It is a pity that it should be so, but for my part I think it is only a temporary matter, and that, like all other things connected with the stage, it will work itself out under the wholesome discipline of the Box Office. A man who will not learn some of the elementary rules of playwriting must ultimately become too expensive for the most patient patron. Nor should we blame the literary man who turns dramatist very severely because he has a contempt for the craft of the playwright. He was born for higher things. His journalist friends proclaim the value of his ideas, and the literary expression of them in his play, and it is only the carelessness of the players and the stupidity of the playgoers that hinder his success. It is all to the good for the stage that men of education and intellect should be players, and that good artists should be scene painters, but no one who is a player or a painter expects to succeed in his stage work without learning the rules of the game. Why should a literary man despise the craft of the playwright when he seeks to earn his wages as a craftsman?
There is nothing new in this distaste of a literary man for the baser duties of playwriting. Bulwer Lytton, who, whatever we may think of his literary qualities, had undeniable talent as a playwright, discovered when he wrote “The Duchess de la Vallière” the interesting fact that playwriting was a special craft and that “dramatic construction and theatrical effect” were mysteries to be mastered. “I felt,” he writes in his preface to the Lady of Lyons, “that it was in this that a writer accustomed to the narrative class of composition would have the most faults to learn and unlearn. Accordingly, it was to the development of the plot and the arrangement of the incidents I directed my chief attention, and I sought to throw whatever belongs to poetry less into the diction and the ‘felicity of words’ than into the construction of the story, the creation of the characters and the spirit of the pervading sentiment.”
Genius will shrug his shoulders at the name of Bulwer Lytton, but as a playwright two things are worth remembering about him—first, that in modern phrase he “got there,” and, second, that “he remains.” And if genius desires to write plays with a view to “getting there” and “remaining,” after the manner of Bulwer Lytton and other greater men who have stooped to the craft, let genius seriously consider whether, in his own interests as well as in the interests of the harmless necessary playgoer, it is not worth while to learn the rules of the game and commence playwright.
ADVICE TO YOUNG ADVOCATES.
Here in the street poor Juvenis
May raise his head and proudly trudge
Alongside Judex—judicis
The Third Declension—Judge.
Pater’s Book of Rhymes.