This paper is one of six lectures on “Will and Psyche in Poetry.” These terms set up a bipolar, arbitrary framework for the study of poems against which, and between which, poems were evaluated in the context.

Will poetry exists because of the power in the cell beyond its energy to maintain itself. Will results in action, through wish, zeal, volition, passion, determination, choice, and command. Will makes something happen in poetry.

Psyche poetry pertains to the soul, to peace, quiet, tranquility, serenity, harmony, stillness and silence. It provides psychic states of passive pleasure.

It might be interesting in attempting to set limits to our Will-Psyche dichotomy to define, but not absolutely, what these types of poetry are not. I take it that they do not include the world of tragedy, a vast area of literature, because tragedy presupposes fatality, against which will is useless and because tragedy is self-contained, engaging its own laws, against which there is no recognition beyond itself.

In the second chapter of my book Method—or Madness?, the lecture analyzing the chart of the Stanislavsky system, I skipped somewhat cautiously over Item Number 17: “Emotional Memory.” Rather than take the risk, in a public talk, of adding to the dangerous nonsense that has been spread around over the years on this subject, I contented myself with a definition and let it go at that. I also felt that this was one of the most involved elements of technique in the Method and could only ultimately be made clear to the actor through actual classroom work. However, because this subject is one of the most fundamental problems of acting: namely, how to generate real, and at the same time appropriate, emotion, I would now like to expand a bit on this point.

The American stage has been called style-less. It has been criticized for not maturing realism but being trapped by it. And, of course, the blame has been laid at method's door. This is unfair. We can just as well blame our “cool” society for its inhibited, self-conscious exhibitionism. Method incorporates style, and sincere and creative use employs it richly. In movement this is precisely mime's concern.

If every actor could perform as a total performer, executing illusions that could create place, time and properties then we could free the stage from its constipated d6cor and reaffirm the essence of theatre—a vital human performing for a live audience.

We have now reached the difficult point and must turn to the unpleasant truths. I regret it, but there is no other way if we want to exhaust our subject. I shall do it as painlessly as possible—without anesthesia. In the preceding chapter we followed the development of several important points in the theory of acting and reviewed the theorists’ artistic demands upon the actor. Finally, we arrive at the actor himself as a type, as a person. The length and purpose of this book do not permit us to occupy ourselves with all the great names, the celebrities, the unforgettable enchanters from the past and the present, so notable and so different. There is only room to mention isolated, selected examples out of which one—as elsewhere in the book—must represent many. It is reassuring to know that certain fundamental traits are alike and common to the majority of the great, leading scenic artists.

It is a commonplace truth that irresponsible artists dream up contexts for fictions set in the past, but it is harder to realize that only the best artist, gifted with the Shavian power to “imagine things as they really are” can conjure up an adequate vision of the context of our present lives. Moreover, imaginative concentration on context or situation in the new drama is, paradoxically, a result of a deep wish to restore reverence for human character. This essay will repeatedly address this paradox as we try to isolate our period style. In drama as in other things, not everything is possible in every period.

The last thing that I expected when I decided to direct a production of Endgame a few months ago was that I would become more and more impressed with it. I had seen Samuel Beckett's play when it was first acted in this country, at the Cherry Lane in New York, and I had come away with no desire to dance in the streets. The play seemed much less impressive than Waiting for Godot—too simple, too simple-minded even. I had been amused occasionally, moved not at all. The philosophical implications, implicit in the title, seemed neither startling nor particularly perceptive; the assumption that this is the worst of all possible worlds seems as silly as the bromide that it is the best, a point made sensibly by the creators of Candide a few years ago when they provided that Pangloss and the pessimistic Martin be played by the same actor.

To compare two such different writers as Christopher Fry and Paul Claudel is, in a sense, an act of presumption; but then such comparisons are, by a paradox, inherent in the very nature of criticism, at once invidious and indispensable. I say by a paradox advisedly, for there can be no criticism without the ability of making comparisons, yet since each significant work of art is unique within its own terms of reference, no comparison can be altogether convincing. All the same, the very fact that Claudel and Fry are both Christian in a non-Christian age and a non-Christian or only nominally Christian society gives one a vantagepoint from which one may be able to assess at least some of the problems that confront the dramatist with a Christian vision of man and a Christian conception of the nature of reality.

The original idea of Crispin, Rival of his Master does not belong to Lesage, but to the Spaniard Hurtado de Mendoza. In Los Empeños del mentir Mendoza depicts the cunning of an adventurer who, after having saved a gentleman from the clutches of three brigands, tries to marry the gentlemen’s sister by passing himself off as her expected fiancé.

Similarly, in Lesage, Crispin will try to marry Angélique under the very beard, one might say, of her suitor Valére. But the resemblance remains superficial. Angélique and Valere are not the principal objects of the scheme the valet Crispin and his double, the valet La Branche, are concocting. The object is the sizable dowry of the young girl: 20,000 écus. And they very nearly make off with this dowry. Their knavery fails only because of a chance revelatory meeting. But this accident is not surprising; it is foreseen because the author has duly prepared it.