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Robert Knopf

For as long as film has existed, comparisons have been made between the ancient mother, theater, and her
youthful offspring, film. The two media have a lot in common, not the least of which is that their predominant
end has been storytelling. Yet the two differ in many ways as well, most of which have been noted by the
critics and theorists found in this book, who have carried on a scholarly debate that extends over the greater
part of the twentieth century. At base, we can probably all agree that theater is live and exists in the moment,
whereas film consists of a performance or story preserved, indeed most would say constructed, on celluloid.

Traditionally, the study of most theater-and-film courses has centered on the adaptation of dramatic texts to
film, and it is precisely this focus that Theater and Film: A Comparative Anthology aims to challenge. For the
adaptation of plays to film is a small, albeit significant, portion of artists' and scholars' investigation of the
relationship between theater and film-a relationship that begins with the birth of film in 1895, when the
earliest showings were exhibited in theatrical houses and, a short while later, as "acts" within vaudeville bills.'
The time has come to broaden the scope of this inquiry by expanding the "lens" through which we view
theater and film. For this reason, the essays in this volume focus less on adaptation and more on the economic,
aesthetic, cultural, and technological relationships between theater and film. To examine theater and film in
this context, we must therefore look beyond the products-the theatrical performance and the cinematic
screening-toward the interweaving of influence and differentiation between the two media, to borrow the
terminology (first used by A. Nicholas Vardac) that had its roots in the days of pre-film and early cinema.'
Only by doing so can we see the complexity of this relationship, which extends far beyond the initial question
of how to transfer a story from one medium to another.

Vardac was the first, or at least the most prominent, scholar to note that cinema's precursor may be detected
in the spectacle theater of the nineteenth century. As he states in this volume, there was a cultural push toward
a realistromantic aesthetic that first developed in melodrama and spectacle theater. A growing cultural desire
to see the world in precise detail, to locate the audience as closely as possible to both the spectacular and the
everyday, created, in a sense, the appetite for the invention of film. For despite all of the advances of the
nineteenth-century stage-seen most clearly in the stage spectacles and melodramas of Steele MacKaye, Henry
Irving, and David Belasco-film could bring audiences to places they could not travel and position them closer
to events than might otherwise be safe in person.

The historical section of this anthology therefore sets up the give-and-take between the two media and
seeks to help students and scholars of theater and film chart the course of the technological, aesthetic, and
economic interaction between the two media. Film was initially, and in many cases still is, considered the
more visual medium. Yet how much of this bias comes from the simple fact that the first films were silent?
Not truly silent, for music, either recorded or live, accompanied most "silent" films, and words were relegated
to intertitles, literally detaching the dialogue from the characters. Conversely, how much of the bias toward
seeing theater as the more verbal medium stems from the fact that the first twenty-five hundred years of
Western theatrical production disappeared into thin air, not preserved by the camera and leaving
predominantly one concrete trace of its existence-the script?3 So, even though early Greek tragedy and
comedy were frequently filled with the spectacle of masks and a dancing chorus, as well as the sound of music
(now lost to the ages), and even though silent theater predates the more language-based theater of Aeschylus,
Sophocles, Euripides, and their brethren,4 theater is often categorized as the more verbal, or text-based
medium.

Yet the assumption seems to linger that film is primarily a visual medium and theater primarily a verbal
one. Certainly this need not be the case. We need look no further than Julie Taymor's productions-for example,
The Lion King (1997) and The Green Bird (2000)-for a predominantly visual theater and Neil LaBute's films-
such as In the Company of Men (1997) and Your Friends and Neighbors (1998) -for a predominantly verbal

7
cinema. Both these artists, moreover, have shown themselves able to switch media and emphasis with ease. So
where does this initial and enduring visual-verbal assumption come from? Most scholars have accepted the
notion that these qualities are inherent in the media, but I prefer to categorize their view as just one "lens"-a
particular way of looking at the issue that shapes the conclusions one may draw. Instead, I would like to
propose a historical explanation for the widespread belief that film is inherently visual and theater is inherently
verbal. First, let us examine the assumption that theater is a verbal medium.

Although many contemporary theater historians suggest precursors to theater in shamanism, Egyptian
rituals, and other "primitive" performances, for just as many the ancient Greek theater remains the first truly
significant one that we can fully imagine. Why? Because it is the first theater with a significant number of
extant scripts. Greek theater also claims the first significant drama critic and theorist: Aristotle. Both the
preservation of scripts and Aristotle's Poetics (ca. 335-323 B.C.) lead us to think of the "great" contributions of
theater as words, scripts, plots, and characters. The scripts can be revived, retranslated, and reimagined. And
Aristotle, in ranking his six elements of theater, put textbased elements of theater (plot, character, thought, and
language) in the top positions and visual and sensual elements (music, spectacle) in the bottom two spots.
Aristotle's relative rankings of dramatic and theatrical elements may be explained, in part, by the fact that he
was writing approximately one hundred years after the great Greek tragedians had written and produced their
plays. Many scholars have pointed out that the quality of theatrical production in Aristotle's time had declined,
and for this reason among others he preferred scripts to productions. The time has come to put aside these
useful, though perhaps outdated, assumptions and examine the relationship between theater and film afresh.

Even if we look at each medium and examine its supposed strengths and weaknesses, the medium does not
irrevocably determine the form of any par ticular film or play. Whereas it is true that many playwrights and
screenwriters write with the medium, and often particular actors, theaters, and production companies, in mind-
the most famous example being none other than William Shakespeare, who wrote his plays with the Lord
Chamberlain's Men and the Globe in mind-it may be most useful and liberating for artists, scholars, critics,
and students to see conditions of production as a challenge rather than a limitation. Whenever something
appears to be impossible in theater or film, someone invents a way to make it happen anyhow. And it is
through productions that creatively cross the border between what was considered impossible, and what is
then found to be realizable, that both media grow and change.

Fig. 1. Buster Keaton in Sherlock, Jr. (1924). Keaton drew his influences from vaudeville magicians,
combining their magic acts with new cinematic techniques that he and his cameraman invented to create

8
new screen magic. Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs.

Film may offer greater visual possibilities, but that does not prevent theater professor-turned-film director
Neil LaBute from writing screenplays that are as highly verbal as his plays.5 At the same time, it would be
difficult if not impos sible to categorize some of the most exciting and popular theater in New York as verbal.
What of Bill Irwin's "new vaudeville" pieces, Largely New York (1989) and Fool Moon (1993), productions
that are virtually silent? What of experiential and nearly nonverbal productions such as Blue Man Group's
Tubes (1991) and De La Guarda's Villa Villa (1998), both still running as of 2003 to sold-out houses? These
productions do not happen to be successful in spite of their neglect of the supposed strengths of their chosen
medium. It is, to my mind, precisely by choosing to overcome the limitations of their medium that these artists
achieve success, for what greater thrill can there be than to see either art form transcend the boundaries that we
have become accustomed to assigning to it?

In her seminal essay "Film and Theater," Susan Sontag concludes that most scholars and critics see theater
and film as either inherently separate or inherently interchangeable. Thus, for most scholars and critics, film is
film and theater is theater, or film can be theatrical and theater can be cinematic, points of view that are
problematic only to the extent that any one individual makes claims to "truth" and fails to recognize that the
relative balance between the verbal and the visual is a matter of choice, regardless of medium. By comparison,
Sontag calls for a new notion of the relationship between film and theater without proposing one, thereby
provocatively challenging us: "We need a new idea. It will probably be a very simple one. Will we be able to
recognize it?"6 What might this new idea be, and how might we go about discovering it? This anthology is
structured on the premise that a new notion of the relationship between theater and film must be based not
only on the history and theory of the two media but also on the contributions of the artists who have been most
influential in them; that the inherent differences in the media provide different options but do not predetermine
what kind of film or theater can be created; and that there is no single "idea" that can answer Sontag's bold
challenge. Rather, there is a multiplicity of answers, and the scholar's or artist's journey toward a particular
answer will ultimately be personal, depending upon the "lens" through which he or she views the two media.

To the above, I would add one more observation: both media are constantly changing in terms of
technology, style, economics, and their influence on each other. For example, one of the most-quoted, though
probably apocryphal, tales of early cinema concerns the first Parisian audience's viewing of film footage of a
train coming into a station in the Lumiere brothers' Arrival ofthe Paris Express (1895). As the story goes,
audience members screamed when the train appeared to come toward them, temporarily unable to distinguish
palpable reality from cinematic imagery. In those early days of film, its novelty as technological innovation
was its principal draw. Yet film does not have a monopoly on new technology; theater has been swayed by its
own flirtation with technology and special effects. The first audiences who saw Miss Saigon had a sensation
similar to the Lumieres' audience when a helicopter appeared to land on a Broadway stage.? For this reason,
all claims to the inherent discreteness of theater and film as media are spurious and subject to the yet-to-be-
seen influences of future technological innovation on both these art forms.

In 1917, when Hugo Munsterberg observed that theater is bound by causality whereas film is not, the use of
simultaneous action and non-causal action on the avant-garde stage had just begun. By 2003, the computerized
light boards of contemporary theater, which allow easy cross-fades from one location to another, have changed
the nature of theater as a medium and continue to revolutionize it, so that Munsterberg's observation becomes
less and less accurate with time.8 And with today's generation of young playwrights having been raised on
film, plays are no longer being written predominantly in the "well-made-play" form. Episodic theater, jumping
from place to place and time to time, is on the rise-though anticipated by medieval mystery plays by a mere
five hundred years or so. And with the Internet encouraging contemporary artists to see time and place as non-
linear, I believe we can expect further experimentation with shifts of time and place in new drama and film.9

If there is an inherent quality of theater that I would isolate at this point, it is the fact that theater
performance, by virtue of its "live-ness," disappears as soon as it is spoken, leaving texts (scripts) as the
primary record and most widely consumed "artifact" of the theatrical event. Film performance, by nature of its

9
preservation on celluloid and now videotape and DVD, is kept "alive" in a way that theater performance, even
in the best-taped performances or in written documentation, cannot be.' O The cinematic artifact, therefore, is
the film itself, whereas the theatrical artifact is the script.

Yet the theatrical artifact (the text), though subject to exhaustive and (occasionally exhausting) scholarly
debate, should not be confused with the theatrical product, whereas the cinematic artifact is the product. Plays
and films are made to be seen, and therefore the focus on the dramatic text shines the spotlight on the words to
a degree that is not always commensurate with their significance in production." With the possible exception
of the plays of Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, and perhaps George Bernard Shaw, theater audiences by and large
remember fully realized, staged moments of a play with greater frequency than lines from the text. All of
which begs the question, why is theater considered the more verbal form and, even if it is, does this change the
theater's capacity in any significant way?

I believe that the answer lies in the way that plays and screenplays develop into production and films. For
the dramatic text leaves open a multitude of interpretations during its artistic life, and these interpretations can
be realized in production without rewriting a word of the script. Films, however, are sometimes remade, and
this process rarely, if ever, has been based word-for-word on the original screenplay-a fact indicating that play
texts are viewed, at least by a significant minority, as sacrosanct, whereas screenplays are not. Yet this need
not be the case, and the overall validity of this generalization tells us more about the power of producers,
directors, and writers in each medium. A theater director like the late Jerzy Grotowski, who used to adapt or
radically reinterpret other playwrights' texts, is labeled "experimental" (among other adjectives), whereas a
filmmaker such as Martin Scorsese can completely rewrite a movie like Cape Fear, and his "remake" has its
own legitimacy as a separate work of art. Whether a cinematic remake has any more independent validity as a
work of art than an experimental theater production can be examined only on a caseby-case basis, however. I
would observe, moreover, that theater produces a greater number and range of interpretations of its most
esteemed scripts than film does of any of its screenplays.

One dominant quality to which both film and theater have often aspired is life-likeness-what often comes
under the terms "realism," "naturalism," or simply representationalism. Indeed, it has often been said that
theater's ability to mimic reality has been surpassed by film, because films can capture behavior in actual
environments to an extent nearly impossible in theater. Whereas theater enthusiasts could point to the sensory
appeal of theater-its ability to communicate to all five senses of the audience-as evidence of its greater
lifelikeness, film lovers will counter with film's capacity to bring the audience closer to the actors' behavior, in
circumstances that are "real" and not "staged." Yet theater and film have always tried to claim, and still do
claim, representationalism or life-likeness as their own special province. From the earliest days of film, we
clearly see theatrical innovators such as Andre Antoine, Konstantin Stanislavsky, and Duke of Saxe-
Meiningen experimenting with numerous ways of making the theater more lifelike. Antoine put carcasses of
beef on stage in The Butchers (1888), Stanislavsky incorporated extensive environmental sound in his
productions of Anton Chekhov's plays at the Moscow Art Theater, and as early as the mid-nineteenth century
the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen used real trees, rocks, and foliage on many of his sets.

At the same time, film's first significant achievements occur both in the realm of representationalism (in the
Lumiere brothers' short, slice-of-life films, such as Arrival of the Paris Express and Passengers Descending
from the Brooklyn Bridge [1896]) and in the realm of fantasy (in the magical films of George Melies, such as
A Trip to the Moon [19oz]). And while early film artists were exploring these two possible directions for
cinematic art, theatrical realism was being challenged by the non-realistic experiments of the avant-garde, seen
first in the Symbolist theater of the 189os and then in the bizarre antics of Alfred Jarry's character King Ubu,
who first appeared on the professional stage in 1896. So, from the beginning, both media displayed the
capability of achieving realism or non-realism. And because some of the earliest exhibitions of films occurred
in vaudeville houses, interspersed between live variety acts, we can see that either medium was able to
contribute "variety" to vaudeville's already wide range of styles. The economic competition and technological
developments of the two media thus result in their being polarized at times, drawn together at others, like two
magnets whose ends either meet or repel.

For example, the greater economic pressure on film, caused by film's larger audiences, led Hollywood to
adopt a more realistic and cost-effective norm, as Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson have convincingly

10
argued.12 Theater is bound less by such economic factors, as the audience for any production is much smaller
and therefore so are the budgets and financial risks. Avant-garde theater, which tends to be lower budget, can
take greater chances, whereas Broadway and the West End productions are confined by the financial risks of
their larger budgets. Only a project with a guaranteed audience, like The Lion King, finally brought the work
of the experimental director Julie Taymor to Broadway and West End audiences. Artistically, the two media
influence each other, then, while economically they push each other further apart in an effort to carve out their
own niche and audience.

Technological innovations (at the time, some would have called them "changes," but not truly innovations)
like the introduction of spoken words to films, which becomes the dominant practice between 1926 and 1929,
change the relationship of these two media or magnets, as I have referred to them above.13 Once sound
recordings of dialogue became the norm in film, Hollywood needed scripts with extensive dialogue-not
merely because Hollywood wished to take advantage of sound's capabilities but also because the earliest
sound equipment required indoor studio sets and nearly static camera work to preserve the quality of the
recording. Combined with audiences' interest in seeing actors speak, the static camera thus impelled studios
toward dialogue driven films in an effort to meet audience demand for "talkies" while keeping movies at least
verbally dynamic. As the technological innovations in sound created a market for dialogue, Hollywood began
to raid every easily accessible source for dialogue-focused narrative and drama, including the theater's troves
of plays. And as Hollywood looked to theater for scripts, theater needed to compete directly with film studios
for dramas and comedies that primarily depended upon dialogue while also searching for other forms and
additional qualities it could call its own. Thus the attraction-repulsion between theater and film continued,
with their supposed strengths temporarily reversedwhile theater explored the visual and the spectacular, film
(at least in the early 1930s) found its "voice" in its first extensive use of dialogue.

Several of the essays in this anthology try to come to grips with the longstanding tensions between spectacle
and narrative (be it silent or spoken) that emerged during the early period of competition between theater and
film. Whereas Vardac explores the roots of cinema in theater, Tom Gunning looks at the earliest cinema, from
1895 to 1906-o8-sometimes called "primitive cin- ema"-and traces its aesthetic backward to the theatrical
"montage of attractions" (a phrase first coined by Vsevold Meyerhold and the theater-turned-film director
Sergei Eisenstein) and forward to the avant-gardes of the 191os and 192.os. The "attractions" of the cinema of
attractions are moments of spectacle that break free from narrative-an impulse that, by 1906-07, "goes
underground" into the cinematic avant-garde, as well as into certain genres of film like musicals, which
"contain" them within safer narrative confines.14 Gunning also connects the "primitive" cinema to the
vaudeville aesthetic of early sound films as well as the cinema of Busby Berkeley and Buster Keaton,
suggesting the path for future work by Henry Jenkins, Martin Rubin, and myself 15 Gunning is very adept,
too, at linking early cinema's interest in sensation to both Eisenstein's and F. T. Marinetti's interest in the
aesthetics of shock, comparing the sensational spectacle of "primitive" film to the more aggressive interaction
between the performers and the audience found in early avantgarde theater.

Rubin takes up the argument about the tension between narrative and spectacle started by Gunning and
relates it to film musicals. Rubin connects the "aggregate forms" popularized by P. T. Barnum's dime museum
and three-ring circus, as well as by minstrel shows and vaudeville, to the Berkleyesque movie musical, and we
might go further in connecting these forms to contemporary theatrical "experiences" such as Blue Man Group,
Cirque du Soled, and De La Guarda, which place a premium on spectacle and experience over narrative val
ues. There is almost no narrative involved in the work of these three groups; instead, the audience's shifting
experience from moment to moment creates a shape or an arc that substitutes for story. Or, to put the matter
another way, the experience of the audience is the story. Thus, when the Blue Men in Tubes drive audience
members into a frenzy through their mounting interaction with them, a non-narrative climax occurs through
experience alone-an experience that has been built throughout the performance by the Group's continually
topping each event or attraction (as Eisenstein and Meyerhold would term it) with something even more
physically, visually, or musically aggressive or spectacular. And this type of structure owes much to all the
following: "primitive" cinema, the early theatrical and cinematic avant-gardes, and slapstick cinema.

My own essay deals with the ways in which Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Charlie Chaplin blended
slapstick with traditional narrative to navigate the transition from short- to feature-length slapstick comedy. I
examine how their theatrical backgrounds and the types of work they did on the vaudeville and music hall

11
stages formed each artist's approach to this transition. Such a dynamic can still be found in the films of such
contemporary stand-up comics as Jim Carrey, Chris Rock, and Roseanne, martial artists like Jackie Chan,
multimedia superstars like Madonna, and such athletes as Shaquille O'Neill, Dennis Rodman, and in decades
past, O. J. Simpson(!), where the celebrity of the actor and his or her original field of expertise bring a material
self-referentiality to the celluloid performance that disrupts the narrative by the weight they exert on our
consciousness. 16

Whereas the historical relationship between theater and film, established in the earliest days of cinema,
exerted a strong influence on the development of each medium through aesthetic cross-fertilization and
differentiation, economic competition, and the establishment of classical Hollywood cinema production norms
in imitation of their equivalents in realistic theater, an equally important relationship was occurring between
acting for the camera and acting on the stage. Many scholars have noted, for example, that amateur actors can
turn in successful performances on film, whereas this is rarely the case on stage in a featured role. Several
reasons for this are apparent. Unlike film, the stage requires the actor to display vocal power and performance
stamina. A theater actor must "fill the house," whereas the same performance on film can be smaller yet still
be captured by the intimate intrusion of the camera. A theater actor must sustain a character over an entire
performance, night after night, whereas the same performance on film can be captured in bits, over several
takes, until the director has found the exact movement and intonation desired. And a the ater actor must find
an arc to a role that the process of filming, in which scenes are often shot out of order, almost completely
impedes. Filming nonsequen- tially breaks up the performance and reduces the actor's ability to find a
character arc. But who says it needs to be this way? Historical practice is just that: practice. It is not set in
stone. To the contrary, the minute practice becomes set, someone usually comes along to unsettle it, lest habit
cause art to die and the blood in its veins to dry up.

The claim is often made that film uncovers a deeper character psychology for its audience by its use of the
close-up and the tracking of an individual's point of view throughout a film. Munsterberg, for example, argued
that screenplays create a harmony that reflects the "inner movement of the mind" through detail, cross-cuts,
and flashbacks.17 Yet these techniques can be found as far back as Elizabethan England in the plays of
Shakespeare and his contemporaries, who achieved the same "movement" through much more modest means:
shifting place and time by "cross-fading" from one scene to another on stage; displaying the "inner mind"
through the use of soliloquy; and moving backward in time through the "flashback" of a history play. Once
again we see that although one medium may have an easier time achieving a style or effect, little is beyond the
reach of the other; in fact, theater and film anticipate each other's techniques, suggest them, perhaps even
create a hunger in each other to match or exceed its rival through different means. In writing this, I come to the
verge of attributing an anthropomorphic presence to the two media, as if they were living creatures growing
with age. Perhaps they are, for theater and film begin to take on lives of their own, the old interwoven with the
new, influencing each other through their collective development and innovation, grafting techniques onto
their "bodies" so as to find out what will grow and what will die. If one wishes to remain essentialist, one may
argue for the inherent strengths of a medium, but the fact remains that the only absolute limitation on the
aesthetics of film and theater lies in as yet unrealized advances of technology and the boundaries of the
individual artist's imagination.

When we debate whether drama or cinema achieves a particular effect, style, or characterization more
effectively than its rival, we thus reveal more of our own preferences-the "lens" through which we frame and
view these two media-than we uncover essential, immutable truths about theater and film. For example, we
tend to think of cinema as a director's medium, yet must it be? I would argue that there are ways to temper the
film director's artistic control. To wit: when the filming of Smoke (1995) was complete, the company still had
eight days left of shooting budget and film stock, so several of the actors stayed on to improvise the "sequel,"
Blue in the Face (1995), joined by friends of the cast and the directors. Although the sequel is very loosely
constructed by Hollywood standards, there is an incredible freshness (though some might see this as a fault) to
seeing actors improvise and create before the camera in the same way that some of the earliest silent
filmmakers did. Keaton was fond of saying that he didn't really need a complete script-just give him a
beginning and an ending and he would find the middle as he filmed. This is the type of filmmaking to which
Blue in the Face harkens back, and the freedom that it provides allows none other than Michael J. Fox, as
down-and-out fast talker Pete Maloney, to create an extraordinary monologue recorded with an almost
completely static camera and few or no cuts. Perhaps even more strikingly, Harvey Keitel's improvised work

12
in Blue in the Face is virtually indistinguishable from his performance in Smoke, as the same character, the
owner of a Brooklyn cigar shop-which makes one of the most accomplished American actors of the stage and
screen an auteur in his own right.

Smoke is a deceptively simple film about storytelling, plot, and characterAristotle's old favorites-and the
camera by and large remains content "merely" to capture the actors' work, in the same way that Keitel, as the
central figure, takes a snapshot of his corner cigar shop every day for years, merely trying to record its daily
image without comment. Is his own performance psychologically deeper due to its recording on film and its
construction in the cutting room? I don't think so. Would it have the same power and depth on stage? I believe
so. Would Keitel modulate the size of his performance if he were to transfer it to the stage? Almost certainly,
depending upon the size of the theater. So we are left with the paradox that an extraordinary performance
might work in similar ways in either medium, should the actor and director choose to approach it the same
way in each.

Allardyce Nicoll argues that, counter to what he assumes we would at first think, stage acting is more
typified and less "real" than film acting-not because of the style of acting, but because the audience remains
aware of the fact that the actors are performing in a theater. Therefore, watching an actor in the theater, we see
"imaginative illusion" rather than an illusion of reality.18 And, of course, this raises the very real issue of
realism on the stage: can the stage ever achieve as effective an illusion of reality as the cinema? Perhaps not,
but this depends upon how we define the illusion of reality and what elements of reality are most important to
a successful illusion for a particular viewer.' 9 In terms of its three-dimensionality, theater achieves life-
likeness that film cannot approach, even in 3D IMAX. So the essential paradox of "realism/life-likeness"
remains an issue for both media: whereas theater is inherently more lifelike because it occurs live and in three
dimensions, the presence of three-dimensional actors in a theater-a "non-real" space-may undercut the
production's resemblance to life at the same time that the actors increase its "liveness." Yet both media have
responded to the challenge to "be real." While film experimented with three dimensions through the use of
multicolored eyeglasses, experimental theater groups such as the Living Theater, the Open Theater,
Grotowski's Polish Laboratory Theater, and the Performance Group created environmental theater, which tried
to overcome theater's spatial limitations by using an existing environment that was as close to reality as
possible, or by designing such an environment-one that envelops the audience, thereby erasing the distinction
between viewing space and playing area.20

Expanding his argument on the limitations of theater in relation to film, Nicoll puts forward the idea that
theater cannot be as psychologically "deep" as the cinema, due to film's ability to express a subjective point of
view. But I think theater reaches a similar depth in a different way: through dialogue, direct address and
soliloquies, and the physical presence of the actor. Is Nicoll privileging visual subjectivity as an indicator of
psychological depth? And why is film's subjective, visual point of view necessarily superior in psychological
depth to the theater's use of language?21 Nicoll proceeds to propose that the "rediscovery of convention" will
save theater, contrasting convention with naturalism, which he views as the death of theater. I agree that the
rediscovery of convention can be a valuable contribution to new theater, but Nicoll overstates his case and
neglects the importance of "artistic quality" in this formulation.22 He holds up Greek and Elizabethan theater
as exemplary models of conventionconscious theater, emphasizing their acknowledgment of the
audiencethough surely the quality of this work is not based solely on this element-but he neglects to
acknowledge the powerful appeal of cinematic voyeurism and of future, related voyeurisms that he could not
have anticipated.

As I write this in late 2003, we live in an age of "virtual" voyeurism: Internet chat, video and DVD, large,
widescreen televisions in our own homes with surround-sound systems that compete with the best movie
palaces. And theater provides a purer form of this voyeurism, which is one of the reasons that theater has
come under attack through the centuries. I say "purer" because in theater things are what they are-relative to
other new media, at the very least. If we consider the by now oft-told, turn-of-the-millennium Internet joke,
"On the Internet, no one knows that you're a dog," I think it is fair to say that on the stage, to deliberately
misquote Gertrude Stein, a dog is a dog is a dog, even if it is representing a person. This statement holds a
good deal of practical truth, because audience members may interpret the dead goat at the end of Edward
Albee's The Goat or Who Is Sylvia? (2002) as a stand-in for a gay lover (if one is looking for such symbolism,
or reading it into the play on the basis of Albee's life) at the same time that they see what appears to be a real

13
(albeit dead) goat on the stage. Alternatively, when Sarah Jessica Parker played a dog in the New York
production of A. R. Gurney's Sylvia in 1995 (why are both animals named Sylvia, I wonder?), the audience
accepted her as a stand-in for a dog, while always acutely aware that the actress was human. This argument,
along with the Internet joke I have used as a jumping-off point, will date with new technological innovations,
but that's precisely the point: new technologies will force us constantly to revise our appraisal of the
relationship between film and theater.

For Andre Bazin, absolute identification of the cinema audience with characters produces a mass mentality
within the audience, whereas the live presence of the actor in theater keeps identification to a minimum.
Therefore, he sees theater as more moral and the theater spectator as more active. In the process, Bazin
appears to argue that psychological depth and the audience's identification with a character are one and the
same. Yet such depth may come at the cost of the audience's critical sense and active participation in the
creation of an imaginary world. I would note that, though Bazin sees these as the dominant tendencies in the
two media-cinematic empathy versus theatrical distancehe understands that these tendencies can be overcome
or compensated for in a particular theatrical production or film.

Sontag inquires whether the two arts are in "opposition" and notes that many scholar-critics see the history
of cinema "as the history of its emancipation from theatrical models," first from frontality, second from
exaggerated acting, and third from theatrical furnishings-thus, a move toward "naturalness" or "fluidity."23
She sees television as capable of making film into "another performing art to be transcribed, miniaturized on
film."24 But by 2003, Sontag's view of television has already been rendered obsolete by the advent of
largescreen HDTV, "home theaters," and DVDs. The creative endeavors pouring out of HBO, including
original movies, theatrical adaptations like Wit (2001), The Laramie Project (2002), and Angels in America
(2003), as well as "cinematic" television programs-by which I mean television that is virtually
indistinguishable from film in terms of style, image, and sound quality, like The Sopranos, Sex and the City,
and Six Feet Under-meanwhile further blur the line between television and film.25

So why is it that we equate the static camera with theater? Theater is staged-with the exception of
environmental staging-for a static audience because it must be or because convention demands it, but the
camera need not be static. If theater spectators had their choice, would they choose to remain static? And why,
if the camera may free itself of stasis, must the static camera be deemed "theatrical"? I could make the claim
that film is a derivative of theater and, in some ways, an advance on it. In fact, classical Hollywood cinema
derived many of its structural techniques from the well-made play, and the theatrical avant-garde pre-dates the
cinematic avant-garde and indeed the invention of film by several years. So why should we view film as a
completely separate, opposed, and unique art when the history of its interaction with theater suggests that film
does not consistently function or exist in this way?

Sontag is quite right in observing that most scholar-critics who favor the strict division between theater and
film define cinema, on the basis of its silent roots, as image with sound added (essentially a visual medium)
and theater as "plays," language-strong and plot-heavy, perhaps because we tend to think of theater as
language-or scripts with visuals. But either definition is descriptive of the majority practice in each medium,
not of the inherent qualities of each. For what is film but celluloid that can, but need not, capture image and
sound? Or, to quote Buster Keaton, "There's nothing wrong with talkies that a little silence couldn't fix." And
what is theater but a space that audience and actors inhabit together for a period of time, to share an event?

It seems to me that reductive notions of film and theater tend to inhibit our realization of the influence of
the two on each other, whereas expansive notions increase our realization of that mutual influence. And the
simple truth is that today's theater artists all watch films, so there's no fighting the influence of film on theater,
except as a choice by an individual artist who avoids this influence like Thoreau in the wild. Not all of today's
film artists see theater, alas, but they should-not to raid the theater of its most promising artists, as television
and film have been doing for years, but to appropriate the creative techniques that theater constantly invents so
as to overcome the limitations of its medium.

Perhaps when all is said and done, the influence of theater and film on each other may be best seen as the
intermingling of high art and popular art, the trading of elements and stylistic conventions back and forth over
the decades, tempered (or tempted) by technological innovation. I am partial to Stanley Kauffmann's

14
comparison, at the end of his essay, between drama and cinema: "The crucial historical difference between
theater and film is this: the theater began as a sacred event and eventually included the profane. The film
began as a profane event and eventually included the sacred."26 And perhaps the differ ent limitations of each
medium recast its potential approaches to the same dramatic material, be it sacred or profane. Yes, there may
be stories that are better told by film or by theater-at least by a particular artist in either mediumbut the best
artists merely see the qualities of each medium as a challenge to find its other strengths, potential styles, and
possible techniques. Instead of seeing these qualities as limitations, many theater and film artists both use and
overcome the supposedly "inherent" qualities of the medium within which they choose to work. It is precisely
this ability to think "beyond the box," or in this case beyond the screen or space, that frequently defines the
most innovative and influential work in either medium.

I would note as well that whereas realism finds its ultimate form with the invention of cinema in 1895, the
avant-garde in theater begins in earnest between 1890 (with Symbolism) and 1896, with the premiere of Ubu
the King. It may be that avant-garde theater was one reaction to the usurping of realism by film. Moreover,
just as classical Hollywood cinema came together as an economic system and aesthetic style in the 19zos, the
dramatic avant-garde reached the height of its popularity (if you can call it that) with the flowering of
Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism. Thus, the chaos of destruction visited upon the world in the First World War
may have shifted film toward wishful systems of order (classical Hollywood cinema), while theater
experimented with purposeful disorder (the avant-garde). And certainly economics plays a part in this
polarization as well: the costlier the medium and more institutionalized the industry, the less experimental and
politically subversive the range of creative output. Yet the two media never totally diverge.

Griffith goes furthest in formally separating film from theater. In his essay "Some Prophecies," he
anticipates computers and CD-ROMs as learning devices and storehouses of information, with their emphasis
on seeing things rather than reading them. In making such a strong case for the independence of filmmaking as
an art, is Griffith right? Or was this essay written at a moment of historical necessity, when filmmakers needed
to stand up for filmmaking as an art, independent of its competing, older stepsisters, the novel and the drama?

And yet, despite his stated preference for film, Griffith emerges as an important figure in the interaction
between theater and film, and as an apt "prophet" of the technological advances to come, which I predict will
continue to push apart and pull together these two media in relationship to one another. The montage
techniques made famous by Soviet filmmakers, for instance, were presaged by Eisenstein and Meyerhold's use
of similar techniques on the stage. The fluidity the camera can produce by moving through space can be seen
as creat ing an increased interest in non-proscenium stage configurations in theater, beginning with a return to
the earliest stage configuration, theater-in-the-round or arena staging, in the mid-twentieth century and
followed by the more frequent use of thrust staging and even environmental theater from the 196os on.

These days theater audiences can see Sam Mendes's long-running production of Cabaret (which began as
fiction, then was transformed into a "straight" play, a musical one, and finally a film version) performed in a
cabaret theater setting in New York's former Studio 54. They can watch actors perform above the audience and
even lift them high in the air in De La Guarda's Villa Villa. In the cinematic world, films like Run Lola Run
(1999) offer alternative endings, effectively demonstrating to the audience that film, like life, can turn out in
different ways depending on a single choice at a particular moment in time. At the same time, film's special
effects have become so lifelike that in a reversal of what purportedly occurred at the first screening of the
Lumieres' Arrival of the Paris Express, when the first footage of the attack on the World Trade Center was
shown on television-captured from a myriad of angles by hundreds of personal video cameras-it was virtually
indistinguishable from what Hollywood studios could have manufactured for a picture such as Armageddon
(1998). When film becomes this close to life, is it therefore lifelike, or has reality started to resemble a film?
When video games of mass annihilation are found in the bedrooms of children who have donned ski masks
and shot their schoolmates, as two teenagers did at Colorado's Columbine High School, is there an
uncomfortable moment when we realize that some of our children (and perhaps some adults) can no longer tell
the difference between created images and reality?

All of this leads me to think about what the cinematic as well as theatrical future may hold. For as Lovborg
says in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler (i89o), though it may be hard to imagine what the future holds, "There may be
one or two things worth saying about it anyhow."27 I believe that technology will continue to have the greatest

15
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influence on how films are made, and that theater and cinema will continue to absorb, reject, and react to each
other's innovations. When I look ahead and imagine thousands of homes with large, widescreen televisions
and surround-sound, I wonder who will go to the multiplexes of today, which themselves made obsolete the
movie palaces and drive-ins of yesteryear. I believe that in a short time most films will be viewed at home and
that the multiplex will become the nearly exclusive province of families and teenagers (this trend has started
already).

If I am right, and films become a predominantly private experience, shared by small groups in living
rooms, what might then become of theater? Will the experimental theater groups of the future perform in our
living rooms, or will the desire for human contact and community drive us back to more traditional theaters?
Or will 3D IMAx be replaced by holographic film, creating three-dimensional worlds that we can walk into,
until we eventually "holographize" old films (just as we colorize them now) and offer audience members the
chance to sit down with Rick in Casablanca (5942), have a drink, and say, "Play it again, Sam." We learn from
the past as we imagine a future that cannot accurately be predicted, because technology, culture, economic
pressures, and the events of the world are beyond the power of any one person to control. But that shouldn't
stop us from making art and creating living stories, for the power of theater and film to help us make sense of
the world, or sometimes simply to escape from it, will remain potent no matter what form these media take.

NOTES

,. Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1990), 273.

2. Stage to Screen: Theatrical Method from Garrick to Griffith (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1949).

3. In point of fact, our understanding of Greek theater scripts is skewed by the vagaries of historical
preservation, since even our possession of these artifacts of Greek performance is a matter of chance, having
more to do with which scripts survived the ages than anything else.

4. The earliest Greek theater was actually performed without dialogue by Doric mimes in the sixth century
B.C., a full century prior to the plays of Aeschylus. See History of the Theater, by Oscar G. Brockett with
Franklin J. Hildy, 8th ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999), 21.

5. See bash: Latterday Plays (Faber & Faber, 2001) and The Shape of Things (Faber & Faber, toot) for the
plays of Neil LaBute. The screenplay of In the Company ofMen (1997) is unpublished, whereas the script of
Your Friends and Neighbors (1998) was published by Faber and Faber in 1999.

6. See page 151 in this volume.

7. The stage helicopter weighed 8,700 pounds and was 75 percent of the size of the actual helicopter used in
Viet Nam (source: www.miss-saigon.com). For an explanation of the mechanics of the helicopter on stage,
see www.sceneplay.com/reviews/MissSaigon.

8. Such are the vagaries, over the decades, of critical authorship. This does not mean that criticism like Hugo
Munsterberg's should be summarily discarded or blithely ignored but rather that such criticism itself must
be viewed critically-or contextually. Hence, because Munsterberg's book The Film: A Psychological Study
(1916) has dated, I have elected not to include an excerpt from it in this collection.

9. Although film has always embraced its inherent ability to shift place and time rapidly, films such as Run
Lola Run (1999) have extended this "fluidity" to include alternative streams or chronologies of action,
dependent upon which character's perspective or choice of action is being adopted at any given moment.

1o. As in all generalizations, there are exceptions to this rule. Jonathan Demme's Swimming to Cambodia
(1987) is an excellent film of Spalding Gray's one-man theatrical performance. For those scholars interested
in seeing the best video documentation of contemporary theater, the video collection at the Lincoln Center
Library for the Performing Arts provides an invaluable service by preserving several thousand videotapes of
significant New York productions since the 1970s, available for viewing at the Library with advance notice.

16
r1. This depends, to a great extent, on the nature of the script and the approach to its production. A realistic
script is more likely to convey a similar directorial sensibility in the majority of its productions than a
nonrealistic one.

12. See The Classical Hollywood Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

13. Although The Jazz Singer (1927) was the first talking feature, short sound films were first exhibited in
1926 and silent films continued to be produced and exhibited until 1929. See Musser, The Emergence of
Cinema, 27.

14. See page 39 in this volume.

15. See Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

16. See Steve Seidman, Comedian Comedy: A Tradition in Hollywood Film (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research
Press, 1981) on self-referentiality in comedy films.

IT Hugo Munsterberg, "The Means of the Photoplay," in The Film: A Psychological Study.

18. See Allardyce Nicoll, Film and Theatre (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1936). Rather than anthologize an
excerpt from this influential book, I have chosen to include Eric Bentley's lesser known but most
convincing rebuttal to Nicoll's argument.

19. Sarah Bay-Cheng's essay in this volume supports Laura Mulvey's claim that different spectators relate to
illusions depending upon their gender and sexual preference (and by extension, I would argue, class and a
number of other personal characteristics) but notes that identification functions differently in film than in
theater because of the selective nature of the camera's gaze as compared to the relative openness of the
spectator's gaze in theater. Bay-Cheng's viewpoint represents an admirable advance over the influential
work of feminist pioneers in theater studies, like Jill Dolan, who first applied Mulvey's theories to spectator-
theory in theater.

20. See Richard Schechner, "Six Axioms for Environmental Theatre," Drama Review 12.3 (Spring 1968).

21. Although I personally have invested a great deal of my creative and scholarly energies in theater and film
that are more physical and visual, I wonder if the critical bias that some film theorists have against words as
communicators of psychological depth is a sign of anti-intellectualism. Or perhaps the bias against words is
an indicator of theorists' preference for inarticulate characters, or audiences' own psychosocial inability to
find words with which to confront the problems of life in today's world.

zz. The concept of quality has gotten a bad reputation since postmodernism, as many now believe that quality
is a purely subjective judgment. Yet I believe that quality is making a comeback, if you will, propelled by
our need for some judgmental certainty in the post 9/1I world. Perhaps the destruction of the World Trade
Center will pull us back from the brink of deconstruction, so that we may recover some truths, relative
though they may be, on which to ground ourselves.

23. See page 135 in this volume.

24. See page 135 in this volume.

25. HBO has film projects of several other theater pieces in the works as of late 2003, including Patrick
Marber's Closer, George C. Wolfe's Jelly's Last Jam, and Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul. See American
Theater2o.i (December 2003), 31.

z6. See page 161 in this volume.

27. Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler, trans. Jon Rabin Baitz (t89o; reprinted Grove Press, 2000), act 2, 47•

17
Translated by Margorie L. Hoover

The reconstructed theatre, using every technical means at its disposal, will work with film, so that scenes
played by the actor on stage can alternate with scenes he has played on screen. Going further, a dramatic
production could become a kind of revue in which the actor uses dramatic, operatic, and film methods, as well
as those of the ballet dancer, acrobat, gymnast, clown. And, of course, the play's division into acts, the
inflexibility of conventional dramatic structure, must be superseded by episodes after the model of
Shakespeare and the dramatists of the old Spanish theatre, making it possible to abandon the antiquated
pseudo-classical unities of time and action. We are entering upon a new phase of playwriting. We are creating
a new kind of play.

At this moment of transition the battle between movies and theatre is considerably greater than any they
have fought before. In the West, particularly America and Germany, there are many more movie houses than
dramatic theatres and opera houses, and many more peo ple go to the movies than to any other kind of theatre.
From this some conclude that the movies are proving a dangerous competitor of the theatre. I don't necessarily
agree.

Excerpted from Vsevolod Meyerhold, "Reconstruction of the Theater," Drama Review ii, no. i (Fall 1966):
186-188.

The movie-theatre owners, who had been drawing huge crowds, noticed one fine day that their audiences
were beginning to be unenthusiastic. The public began to demand more than silent figures in motion, and
technology gave in to its demands. In order to compete with the stage and with the live actor, the talkies were
born; but this did not represent a victory over theatre for the movies. However attractive the screen's great
freedom to move action from one scene to another, change night to day, perform miracles of transformation
for the actor-it all wasn't enough. The audience insisted that the actor, whom it idolized, speak, and with the
silent film's surrender to the sound film the international significance of the movies was lost. A Chaplin who
was understood in America, the USSR, and Holland became incomprehensible as soon as he began to speak
English. The Russian peasant now refuses to accept Chaplin, the Englishman, although Chaplin had been close
and comprehensible to him as long as he only mimed. The film's progress is therefore a step backward....

The theatres we know in our country are not those we shall have in the future. We shall abandon the
structures inherited from the Tzarist period, when the peep-show illusionistic stage was built and productions
staged so that the audience might relax, doze, flirt, and gossip. Today we who build theatres in competition
with the movies say: let us "cinematify" the theatre, let us use in the theatre all the technical means of the
screen-but not just in the sense that we install a screen in the theatre. We must move into theatre spectacle-and
we shall stage productions attracting audiences as large as those in the movie theatres. The revolution to
"reconstruct" the contemporary theatre in form and content has come to a halt only for lack of the means to re-
equip stage and auditorium.

We must satisfy the contemporary spectator's need to see a play not in the company of three to five hundred
persons-the proletariat will not go to "intimate" or "miniature" theatres-but surrounded by tens of thousands.
Instead of today's football, we must devise tomorrow's theatricalized "sport." The electric charge which the
contemporary spectator demands of the lecture must be increased to the high tension suitable for large masses
of people. The technique of both contemporary playwriting and directing makes use of the audience as well as
of the actors and stage machinery. I intentionally produce plays so that they seem on stage to be incomplete,
for I know that the most significant revision of a play is done by the audience. The playwright and director

18
regard the work of staging as preparation for the work done day by day during the run by two most effective
forces in the theatre: actor and audience. The staging must not impose itself or compel, but allow free
collaboration between these forces. Everything sketched in during rehearsal is only approximate, and therefore
it is essential that the audience be large.

This is also how movies work. When an important film is made in Hollywood, it is given a surprise pre-
release showing in some large movie theatre. When people have been seated, the announced feature is
cancelled and in its stead the film to be tested is shown. Agents from the studio are planted among the
spectators to take notes, and thus they test the film with an unprejudiced audience, not one "selected" like that
at a theatrical first night. After this the movie is revised, and only then released.

What will be the future development of the screen and stage? It is obvious that the theatre cannot surrender
its position just as it is about to realize the technical stage equipment it so badly needs. The theatre must go
further toward "cinematification," but the movies, I fear, must encounter the barrier already described: the
actor playing in the talkies will realize one fine day that he is losing his international public, and wish to return
to the silent pictures.

When we reconstruct dramatic and operatic stages in the only way suitable for producing the new
revolutionary plays, we face the enormous difficulty that our theatre is not yet industrialized. We do not have
the means necessary to perfect a technically still imperfect stage. Govozdev says: "Piscator is not afraid to
bring theatre and movies together." Can we do what Piscator has done?

19
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 The French army was routed; but its condition was made
exceptionally bad because only one avenue of retreat was followed,
and also because this avenue was practically blocked at Genappe by
the supposed necessity of crossing the Dyle on a single bridge.752
Had the army been able to spread itself over an open country, it is
not likely that the rout would have been so complete, and it is quite
certain that the captures of artillery would not have been so great.
But the Prussian cavalry took up the pursuit which neither the
Prussian nor the British infantry were sufficiently fresh to maintain;
and in the exhausted condition of body and bewildered state of mind
in which the mass of the French soldiers were when the catastrophe
came, little was needed to complete their demoralization. At
Genappe over a hundred pieces of cannon were abandoned, and
from that point on no attempt was made to keep up even a
semblance of order.
Such was the famous battle of Waterloo. It has become a
synonym for hopeless and irremediable disaster. It is not, however,
necessary here to review the causes of the catastrophe. What we
have still to say on this head we shall put into the Notes to this
chapter. But there is one subject that properly belongs here.
What would have been the effect if Grouchy had detained the
corps of Bülow and Pirch I., so that they could not have taken part in
the action?
In this discussion we shall assume the correctness of our
conclusions, reached previously, that if Grouchy had started at
daybreak for the bridge of Moustier, or even if he had followed the
counsel of Gérard, he would almost certainly have prevented Bülow,
Pirch I. and Thielemann from taking any part in the battle.753 We
shall not reargue these questions, for they have been already fully
discussed.
Let us suppose, then, that Napoleon could have utilized his whole
force against the army of Wellington during the whole afternoon;
that he could have given his personal direction to the conduct of the
action; that he could have followed up the repulse of the 1st Corps
with a new attack in which Lobau should support d’Erlon, and in
which the cavalry should take its proper part; that he had been on
the spot when La Haye Sainte fell, and had improved that advantage
as he well knew how to do; that he had had the whole of the
Imperial Guard—infantry, cavalry, and artillery,—at his disposal for
the carrying of Wellington’s position; it seems to us there can be no
reasonable question as to the result; the Duke would have been
badly beaten, and the action would in all probability have been over,
or substantially so, by six o’clock. This question is not asked to
gratify the imagination, or for purposes of speculation, but simply
that we may form a judgment on the adequacy of Napoleon’s means
to the end which he had in view; for, if military history cannot assist
us in forming correct opinions on the adequacy of certain available
means to the attainment of certain proposed objects, it is of no use
whatever. The view we hold as to the necessity of Blüchers support
to Wellington’s success is the same as that which we have seen754
put forth by Sir James Shaw-Kennedy, where he is justifying the
Duke for accepting battle at Waterloo.755
As for Zieten, he could not have come up till half-past seven
o’clock, which would have been too late for him to be of any use to
the English. The probability is that he would have joined the other
corps that were fighting Grouchy. It is hardly likely that he would
have pursued his intention of joining Wellington, after he had heard
that the other three corps were not likely to interfere in the battle
between Napoleon and Wellington. This would have been to run a
great risk; and one that under the circumstances no prudent officer
would run. We are supposing now that Zieten hears at Ohain, for
instance, that the other corps are engaged with Grouchy at St.
Lambert or Couture,—now, then, he must admit that if Grouchy shall
be able, owing to obstinate or skilful fighting, or to the lateness of
the hour, or to chance, to prevent Bülow, Pirch I. and Thielemann
from attacking Napoleon that afternoon, the chances are that
Napoleon will defeat Wellington before he, Zieten, can possibly
arrive; and, therefore, for him to proceed further than Ohain will
simply be to involve himself in the disaster of the Anglo-Dutch army.
 But while we must state our conviction that Grouchy would have
prevented the defeat of Napoleon had he crossed the Dyle, we
certainly do not consider him the sole cause of the defeat.
 NOTES TO CHAPTER XVI.
1. That the tactics employed by the French at the battle of
Waterloo in their operations against the army of the Duke of
Wellington were unworthy of the experience and reputation of their
commanders is almost universally admitted. The word
“commanders” is used advisedly, because Ney seems to have had
the immediate direction of the 1st and 2d Corps even when the
Emperor was personally superintending the battle, and when
Napoleon was called off to direct the defence of Planchenoit, Ney
was certainly in sole control. But this does not fully exonerate the
Emperor from responsibility for the dispositions which were made.
The faulty formation of d’Erlon’s Corps in its great assault on the
English left was the first blunder. The employment of the whole of
Reille’s Corps in the attack on Hougomont was the next. Then the
negligent and wasteful way in which the attacks on both Hougomont
and La Haye Sainte were conducted warrant severe criticism. The
employment of all the reserve cavalry of the army was a most
unheard of and uncalled for proceeding; they were all put in, and
kept in until they were all exhausted. One would certainly suppose
that Ney, who was responsible for this proceeding, must have seen,
long before the close of the afternoon, that the cavalry were being
completely ruined, and that no appreciable injury was being inflicted
on the enemy.
We cannot but think that if Napoleon had personally directed the
battle at this period, this useless and wasteful employment of the
cavalry would not have been made. And we cannot help thinking,
also, that the Emperor would have brought some at least of Reille’s
troops out of the enclosures of Hougomont to support any attacks of
cavalry which he might have ordered, either in conjunction with the
divisions of Donzelot and Quiot, or with the Imperial Guard, which,
but for the attack of the Prussians, he would no doubt have put in
between 4 and 5 o’clock. We must bear in mind, that Napoleon was
fighting the Prussians near Planchenoit during a large part of the
afternoon, and, in fact during the critical period of the battle; and
that he cannot fairly be held liable to the censure for the tactics used
in the fight against the English, which some English writers, in
forgetfulness of this fact, have undertaken to apply to him.
The 1st Corps, after its severe repulse, rallied well and did
extremely good work. The persistent attacks of Quiot’s and
Donzelot’s infantry showed great enterprise and daring, up to the
very last; and these troops deserve all praise. No doubt the bravery
of the men of the 2d Corps in their ineffectual attacks on
Hougomont was equally commendable; but it was a great waste of
material to employ the entire corps in such an operation as attacking
Hougomont. Hougomont should have been attacked, undoubtedly,
but only by a moderate force; very possibly it might have been
carried, had proper means been employed.756 But it was of far more
importance to utilize the infantry of the 2d Corps in breaking the
English lines to the eastward of Hougomont, in conjunction with
cavalry or the Imperial Guard, than to persist in throwing fresh
regiments against the brick walls of the house and garden.
Hougomont might in fact have been turned; and, if the last charge
had succeeded, it would have been. A notable exception to the
unfavorable criticism on the French tactics on this day is made by all
historians when speaking of the gallant, skilful and obstinate defence
of Planchenoit against the Prussians by the 6th Corps under the
Count de Lobau, assisted by the Young Guard and some regiments
of grenadiers and chasseurs. No praise is too high for these troops.
2. The English tactics deserved, and have always received, the
high commendation of historians. Not only was the Duke himself
always watchful and alert, but his efforts were admirably seconded
by his officers. The unfailing energy and enterprise shown even at
the very close of this exhausting day by the Duke himself and his
lieutenants is at least quite as remarkable as the obstinacy and
courage displayed in resisting the repeated attacks of their
antagonists. The conduct of Maitland, Halkett and Colborne in the
last great emergency exhibits the tenacity, courage, presence of
mind, and readiness to seize the opportunity, which are the great
military virtues, existing in undiminished vigor at the close of a most
bloody and doubtful contest.
3. The account given in the text of the charge of the Imperial
Guard does not agree fully with any of the narratives, but will be
found, on reflection, it is submitted, to harmonize most of the
conflicting evidence. The subject is a large one, and the testimony is
very confusing. It is impossible to reconcile all the statements. But it
is believed that the view maintained in the text,—that the Imperial
Guard advanced in one body, or column, not in two; that this column
(as we may call it, for lack of a better term) consisted at most of
eight, and probably of only six battalions, each formed in close
column of grand divisions,—that is, with a front of two companies,—
the usual practice in those days,—presenting about 75 men in the
front rank,—that these battalions advanced in échelon, the right in
advance,—explains most of the discrepancies, and accounts for all or
nearly all the important statements contained in the different
narratives. It was the leading battalions of this column which were
met and defeated by Maitland’s guards; it was the rear battalions
which were flanked and routed by the 52d and the other regiments
of Adam’s (light) brigade.
A. There is, in our judgment, no foundation for the hypothesis of
two columns, which, introduced by Siborne, has received the
indorsement of Chesney, Kennedy and Hooper. It is opposed to the
contemporaneous authorities of both nations. Napoleon’s report of
the battle,757—Ney’s letter to the Duke of Otranto,758—Drouot’s
speech in the chamber of Peers,759—speak but of one column,—of
one attack,—of one repulse. Sir Digby Mackworth, who was on Lord
Hill’s staff, in a position where he could observe everything, wrote in
his journal at eleven o’clock at night, after the battle was over, as
follows:—760
“A black mass of the grenadiers of the Imperial Guard, with
music playing and the great Napoleon at their head, came
rolling onward from the farm of La Belle Alliance. * * * The
point at which the enemy aimed was now evident. It was an
 angle formed by a brigade of guards [Maitland’s] and the light
brigade [Adam’s] of Lord Hill’s Corps.”
Mackworth then goes on to describe the contest, and the rout of
the enemy. There is not a word of there being two columns and two
attacks.
This is true, it is believed, of all the early narratives by British
officers.761 It may fairly be deduced from this evidence that the
repulse of the right and advanced battalions by the guards, and the
attack on the left and rear ones by the light brigade were nearly
synchronous,—the latter being probably a few minutes later than the
former.
B. The claims put forward on behalf of the light brigade (Adam’s),
and specially of the 52d regiment, next demand our consideration.
Gawler, a distinguished officer of the 52d, in his “Crisis and Close
of the Action at Waterloo”762 admits that “the headmost companies
of the Imperial Guard * * * crowned the very summit of the
position.” He says that “the fire of the brigade of guards then
opened upon them, but they still pressed forward.” And he claims763
that their attack was repulsed not “by a charge of General Maitland’s
brigade of guards,” “but * * * by a charge of the 52d, covered by
the 71st regiment, without the direct coöperation of any other
portion of the allied army.”
Unfortunately for this claim, however, we have it from another
officer of the 52d, Leeke, that Gawler was on the extreme right of
the regiment.764 In this position, as Leeke remarks, he could not
have seen what took place at the head of the French column.765
When he says, therefore, that the flank attack of the 52d alone
overthrew the Imperial Guard, he is speaking without any personal
knowledge of what took place in the front of that column, and we
are thrown back on the evidence of the officers of Maitland’s
brigade.
Leeke has a curious theory on this matter. He says that the
advance of the Guard was preceded and covered by “a mass of
skirmishers,”766 and that it was these skirmishers and these only
that were driven off by Maitland’s brigade.
In order to maintain this contention, Leeke is compelled to assume
the presence in front of the main body of the Imperial Guard of
“massed skirmishers” thrown out by the Guard, and also that the
battalions of the Guard never got nearer to Maitland’s brigade than
300 yards.767
But this is mere guess work. Sharpin, an officer in Napier’s battery,
which was stationed close to Maitland’s brigade, says:—768
“We saw the French bonnets just above the high corn and
within 40 or 50 yards of our guns. I believe they were in close
columns of grand divisions.”
Says Captain Powell of the 1st Foot Guards:—769
“A close column of grenadiers (about seventies in front) * * *
were seen ascending the rise * * * They continued to advance
till within 50 or 60 paces of our front.”
Says Captain Dirom of the same regiment:—770
“The Imperial Guard advanced in close column with ported
arms, the officers of the leading division in front waving their
swords. The French columns showed no appearance of having
suffered on their advance, but seemed as regularly formed as if
at a field-day. When they got within a short distance we were
ordered to make ready, present and fire.”
Leeke’s theory of “massed skirmishers” needs no further
refutation. There can be no question that the officers of Maitland’s
guards saw right before them the leading battalions of the Imperial
Guard formed in the ordinary manner, in close columns of grand
divisions. The skirmishers had all been withdrawn by the time the
leading battalions reached the top of the acclivity.
It should, however, be added that the left and rear battalions
which Colborne attacked in flank were entirely unaffected by the
charge of Maitland’s brigade. The British guards did undoubtedly
charge the troops in their front, and drove them down the hill a
short distance, but on finding other troops, i.e., the four (or, more
probably, three) rear and left battalions of the Imperial Guard, on
their right flank, they retired to the crest of the hill, and certainly did
not assist the 52d and the other regiments of Adam’s brigade in their
brilliant flank attack. The credit of having overthrown the rear half of
the column of the Imperial Guard is due entirely to that brigade; and
it assuredly was a most skilfully designed and daringly executed
movement. Colborne saw at a glance that the several battalions of
the Guard could not be deployed in such a way as to return anything
like as destructive a fire as that which the unbroken line of the 52d
could deliver. The Guard undoubtedly did its best; the firing was very
hot for a time; Gawler says771 his regiment lost 150 officers and
men in four or five minutes. But his men were perfectly steady; their
fire was at very close range and well kept up; they had the
advantage of position; the loss of the French columns was
fearful;772 and when Colborne, perceiving that the moment had
come, ordered a charge, the Guard broke into a confused mass, and
were pursued to and across the Charleroi road. The flank attack of
Adam’s brigade was certainly a most brilliant, and yet a well-
justified, manœuvre,—impossible to any but veteran troops, and
which none but an experienced, vigilant and daring officer would
ever have ordered. Colborne took, it must be admitted, great risks.
He says himself773 that, as his skirmishers opened fire on the
Guards, his attention was completely drawn to his position and
dangerous advance,—a large mass of cavalry having been seen on
the right. Certainly it must have required some nerve to decide to
run such a risk as this, and on his own responsibility too, for he
advanced his regiment before receiving any order from General
Adam. But success justified his decision.
4. Whether Napoleon was warranted in ordering the Guard
forward, or rather that portion of it which could be mustered, is a
question which has been much discussed, and, we are inclined to
think, to no great profit. The answer must depend on the extent of
the information possessed by Napoleon as to the actual condition of
things at the time when he ordered the movement; and this, of
course, must be mainly a matter of conjecture. The order was given
somewhere about half-past six o’clock,—an hour before Zieten
arrived at Papelotte; and Napoleon certainly did not expect him.
Bülow had been forced to retire. The news from the front received
by the Emperor when he was conducting the fight against the
Prussian flank attack near Planchenoit had been decidedly favorable.
The army of Wellington was reported as manifestly getting weaker
and weaker. The guns placed near La Haye Sainte had done serious
damage to the English squares and batteries. The activity and
energy of Quiot’s and Donzelot’s infantry showed no abatement. It
seems to us that the Emperor had good reason to think that the
English lines would give way before a determined attack made by
fresh troops, and those the veterans of the Imperial Guard. He told
Ney to mass on the right of Hougomont all the troops of Reille’s
Corps that he could collect, to concentrate the divisions of Quiot and
Donzelot near La Haye Sainte, and to prepare to support the attack
with cavalry.774
He must, however, have been grievously disappointed as to the
execution of this order by Marshal Ney. When the Emperor brought
up the Guard, Bachelu’s infantry had not been drawn out of the
wood of Hougomont.775 Piré’s cavalry, which were in perfectly good
condition, had not been brought over from the Nivelles road.776 No
attempt apparently had been made to organize any cavalry force
from the wrecks of the splendid divisions which Ney had so
obstinately and blindly launched again and again upon the English
squares. And the Emperor, who must have expected that an officer
of the ability and experience of Marshal Ney would have made some
at least of the necessary arrangements for the proper support of the
charging column, must have experienced a disappointment as
sudden as it must have been bitter, when he saw the battalions of
the Guard ascend the plateau without a regiment of cavalry to
protect their flanks, or any part of the 2d Corps supporting their
attack.
 The charge, such as it was, of the Imperial Guard at Waterloo was
most firmly and gallantly met and repulsed. But it should never be
forgotten that it was not the sort of charge which Napoleon was in
the habit of making with his Guard; that it was, at best, a charge of
8 battalions out of 24,—of 12 guns out of 96,—and that no cavalry
at all, light or heavy, supported the charging column. Made, as it
was, without supports, except so far as Donzelot’s gallant infantry
protected its right flank, it was a terrible mistake to make it. And it is
all but certain that if proper care and skill had been expended on the
preparations and accompaniments of the movement,—if, in a word,
Ney had kept his head cool and his hand steady, as did the Duke,—
Piré’s lancers and Bachelu’s division would have given abundant
employment to the whole of Adam’s brigade, and a few squadrons of
horse could have protected the advance on the right. This is not, we
submit, going too far in the region of conjecture. Bachelu and Piré,
at any rate, were close at hand, and under Ney’s command, and
were, so far as we know, doing nothing at the time when the charge
was ordered.
Ney, in fact, contributed apparently little, except his example of
desperate courage, to the success of the day. But courage, though
indispensable, does not take the place of judgment and presence of
mind.777 Ney failed most unmistakably to make the most of his
resources; he lost sight, practically, of one of the two corps under his
orders; he used up all his cavalry; and he neglected to make even
the preparations and arrangements which were yet feasible to
second the attack of the Guard. It is impossible not to contrast his
conduct with that of Wellington, whose admirable forethought and
coolness gave him the control of the situation, and enabled him to
utilize fully all the resources which at the close of this trying day still
remained to him.
5. We have not thought it necessary to do more than to call
attention to the fact that the Duke of Wellington retained some
18,000 men of Colville’s division at Hal and Tubize throughout this
perilous and bloody day. The best English authorities778
unhesitatingly condemn the Duke’s action in this regard. Says Sir
James Shaw-Kennedy:—779
“Wellington certainly ought to have had Colville, with the
force under his command, on the field of battle at Waterloo.
There was no cause whatever for his being kept in the direction
of Hal. It would have been a gross error on the part of
Napoleon to have detached any important force on that road,
and Colville should, early on the morning of the 18th, have been
ordered to march to Waterloo, if he had no information of the
advance of the enemy on Hal.”
6. It may be thought by some that the effect upon the corps of
Bülow and Pirch I. of the appearance of Marshal Grouchy’s
command, marching from Moustier and Ottignies upon Lasne and St.
Lambert, has been stated too strongly in the text. But we cannot
think so. Imagine 30,000 or 40,000 men marching in a long column
along miry roads to attack an enemy, and still some miles from the
field of battle, perceiving a body of troops of apparently equal or
nearly equal strength moving right upon their line of march, which is
also their line of communications. How many officers in Bülow’s
position would not have halted to resist such an attack?
It is to be observed, that the dilemma in which Bülow and Pirch I.
were placed by knowing that Grouchy was attacking Wavre was
quite a different one. In the first place, they, as we now know,
estimated Grouchy’s force at only half its strength,—they never, it
must be remembered, actually saw it; and in the second place,
Grouchy might well be detained by Thielemann at and about Wavre
until the battle of Waterloo had been won.
If, however, Grouchy had been observed marching from the Dyle
directly on their columns en route for Planchenoit, the Prussian
commanders almost certainly would have been compelled to halt
and to give him battle. And this they must have done even although
they might have been satisfied that their forces were superior in
numbers. A smaller force, if it is directed on the line of march of a
larger one, almost inevitably must detain it.
 7. The complete ruin which overtook the French army at Waterloo
is to be attributed mainly to the unexpected appearance and
vigorous attack of Zieten’s Corps at the close of the day, when the
French had become thoroughly exhausted, and when, owing to the
darkness, it was impossible for the Emperor to accomplish anything
in the way of rallying them or making new dispositions. The English
had certainly won a great success in routing the Imperial Guard; but
they were not strong enough to drive the French army from the
field, even with the assistance which Bülow and Pirch I. afforded on
the side of Planchenoit. They had cleared their front of the enemy
from Hougomont to the turnpike; but they were in no condition to
attack the strong position of the French, defended by the troops of
the 2d Corps, and crowned with many and powerful batteries. The
French centre, Müffling tells us,780 remained immovable after their
right wing was in full retreat, and it was not until some of Zieten’s
batteries, which had been brought over to the west of La Haye
Sainte, opened fire, that it began to retire. Then Wellington ordered
his whole line to advance. But it was a very thin line indeed,
consisting, as Müffling says, only of small bodies, of a few hundred
men each, and at great intervals from each other. Müffling goes on
to say:—781
“The advance of such weak battalions, with the great gaps
between, appeared hazardous, and General Lord Uxbridge, who
commanded the cavalry, drew the Duke’s attention to the
danger; the Duke, however, would not order them to stop. * * *
The Duke with his practised eye perceived that the French army
was no longer dangerous; he was equally aware, indeed, that,
with his infantry so diminished, he could achieve nothing more
of importance: but if he stood still, and resigned the pursuit to
the Prussian army alone, it might appear in the eyes of Europe
as if the English army had defended themselves bravely indeed,
but that the Prussians alone decided and won the battle.”
The rout of the divisions of Durutte and Marcognet was entirely
due to Zieten’s attack; this is universally admitted. Had it not been
for Zieten, then, the only contest that would have gone on that
evening would have been at and near Planchenoit; and it is hard to
suppose that Napoleon could not have maintained his position there,
if he had had his whole army to draw from when the Young Guard
and Lobau needed reinforcements. To the unexpected irruption of
Zieten’s Corps,—or rather of his leading division of infantry, all his
cavalry, and most of his artillery,—arriving at the close of the day, on
the flank of the army, and in perfectly open ground, is the rout of
the French army, therefore, principally to be attributed.
8. It only remains to discuss the question of the responsibility for
the intervention of the Prussians, as between the Emperor and
Marshal Grouchy. It may fairly be said that if either of them had
taken all the steps which the situation, as it presented itself to his
mind, demanded, this intervention might have been prevented.
If the Emperor, when he thought it possible that the Prussians
might be intending to unite with the English, had taken Grouchy with
him, and had stationed his two corps, or one of them, on the day of
the battle, at or near Lasne and St. Lambert, or if he had employed
one or both of Grouchy’s corps in attacking the English, Blücher, it is
safe to say, would not have interfered in the duel between Napoleon
and Wellington.
If, after sending Grouchy off, Napoleon had informed him of the
impending battle, and had charged him to return to the main army
by way of Moustier if he found that the Prussians had gone to
Wavre, it is altogether probable that the march of the Prussians
would have been arrested.
On the other hand, if Grouchy had acted of his own motion on
sound military principles at daybreak of the 18th, or even had been
willing to follow the counsel of Gérard at noon, the same result
would probably have been attained.
Napoleon took a wholly unnecessary risk when he detached
Grouchy with such a large force, after he had reason to apprehend
that the Prussians were intending to unite with the English, and he
negligently omitted to take the usual means to reduce this risk by
supplying his lieutenant with the necessary information, and with
precise orders in case he should find that Blücher intended to
coöperate with Wellington. He trusted to Grouchy to take the right
course, and Grouchy failed to do so. Both Napoleon and Grouchy are
therefore responsible for the intervention of the Prussians and the
loss of the battle.
 CHAPTER XVII.

CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS.
The justification for this book on the well-worn subject of the
campaign of Waterloo is to be found, if at all, in its treatment of
certain topics to which we now propose very briefly to advert.
1. First among them is Napoleon’s plan of campaign.782 In regard
to this we have followed his own account, and have pointed out the
difference between it and the plan which it has been claimed he
either really did entertain or ought to have entertained.
2. In regard to the much-vexed question of the alleged verbal
order to Marshal Ney to seize Quatre Bras on the afternoon of the
15th of June, new light, it is submitted, has been thrown.783 The
contemporaneous evidence of the bulletin, and the statement made
by Marshal Grouchy in 1818, make it very difficult to disbelieve
Napoleon’s account of this matter.
3. The true cause of the delay on the morning of the 16th of June
has been, we submit, pointed out.784 The fact that d’Erlon’s Corps
was so far in the rear seems to have been the chief reason for
delaying the forward movement both of the left wing and of the
main army.
4. It has been shown by Marshal Ney’s orders to his command,
and from other evidence furnished by his defenders, that his
arrangements for carrying out his instructions on the 16th were
extremely defective, and, in fact, that he perversely departed from
the letter and spirit of his orders.785 It has also been shown that a
vigorous and unhesitating compliance with the orders which he
received would in all probability have changed the issue of the
campaign.786
5. In regard to the movements of d’Erlon’s Corps on the 16th, it
has been shown that its leading division was two hours and a half
behind the rear divisions of the 2d Corps on the road to Quatre Bras;
and that if d’Erlon’s Corps had closely followed the rear division of
the 2d Corps, it could not have been turned aside by the staff-
officer’s blunder.787
6. Attention has been called to Napoleon’s plan of battle at Ligny,
and to the criticisms which it has met with.788
7. The view of those writers who regard it as great negligence on
the part of Napoleon that on the morning of the 17th he did not take
adequate measures to ascertain the direction of the Prussian retreat,
is fully adopted.789
8. It is also maintained that Napoleon should on that morning at
daybreak have marched with the 6th Corps and the Guard to attack
the English at Quatre Bras in conjunction with Ney’s forces,—a point
on which most writers strongly insist.790
9. The connection between the injunction contained in the
Bertrand order and the new idea as to the projects of Marshal
Blücher, which Berton’s discovery of a Prussian corps at Gembloux
had started in Napoleon’s mind, is brought out;791 and Napoleon is
censured for having on the afternoon of the 17th detached so large
a force from his army when he had reason to apprehend that a
movement by Blücher with the intention of coöperating with
Wellington had been in operation since the previous evening.792
10. The warning contained in the Bertrand order is given its due
prominence; and the fact that Marshal Grouchy was acting under
that order, and therefore had entire liberty to take any steps which
his own judgment might approve to frustrate the attempt of the
Prussians to act in conjunction with the English, is strongly insisted
on.793
11. It is shown that Grouchy was at Walhain, and not at Sart-à-
Walhain when he heard the sound of the cannon of Waterloo and
rejected the counsel of Gérard.794
12. That Napoleon expected Grouchy to arrive on the left bank of
the Dyle by crossing it at the bridge of Moustier is shown by
Marbot’s testimony; and attention is called to the inference which
this fact warrants, that Napoleon was not cognizant of the language
used in the 10 A.M. order to Marshal Grouchy, which seemed to
imply that Grouchy was expected to reach Wavre first.795
13. It is pointed out that from about four o’clock in the afternoon
of the 18th of June to about half-past six, Napoleon’s attention was
absorbed by the attack of Bülow’s Corps upon the right and rear of
the French army; and that, for the mistakes committed during this
period in the assaults on the English army, Ney is mainly
responsible.796 It is furthermore shown that by reason of this
distraction of the Emperor’s attention from the operations in his
front, valuable opportunities for success against Wellington’s army
were lost.797
14. Marshal Ney is censured for having done so little in the way of
preparation for the successful charge of the Imperial Guard.798
15. The questions relating to the formation of the Imperial Guard
in its charge against the English, and of its repulse and defeat by the
English guards and the light brigade, have received particular
attention. It is believed that the view here presented will be found to
harmonize nearly all the conflicting statements.799
16. It is maintained that Marshal Grouchy, if he had started for the
bridge of Moustier at daybreak,800 or had followed the advice of
Gérard at noon,801 would probably have stopped Bülow and Pirch I.
by engaging them, and that Zieten, in all probability, would not have
proceeded further than Ohain;802 in which case Napoleon would
have been able to employ his whole army against that of Wellington,
and would have defeated it.
Coming now to the Allies:—
17. It is contended that the definite understanding as to the steps
to be taken in the event of a French invasion, which has generally
been attributed to the Duke of Wellington and Marshal Blücher, did
not exist.803
18. That the Duke, in the early morning hours of the 16th,
ordered a general concentration of his army at Quatre Bras, as he
says in his Report he did, is shown by an examination of his letter to
Marshal Blücher, and a comparison of that letter with the statement
as to the situation and destination at 7 A.M. of the 16th of the
different divisions of his army, known as “The Disposition,” drawn up
by Sir William De Lancey, the Deputy Quartermaster General, before
the Duke left Brussels.804
19. That the Duke, in issuing the order for concentrating at Quatre
Bras after he had become satisfied that Napoleon was concentrating
in front of Blücher, was acting in strict accordance with the demands
of the situation, is maintained:805 but it is shown that it was several
hours after Wellington received this information as to Blücher and
Napoleon before he issued the order, and that this delay was not
only uncalled for, but that it gravely imperilled the success of the
allies.806
20. It is shown that it is not true that Blüchers decision to fight at
Ligny was based on a promise of support from Wellington.807
21. Attention is called to the now generally admitted fact that it
was not until the early morning hours of the 18th that Blücher was
able to give Wellington definite assurance of his support in the battle
of Waterloo.808
22. The evidence in regard to the story that the Duke rode over to
Wavre on the evening of the 17th is given,809 and, on that evidence,
the story is rejected.
A few words in conclusion.
1. It does not seem to us that Napoleon can be charged with any
lack of activity or decision of character, except on the morning after
the battle of Ligny, when he was, as we imagine, pretty well tired
out. But his energy speedily returned, and we find him conducting
the pursuit of the English during the afternoon, and making an
examination of their position in the mud and rain in the middle of
the night.
2. Nor was there any defect in his plan of campaign. Had Ney
executed his orders with promptness and without hesitation, the
campaign would have been finished on the 16th of June, either by
Ney’s furnishing the needed force to take the Prussians in rear at
Brye and Wagnelée, or by his defeating Wellington badly by the help
of the 1st Corps. If either of these things had happened, there could
not possibly have been any battle of Waterloo; the Prussian and
English armies would have been definitely separated; one, and
perhaps both, would have been beaten; and never, in all probability,
would they have acted together again. For this failure to achieve
success on the second day of the campaign, Ney and not Napoleon
was responsible.
3. But for not overwhelming at Quatre Bras on the early morning
of the 17th the two-thirds of his army which Wellington had
collected there, no one but Napoleon was responsible; and his failure
to do this must be attributed to his excessive fatigue.
4. Then, for his neglect to ascertain the direction of the Prussian
retreat on the same morning, Napoleon is responsible; and although
Soult ought to have attended to this, in his capacity of chief-of-staff,
yet, as the Emperor does not appear to have blamed him for not
having reconnoitred in the direction of Wavre, we must consider
Napoleon as open to this censure. It is true, it was not likely that
Blücher had retired in the direction of Wavre; but it was of vital
importance to know whether he had or not. Hence it was a great
neglect not to find out.
5. Napoleon is also solely responsible for having persisted in his
original design of detaching Grouchy in pursuit of the Prussians after
he had reason to believe that they were intending to unite with the
English, and to suspect, in fact, that they had been approaching the
English during the previous night and morning; and for contenting
himself with merely giving Grouchy a warning that this might be
their intention. He laid upon Grouchy, in fact, a burden which to that
officer, as Napoleon was well aware, was entirely new; hence, the
Emperor was not warranted in risking so much on the chance of
Grouchy’s being able to sustain it. It is this that Napoleon is to blame
for in this connection; for having, when he saw that the Prussians
might (as the Bertrand order expresses it) be “intending to unite
with the English to cover Brussels in trying the fate of another
battle,” persisted in adhering to his original plan,—devised when he
and Grouchy and everybody else supposed that the Prussians had
gone to Namur,—of sending Grouchy in pursuit of them with two
corps d’armée. Many writers will have it that “Napoleon did not in
the least foresee the flank march of the Prussians.”810 This,—if to
foresee be equivalent to expect,—may be true. But Napoleon
certainly did, at 1 P.M. of the 17th, recognize the possibility of the
Prussians uniting with the English; and the true criticism on him is,
as it seems to us, that, having this in mind, as a possibility, he
should have detached Marshal Grouchy with 33,000 men from the
main army, and have been content to rely on Grouchy’s being able to
prevent this project of the Prussians from being carried out. It must
be added to this, that his neglect to send Grouchy any information of
his own situation, and any orders as to what he expected him to do
if he found the Prussians were marching to join Wellington or to
attack the main French army, showed an unjustifiable reliance on the
favors of fortune.
6. To Marshal Grouchy belongs the blame of having entirely failed
to apprehend his mission, as indicated to him by the express
warning contained in the Bertrand order. Had he acted intelligently in
accordance with the information which he acquired in the night of
the 17th and 18th, he could have prevented the Emperor from being
overwhelmed by both the allied armies. At daybreak, as appears
from his letter to Pajol, he knew that the Prussians had retired
towards Wavre and Brussels. But the meaning of this fact he utterly
failed to grasp. He made no change in his previously ordered
dispositions, which this news should have shown him were wholly
unsuited to the situation as now ascertained. Nor did the sound of
the cannon of Waterloo produce on him a greater effect. He would
not accept the suggestion of Gérard. He persisted in a course which
completely isolated his command, and prevented it from playing any
part in the events of that memorable day. Napoleon, as we have
pointed out, made a great mistake in trusting so much to Grouchy’s
good judgment; he took a wholly unnecessary risk; he might, as well
as not, have taken Grouchy, with far the larger part of his command,
with the main army; had he done so, the catastrophe of Waterloo
could not, so far as we can judge, have happened. But had Grouchy
acted up to the demands of the situation in which he found himself,
he also would have averted the ruin which the unhindered union of
the allies brought upon Napoleon and his army.
 APPENDIX A.

ON SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF NAPOLEON’S MEMOIRS.

Probably no military narratives that ever were written have been
subjected to more harsh and unjust criticism than the two accounts
of the campaign of Waterloo, which, under the names of the
Gourgaud Narrative and the Memoirs, were dictated or written by
Napoleon at St. Helena. To read the remarks of Charras, Chesney,
Hooper, and others, about these books, one would suppose that a
military narrative is the easiest, plainest sort of narrative to write,
and that if a general wished to compose it properly he would isolate
himself from his fellow-officers and subordinates, and get into some
secluded corner of the world thousands of miles from the records of
the war-department. For if this is not the view of these writers and
of others like them, they are either ignorant of the extreme difficulty
which attends the composition of a military narrative, or else are
bent upon treating the fallen Emperor with gross injustice.
For instance, Napoleon says in his “Memoirs”811 that “on the 14th
in the evening,”812 General Bourmont deserted to the enemy. The
whole army broke camp in the early hours of the 15th. When the 4th
Corps moved at five o’clock, it was discovered that Bourmont had
left. Charras states that the staff-records of the 4th Corps, to which
Bourmont belonged, mention that he deserted on the 15th, and that
he wrote a letter to Gérard announcing his desertion dated at
Philippeville on the 15th. But Napoleon at St. Helena had neither the
staff-records of the 4th Corps to go by, nor the letter of Bourmont to
Gérard. Yet Charras813 calls the Emperor’s statement a designed
misstatement (une inexactitude calculée).
But we have no disposition to dwell on harsh criticisms of this
kind. Our purpose at present is to call attention to a peculiarity of
Napoleon’s which may serve to explain the existence in his Memoirs
of very definite statements which are apparently very wide of the
truth. This peculiarity is, that while his orders to his lieutenants were
often very general in their character,—pointing out clearly enough, it
is true, the thing to be aimed at, or the danger to be feared,—but
leaving entirely to the officer the course to be adopted if the
emergency should arise,—yet these orders never seem to have been
retained in Napoleon’s memory in the shape in which they were
given, but what he did recall about them was his expectation that,
on receiving his order, his lieutenant would act in such or such a
manner. This expectation, that such or such action would be taken
by his lieutenant on receiving such or such an order, was all that was
left of the order in his mind; and, when he came to write his
narrative, he would often (at any rate) state that he had given
definite instructions to such or such an effect, when all he had really
done was to give a general order, from the giving of which he
expected such or such a course of action to be taken by his
subordinate.
Thus, take the orders to Ney, issued on the afternoon of the 16th,
at 2 and 3.15 P.M.814 They were, as we have seen, very general in
character; Ney was directed, after he should have beaten, or, at
least, checked, the English, to turn round, and manœuvre so as to
take the Prussians in flank and rear. But the “Memoirs”815 say:—
“He [Napoleon] reiterated the order for him to push on in
front of Quatre Bras; and, as soon as he should have taken
position there, to detach a column of 8,000 infantry, with the
cavalry-division of Lefebvre-Desnouettes, and 28 pieces of
cannon, by the turnpike which ran from Quatre Bras to Namur,
which he was to leave at the village of Marbais, in order to
attack the heights of Brye, in the enemy’s rear.”
It is to be observed that the Memoirs make no mention of the
orders which were actually sent to Ney that afternoon. And
Napoleon sent to Ney no such order as this. What he here calls an
order was really what he expected Ney to do when he should get
the 2 and 3.15 P.M. orders. That this was so, appears from what
follows:—
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