities—of the particular bit of nature under observation

But it is more than this, for these two definitions, the eclectic and the naturalist, concern but a limited number of the arts, and but one side of them; that small number to which imitation is open (painting, literature of character, and, in a limited way, sculpture) , and that side of them which is purely imitative. What significance have these two definitions (both of which rest upon the reproduction of reality, the one exalting and the other belittling it) if they be confronted with Music, with the didactic poetry of a Hesiod, with the Vedic incantations, with true statuary, simplified and significant, from the mighty chiselstrokes of Phidias or of the XIII Century, with purely ornamental or decorative art,—the "beauty" of a demonstration in geometry,—or finally with Architecture, now reviving in silence and obscurity, that art which comes periodically to reunite and, like an ark, to rescue the others, that art which shall once more return to lead us away from the prematurely senile follies of our delettanti and sectarians.

Upon a like height stands a principle greater than Naturalism with its experimental method, or Idealism which gives battle to it,—Logic.

It is by methods of logic that Viollet-le-Duc has enabled us to estimate truly the marvels of our "grand siecle," the XIII Century, substituting (to cite only this) for the simple admiration of 1830 before each stone saint so "picturesquely" perched upon the point of an ogive, the builders' explanation: that a stone of the exact weight and dimensions of the saint was there absolutely necessary, to prevent the breaking of the ogive under a double lateral pressure,—whence the instinctive satisfaction it gives our eyes. It is a great misfortune that the understanding of that magnificent age in which a Saint Louis presided over the multiple communal life, an age whose only equal in the world's history is that in which Pericles directed, from the Athenian metropolis, an identical movement,—that this understanding, which would be so useful to us, should have been horribly compromised in the Romantic carnival. Hugo's "Notre-Dame de Paris," wherein the public believed it beheld a portrait of our "moyen-age" (a most absurd appellation, by the way), represents it, by a singular choice, as already long dead,—after the Hundred Years' War which bled us to the point where we fell, passive and defenseless, under the domination of the Florentine national art called "renaissant," and then of various other influences, ancient and foreign, during four centuries. And, down to the very moment at which I write, the literary productions upon the subject of this most incomparable period of our past have been but pitiable affairs. But yesterday, a Renan was writing of ogival art as an effort which had been impotent ("Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse") or which at most had fathered works of no enduring character ("Priere sur l'Acropie"); the very Catholic Huysmans, in his "En Route," was making the most astounding salad of Roman vaulting, Primitive painting, Gregorian plain-chant,—a salad whose recipe is "the Faith" and which is called, naturally, the "Moyen-age,"—that age which embraces ten centuries of humanity, plus one-third of humanity's authentic history, three epochs strongly antagonistic to each other, peoples widely diverse and opposed; a something equivalent to a marriage between Alcibiades and Saint Genevieve.

The "Moyen-age," or, to speak more accurately, the XII, XIII, and XIV Centuries, were not in the least fantastic and freakish; this is the character merely of an occasional generation, such as that of LouisPhilippe. Neither were they mystic, in the present sense of that word. The architecture of those centuries grew, stone by stone, plan by plan, out of the most practical of reasons. In their sculpture there was nothing "naive"—the naivete is ours, when we so estimate that sculpture, which is far more realistic than our own; and if, persisting in the contrary opinion, we cling to the weird forms of the gargoyles, it may be said that, born of a symbolism akin to those of Egypt and Greece, they represent analogies equally ingenious and profound. In this period arose Thomism, lately called back into a position of honor to combat Positivism, and which realized so happy a harmony between Aristotelianism and Christian faith, between science and theology. In this period, too; were born the natural sciences, and, in the minds of its poets, evolved the laws by which our poetry lives today, those rhythms which through Ronsard we still hear, that Rhyme which we gave to all Europe,—and, at the same time, thy groined vaultings, 0 little town of Saint-Denis, suzerain oriflamme, pilot-barque of France! All these were born, and grew, beneath the grave gaze of the same wisdom which, on the Ionian shores, was called Athene.

Toward a new aspect of the same logic our own age already turns, since, having drunk of that antiquity by whose forces we ruled Europe a second time in the XVII Century; having drunk of the latest of great foreign influences, the Germanic, we are returning to reality and to the future. Thus, when each Greek city had absorbed the neighboring local cults (its "foreign influences") and the Oriental cults (the "antiquity" of that day), the most beautiful of mythologies were formed. It is, at least, toward an art purely logical, purely technical, and of infinitely varied creations, that all our literary tendencies seem to me to be converging. In that direction proceed Flaubert and Zola, those rugged pioneers, Ibsen. Strindberg, and all writers deliberately unmindful of their libraries, as the Hellenes were of barbarian literature; there moves Maeterlinck, having reduced action to the development of a single idea; Verlaine, delivering from conventional rules true rhythm, which makes for itself its own rules; Mallarme, prince of ellipse, clarifying syntax and expelling clouds of our little parasite words and tattered formulas; in that direction Moreas calls us, but without freeing himself, unfortunately, from the Italianism of our so-called Renaissance; all these, and others not less glorious, a whole new generation springing up, futurists, "loups," cubists, seem to me to be seeking the same goal, the final abolition of all absolute authority, even that of Nature and of our sciences her interpreters; and the erection upon its debris of simple logic, of an art solely technical, and thus capable of revealing an unknown system of harmony; in brief, an artists' art.

In literature, in dramatic literature which is the special subject of our consideration, the investigation of Proportion of which I have above spoken will show us the various "general methods" of presenting any situation whatever. Each one of these "general methods, containing a sort of canon applicable to all situations, will constitute for us an "order" analogous to the orders of architecture, and which, like them, will take its place with other orders, in a dramatic '"system." But the systems, in their turn, will come together under certain rubrics yet more general, comparisons of which will furnish us many a subject for reflection. In that which we might call Enchantment, there meet, oddly enough, systems as far apart in origin as Indian drama; certain comedies of Shakespeare ("A Midsummer Night's Dream"; "The Tempest"), the "fiabesque" genre of Gozzi, and "Faust;" the Mystery brings together the works of Persia, Thespis and the pre-Aeschyleans, "Prometheus," the book of "Job," the stage of the tragic Ezekiel, of Saint Gregory Nazianzen, of Hroswitha, the Jeux and Miracles of our XIII Century, the Autos; here, Greek tragedy and the psychologists' imitations of it; there, English, German and French drama of 1830; still nearer, the type of piece which from the background of China, through Lope and Calderon, Diderot and Goethe, has come to cover our stage today....

It will be remembered that, when we were cataloging dramatic production in its thirty-six classes, an assiduous effort to establish, for every exceptional case found in one of them, symmetrical cases in the other thirty-five caused unforeseen subjects to spring up under our very feet. Likewise, when we shall have analyzed these orders, systems and groups of systems, when we shall have measured with precision their resemblances and their differences, and classified them, or, one by one, according to the questions considered, shall have brought them together or separated them,—we shall necessarily remark that numerous combinations have been forgotten. Among these the New Art will choose.

Would that I might be able to place the first, the obscurest foundation-stone of its gigantic citadel! There, drawing about her the souls of the poets, the Muse shall rise before this audience re-assembled from ancient temples, before these peoples who gathered of yore around Herodotus and Pindar; she will speak the new language—the Dramatic—a language too lofty for the comprehension of the single soul, however great it be,—a language not of words but of thrills, such as that spoken to armies,—a language in truth addressed to thee, 0 Bacchus, dispenser of glory, soul of crowds, delirium of races, abstract, but One and Eternal! Not in one of our parlor-like pasteboard reductions of the Roman demi-circus will this come to pass, but upon a sort of mountain, flooded with light and air,—raised, thanks to our conquest of iron added to the constructive experience of the Middle Ages; offered to the nation by those who have still held to the vanity of riches, —a greater thing than the theater of Dionysos where gathered thirty thousand people, greater than that of Ephesus wherein sat, joyous, a hundred and fifty thousand spectators, an immense orifice-like crater in which the earth seems to encompass the very heavens i