When a play composed by two of his friends failed to find the success on the stage which had been anticipated for it, Mr. Augustus Thomas made the shrewd remark that the two authors had probably been "too polite to each other"—that is to say, that they had not insisted upon criticising the successive suggestions made by each in turn. On the other hand, the collaborators must be broad-minded enough not to resent this necessary criticism. Like any other partnership, collaboration is a ticklish experiment, and it can be profitable only when the two partners are willing to give and take. They need more than usual self-control; they must be able, each of them, to preserve his own self-respect while full of regard for the self-respect of the other. It is not surprising that the long collaborations of Erckmann-Chatrain and of Meilhac and Halévy finally came to a sudden end because of an abrupt quarrel. That disagreement is likely to arise out of the discussions inherent in any profitable literary partnership is evidenced by a retort credited to the younger Dumas, who was a rather authoritative partner, and who did not always succeed in keeping on good terms with those whose plays he had bettered. A friend once suggested a theme for a play, and invited the collaboration of Dumas. "But why should I wish to quarrel with you?" was answer of the witty dramatist.
Perhaps the most remarkable instance of self-control in all the long history of collaboration is that of Théodore Barrière, the author of the once-famous play called the 'Marble Heart,' one of the latest of whose pieces (adapted by Augustin Daly as 'Alixe') was composed in collaboration with his mother-in-law!
Sometimes the breach between the two partners is postponed until after the play is completed and produced. Charles Reade and Tom Taylor joined forces in the composition of the long-popular comedy called 'Masks and Faces,' and after it had established itself upon the stage, Charles Reade took its plot and its characters and utilized them in his charming novel, 'Peg Woffington,' and as he had taken the liberty of thus making a private profit out of the property of the partnership, it is not to be wondered at that Tom Taylor was distinctly displeased. But Charles Reade, altho he collaborated with Tom Taylor, with Paul Merritt, and with Dion Boucicault, was more or less deficient in the courtesy and consideration that a man ought to possess to fit him for partnership. When he allied himself with Dion Boucicault in the writing of the novel of 'Foul Play,' the collaborators quarreled so violently that they felt themselves justified in preparing rival dramatizations of the story they had written in conjunction, so that London playgoers had the opportunity of choosing between two different theatrical adaptations of the same tale.
When the two partners are courteous to each other but not too yielding, when they are sympathetic but not too much alike in their characteristics and qualifications, when each of them supplements the weaker points of the other, then collaboration ought to result in plays of more variety of invention, and of more ingenuity of construction than is likely to be possessed by the average play due to a single mind. This much must be admitted; and it is the final justification for collaboration. But altho these partnerships in play-making spread abroad a knowledge of the principles of the art, and altho they raise the probable value of the average play, it must be admitted also, and with equal frankness, that the possibilities of collaboration are sharply limited.
No single one of the mightiest masterpieces of dramatic literature, ancient and modern, is to be credited to collaboration; and the only possible exception to this sweeping statement would be urged by the critics who hold that the 'Gendre de M. Poirier' of Augier and Sandeau is the masterpiece of French comedy in the nineteenth century. Those who have climbed to the loftiest height of dramatic art have always done so alone, sustained by enthusiasm and supported by imagination. In spite of the greater "richness of purview, consideration, and invention" that collaboration undoubtedly bestows, the man of surpassing genius, the great master of the drama, Sophocles or Shakspere or Molière, works best alone. It is true that he may now and again take to himself an ally, as Shakspere condescended to the assistance of Fletcher in 'Henry VIII,' and as Molière invoked the aid of Corneille in 'Psyché,' but it is true also that these plays, written in collaboration by Shakspere and by Molière, are not the plays which establish and confirm their fame. Indeed, these plays are not even among the more important pieces of Shakspere and Molière, and the reputation of the authors would be no lower if these plays had never come into existence.
It is by the comedies and tragedies which Shakspere wrote alone that the Elizabethan stage is made glorious, and not by the dramatic romances that go under the joint names of Beaumont and Fletcher. It is by the lyrical melodramas of which Victor Hugo was sole author that we recall the Romanticist revolt in the French theater in 1830, and immediately thereafter, and not by the perfervidly passionate pieces that the elder Dumas put together in partnership with a group of now-forgotten auxiliaries. It is by the comedies that Augier and the younger Dumas wrote, each of them expressing himself in his own fashion, that the drama of France is illumined a score or more years later, and not by the comedies in the composition of which Scribe had the aid of an army of allies.
In any period of abundant fertility we can observe growing together at the same time from the soil, a fairly large number of trees rising above the underbrush, and we can also perceive here and there a tree of conspicuous eminence towering above these clumps of average height. In the luxuriant forest of the drama many of the trees of average height may be ticketed with two names, but the monarchs of the wood, those whose tops lift themselves high above their neighbors—these will be found to bear only single signature.
(1914.)