It is just this greater concreteness and consequent greater vividness of the staged play which makes us object to seeing and hearing in the theatre that of which we have read with comparative calmness in the newspaper, the magazine, or the novel. Daily we read in the newspapers with unquickened pulse of horror after horror. Merely to see a fatal runaway or automobile accident sends us home sickened or unnerved. We read to the end, though horrified, the Red Laugh of Andreiev. Reproduce accurately on the stage the terrors of the book and some persons in the audience would probably go as mad as did people in the story. This difference applies in our attitude toward moral questions as treated in books or on the stage. “Let us instance the Matron of Ephesus. This acrid fable is well known; it is unquestionably the bitterest satire that was ever made on female frivolity. It has been recounted a thousand times after Petronius, and since it pleased even in the worst copy, it was thought that the subject must be an equally happy one for the stage.... The character of the matron in the story provokes a not unpleasant sarcastic smile at the audacity of wedded love; in the drama this becomes repulsive, horrible. In the drama, the soldier’s persuasions do not seem nearly so subtle, importunate, triumphant, as in the story. In the story we picture to ourselves a sensitive little woman who is really in earnest in her grief, but succumbs to temptation and to her temperament, her weakness seems the weakness of her sex, we therefore conceive no especial hatred towards her, we deem that what she does nearly every woman would have done. Even her suggestion to save her living lover by means of her dead husband we think we can forgive her because of its ingenuity and presence of mind; or rather its very ingenuity leads us to imagine that this suggestion may have been appended by the malicious narrator who desired to end his tale with some right poisonous sting. Now in the drama we cannot harbour this suggestion; what we hear has happened in the story, we see really occur; what we would doubt of in the story, in the drama the evidence of our own eyes settles incontrovertibly. The mere possibility of such an action diverted us; its reality shows it in all its atrocity; the suggestion amused our fancy, the execution revolts our feelings, we turn our backs to the stage and say with the Lykas of Petronius, without being in Lykas’s peculiar position: ‘Had the emperor been just, he would have restored the body of the father to its tomb and crucified the woman.’ And she seems to us the more to deserve this punishment, the less art the poet has expended on her seduction, for we do not then condemn in her weak woman in general, but an especially volatile, worthless female in particular.”[2]
As Lessing points out, in the printed page we can stand a free treatment of social question after social question which on the stage we should find revolting. Imagine the horror and outcry if we were to put upon the stage a dramatized newspaper or popular magazine. Just in this intense vividness, this great reality of effect, lies a large part of the power of the stage. On the other hand, this very vividness may create difficulties. For instance, the novelist can say, “So, in a silence, almost unbroken, the long hours passed.” But we watching, on the stage, the scene described in the novel, know perfectly that only a few minutes have elapsed. From this difficulty have arisen, to create a sense of time, the Elizabethan use of the Chorus, our entr’acte pauses, interpolated scenes which draw off our attention from the main story, and many other devices. But even with all the devices of the past, it is well-nigh impossible in a one-act play or in an act of one setting to create the feeling that much time has passed. Many an attempt has been made to dramatize in one act Stevenson’s delightful story, The Sire de Maletroit’s Door, but all have come to grief because the greater vividness of the stage makes the necessary lapse of considerable time too apparent. It is not difficult for the story-teller to make us believe that, between a time late one evening and early the next morning, Blanche de Maletroit lost completely her liking for one man and became more than ready to marry Denis de Beaulieu, who entered the house for the first time on this same evening. On the stage, motivation and dialogue must be such as to make so swift a change entirely convincing even though it occur merely in the time of the acting. The motivation that was easy for the novelist as he explained how profoundly Blanche was moved by winning words or persuasive action of Denis, becomes almost impossible unless the words and action when seen and heard are for us equally winning and persuasive. The time difficulty in this story has led to all sorts of amusing expedients to account for Blanche’s complete change of feeling. One young author went so far as to make the first lover of Blanche flirt so desperately with a maid-servant off stage that the report of his conduct by a jealous man-servant was the last straw to bring about the change in Blanche’s feelings. Though aiming at a real difficulty, this device missed because it so vulgarized the original. When all is said and done, this time difficulty caused by the greater vividness of stage presentation remains the chief obstacle in the way of the dramatist who would write of a sequence of historical events or of evolution or devolution in character. Again we foresee probable differences in technique, this time caused by the theatre, the stage, and the intense vividness of the latter.
The novel is, so to speak, the work of an individual; a play is a cooperative effort—of author, actor, producer, and even audience. Though the author writes the play, it cannot be properly judged till the producer stages it, the players act it, and the audience approves or disapproves of it. Undeniably the dialogue of a play must be very different from that of a novel because the gesture, facial expression, intonation, and general movement of the actor may in large part replace description, narration, and even parts of the dialogue of a novel. We have good dialogue for a novel when Cleopatra says, “I’ll seem the thing I am not; Antony will be himself.” The fact and the characterization are what count here. In the same scene, Antony, absorbed in adoration of Cleopatra, cries, when interrupted by a messenger from Rome, “Grates me; the sum.” Here we need the action of the speaker, his intonation, and his facial expression, if the speech is to have its full value. In its context, however, it is as dramatic dialogue perfect. In a story or novel, mere clearness would demand more because the author could not be sure that the reader would hit the right intonation or feel the gesture which must accompany the words. It is in large part just because dramatic dialogue is a kind of shorthand written by the dramatist for the actor to fill out that most persons find plays more difficult reading than novels. Few untrained imaginations respond quickly enough to feel the full significance of the printed page of the play. On the other hand, any one accustomed to read plays often finds novels irritating because they tell so much more than is necessary for him who responds quickly to emotionalized speech properly recorded.
Just as dialogue for the stage is incomplete without the actor, so, too, the stage direction needs filling out. Made as concise as possible by the dramatist, it is meant to be packed with meaning, not only for the actor, but for the producer. The latter is trusted to fill out, in as full detail as his means or his desires permit, the hints of stage directions as to setting and atmosphere. On the producer depends wholly the scenery, lighting, and properties used. All of this the novelist supplies in full detail for himself. An intelligent producer who reads the play with comprehension but follows only the letter of the stage directions gives a production no more than adequate at best. An uncomprehending and self-willed producer may easily so confuse the values of a well-written play as to ruin its chances. A thoroughly sympathetic and finely imaginative producer may, like an equally endowed actor, reveal genuine values in the play unsuspected even by the dramatist himself. Surely writing stage directions will differ from the narration and description of a novel.
The novelist, as has been pointed out, deals with the individual reader, or through one reader with a small group. What has just been said makes obvious that the dramatist never works directly, but through intermediaries, the actors and the producer. More than that, he seeks to stir the individual, not for his own sake as does the novelist, but because he is a unit in the large group filling the theatre. The novelist—to make a rough generalization—works through the individual, the dramatist through the group. This is not the place to discuss in detail the relation of a dramatist to his audience, but it is undeniable that the psychology of the crowd in a theatre is not exactly the same thing as the sum total of the emotional responses of each individual in it to some given dramatic incident. The psychology of the individual and the psychology of the crowd are not one and the same. The reputation of the novelist rests very largely on the verdict of his individual readers. The dramatist must move, not a considerable number of individuals, but at least the great majority of his audience. He must move his audience, too, not by emotions individual to a considerable number, but by emotions they naturally share in common or by his art can be made to share. The dramatist who understands only the psychology of the individual or the small group may write a play well characterized, but he cannot write a successful play till he has studied deeply the psychology of the crowd and has thus learned so to present his chosen subject as to gain from the group which makes the theatrical public the emotional response he desires.
Obviously, then, from many different points of view, the great art of the novelist and the equally great art of the dramatist are not the same. It is the unwise holding of an opposite opinion which has led many a successful novelist into disastrous play-writing. It is the attempt to reproduce exactly on the stage the most popular parts of successful novels which has made many an adaptation a failure surprising to author and adapter. The whole situation is admirably summed up in a letter of Edward Knobloch, author of Kismet. “I have found it very useful, when asked to dramatize a novel, not to read it myself, but to get some one else to read it and tell me about it. At once, all the stuffing drops away, and the vital active part, the verb of the novel comes to the fore. If the story of a novel cannot be told by some one in a hundred words or so, there is apt to be no drama in it. If I were to write a play on Hamilton, I would look up an article in an encyclopædia; then make a scenario; then read detailed biographies. Too much knowledge hampers. It is just for that reason that short stories are easier dramatized than long novels. The stories that Shakespeare chose for his plays are practically summaries. As long as they stirred his imagination, that was all he asked of them. Then he added his magic. Once the novel has been told, make the scenario. Then read the novel after. There will be very little to alter and only a certain amount of touches to add.” If, in accordance with this suggestion, an adapter would plan out in scenario the mere story of the novel he wishes to adapt for the stage, would then transfer to his scenario only so much of the novel as perfectly fits the needs of the stage; and finally with the aid of the original author, would rewrite the portions which can be used only in part, and with him compose certain parts entirely anew, we should have a much larger proportion of permanently successful adaptations.
Though it is true, then, that the novelist and the dramatist work with common elements of story, characterization and dialogue, the differing conditions under which they work affect their story-telling, their characterization, and their dialogue. The differences brought about by the greater speed, greater compactness, and greater vividness of the drama, with its impersonality, its coöperative nature, its appeal to the group rather than to the individual, create the fundamental technique which distinguishes the drama from the novel. This is the technique possessed in common by the dramatists of all periods. The art of the playwright is not, then, the art of the novelist. Throughout the centuries a very different technique has distinguished them.
“But,” it may be urged, “all that has been said of the differences between the play and the novel shows that the play cramps truthful presentation of life. Is not play-writing an art of falsification rather than truth?” A living French novelist once exclaimed, “I have written novels for many years, with some returns in reputation but little return in money. Now, when a young actor helps me, I adapt one of my novels to the stage and this bastard art immediately makes it possible for me to buy automobiles.” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, toward the end of his life, to Mr. Sidney Colvin, “No, I will not write a play for Irving nor for the devil. Can you not see that the work of falsification, which a play demands is, of all tasks, the most ungrateful? And I have done it a long while,—and nothing ever came of it.”[3] The trouble with both these critics of the drama was that they held a view of the stage which makes it necessary to shape, to twist, and to contort life when represented on it. While it is true that selection and compression underlie all dramatic art, as they underlie all of the pictorial arts, it is no longer true, as it was in the mid-nineteenth century, that dramatists believe that we should shape life to fit hampering conditions of the stage, accepted as inevitably rigid. Today we regard the stage, as we should, as plastic. If the stage of the moment forbids in any way the just representation of life, so much the worse for that stage; it must yield. The ingenuity of author, producer, scenic artist, and stage mechanician must labor until the stage is fitted to represent life as the author sees it. For many years now, the cry of the dramatist has been, not “Let us adapt life to the stage,” but rather: “Let us adapt the stage, at any cost for it, at any cost of imaginative effort or mechanical labor, to adequate and truthful representation of life.” The art of the playwright may be the art of fantasy or of realism, but for him who understands it rightly, not mistaking it for another art, and laboring till he grasps and understands its seeming mysteries, it can never be an art of falsification. Instead, it is the art that, drawing to its aid all its sister fine arts, in splendid cooperation, moves the masses of men as does no other art. As Sir Arthur Pinero has said, “The art—the great and fascinating and most difficult art—of the modern dramatist is nothing else than to achieve that compression of life which the stage undoubtedly demands, without falsification.”[4]
[1] Robert Louis Stevenson: The Dramatist, p. 7. Sir A. Pinero. Chiswick Press, London.