When it is asserted, then, that the British drama has been dead for nearly two hundred years, what is really meant is that its literary vitality went out of it some two centuries ago, and has not yet come back. It is hard to say what causes the breath of life suddenly to enter some particular literary form, inspire it fully for a few years, and then desert it for another; leaving it all flaccid and inanimate. Literary forms have their periods. No one now sits down to compose an epic poem or a minstrel ballad or a five-act blank verse tragedy without an uneasy sense of anachronism. The dramatic form had run along in England for generations, from the mediaeval miracles down to the rude chronicle histories, Senecan tragedies, and clownish interludes of the sixteenth century. Suddenly, in the last years of that century, the spark of genius touched and kindled it into the great drama of Elizabeth. About the middle of the eighteenth century life abandoned it again, and took possession of the novel. Fielding is the point of contact between the dying drama and new-born fiction. The whole process of the change may be followed in him. “Tom Jones” and “Amelia” still rank as masterpieces, but who reads “The Modern Husband,” or “Miss Lucy in Town,” or “Love in Several Masques,” or any other of Fielding’s plays? How many even know that he wrote any plays? Mr. Shaw attributes Fielding’s change of base to the government censorship. He writes:
In 1737 Henry Fielding, the greatest practising dramatist, with the single exception of Shakspere, produced by England between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century, devoted his genius to the task of exposing and destroying parliamentary corruption. . . . Walpole . . . promptly gagged the stage by a censorship which is in full force at the present moment [1898]. Fielding, driven out of the trade of Molière and Aristophanes, took to that of Cervantes; and since then, the English novel has been one of the glories of literature, whilst the English drama has been its disgrace.
But Mr. Shaw’s explanation fails to explain, and his estimate of Fielding’s talent for drama is too high. With the exception of “Tom Thumb,” his plays are very dull, and it is doubtful whether, given the freest hand, he would ever have become a great dramatist. It was not Walpole but the Zeitgeist that was responsible for his failure in one literary form and his triumph in another. The clock had run down, and though Goldsmith and Sheridan wound it up once more towards the end of the century, it only went for an hour or so. It is usual to refer to their comedy group as the last flare of the literary drama in England before its final extinction.
In the appendix to Clement Scott’s “The Drama of Yesterday and To-day” there is given, by way of supplement to Genest, a list of the new plays put on at London theatres between 1830 and 1900. They number about twenty-four hundred; and—until we reach the last decade of the century—it would be hard to pick out a dozen of them which have become a part of English literature: which any one would think of reading for pleasure or profit, as one reads, say, the plays of Marlowe or Fletcher or Congreve. Of course, many of the pieces on the list are of non-literary kinds—burlesques, vaudevilles, operas, and the like. Then there is a large body of translations and adaptations from the foreign drama, more especially from the French of Scribe, Sardou, Dumas, père et fils, d’Hennery, Labiche, Goudinet, Meilhac and Halévy, Ohnet, and many others. Next to the French theatre, the most abundant feeder of our modern stage has been contemporary fiction. Nowadays, every successful novel is immediately dramatized. This has been the case, more or less, for three-quarters of a century. The Waverley Novels were dramatized in their time, and Dickens’s stories in theirs, and there are a plenty of dramatized novels on Scott’s catalogue. But the practice has greatly increased of recent years. Now, for some reason, a dramatized novel seldom means a good play; that is to say, permanently good, though it may act fairly well for a season. One does not care to read the stage version of “Vanity Fair,” known as “Becky Sharp,” any more than one would care to read “The School for Scandal” diluted into a novel. The dramatist conceives and moulds his theme otherwise than the novelist. “Playwriting,” says Walter Scott, “is the art of forming situations.” To be sure, Shakespeare took plots from Italian “novels,” so called; that is, short romantic tales like Boccaccio’s or Bandello’s. But he took only the bare outline, and altered freely. The modern novel is a far more elaborate thing. In it, not only incident and character, but a great part of the dialogue is already done to hand.
Glancing over Clement Scott’s list, old playgoers will find their memories somewhat pathetically stirred by forgotten fashions and schools. There are Planché’s extravaganzas, and later Dion Boucicault’s versatilities—“classical” comedies like “London Assurance,” sentimental Irish melodramas—“The Shaughraun,” “The Colleen Bawn”—and popular favorites, such as “Rip Van Winkle”; the equally versatile Tom Taylor, with his “Our American Cousin,” “The Ticket-of-Leave Man,” etc.; Burnand’s multifarious facetiae; the cockney vulgarities of that very prolific Mr. H. J. Byron; and, in the late sixties, Robertson’s “cup-and-saucer” comedies—“Ours,” “Caste,” “Society,” “School.” Three thousand representations of these fashionable comedies were given inside of twenty years. How gay, how brilliant, even, the dialogue seemed to us in those good old days! But take up the text of one of Tom Robertson’s plays now and try to read it. What has become of the sparkle? Does any one recall the famous “Ours” galop that we used to dance to consule Planco? Eheu fugaces!
The playwriters whom I have named, and others whom I might have named, their contemporaries, were the Clyde Fitches, Augustus Thomases, and George Ades of their generation. They provided a fair article of entertainment for the public of their time, but they added nothing to literature. The poverty of the English stage, during these late centuries, in work of real substance and value, is the more striking because there has been no dearth of genius in other departments. There have been great English poets, novelists, humorists, essayists, critics, historians. Moreover, the literary drama has flourished in other countries. France has never lacked accomplished artists in this kind: from Voltaire to Victor Hugo, from Hugo to Rostand, talent always, and genius not unfrequently, have been at the service of the French theatres. In Germany—with some breaks—the case has been the same. From Lessing and Goethe and Schiller down to our own contemporaries, to Hauptmann, Sudermann, and Halbe, Germany has seldom been without worthy dramatists. Both the Germans and the French have taken the theatre seriously. Their actors have been carefully trained, their audiences intelligently critical, their playhouses in part maintained by government subventions, as institutions importantly related to the national life.
It is not that English men of letters have been unwilling to contribute to the stage. On the contrary, they have shown an eager, although mostly ineffectual, ambition for dramatic honors. In the eighteenth century it was well-nigh the rule that a successful writer should try his hand at a play. Addison did so, and Steele, Pope, Gay, Fielding, Johnson, Goldsmith, Smollett, Thomson, Mason, Mallet, Chatterton, and many others who had no natural turn for it, and would not think of such a thing now. In the nineteenth century the tradition had lost much of its force: still, we find Scott, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, Thackeray, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, all using the dramatic form, and some of them attempting the stage. Charles Lamb, one of the most ardent of playgoers and best of dramatic critics, was greatly chagrined by the failure of his farce, “Mr. H——.” Dickens was a good actor in private theatricals, and was intensely concerned with the theatre and the theatrical fortunes of his own dramatized novels. So was Charles Reade, who collaborated with Tom Taylor in a number of plays, and whose theatre piece “Masks and Faces,” was the original of his novelette, “Peg Woffington”—vice versa the usual case. More recently we have seen Stevenson and Henley collaborating in three plays, “Deacon Brodie” and “Beau Austin,” performed at London and Montreal in 1884–87, and “Admiral Guinea,” shown at the Haymarket in 1890; the first and third, low-life melodrama and broad comedy, of some vigor but no great importance; the second, an unusually good eighteenth century society play. Most certainly these experiments do not rank with Stevenson’s romances or Henley’s poems. Another curious illustration of the attraction of the dramatic form for the literary mind is Thomas Hardy’s “The Dynasts” (1904), a drama of the Napoleonic wars, projected in nineteen acts, with choruses of spirits and personified abstractions; a sort of reversion to the class of morality and chronicle play exemplified in Bale’s “King John.” Mr. Hardy is perhaps the foremost living English novelist, but “The Dynasts” is a dramatic monster, and, happily, a torso. The preface confesses that the abortion is a “panoramic show” and intended for “mental performance” only, and suggests an apology for closet drama by inquiring whether “mental performance alone may not eventually be the fate of all drama other than that of contemporary or frivolous life.”
Mr. Henry James, too, has tempted the stage, teased, yet fascinated, by the “insufferable little art”; and the result is a dramatized version of “Daisy Miller,” and two volumes of “Theatricals”: “Tenants” and “Disengaged” (1894); “The Album” and “The Reprobate” (1895). These last were written with a view to their being played at country theatres (an opportunity having seemingly presented itself), but they never got so far. In reading them, one feels that a single rehearsal would have decided their chances. Mr. James, in the preface to the printed plays, treats his failure with humorous resignation. He complains of “the hard meagreness inherent in the theatrical form,” and of his own conscientious effort to avoid supersubtlety and to cultivate an “anxious simplicity” and a “deadly directness”—to write “something elaborately plain.” It was to be expected that Mr. James’s habit of refined analysis would prove but a poor preparation for acted drama; and that his singular coldness or shyness or reticence would handicap him fatally in emotional crises. Whenever he is led squarely up to such, he bolts. Innuendo is not the language of passion. In vain he cries: “See me being popular: observe this play to the gallery.” The failure is so complete as to have the finality of a demonstration.
What was less to be expected is the odd way in which this artist drops realism for melodrama and farce when he exchanges fiction for playwriting. Sir Ralph Damant, in “The Album,” is a farce or “humor” character in the Jonsonian sense, his particular obsession being a fixed idea that all the women in the play want to marry him. In “Disengaged,” Mrs. Wigmore, a campaigner with a trained daughter, is another farce character; and there are iterations of phrase and catchwords here and elsewhere, as in Dickens’s or Jonson’s humorists. In “The Reprobate,” Paul Doubleday and Pitt Brunt, M.P., have the accentuated contrast of the Surface brothers. In “The Album,” that innocent old stage trick is played again, whereby some article—a lace handkerchief, a scrap of paper, a necklace, or what not—is made the plot centre. In “Daisy Miller”—dramatized version—the famous little masterpiece is spoiled by the substitution of a conventional happy ending and the introduction of a blackmailing villain. All this insinuates a doubt as to the reality of a realism which turns into improbability and artificiality merely by a change in the method of presentation. But the doubt is unfair. No reductio ad absurdum has occurred, but simply another instance of the law that every art has its own method, and that the method of the novel is not that of the play. Of course, there are clever things in the dialogue of these three-act comedies, for Mr. James is always Mr. James. But the only one of them that comes near to being a practicable theatre piece is “Tenants,” which has a good plot founded on a French story.
The paralysis of the literary drama, then, has not been due to the indifference of the literary class. Perhaps it is time thrown away to seek for its cause. The fact is that, for one reason or another, England has lost the dramatic habit.