Jeanne D'Arc at Vaucouleurs: A Romantic Drama for the Stage (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Jeanne D'arc at Vaucouleurs: A Romantic Drama for the Stage

So matter brings us to form once more. Every attempt to found a dramatic practice on formula or dogmas is, of course, foredoomed to failure. Greek form, the formula of mechanism, for the most part external, has filled the centuries with the dry bones of those who drank at the source, but not deep enough. On the other hand, who shall number the victims of the Juggernaut we call the stage, whose insatiable demand for playwrights always postulates an apprenticeship in the school of vicious practice as a guarantee of stage craft? Meanwhile the greatest modern technician of the drama was graduated from a country store in an obscure corner of Europe. There are eternal and valid principles in the drama, and they can be induced and applied, andeven formulated, provided always that the currents of life are allowed to flow in channels which at least simu late nature. Every serious attempt will have at least the fruition of a good conscience, if only those channels are kept open.

The debated formula of unity are a case in point. It is no fetish of tradition which brings back ever and again the Greek law of unity in time and place. Rather, it is the very reverse. Unity is only another name for organic coherence and vitality, and has its sure reward in a cumulative power which is unmistakable. The winter sun will not melt ice at mid-day, however clear and bright it may be. But focus it with even an imperfect lens, and you have a conflagration. Again, the drama is a lens and not a mirror.

Action, then, may be justly and legitimately adapted from history with out violence to the inner truth of detached facts. In order to conserve the principle of continuity of action, which is the unity of time, it is worth while to condense and focus the significant fragments of circumstantial actuality. To present the drama of history is not, and cannot be, the function of the historian; nor is it the function of the dramatist to perpetuate the irrelevant facts of history.

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