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ART FORM AND MATERIAL 259
wrong. The history of literature is full of classic masterpieces which are adaptations of other works.
The theoretical reason on which the opposition to adaptations is based is that there is an organic connection between form1 and content in every art and that a certain art form always offers the most adequate expression for a certain content. Thus the adaptation of a content to a different art form can only be detrimental to a work of art, if that work of art was good. In other words, one may perhaps make a good film out of a bad novel, but never out of a good one.
This theoretically impeccable thesis is contradicted by such realities as these : Shakespeare took the stories of some of his very good plays from certain very good old Italian tales and the plots of the Greek classical drama were also derived from older epics.
Most of the classical dramas used the material of the old epics and if we turn the pages of Lessing's Hamburgische Dramaturgic we will find that the very first three reviews in it deal with plays adapted from novels. It should be mentioned that the author of the immortal art philosophy contained in Laokoon, whose concern was precisely to find the specific laws governing each form of art, found much to criticize in the plays which he reviewed, but had no objection to their being the adaptations of novels. On the contrary, he proffered much good advice as to how such adaptations could be more skilfully done.
The contradiction appears so obvious that one must wonder why no learned aestheticist ever bothered to clear up this problem. For if the objection on principle to adaptations were merely a theoretical error, the matter would be simple. But it is not an error; it is a logical conclusion from the undeniably correct thesis about the connection between content and form.
It is obvious that the contradiction here is only apparent — an undialectic nailing-down of partial truths. It may be worth while to probe deeper for the source of the error.
To accept the thesis that the content or material determines the form and with it the art form, and nevertheless to admit the possibility of putting the same material into a different form,