"We might have offered this to So-and-So or So-and-So," they said, designating persons of importance. "But we preferred to come to you."
"I assume my name is to appear?" I said.
But my name was not to appear, and I begged to be allowed to decline the work.
I suddenly found myself on terms of familiarity with some of the great ones of the stage. I found myself invited into the Garrick Club, and into the more Bohemian atmosphere of the Green Room Club. I became accustomed to hearing the phrase: "You are the dramatist of the future." One afternoon I was walking down Bedford Street when a hand was placed on my shoulder, and a voice noted for its rich and beautiful quality exclaimed: "How the d——l are you, my dear chap?" The speaker bears a name famous throughout the English-speaking world.
"You are arriving!" I said to myself, naïvely proud of this greeting. I had always understood that the theatrical "ring" was impenetrable to an outsider; and yet I had stepped into the very middle of it without the least trouble.
My collaborator and I then wrote a farce. "We can't expect to sell everything," I said to him warningly, but I sold it quite easily. Indeed I sold it, repurchased it, and sold it again, within the space of three months.
Reasons of discretion prevent me from carrying my theatrical record beyond this point.
I have not spoken of the artistic side of this play-concoction, because it scarcely has any. My aim in writing plays, whether alone or in collaboration, has always been strictly commercial.[3] I wanted money in heaps, and I wanted advertisement for my books. Here and there, in the comedies and farces in which I have been concerned, a little genuine dramatic art has, I fancy, been introduced; but surreptitiously, and quite unknown to the managers. I have never boasted of it in managerial apartments. That I have amused myself while constructing these arabesques of intrigue and epigram is indubitable, whether to my credit or discredit as a serious person. I laugh constantly in writing a farce. I have found it far easier to compose a commercial play than an artistic novel. How our princes of the dramatic kingdom can contrive to spend two years over a single piece, as they say they do, I cannot imagine. The average play contains from eighteen to twenty thousand words; the average novel contains eighty thousand; after all, writing is a question of words. At the rate of a thousand words a day, one could write a play three times over in a couple of months; prefix a month—thirty solid days of old Time!—for the perfecting of the plot, and you will be able to calculate the number of plays producible by an expert craftsman in a year. And unsuccessful plays are decidedly more remunerative than many successful novels. I am quite certain that the vast majority of failures produced in the West End mean to their authors a minimum remuneration of ten pounds per thousand words. In the fiction-mart ten pounds per thousand is gilded opulence. I am neither Sardou, Sudermann, nor George R. Sims, but I know what I am talking about, and I say that dramatic composition for the market is child's play compared to the writing of decent average fiction—provided one has an instinct for stage effect.
[3]Once more written in 1900.