Playwrights on playmaking

by Brander Matthews

I

No passage of Stevenson’s has been oftener quoted than his confession how he taught himself the art of letters by playing “the sedulous ape to many masters”; and in this avowal he had been preceded by masters of style as dissimilar in their accomplishment as Franklin and Newman. Stevenson may be overstating the case—he had caught the trick of over-statement from Thoreau—but he is not misstating it when he asserts that this is the only way to learn to write. Certainly it is an excellent way, if we judge by its results in his own case, in Franklin’s and in Newman’s. The method of imitative emulation will help any apprentice of the craft to choose his words, to arrange them in sentences and to build them up in coherent paragraphs. It is a specific against that easy writing which is “cursed hard reading.” But it goes no deeper than the skin, since it affords insufficient support when the novice has to consider his structure as a whole, the total form he will bestow upon his essay, his story, his play.

In the choice of the proper framework for his conception the author’s task is made measurably lighter if he can find a fit pattern ready to his hand. Whether he shall happen upon this when he needs it is a matter of chance, since it depends on what the engineers call “the state of the art.” There have been story-tellers and playwrights not a few who have gone astray and dissipated their energies, not through any fault of their own, but solely because no predecessor had devised a pattern suitable for their immediate purpose. They have wandered afield because the trail had not been blazed by earlier, and possibly less gifted, wayfarers and adventurers.

Perhaps I can make clear what I mean by a concrete example not taken from the art of letters. In Professor John C. Van Dyke’s acute analysis of the traditions of American painting, he has told us that when La Farge designed the ‘Ascension’ for the church of that name in New York,

The architectural place for it was simplified by placing on the chancel wall of the church a heavily gilded moulding, deep-niched, and with an arched top, which acted at once both as a frame and a limit to the picture. The space was practically that of a huge window with a square base and a half-top requiring for its filling two groups of figures one above the other. La Farge placed his standing figures of the apostles and the holy women in the lower space and their perpendicular lines paralleled the uprights of the frame; at the top he placed an oval of angels about the risen Christ, and again the rounded lines of the angel group repeated the curves of the gilded arch.

Then Professor Van Dyke appends this significant comment:

There was no great novelty in this arrangement. It was frankly adopted from Italian Renascence painting and had been used for high altar-pieces by all the later painters—Andrea del Sarto, Raphael, Titian, Palma. They had worked out the best way of filling that up-right-and-arched space, and La Farge followed the tradition because he recognized its sufficiency.

In other words, the art of painting had so far advanced that La Farge was supplied with the pattern best suited to his purpose; and this pattern once accepted, he was at liberty to paint the picture as he saw it, without wasting time in quest of another construction. The picture he put within that frame was his and his only, even if the pattern of it had been devised centuries before he was born. In thus utilizing a framework invented by his predecessors he was not cramped and confined; rather was he set free. So it is that to Milton and to Wordsworth the rigidity of the sonnet was not a hindrance but a help—especially to Wordsworth since it curbed his tendency to diffuseness. Wordsworth himself declared his delight in the restrictions of the sonnet:

In truth the prison into which we doom

Ourselves no prison is: and hence for me,

In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound

Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;

Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be),

Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,

Should find brief solace here, as I have found.

That utterance of Wordsworth’s may be recommended to the ardent advocates of Free Verse,—that is, of the verse which boasts itself to be patternless and to come into being in response solely to the whim of the moment. Sooner or later the Free Versifiers will discover the inexorable truth in Huxley’s saying that it is when a man can do as he pleases that his trouble begins.

Since I have ventured these three quotations I am emboldened to make a fourth—from John Morley’s essay on Macaulay. After informing us about the rules which Comte imposed on himself in composition, Morley tells us that Comte

justified his literary solicitude by insisting on the wholesomeness alike to heart and intelligence of submission to artificial restrictions. He felt, after he had once mastered the habit of the new yoke, that it became the source of continual and unforeseeable improvement even in thought, and he perceived that the reason why verse is a higher kind of literary perfection than prose, is that verse imposes a greater number of rigorous forms.

It is because of their rigorous forms that the ballade and the rondeau have established themselves by the side of the sonnet; and the lyrist who has learnt to love them finds in their fixity no curb on his power of self-expression. So in the kindred art of music, the sonata and the symphony are forms each with a law of its own; yet the composer has abundant liberty within the law. He has all the freedom that is good for him; and the prison to which he dooms himself no prison is.