How, then, did it happen that Balzac, Byron, Browning and Reade failed as dramatists, despite the eager desire of three of them, at least, to win success on the boards? It is undeniable that the three—one may put aside Byron—are intensely "dramatic" writers. Les Chouans reads almost as if it were a play converted into a novel, and has been adapted successfully, and like Le Père Goriot, which someone has called the French King Lear, has been used for the stage after the time when the long-desired marriage with Madame Hanska was ended by the premature death of the author of the fine phrase, "Vierges de corps nous étions hardis en paroles." Indeed, in half the works composing the prodigious Comédie Humaine are passages of immense dramatic force. Clearly, too, the author of "The Cloister and the Hearth" could paint character and was a splendid storyteller into the bargain. It would be impossible to say this without certain qualifications in the case of Browning; yet who that has been fascinated by that colossal work "The Ring and the Book" can deny it? Why, then, should Balzac and Browning have failed where Shakespeare and Sardou have succeeded?
The question brings forward another, and it is this: whether Shakespeare, if he were writing nowadays, would be a successful dramatist. At first sight it seems an absurd question, but it is permissible because one must recognize the fact that what perhaps prevented Balzac and Browning from being successful has not proved an impediment to the triumph of Shakespeare. The dramas of our national dramatist are the most heavily thought-burdened plays that have had popular success in modern times, and in the works of Browning there are so many ideas that it is often difficult to see the idea. To the modern writer of anything like Shakespeare's calibre, or Browning's, the simple joy in the story is no longer possible, and probably Shakespeare, if born forty years ago, and if content to work for such a medium as the stage, would, like an Ibsen, have chosen themes that do not appeal to our people. But was Shakespeare, "Shakespeare"?
It is not merely a want of the knack of playwriting—a vulgar, useful term—that kept Browning or Tennyson from success on the stage. No one ever had such a prodigious "knack" as Ibsen, and Rosmersholm is the most amazing tour de force of craftmanship. Yet despite his influence upon modern drama, Ibsen—a great poet, a great thinker, a great observer, and the greatest of craftsmen—has been unpopular as a dramatist in England.
One begins to see that an element in the answer to be given to the question is the fact that some of the great writers who have failed upon the stage owe their want of success in part to their over-estimation of the power of the acting play to convey ideas, and consequently to their putting so much more into their work than the average audience can get out that the public shirks the task of grappling with them at all. Shakespeare, under peculiar circumstances, was grappled with before our time, and has been predigested for us; but the others have had no such fortune. Moreover, much of the national dramatist's finest work is cut when his works are produced and some are rarely given, others never.
Several able writers, such as Robert Buchanan, have rushed to the opposite extreme and obtained ephemeral success by empty plays injurious to their reputation as men of letters, and a few of us think that one of our most successful and brilliant novelist-playwrights has a dangerous tendency in this direction. It is, of course, given to few to judge so perfectly as Pinero what is the extreme quantity of thought that can be put into a play without frightening the public, and he has had more than one splendid failure from taking too hopeful a view of the intelligence of playgoers.
[The Ending of the Play ]
A large number of readers begin a novel at the wrong end, particularly those of the sex many members of which are threatened with moustaches, according to the latest hysterical shriek of certain medicine-men, because of their weakness for putting cigarettes between their dainty lips. They look at the last chapter before reading the first; the practice is indefensible, criminal. Authors take an immense amount of trouble in working up logically to a conclusion and preparing the minds of their readers for it, and most of this trouble goes by the board if you begin by reading the last chapter. In the case of the humbler classes of fiction the injury to the writer is even greater: he has endeavoured by manoeuvres, limited in character by certain laws of the game, to spring a surprise upon the reader by puzzling her as to the ending of the story and she, instead of "playing the game" and trying to unravel it, "cuts the Gordian knot," the most hackneyed cliché in the répertoire of the journalist. This grossly unfair treatment of novelists ought to be punished, or at least be subject to procedure in the Chancery Division for breach of confidence.
The really honest reader shrinks from such an offence as if it were eavesdropping. It is well known that many novels actually begin with the last chapter. The Irishism represents the fact that the author starts by exhibiting people in a dramatic position and then proceeds to show how they came to be there.
There is always something of this method in a play. One cannot conveniently begin, like Sterne, with the birth of the hero—and even a little before—and work steadily forward. "Tristram Shandy," it may be, is a poor example, since "steadily" is perhaps the worst adjective in the dictionary to describe the progress of that novel. Of course there are plays in which a prologue is employed, but the device is clumsy; and in these instances, when the real drama is reached, an explanation of what has happened during the gap between the prologue and the first act is necessary.
In other words, part of the author's work and a great part of his difficulty lie in telling the audience a number of antecedent facts. The task has grown very difficult since soliloquies have gone out of vogue and audiences become so sophisticated as to smile at the old-fashioned conversations in which information is given to the house by causing the hero to tell to his friend—"his friend Charles"—a number of matters with which, to the knowledge of everybody, Charles is already well acquainted.