I
It is a commonplace of dramatic reporting, which in spite of its frequently doubtful application has the truth of an old saw, that the novelist cannot write plays. Certainly, it would seem that the qualities which go to the making of good plays are not precisely those which make good novels; for while it is possible to conceive a novel in terms of narrative, descriptions of abounding nature, psychological analysis, and tableaux, the play has rules more strictly objective and more definitely rigid. Now if we, for the moment, pass over the question of Stevenson’s collaborator in the four printed plays with which his name is associated, and if we, for this occasion, treat them as though they were his work entirely, we shall be better able to distinguish certain remarkable characteristics of these plays, and, anticipating certain general conclusions to be made later, of Stevenson’s talent.
Stevenson, we are all aware, was never, strictly speaking, in spite of Catriona and Weir of Hermiston, a novelist. He was a writer of many kinds of stories; but they were not primarily, until we come to Weir, domestic or psychological. Many of them were what no doubt would commonly be called “dramatic,” in the sense that they contained scenes of some violence; but for the most part they were narrative interspersed with tableaux. They were “picturesque,” not because they were startlingly visual, but because Stevenson had that flair for the odd, the startling, or the vivid effect of contrast which is generally described by the word “picturesque.” It was the oddness of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that allured him before he became oppressed by its symbolism. It was, equally, oddness that always attracted him in character: he had no profound sense of character, for this reason. Passivity he never understood. His characters must forever be in action. That, it might be supposed, was in itself a first reason for turning to the theatre, since, according to modern dramatic reporters, “drama” is a word synonymous with the word “action.” Action, something doing—that, by the recipe, is the certain play. But while action may give a play breathless suspense, while it may provide the kind of play which, in a specifically theatrical sense, is called a “drama,” action is not the whole battle. To action, or at least to the psychological excitement created by a sense of action in progress and a climax pending, must be added a very powerful sense of what is effective in the theatre. A pause, a sound, verbal repetition, an abrupt change—these things are crude examples, chosen at random from among the obvious instances of what contributes to the sense of the theatre. If we think of such things as the tapping of Pew’s stick (in Admiral Guinea), and, in Deacon Brodie, the appearance of the masked Deacon at the window by which Leslie is watching for him, we shall realise that in some degree, in some very obvious and primitive form, Stevenson was possessed of this attribute. But one thing we shall infallibly discover him to lack, a thing which Mr. Henry James missed in Catriona, a thing which has vital importance in drama—the visual sense. These plays show no real power of visualising a scene. Picturesque they all are; they all have qualities which make them engrossing—as reading. But they are not focussed for the eyes, and they are not well constructed for real dramatic effect.
Deacon Brodie is in five acts and eight tableaux, and its effects are indescribably broken, so that irrelevancies are numerous, distracting side issues over-emphasised, and so that the Deacon is almost a minor character. It is hard to realise that there are only a dozen persons in the play, for their comings and goings are so frequent as to give the effect of a confused number of straggling participants in desultory action. The play itself centres round an historical figure—Deacon Brodie—who was an honest man before the world by day, and by night an expert cracksman. His name is familiar both in criminal history and in the annals of Edinburgh, where his activities became, after his death, notorious. In the play, Brodie at last is eager for reform; but one of his cronies, tempted by a Bow Street runner, and the only one of Brodie’s friends to yield to temptation, betrays him. Though Brodie escapes, his absence from home has been discovered in the excitement consequent upon his father’s death, and, when arrest is imminent, he takes his own life. Stevenson had found the details of Brodie’s life while he was preparing the sketches collected under the title Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes; and it is conceivable that in some measure the play’s technique was a little influenced by a reading of some eighteenth-century episodic plays, such, for example, as Gay’s “Beggar’s Opera,” which is similarly broken in construction, though more permissibly so, because “The Beggar’s Opera” is no more than a skein in which ballads and satire may be found to provide our entertainment. This mention of “The Beggar’s Opera” must not be taken too seriously, however, because although that play deals with the life of highwaymen and pickpurses and thief-takers in the eighteenth century, as Deacon Brodie does, it is profoundly real, whereas Deacon Brodie is only too obviously modern fake. Macheath and Polly Peachum are infinitely more real than Brodie and his doxy. Moreover the ensemble in Deacon Brodie is on the whole poorly conceived. The minor persons are mere figures, introduced to stand here or there, or do this or that, and are labelled with names and idiosyncrasies. The major persons, though more detailed, have an equal lack of vitality. It is necessary to add the further explanation that Deacon Brodie is the first of the plays, and that it dates from 1880. It is easily the least coherent of them all. Stevenson was to improve upon Deacon Brodie in that respect, at least.