Having to combat that sort of folly was the thing that made it hard to write a society play. It was like dramatizing a novel and trying to create a heroine who would agree with the ten thousand notions of her cherished by the ten thousand readers of the book. Gradually, as the mirror held up to nature has become more nearly true, we have grown to understand that, in the grip of a great joy or grief, a nobleman behaves very much like a bricklayer; sometimes a trifle better, and sometimes, as in the case of the bazaar disaster in Paris, a good deal worse.
One fact not universally understood by persons who criticize the smart set on the stage is that there are many kinds of society. The group depicted in "Gallops" or "Lord and Lady Algy" is antipodally different from that shown in "The Way of the World" or "His House in Order." The self-made men of "The Pit" and "The Lion and the Mouse" are miles removed from the aristocrats of "The Idler" or "A Royal Family." The gambling males and cigarette-smoking females of "The Walls of Jericho" and "The House of Mirth" have very little in common with the conservatives of "The Hypocrites" and "The Duke of Killicrankie." All society looks alike to the assistant dramatic editor, however, and, if some girl delivers herself of a slang phrase, he is quick to realize that the playwright who created her can know nothing of good form.
The man who deals with fashionables on the stage fingers a pianoforte with a single octave. More than half of the conditions that produce sentiment and sensation in Harlem never get as far down town as Fifth Avenue. That is why most drawing room dramas are worked out with the same characters and about the same stories. Someone has said that there do not exist more than three plots for farce; certainly, not more than ten have been used in society plays. Of these, the favorite is the tale of the good-for-nothing gentleman who goes away with the wife of the studious or hard-working hero. Sometimes, he is only about to go away with this malcontent when the hero aforesaid finds her at midnight in the "rooms" of his rival. The places in which a woman is found at midnight are always "rooms"; never, by any chance, chambers, or apartments, or a flat. Occasionally, the lady, or the gentleman, or both, are quite innocent of wrong-doing. The lady may have come to save the reputation of another lady, or to prepare a rarebit, but when the husband has tracked her by the fan that years of Wilde have not taught such callers to hide with them, he gets into a towering rage and does not get out again until the end of the fourth act. Henry Arthur Jones calls tea the prop of our drama. I disagree with him. It is the careless lady with a penchant for nocturnal visits who makes the theater possible in England and America. You don't believe it? Well, some of the comedies produced in New York during one season in which this incident figured were "Popularity", "Man and His Angel", "The Chorus Lady", "The Three of Us", "The House of Mirth", "Daughters of Men", "The Straight Road", and "All-of-a-Sudden Peggy." James M. Barrie satirized the situation in "Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire", and then employed it seriously for his most effective scene.
"The lady may have come to prepare a rarebit"
Of course, one or two of the pieces in the list given do not come strictly under the head of drawing room drama, but the fact remains that a majority of the young women who go calling on the stroke of twelve dive into indiscretion under Marcel waves. The coveting of his neighbor's wife is supposed to be a specialty of the society man, and thus it is that so many comedies of manors are founded on that theme. The marriage of convenience is much used in plays of this type, too, as well as the mesalliance that afterward turns out well. Divorce is coming more and more into vogue as a subject. Then there are satires in which the follies of the smart set are held up to ridicule and execration; comedies in which the vulgarisms of a very rich man, usually an American and father of the heroine, are contrasted favorably with the culture of the aristocracy of Europe; and plays in which the wronged girl figures, wearing a wan expression and a becoming black dress. Add to these varieties that class of composition in which society is only the background for contests in politics, diplomacy, business, or detective work, and we have pretty well come to the end of our possibilities.
Whatever else happens in the society play, there always is a dance at which the juvenile lovers flirt, and the serious people discuss such tragic things as ruin and sudden death, while an orchestra "off at R." fiddles through "Love's Dream After the Ball." Next to elopements, ruin and sudden death are the chief necessities of the society play. Whenever a gentleman gets on the wrong side of the market, or has the misfortune to possess a wife whose lover is the hero of the piece, instead of the villain, he promptly kills himself. After reading a succession of dramas like "The Climbers" and "The Moth and the Flame" one is amazed to discover that in the United States only about one hundreth of one per cent. of the population cashes in its checks self-endorsed.
If you have followed so far, patient peruser, you probably will join me in the conclusion that the society play is nothing on earth but melodrama in a frock coat. The effectiveness of the play depends upon the completeness of the disguise; with the dramatic tailor rests the question whether you sniff or sniffle. Undraped melodrama treating of fashionable folk is the funniest entertainment in the world, excepting "Charley's Aunt." Fine evenings, when my brain cells were closed for repairs and I was weary of musical comedy, I used to go over to Eighth Avenue and see "Why Women Sin" and "A Working Girl's Wrongs." I found that our class is responsible alike for the sins and the wrongs; that gentility is a thing to move virtuous burglars, comic green grocers and other honest men and women to a passion of righteous indignation. "I was ne'er so thrummed since I was gentleman", wrote Thomas Dekker in an ancient comedy of unprintable title, and it is my opinion that he penned the line after seeing his kind through the astigmatic glasses of Theodore Kremer. Small wonder, indeed! On Eighth Avenue, in the old days, everyone sufficiently prosperous to be opposed to an income tax wore a silk hat and lived in a "mansion." Apparently "mansions" were not places in which privacy was to be had, since the Eighth Avenue millionaire invariably came out into the street when he wanted to exhibit "the papers." Eighth Avenue millionaires always were white-haired, drank cold tea and soda, plotted "dirty work", and had closets so full of skeletons that any physician might have mistaken them for anatomical museums. "Little children", I used to say to the progeny of a friend of mine, "when you grow up be careful not to be an Eighth Avenue millionaire."