Playwrights on playmaking

by Brander Matthews

It remains to be recorded only that Henry James included among his ‘Essays in London and Elsewhere’ two papers on Ibsen’s plays, originally written in 1891 and 1893: and that in his ‘Notes on Novelists’ he preserved a paper on Alexandre Dumas fils, written in 1895. Quite probably there may be other articles on theatrical themes contributed to one or another of the newspapers for which he served now and again as correspondent from Paris or from London. And not to be omitted from this record is the long story called the ‘Tragic Muse,’ one of the most veracious of theatrical novels; it was published in 1890.

From one or another of his dramatic criticisms I could borrow not a few pregnant passages, revelations of his penetrating insight into the inexorable conditions under which the playwright must do his work. Here is an early remark, culled from a letter on the Parisian stage, written in 1872:

An acted play is a novel, intensified; it realizes what the novel suggests, and by paying a liberal tribute to the senses, anticipates your possible complaint that your entertainment is of the meager sort styled intellectual.

This does not pierce to the marrow of the matter; it does not detail all the difference between the acted play and the novel; but it has its significance, none the less. In the same letter Henry James ventures to speak of the “colossal flimsiness” of the ‘Dame aux Camélias.’ Now Dumas’s pathetic play may be more or less false, but it is not flimsy; it must have had a solidity of its own, and even a certain sincerity of a kind, since it kept the stage for three score years and ten.

Here, however, is a long paragraph from the paper on Tennyson’s ‘Queen Mary’ (written in 1875), which discloses an indisputable insight into the difficulties of the dramatist’s art:

The fine thing in a real drama, generally speaking, is that, more than any other work of literary art, it needs a masterly structure. It needs to be shaped and fashioned and laid together, and this process makes a demand upon an artist’s rarest gifts. He must combine and arrange, interpolate and eliminate, play the joiner with the most attentive skill; and yet at the end effectually bury his tools and his sawdust, and invest his elaborate skeleton with the smoothest and most polished integument. The five-act drama—serious or humorous, poetic or prosaic—is like a box of fixt dimensions and inelastic material, into which a mass of precious things are to be packed away. The precious things in question seem out of all proportion to the compass of the receptacle; but the artist has an assurance that with patience and skill a place may be made for each, and that nothing need be clipped or crumpled, squeezed or damaged. The false dramatist either knocks out the sides of his box or plays the deuce with the contents; the real one gets down on his knees, disposes of his goods tentatively, this, that, and the other way, loses his temper but keeps his ideal, and at last rises in triumph, having packed his coffer in the one way that is mathematically right. It closes perfectly, and the lock turns with a click; between one object and another you cannot insert the point of a penknife.

It will be enough to risk only one more quotation,—this time from the paper evoked by the first performance of Ibsen’s ‘Hedda Gabler’ in London in 1891:

The stage is to the prose drama (and Ibsen’s later manner is the very prose of prose) what the tune is to the song or the concrete case to the general law. It immediately becomes apparent that he needs the test to show his strength and the frame to show his picture. An extraordinary process of vivification takes place; the conditions seem essentially enlarged. Those of the stage in general strike us for the most part as small enough, so that the game played in them is often not more inspiring than a successful sack-race. But Ibsen reminds us that if they did not in themselves confer life, they can at least receive it when the infusion is artfully administered. Yet how much of it they were doomed to receive from ‘Hedda Gabler’ was not to be divined till we had seen ‘Hedda Gabler’ in the frame. The play, on perusal, left us comparatively muddled and mystified, fascinated but—in one’s intellectual sympathy—snubbed. Acted, it leads that sympathy over the straightest of roads with all the exhilaration of a superior pace.