There are other beliefs of the successful playwrights, perhaps not so unanimously expressed, yet widely held. One of them is that the playwright, like the poet, is born and not made. The younger Dumas declared that a man “may become a painter, a sculptor, even a musician, by study—but not a playwright.... It is a freak of nature, which has constructed the vision as to enable him to see things in a certain way.” He added that this very rare faculty is revealed in the first attempt at playwriting, however unambitious this juvenile effort may be. Goethe had said almost the same thing, asserting that “writing for the stage is something peculiar.... It is a craft which one must understand and it requires a talent which one must possess.” In other words, the playwright, like the poet again, must be born, and he must be made also, after he is born, since he needs to master the technic of the trade.
On another occasion Goethe spoke of the prolixity of Schiller’s earlier pieces, a fault which Schiller was never quite able to overcome. Goethe commented that it “is more difficult than is imagined to control a subject properly, to keep it from overpowering one, and to concentrate one’s attention on that alone which is absolutely essential.” The younger Dumas, who always knew what he was driving at, declared that the first qualification of the accomplished dramatist was logic, which “must be implacable from beginning to end.... The playwright must unfailingly place before the spectator that part of the being or thing for or against which he wishes to draw a conclusion.”
Sir Arthur Pinero agrees with Dumas in holding that
dramatic, like poetic, talent is born, not made; if it is to achieve success it must be developed into theatrical talent by hard study and generally by long practice. For theatrical talent consists in the power of making your characters not only tell a story by means of dialog but tell it in such skilfully devised form and order as shall, within the limits of an ordinary theatrical representation, give rise to the greatest amount of that peculiar kind of emotional effect the production of which is the one great function of the theater.
This theatrical talent has to be exercised within the limits of the theater as this exists at the time when the dramatist lives. The principles of playmaking are eternal, no doubt, but the practices of playmaking are modified by the constantly changing conditions of the stage.
Pinero likens the art of the drama to the art of war, the permanent principles of playmaking to strategy, and its variable principles to tactics. Strategy is to-day what it was yesterday; and it was succinctly defined during our Civil War by General Forrest, when he said it consisted in “getting there first with the most men”—that is to say, in gaining an advantageous position for yourself and putting the enemy in a disadvantageous position. It is therefore unchanging in its essential elements, Foch profiting by the example of Napoleon and Cæsar, Hannibal and Alexander. But tactics are in incessant modification, as the soldier has new implements put in his hands by the inventions of the ages, gunpowder unhorsing the man in armor and tanks taking the place of elephants. While the strategy of the drama is constant, its tactics “are always changing,” so Pinero has put it; and
every dramatist whose ambition it is to produce live plays is absolutely bound to study carefully, and I may add respectfully—at any rate not contemptuously—the conditions that hold good for his own age and generation.
The strategy of Shakspere is that of Sophocles, of Molière and of Ibsen, even if the later men did not recognize their own obedience to the laws which had governed the earlier. The tactics of Sophocles were diametrically opposed to those of Shakspere, because the Greek dramatist built his massive plays to conform to the conditions of the immense open air theater of Athens with its extraordinarily intelligent spectators, whereas the English dramatist had to adjust his pieces, comic and tragic, to the bare platform of the half-timbered London playhouse, with its gallants seated on the stage and its rude and turbulent groundlings standing in the unroofed yard. So the tactics of Molière and Ibsen are strangely unlike, the French author fitting his comedies to a long, narrow theater, dimly lighted by candles, with the courtiers accommodated on benches just behind the curtain and with the well-to-do burghers of Paris making up the bulk of the audience, while the stern Scandinavian found his profit in the modern picture-frame stage, with its realistic sets and with its spectators comfortably seated in front of the curtain. Each of the four followed the methods of his own time and place; and each in turn made the best of the theatrical conditions which confronted him. But however much they may differ in practice, in tactics they worked in accord with the same principles, and employed the same strategy.
Bronson Howard admitted that Aeschylus “taught the future world the art of writing a play” but he “did not create the laws of dramatic construction. Those laws exist in the passions and sympathies of the human race.” A little later in the same address, Bronson Howard declared that the laws of dramatic construction “bear about the same relation to human character and human sympathies as the laws of nature bear to the material universe.” In other words, the drama is what it is, what it always has been, what it always will be, because human nature is what it is and was and will be. And this brings us back to the inexorable fact that the eternally dominating element in the theater is the audience. “The dramatist,” so Bronson Howard reminded us, “must remember that his work cannot, like that of the novelist or the poet, pick out the hearts, here and there, that happen to be in sympathy with its subject. He appeals to a thousand hearts at the same moment; he has no choice in the matter; he must do this.” That is to say, the drama is immitigably “a function of the crowd,” as Mr. Walkley has aptly called it.