A Book About the Theater

by Brander Matthews

The art of play-writing, like the art of story-telling, and, indeed, like all the other arts, demands both a native gift and an acquired craft. Its basic principles are the same ever since the drama began; but its immediate methods vary at different times and in different countries. While every artist must say what it is given him to say, he can say it acceptably only by acquiring the method of speech employed by his immediate predecessors. However original he may prove himself at the end, in the beginning he can only imitate the methods and borrow the processes and avail himself of the practises which the elder craftsmen are employing successfully at the moment when he sets himself to learn their trade. He must—to use the apt term of the engineers—he must keep himself abreast of "state of the art." This is what the great dramatists have ever done; Sophocles follows in the footsteps of Æschylus, as Shakspere emulates Marlowe and Kyd, and as Molière went to school to the adroit and acrobatic Italian comedians. These great dramatists were perfectly content to begin by taking over the patterns devised by their immediate predecessors in play-making, even if they were soon to enlarge these patterns and so modify them to suit their even larger needs.

Plate No. 7, complete as published, ready to be cut out and put into use in the toy theater

Now, the state of the art when Stevenson turned to the theater was in accord with the picture-frame stage of to-day, with a single set to the act, and without the soliloquies and the confidential asides to the audience which may then have been proper enough on the apron-stage of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Even in the lower grade of playhouse, where rude and crude melodramas were performed, the method and the manner of the 'Miller and His Men' had long departed. The pleasure that melodrama can give is perennial; but its processes vary in accord with the changing conditions of the theater. The door was open for Stevenson to write melodrama, if he preferred that species of play, and if he desired to varnish it with literature as he was to varnish the police-novel or mystery-story in the 'Wrecker.' But if he sought to do this, he was bound to inform himself as to the state of the art at the instant of composition. If he shut his eyes to the changed conditions of the theater since the 'Miller and His Men' had won a wide popularity in the playhouse, then he made an unpardonable blunder, for the battle was lost before he could deploy his forces. He might have been forewarned by the failure of Charles Lamb in a like attempt. When Lamb's Elizabethan imitation 'John Woodvil' was rejected for Drury Lane by John Philip Kemble as not "consonant with the taste of the age"; its exasperated author cried: "Hang on the age! I'll write for antiquity!" But those who write for antiquity cannot complain if they do not delight their contemporaries. It is to his contemporaries, and not to antiquity or to posterity, that every true dramatist has appealed.

IV

And as Stevenson might have taken warning from the sad fate of Lamb, so he might have found his profit in considering the happy fortune of Victor Hugo, who also had a taste for melodrama. When the leader of the French romanticists felt that it was incumbent upon him to conquer the theater which the classicists held as their last stronghold, he was swift to consider the state of the art. He sought immediate success upon the stage, and the most successful plays of that period in France were the melodramas of Pixérécourt, and of his followers, and therefore Hugo sat himself down to spy out the secrets of their craft. He made himself master of their methods, and he put together the striking and startling plots of 'Hernani' and 'Ruy Blas' in strict accord with their formulas, certain that he could varnish with literature their melodramatic actions. So glittering was his varnish, so brilliant was his metrical rhetoric, so glowing were his golden verses, that he blinded the spectators and kept the most of them from peering beneath at his arbitrary and artificial skeleton of supporting melodramatic structure. To-day, after fourscore years, we can see just what it is that Hugo did; and his plays, superb as they are in their lyric adornment, stand revealed as frank melodramas, lacking sincerity of motive and veracity of character drawing. But when Hugo wrote them they were in Kemble's phrase "consonant with the taste of the age," and the best of them have not yet worn out their welcome in the theater.

Stevenson did not heed the warning of Lamb, and he did not profit by the example of Hugo. 'Deacon Brodie' was born out of date; so was 'Admiral Guinea'; and all the varnish of literature which the two collaborators applied externally and with loving solicitude availed naught. It is due to his entanglement in the strangling coils of Skeltery that Stevenson did not take the drama seriously. He seemed to have looked at it as something to be tossed off lightly to make money in the interstices of honest work. In his stories, long and short, he strove for effect, no doubt, but he was bent also on achieving sincerity and veracity. In his plays he made little effort for either sincerity or veracity, so far at least as his plot was concerned; and he thought he could lift these concoctions to the level of literature by the polish of his dialog, and by qualities applied on the outside instead of being developed from the inside. He seems to have believed that in the drama, at least, he could attain beauty by constructing his ornament instead of by ornamenting his construction, ignoring or ignorant of the fact that in the drama, the construction, if only it be solid enough, and four square to all the winds that blow, needs no ornament and is most impressive in its stark simplicity.

In his boyhood Goethe had also played with a toy theater, and it was a puppet-show piece which first called his attention to the mighty theme of his supreme poem; but the great German poet, captivated as he may have been by his youthful experience, was able in his manhood to free himself from its shackles. He came in time to have a profound insight into the principles of dramatic art, and of the dramaturgic craft. In his old age he talked about the theater freely and frequently to Eckermann; and there are few of his utterances which do not furnish food for reflection. Here is one of them:

Writing for the stage is something peculiar; and he who does not understand it had better leave it alone. Every one thinks that an interesting fact will appear interesting on the boards—nothing of the kind! Things may be very pretty to read, and very pretty to think about; but as soon as they are put upon the stage the effect is quite different; and that which has charmed us in the closet will probably fall flat on the boards.... Writing for the stage is a trade that one must understand, and requires a talent that one must possess. Both are uncommon, and where they are not combined, we have scarcely any good result.