Ruth (calling). Mr. Phenyl! Mr. Phenyl! The barber.
You see, Sir Arthur Pinero, having been an actor and knowing his business, informs you in a few lines not only the names of Phenyl, Hale, their housekeeper, and barber, but where each of the two men sleep and something of their characters. In a word, Pinero, like Shakespeare, is a thoroughly experienced playwright.
No doubt the younger writers of to-day have been led into their contempt for the business they have undertaken by the success that has enriched Mr. Bernard Shaw. They should remember, however, that he is more of a preacher and society entertainer than a playwright, winning the game by his delightful personality or personalities. He is an earnest religious man, with a great hatred of the theatre, the stage, and entertainment, to use his own words, “the great dramatist has something better to do than to amuse either himself or his audience.” But dour Nonconformist as he is, his dullest moments are interrupted by his deep insight into the really funny things of this world. Mr. Shaw could make a sound play if he cared enough about it to try to do so, and in “Arms and the Man” and “You Never Can Tell” he showed much knowledge of the business. He would never, I think, have attained the real grip of the matter that Shakespeare and Pinero have, and knowing this he prefers to exploit his really great qualities in other ways.
But anyone can see for himself in this one little matter of entrances how slovenly the modern writer can be. If you turn to Mr. Galsworthy’s “Joy,” the play is opened without any effort being made to tell you the names and identities of the people on the stage; so, too, I remember, in the first act of the “Silver Box,” Mr. and Mrs. Borthwick discourse amusingly about politics without disclosing who they are. No doubt these little mysteries are easily solved by the regular up-to-date theatregoer armed with a programme, but the absence of the information irritates some of the duller members of the audience, and the play suffers. Mr. Granville Barker, in “Waste,” opens his piece with a room containing five ladies and one gentleman. He does not disclose you an identity by name for twelve lines, and Mr. Walter Kent, one of the characters, is not introduced by name until some nine pages of very clever dialogue have been spoken.
No one supposes that Mr. Galsworthy or Mr. Barker could not put these little matters right somehow, though they could not do it with the craftsmanship of Pinero or Shakespeare. Unfortunately they seem to have a very real contempt for the minor details of the playwright’s business, which prevents the full effect of their literary gifts being appreciable in a theatre. Mr. Galsworthy, it is very pleasant to notice, is growing out of these ways somewhat, and will probably, as his knowledge of the stage increases, come to respect its old world characteristics, and recognise that they are permanent, fixed, and unalterable. In his love of pantomime and the exhibition of real things on the stage, he has the true playwright’s instinct. His real police courts, real prisons, and real boardrooms are admirable, and he is on the verge of understanding the true gospel of the playwright according to Vincent Crummles, manager, who really knew all about it from the Shakespearean standpoint.
Of course, this little matter of opening a play and designing an entrance for a character is only one of many simple matters that a good workman or “wright” has to attend to, but it is a very important one, and sufficiently illustrative of the difference between good and bad craftsmanship. To extend the theme by citing further instances of elementary rules broken and followed would be to commence an essay on the construction of plays. But to anyone who wishes to pursue the matter, it is curiously entertaining to see how in all essential things the actor-playwright is invariably the better craftsman than the literary man who commences dramatist. Mr. McEvoy, one of our most interesting modern dramatists, who has still perhaps something of the craft to learn, writes in a spirit of noble optimism: “I, as a dramatist, who knows how to do things the right way, mainly because I never had to unlearn how to do them wrong,” in a few words, expresses the attitude of the dramatist of to-day towards the experience of centuries in the craft of playwriting. No one doubts that Mr. McEvoy and others may help a little in the evolution of the stage, but they lessen their chances of success by the belief so piously held nowadays that there is nothing to be learned from the playwrights that have gone before. It was reckoned a mad conceit that prompted Walt Whitman to sing:
“I conn’d old times
I sat studying at the feet of the great masters
Now if eligible O that the great masters might return and study me.”
The modern genius finds nothing to study in the old masters, and if they, poor fellows, were now eligible to return and study our world of genius, I fear they would lack even the courtesy of an invitation box.