IV
For that brings us to the pathetic final explanation of the failure of the Henley-Stevenson plays. We may say that they are deficient in drama, or that they are trivial in theme, or that they have no visual sense to illumine them for our eyes; but the truth is that they fail because they are false. The theatre has in it much that is false, much to which we deliberately shut our eyes in order that we may accept the dramatist’s formal conventions. We do not, in the theatre, demand that “King Lear” shall be accompanied by a pandemonium of crackling tin and iron and artificial whoopings of wind. Those things we prefer to imagine for ourselves. But somehow the mixture of legitimate convention and the basest imitation of reality has been confused in the theatre. The exaggeration regarded as necessary by an effete system of acting and production has created other unpardonable falsenesses. The stage has been a place upon which actors disported themselves. It was of such a stage that Stevenson thought. In each case he hung a play upon a sensational figure—Brodie, Macaire, Pew, and, in a much lesser degree, upon the picturesque figure of Beau Austin. To him the drama was nothing but play. It was an excuse—nay, a demand, for unreality. He supposed that stage characters really were cardboard figures such as he had known, moralising ranters, virtuous girls, spouters of Latin tags, pious brands from the burning, handsome courageous puppet-like juvenile leads, and so on. It never occurred to him to put a real figure in a play: he never supposed that a character in a play had any end but to be put back in the box with the other playthings. That is really the cause of the shallowness of these four plays. As Stevenson admitted to Mr. Henry James, he heard people talking, and felt them acting, and that seemed to him to be fiction. But to hear people talking and to feel them acting bespeaks a very unmaterial conception of them: if a character in a play talks, however monotonously, without developing any personality save that of verbal mannerism, we are bound to feel that he has not been realised. And just as Stevenson realised none of the characters in his plays, so we are powerless to realise them. We find them, as Professor Saintsbury pathetically found Catriona herself, bloodless. Professor Saintsbury found Catriona full of sawdust, while of the characters in the plays we have used the word “paper”: very well, the impression of lifelessness is as clearly felt in each case. And such an impression, carried to its logical end, explains why, in at least one department of letters, Stevenson from the first mistook his ground. Not one of the four plays has serious value as an example of dramatic art; it is clear that not one of them so far has commended itself to the public or to the actor-managers. Yet the plays were obviously set to catch the popular taste, and their literary finish, a confession in itself of an absence of dramatic impulse, does not succeed in commending them to those who judge by more exacting standards.