On the other hand, Macaire has a thin air of jocularity which almost carries it through. It has a sententious cleric, a drunken notary, a repetitious father for the bride, a courteous host, a little mystery of the bridegroom’s nurseling days, the facetious Macaire and his companion. It has all these things, and it has an idea, strong enough for a single act, stretched to its thinnest over several acts which demand cuts more severe than the authors allow.
Macaire escaping from justice, threatened each moment, in the face of the audience, with instant arrest, carries himself with unfailing sang-froid through all his difficulties but the last. Finding a chance of sport, and possibly of profit, he impersonates an erring father. The real father appears. Macaire still, after the manner of Mr. Jingle, is imperturbable. Competition follows, until the desire for the genuine father’s money becomes too strong for Macaire. Then only does he show the blackness of his heart, which does not shrink, in such desperate situations, from murder. So Macaire, still talking, still watchful and unscrupulous, is brought to bay. Fiercely turning, in a picturesque situation, upon the stairs, he is shot by a gendarme on the stage. That is a skeleton of the play; but the play is again a literary play, so that sensationalism will not redeem it. By repetitions of catch-phrases and by trivial incidents which (e.g. the exchanging of the wine-bottles) are not unknown to the humbler kinds of drama, the story is continued until its idle joking can no longer be suddenly stirred into flaming melodrama by the noise and zest of bloody crime. It has many shrewd bids for theatrical effectiveness; but it faints for want of a fabric upon which its devices might flourish and triumphantly justify themselves.
III
The fourth play, Admiral Guinea, has fine qualities, both literary and dramatic; it is the least literary and the most dramatically effective of all the plays. It contains one figure, in Pew, which might have been, as far as one may judge in reading, a hauntingly gruesome object; and, in spite of Stevenson’s own subsequent contempt for this play and for Macaire, shows a greater, if conventional, power of simplification than does any of the other plays. Admiral Guinea, a retired and penitent slaver, refuses his daughter her lover, on the ground that the lover is ungodly. Pew, an old associate of Admiral Guinea, become blind for his sins, and still full of vengeful wickedness, arrives in the neighbourhood, catches the lover drunk, leads him back to Admiral Guinea’s cottage, and tries, with his aid, to rob his old captain of certain riches which he supposes to lie in a brass-bound chest. The young man’s reaction, their discovery by Admiral Guinea, the violent death of the unrepentant Pew follow; whereupon the lovers are suitably blessed by Admiral Guinea.
It has been said, above, that this play shows a greater power of simplification than the others; the action of it is certainly quicker, more obvious, less choked with verbal expressiveness, than is the action of the other plays; and in so far as this is so it would appear that Admiral Guinea is a considerable advance, technically, upon them.
The simplification is, to some considerable extent, effected by a strange poverty of invention, and the play is likest of all to those nondescripts which Stevenson as a little boy must have performed upon his toy stage, with paper figures pushed hither and thither in tin slides upon the boards. In spite of that, Admiral Guinea is the best of the plays because, in a higher degree than its fellows, it is truly actable. We cannot regard the confused cramped episodic Deacon Brodie as theatrically effective. Equally it is impossible, from the standpoint of public performance, to consider as satisfactory either Beau Austin or Macaire. Admiral Guinea, however, even if it belongs to a class of play which is associated in our minds with such titles as “Black-Eyed Susan,” has its action very largely comprised in the material put upon the stage; it has the obvious stage effects of darkness and the dreadful tapping stick of Pew; and it has picturesque struggles, death, wounded and reasserted honour, and, for these plays, a minimum of soliloquy. More it would be impossible to claim for Admiral Guinea without seeing it performed: again we have types roughly “mannered” to serve as persons of the play: but they are types clearly in accordance with tradition, and they preserve their interest fully until they are done with and put away with the footlight-wicks, and the tin slides, and the other paraphernalia of the toy stage—paper figures, a penny plain, and twopence coloured.
IV
For that brings us to the pathetic final explanation of the failure of the Henley-Stevenson plays. We may say that they are deficient in drama, or that they are trivial in theme, or that they have no visual sense to illumine them for our eyes; but the truth is that they fail because they are false. The theatre has in it much that is false, much to which we deliberately shut our eyes in order that we may accept the dramatist’s formal conventions. We do not, in the theatre, demand that “King Lear” shall be accompanied by a pandemonium of crackling tin and iron and artificial whoopings of wind. Those things we prefer to imagine for ourselves. But somehow the mixture of legitimate convention and the basest imitation of reality has been confused in the theatre. The exaggeration regarded as necessary by an effete system of acting and production has created other unpardonable falsenesses. The stage has been a place upon which actors disported themselves. It was of such a stage that Stevenson thought. In each case he hung a play upon a sensational figure—Brodie, Macaire, Pew, and, in a much lesser degree, upon the picturesque figure of Beau Austin. To him the drama was nothing but play. It was an excuse—nay, a demand, for unreality. He supposed that stage characters really were cardboard figures such as he had known, moralising ranters, virtuous girls, spouters of Latin tags, pious brands from the burning, handsome courageous puppet-like juvenile leads, and so on. It never occurred to him to put a real figure in a play: he never supposed that a character in a play had any end but to be put back in the box with the other playthings. That is really the cause of the shallowness of these four plays. As Stevenson admitted to Mr. Henry James, he heard people talking, and felt them acting, and that seemed to him to be fiction. But to hear people talking and to feel them acting bespeaks a very unmaterial conception of them: if a character in a play talks, however monotonously, without developing any personality save that of verbal mannerism, we are bound to feel that he has not been realised. And just as Stevenson realised none of the characters in his plays, so we are powerless to realise them. We find them, as Professor Saintsbury pathetically found Catriona herself, bloodless. Professor Saintsbury found Catriona full of sawdust, while of the characters in the plays we have used the word “paper”: very well, the impression of lifelessness is as clearly felt in each case. And such an impression, carried to its logical end, explains why, in at least one department of letters, Stevenson from the first mistook his ground. Not one of the four plays has serious value as an example of dramatic art; it is clear that not one of them so far has commended itself to the public or to the actor-managers. Yet the plays were obviously set to catch the popular taste, and their literary finish, a confession in itself of an absence of dramatic impulse, does not succeed in commending them to those who judge by more exacting standards.