Playwrights on playmaking

by Brander Matthews

Since Scott’s day his pattern has approved itself to three generations of novelists; and it is not yet outworn. In France Victor Hugo and Alexander Dumas accepted it, each of them altering it at will, feeling free to adjust it to their own differing necessities. In Italy it was employed by Manzoni, in Poland by Sinckiewitz; and in Germany by a horde of uninspired story-tellers. In the United States it was at once borrowed by Cooper for the ‘Spy,’ the first American historical novel. Then Cooper, having proved its value, took the pattern which Scott had created for the telling of a story the action of which took place on land, and in the ‘Pilot’ made it serve for a story the action of which took place mainly on the sea,—perhaps a more striking originality than his contemporaneous employment of it for a series of tales the action of which took place in the forest.

It is one of the most fortunate coincidences in the history of literature that Scott crossed the border and made a foray into English history at the very moment when Cooper was ready to write fiction about his own country; and it was almost equally unfortunate that Charles Brockden Brown was born too early to be able to avail himself of the pattern Scott and Cooper were to handle triumphantly. Brown died a score of years before the publication of ‘Ivanhoe.’ He left half-a-dozen novels of varying value, known only to devoted students of American fiction. He had great gifts; he had invention and imagination; he was a keen observer of human nature; he had a rich faculty of description. (In one of his books there is a portrayal of an epidemic of yellow fever in Philadelphia which almost challenges comparison with De Foe’s ‘Journal of the Plague Year’.) But “the state of the art” of fiction supplied Brown with no model appropriate to his endowment; and therefore he had to do the best he could with the unworthy pattern of the Gothic Romance of Horace Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe and of their belated followers, “Monk” Lewis and Godwin. If Brown had been a contemporary of Cooper, then the author of the ‘Last of the Mohicans’ might have had a worthy rival in his own country.

The state of the art in his own time was a detriment to a far greater story-teller than Brown or Cooper or Scott, to one of the greatest of all story-tellers, to Cervantes. ‘Don Quixote’ abides as the imperishable monument to his genius, to his wisdom, to his insight, to his humor, to his all-embracing sympathy. None the less is it sprawling in its construction and careless in its composition. There were only two models available for Cervantes when he wrote this masterpiece of fiction, the Romance of Chivalry and its antithesis, the Romance of Roguery—the picaresque tale. The Romance of Chivalry was generally chaotic and involute, with a plot at once complicated and repetitious. The Romance of Roguery, born of an inevitable reaction against the highflown and toplofty unreality of the interminable narratives of knight-errantry, was quite as straggling in its episodes; and it was also addicted to cruel and brutal practical joking. For Cervantes these were unworthy patterns; and he had no other. So it is that the method of ‘Don Quixote’ is sometimes unsatisfactory, even when the manner is always beyond all cavil. Moreover, it is evident that Cervantes builded better than he knew; he seems not to have suspected the transcendent quality of his own work; and therefore he did not take his task as seriously as he might. As it has been well said, Cervantes came too early to profit by Cervantes.

How much luckier are the novelists and short-story writers of to-day! The state of the art has advanced to a point unforeseen even a century ago. Whatever theme a writer of fiction may want to treat now, he is never at a loss for a pattern, which will preserve him from the misadventure which befell Cervantes. In its methods, if in nothing else, fiction is a finer art than it was once upon a time. Consider Rudyard Kipling, for example, who is almost infinitely various, and who is always inexpugnably original. Whatever his subject might be, there was always an appropriate pattern at his service; he had only to pick and choose that which best suited his immediate need. Consider Stevenson, again, and how he was able to play the sedulous ape at one time to Scott and Dumas, and at another to Hawthorne and Poe.

III

It is perhaps in the field of playmaking that the utility of the pattern is most obvious. Sophocles modeled himself on Aeschylus, and then modified the formula in his own favor. Calderon took over the pattern that Lope de Vega had developed and the younger playwright departed from it only infrequently. Racine modeled himself upon Corneille; and then transformed the formula he borrowed in obedience to his own genius. Victor Hugo took the theatrically effective (but psychologically empty) pattern of contemporary Parisian melodrama and draped its bare bones with his glittering lyrism. Maeterlinck took the traditional formula of the fairy-play, the féerie, and endowed it with the poetic feeling which delights us in the ‘Blue Bird.’ Oscar Wilde took the framework of Scribe and Sardou; and he was thus enabled adroitly to complicate the situations of ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan.’

Then there is Ibsen, whose skilful construction has demanded the praise of all students of the art and mystery of playmaking. He started where Scribe and Sardou left off. The earliest of his social dramas, the ‘League of Youth,’ is in accord with the pattern of Augier and the younger Dumas. The next, the ‘Doll’s House,’ might have been composed by Sardou—up to the moment in the final act when husband and wife sit down on opposite sides of the table to talk out their future relation. Thereafter Ibsen evolved from this French pattern a pattern of his own which was exactly suited to his later social dramas and which has in its turn been helpful to the more serious dramatists of to-day.

As Shakspere had been content to take the verse-forms of his predecessors and contemporaries, so he never hesitated to employ their playmaking formulas. Kyd had developed the type of play which we call the tragedy-of-blood; and Shakspere borrowed it for his ‘Titus Andronicus’ (if this is his, which is more than doubtful) and even for his ‘Hamlet,’ wherein it is purged of most of its violence. Marlowe lifted into literature the unliterary and loosely knit chronicle-play; and Shakspere enlarged this formula in ‘Richard III’ and ‘Richard II.’ It was in his youth that Shakspere trod in the trail of Kyd and Marlowe; and in his maturity he followed in the footsteps of his younger friends, Beaumont and Fletcher, taking the pattern of their dramatic-romance for his ‘Winter’s Tale’ and ‘Cymbeline.’ Due perhaps to the fact that the state of the art did not provide him with a pattern for what has been called high-comedy, Shakspere did not attempt any searching study of Elizabethan society,—altho, of course, this may have been because Elizabethan society was lacking in the delicate refinements of fashion which are the fit background of high-comedy.

Whatever the explanation may be, it was left for Molière, inspired by the external elegancies of the court of Louis XIV, to create the pattern of high-comedy in ‘Tartuffe’ and the ‘Misanthrope’ and the ‘Femmes Savantes,’—the pattern which was to serve Congreve for the ‘Way of the World,’ Sheridan for the ‘School for Scandal,’ Augier and Sandeau for the ‘Gendre de Monsieur Poirier.’ And Molière really created the formula, with little or no help from any earlier dramatists, either Greek or Latin. Neither in Athens nor in Rome was there the atmosphere of breeding which might have stimulated Menander or Terence to the composition of comedies of this distinction. It is the more remarkable that Molière should have accomplished this feat, since he sought no originality of form in his earlier efforts, contenting himself with the loose and liberal framework of the Italian improvized plays, the Comedy-of-Masks.

One of the many reasons for the sterility of the English drama in the middle of the nineteenth century is that the dramatists of our language seem to have believed it their duty to abide by the patterns which had been acceptable to the Jacobean and Restoration audiences and which were not appropriate to the theater of the nineteenth century, widely different in its size and in its scenic appliances. The English poets apparently despised the stage of their own time; and they made no effort to master its methods. As a result they wrote dramatic poems and not poetic dramas. They did not follow the example of Victor Hugo and lift into literature a type of play which was unliterary. Stevenson, in his unfortunate adventures into playmaking, made the unpardonable mistake of trying to varnish with style a dramatic formula which had long ceased to be popular.