I
PLAYWRIGHTS ON PLAYMAKING
I
We have no right to expect that a creator of art should be also a critic of art. He is a creator because he can create, because he can paint a picture, model a statue, tell a story in action on the stage or delineate character in narrative; and he needs only enough of the critical faculty to enable him to achieve the obligatory self-criticism, without which he may go astray. If he is a born story-teller, for instance, he may tell stories by native gift, almost without taking thought as to how he does it; and even if he does it very well, he may be an artist in spite of himself, so to speak. He may achieve his effects without analyzing his processes, perhaps without understanding them or even perceiving them. His methods are intuitive rather than rational; they are personal to him; and he cannot impart them to others.
He may in fact misconceive his own effort and see himself in a false light, sincerely believing that he is doing his work in one way when he is really doing it in another. Zola, for one, was entirely at fault in the opinion he held about his own novels; he was so uncritical that he supposed himself to be a Realist, avid of facts, whereas he was unmistakably a Romanticist, planning epic edifices symmetrical and fantastic and forcing the facts he diligently sought for to fit as best they could into the structure of the dream-dwelling he was building. Zola was a tireless worker dowered with constructive imagination, but he was not more intelligent than the average man; and he was distinctly deficient in critical insight, as was swiftly disclosed when he ventured to discuss the principles of novel-writing and the practices of his fellow-craftsmen.
But there are artists, and not a few, who are keenly intelligent and who are able to philosophize about their calling; and whenever they are moved to talk about the technic of their several arts we shall do well to listen that we may learn. We can make our profit from what Horace and Wordsworth have to say about poetry and from what Pope and Poe have to say about versification. We can gain enlightenment from the remarks of Reynolds and Fromentin and La Farge on painting and from the remarks of Fielding and Scott, Howells and Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson about fiction. We must, of course, make our allowances in each case for the personal equation and for the predilection the artist-critic is likely to possess for the special school of art to which he himself belongs,—and also for the forgivable intolerance he sometimes reveals toward those who are students in other schools.
When the artist who is also a critic addresses the public, he has his eyes directed more often than not particularly to his fellow practitioners. Thus it is that he tends to deal more especially with technic and to talk about the processes of the craft and about the best method of achieving needed effects. Nor is this to be deplored, since we need all the information we can get about technic to enable us to appreciate the artist’s accomplishment,—and who can supply this information so satisfactorily as the artist himself? There may be other points of view than the artist’s, there is that of the public, for one, but the artist’s must ever be the most significant; and what this is we can learn only from him. He at least has practised what he is preaching; and this fact gives a validity to his discourse.
Even in this twentieth century there are critics not a few who persist in dealing with the drama as literature only, deliberately ignoring its necessary connection with the theater. This is a wilful error, which vitiates only too many estimates of the masters of tragedy and comedy, Sophocles, Shakspere, and Molière. Perhaps the best corrective is a consideration of the utterances of the dramatists who have discussed the principles of playmaking. Here we may find light, even if it is sometimes accompanied by more or less heat.
The list of the dramatists who have been tempted to talk about the drama as an art is long, far longer indeed than is suspected by those who have never sought to seek them out. It includes Lope de Vega, Ben Jonson and Dryden, Corneille and Molière, Goethe, Lessing and Grillparzer, Voltaire and Goldoni, Victor Hugo and the two Dumas, Ernest Legouvé and Jules Lemaître, Bronson Howard and William Gillette, Arthur Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones. These are all the names of professional playwrights whose dramas, comic and tragic, withstood the ordeal by fire in the theater. Yet it may be well to point out that they divide themselves into two groups. We may put into the first group those who were critics by profession and whose reputation is due rather to their critical acumen than to their playmaking skill,—Ben Jonson and Dryden, Lessing and Jules Lemaître. Then we put into a second group those who were critics only on occasion, their fame being based on their creative work,—Lope de Vega, Corneille and Molière, Grillparzer and Pinero, to name only a few. It is from these latter that we have a right to expect the most significant statements.