I have already noted that not long after the publication of the ‘Prince and the Pauper’ Mrs. Clemens had arranged scenes from it to be acted by members of the family and by their young friends, and that Mark himself had undertaken the part of Miles Hendon. A little later a dramatization of the whole story was made by Abby Sage Richardson; and this was produced in New York in January, 1890. It achieved instant popularity, as well it might, since the story is indisputably dramatic and since it has a more direct action than any other of Mark’s novels. This version, revised by Amélie Rives, was revived in 1920 by William Faversham, who appeared as Miles Hendon. The revival met with a reception as warm as that which had greeted the original production.
In one respect this professional dramatization was inferior to Mrs. Clemens’s amateur arrangement; it was so devised that one performer should assume two characters, the little Prince and the little Pauper; and this necessitated the omission of the culminating moment in the tale when the Prince and the Pauper stand face to face. And in both the amateur and the professional performances these two lads were impersonated by girls. This may have been necessary, since it is almost impossible to find competent boy actors, while there are girl actors aplenty; but none the less was it unfortunate, since a girl is never entirely satisfactory in boy’s clothes. Very rarely can she conceal from us the fact that she is a girl, doing her best to be a boy. Curiously enough, boys can act girls’ parts and make us forget for the moment that they are not what they seem.
Five years after Mrs. Richardson had dramatized the ‘Prince and the Pauper,’ Frank Mayo made a most effective play out of ‘Pudd’nhead Wilson.’ He arranged the title-part for his own vigorous and impressive acting. He simplified Mark’s story and he amplified it; he condensed it and he heightened it; he preserved the ingenious incidents and the veracious characters; he made his profit out of the telling dialog; and he was skilful in disentangling the essentially dramatic elements of Mark’s rather rambling story. He produced it in New York in the spring of 1895. Mark was then in Europe; but when he returned he made haste to see the piece. He was discovered by the audience and called upon for a speech, in which he congratulated the player-playwright on a “delightful play.” He ended by saying, “Confidentially I have always had an idea that I was well equipt to write plays, but I have never encountered a manager who has agreed with me”—which was not strictly accurate since two different managers had accepted the ‘Gilded Age’ and ‘Ah Sin.’
V
When the ‘Gilded Age’ was brought out in New York in the fall of 1874, Mark climbed the eighty steps which led to the editorial offices of the New York World, then in the control of Manton Marble. He asked for the city editor and he was shown into the cubicle occupied by William C. Brownell. He explained that he had come to ask the editor to puff his play; whereupon Brownell inquired if it was a good play. “No,” was Mark’s drawling answer, “it isn’t a good play. It’s a bad play, a damned bad play. I couldn’t write a good play. But it has a good character. I can write character; and that character is the best I can do. If it was a good play, I shouldn’t have had to climb up here to ask you to puff it.”
Here Mark was unconsciously revealing his agreement with Aristotle, the master of all who know. Aristotle declared that in a tragedy—and the remark is even more applicable to comedy—plot is more important than character, since you can have an appealing drama without character but you cannot have it without plot. Lowell said the same thing in more detail, in one of his lectures on the ‘Old English Dramatists.’
In a play we not only expect a succession of scenes, but that each scene should lead by a logic more or less stringent, if not to the next, at any rate to something that is to follow and that all should contribute their fraction of impulse to the inevitable catastrophe. That is to say, the structure should be organic, with a necessary and harmonious connection and relation of parts, and not merely mechanical with an arbitrary or haphazard joining of one part to another.
It was this constructive skill that Mark lacked. He could create characters; he could make them reveal themselves in appropriate situations; he could carry on a story which in the library would delight all of us, but which was without the compact directness demanded by us when we are in the theater. He possessed all the qualifications of the dramatist except the one thing needful, without which the rest are unavailing; he could not organize a structure with the necessary and harmonious connection and relation of its parts. In other words he was devoid of the engineering draftsmanship which plans the steel-frame, four-square to all the winds that blow.
He may have had—indeed, he did have—dramatic genius; but he never acquired the theatrical talent which would make his genius available. He could not cut and polish and set his own diamonds.
(1921)