Emile Gaboriau was the master of this form of writing, and to this day we all more or less faithfully follow his model, although his complicated plot structure requires more skill and patience than most modern authors are able to supply. Poe borrowed the formula, as he quite frankly admitted, and from him it descended to Anna Catherine Green, whose LEAVENWORTH CASE and HAND AND RING are fine examples of this form of writing. Jumping again across the Atlantic, we see in the Sherlock Holmes character, and in Watson’s shrewd “feeding” of that character strong traces of the Gaboriau style. After these came the deluge: Bayard Veiller, with his almost perfect THE 13TH CHAIR, several of my own and many others leading up to the endless stream of mysterious murders, strange disappearances, midnight crimes, haunted houses, etc., etc., etc.
I know hundreds of men who read one at one sitting, but I defy any man to write one in less than one hundred hours of solid work. When I tackle a job of this sort, my study looks like an architect’s work room, charts everywhere, on the wall and tables and even on the floor. I make a chart for each character, showing exactly where he is, what he says and what he is thinking of each moment of the play. In this sort of trick writing, every word one says is extremely likely to be used against him. Next to rough farce, the writing of a play of this sort calls for more technical skill and inventive power than any other form of play making.
The only thing I can add to these scattered notes about play writing is that no one should allow a failure to beat him. There isn’t anything at all remarkable about having written a bad play; it’s been done before and it’s going to be done again. It’s writing a good play that is unusual as the man who bit the dog; he’s the fellow worth talking about. No matter how much you may be scorned and derided for having written what you wrote, no matter how sure you may be that you never again will dare to look anybody in the face—for a dramatist’s failure in the theater, for some reason that escapes me, seems to carry with it a moral disgrace and a social ostracism—in spite of this you will get another chance when you get another play. I have always demanded that each new play of mine should be judged exactly as though I had never written one before, and, as I said earlier in this article, the critic must tell the truth; he may not want to, but if you really have done a good job he can’t help himself. Critics, like dramatists, are emotional idiots.
Although I remain firmly of the opinion that the talent of the dramatist, like the talent of the great singer, actor, painter and musician, is a thing born in them and not to be acquired by any other than the chosen few, I know that love and appreciation of the theater may be taught and hidden talents discovered and developed. When in my college days I was running one hundred yards in ten and one-fifth seconds I often thought that, in spite of the fact that few men alive at that time had me beaten that time, there were probably plenty of young fellows in the country towns who could have been trained to beat it. Every boy in the world doesn’t try to run a hundred yards, and of course many a doctor and lawyer and business man has been born with the gift of poetry, music, painting and drama and has neglected those talents or even been quite unconscious of them. These new classes of Dramatic Arts in the schools and universities will catch any submerged talent and bring it to the light and beside this they will make cultured audiences, and in the end good audiences will make good plays.
Our present bewilderment in the theater as to what the public wants would soon vanish if we had a public who themselves knew what they wanted and when the day comes when we have a large audience ready to express the growing demand for mature and adult drama even we laggards of the theater will hasten to furnish it—we are all of us hungry for success even to the extreme of being willing to do good work for it.
In November of last year a group of Harvard undergraduates, accompanied by Professor Parker of the Harvard English Department, called on me, and at the same time on Winthrop Ames and Lee Simonson and asked us to help them form a school of the drama in Cambridge. The Harvard faculty seemed unwilling to provide the desired instruction in the arts of the theater and since Professor Baker’s withdrawal there had been no Dramatic Department. Mr. Ames, Mr. Simonson and I called a meeting of Harvard graduates at the Harvard Club and asked these boys to meet us there and tell us their troubles and their desires. As a result of that meeting the Cambridge School of the Drama was organized with a board of governors whose names read like an all-star cast. At this school students of Harvard and Radcliffe and a limited number of outsiders may now take courses in dramatic technique and the arts of the theater.
The faculty of the school is composed of Albert R. Lovejoy, Walter Prichard Eaton and H. W. L. Dana. The visiting lecturers and board of governors, each of whom is to lecture once each term and meet the students for informal talks, are:
Lecturers on play production—Winthrop Ames, Vinton Freedley, Kenneth Macgowan, Gilbert Seldes, Maurice Wertheim.
Lecturers on drama and criticism—Heywood Broun, J. Brooks Atkinson, J. W. D. Seymour, H. K. Motherwell, John T. Williams, Isaac Goldberg, Professor C. T. Copeland, Norman Hapgood, Prof. J. Tucker Murray, Owen Wister, Robert Littell, H. T. Parker.
Lecturers on stage lighting, scene designing, etc.—Lee Simonson, Robert Edmond Jones.