Chapter XII: Act IV: Scene 1. The next morning. Barbara's room. Captain Trumbull lies

peacefully on the bed. Mammy Lu, the colored nurse, is dozing as Barbara enters. They listen for the invalid's breathing, hear none, and find that he is dead. Half crazed, Barbara snatches the bloody flag from his bosom. The scene changes.

Scene 2. The balconied stoop in front of the house. The Confederate soldiers, headed by Stonewall Jackson, are heralded by a large crowd! Barbara, hanging the Union flag out on the balcony, is discovered by the mob, who begin to stone her, urging somebody to shoot. The lines of Whittier's poem, to fit the circumstances which Clyde Fitch has made, now become:

Shoot! You've taken a life already dearer to me than my own. Shoot,
and I'll _thank_ you! but _spare_ your flag![19]

General Jackson orders that no shot be fired on penalty of death. Her crazed lover, Negly, shoots her down from the street, and his own father orders the execution of the penalty.

"In many cases, no doubt, it is the plain and literal fact that the impulse to write some play--any play--exists, so to speak, in the abstract, unassociated with any particular subject, and that the would-be playwright proceeds, as he thinks, to set his imagination to work and invent a story. But this frame of mind is to be regarded with suspicion. Few plays of much value, one may guess, have resulted from such an abstract impulse. Invention in these cases is apt to be nothing but recollection in disguise, the shaking of a kaleidoscope formed of fragmentary reminiscences. I remember once in some momentary access of ambition, trying to invent a play. I occupied several hours of a long country walk, in, as I believed, creating out of nothing at all a dramatic story. When at last I had modelled it into some sort of coherency, I stepped back from it in my mind as it were, and contemplated it as a whole. No sooner had I done so than it began to seem vaguely familiar. 'Where have I seen this story before?' I asked myself; and it was only after cudgelling my brains for several minutes that I found I had re-invented Ibsen's _Hedda Gabler_. Thus, when we think we are choosing a plot out of the void, we are very apt to be, in fact, ransacking the storehouse of memory."[20]

There is, of course, another group of would-be playwrights who care nothing for freshness of subject but are perfectly content to imitate the latest success, hoping thereby to win immediate notoriety, or what interests them even more, immediate money return. Undoubtedly a man may take a subject just presented in a successful play and so re-shape it by the force of his own personality as to make it an original work of power. Ordinarily, however, these imitators should remember the old adage about the crock which goes so often to the well that at last it comes back broken. He who merely imitates may have some temporary vogue, and dramatic technique may help him to win it, but whatever is very popular soon gives way to something else, for the fundamental law of art, as of life, is change. He who is content merely to imitate must be content with impermanency. It is the creator _and_ perfecter whom we most remember. Even the creator _or_ the perfecter we remember. The mere imitators have their brief day and pass. Today we still read the work of the initiators, Lyly, Greene, Kyd. With pleasure we turn the pages of Marlowe, Jonson, and Fletcher, not to mention Shakespeare. The dozens of mere imitators who had their little day are known only as names.

The ambitious but inexperienced writer of plays worries himself much in hunting a novel subject,--and in vain. Far afield he goes, seeking the sensational, the bizarre, the occult, for new emotions and situations, failing to recognize that the emotional life of yesterday, today, and tomorrow can differ little fundamentally. Civilization refines or deteriorates, kingdoms rise and fall, languages develop and pass, but love of man and woman, of friend for friend, ambition, jealousy, envy, selfishness,--these emotions abide. A book has been published to show that there are but thirty-six possible dramatic situations. It is based on the dictum of the Italian dramatist, Gozzi, that "there could be only thirty-six tragic situations. Schiller gave himself much trouble to find more, but was unable to find as many."[21] The very chapter headings of the book mentioned prove that the number of possible dramatic situations is a mere matter of subdivision: "Vengeance Pursuing Crime"; "Madness"; "Fatal Imprudence"; "Loss of Property "; "Ambition." Obviously, there are many different kinds of vengeance, as the person pursuing the crime is a hired detective, a wronged person, an officer of state, etc. Moreover, differing conditions surrounding the crime, as well as the character of the avenger, would make the vengeance sought different. The same may be said of the other chapter-headings. It may be possible to agree on the smallest number of dramatic situations possible, but disagreement surely lies beyond that, for, according to our natures, we shall wish to subdivide and increase the number. Just what that smallest number is, here is unimportant. The important fact is: keen thinkers about the drama agree that the stuff from which it is made may be put into a small number of categories. This rests on the belief that the emotions we feel today are the same old emotions, though we may feel them in greater or less degree because of differences in climate, civilization or ideals. Modern invention, of course, affects our emotional life. It is now a commonplace that invention has quite changed the heroism of warfare from what it was even a generation ago. It is still heroism, but under conditions so different that it needs wholly different treatment dramatically. In Restoration Comedy the rake was the hero. The audience, viewing life through his eyes saw the victims of his selfishness as fools or as people who, in any combat of wits with the hero, deservedly came off defeated. Interest in one's fellow man, a more just sense of life had developed in the early years of the eighteenth century. This wholly changed the emphasis, and gave birth to the Sentimental Comedy. The characters, even the story, of this newer comedy are almost identical with the Restoration Comedy, but the material is so treated that our sympathies go to the unfortunate wife of _The Careless Husband_, not to the man himself, as they would have a generation before. In _The Provoked Husband_[22] it is the point of view of that husband as to Lady Townley, though she is presented in all her charm and gaiety, with which we are left.

The sentimentality of the present day is not the sentimentality of 1850 to 1870. The higher education of women, the growth of suffrage, the prevailing wide discussion of scientific matters have not taken sentimentality from us, but have changed its look. Because of changes in costume and custom it even appears more different than it really is. A perfect illustration of the point is _Milestones_,[23] of Mr. Edward Knobloch. Three generations live before our eyes the same story, but how differently because of changed costumes, ideas, and immediate surroundings. In French drama, the wet-nurse is no new figure as one employee in a household where we are watching the comedy or the tragedy of the employers. Brieux was the first, however, to study the emotions of such a household through the nurse, making her feelings of prime consequence. Hence, _Les Remplacantes_.[24] The whole situation is summed up by William Sharp (Fiona Macleod) in his Introduction to _The House of Usna_:

The tradition of accursed families is not the fantasy of one
dramatist, or of one country or of one time....

Whether the poet turn to the tragedy of the Theban dynasty, or to the
tragedy of the Achaian dynasty, or to the tragedy of Lear, or to the
Celtic tragedy of the House of Fionn, or to the other and less
familiar Gaelic tragedy of the House of Usna--whether one turn to
these or to the doom of the House of Malatesta, or to the doom of the
House of Macbeth, or to the doom of the House of Ravenswood, one turns
in vain if he be blind and deaf to the same elemental forces as they
move in their eternal ichor through the blood that has today's warmth
in it, that are the same powers though they be known of the obscure
and the silent, and are committed like wandering flame to the torch of
a ballad as well as to the starry march of the compelling words of
genius; are of the same dominion, though that be in the shaken hearts
of islesfolk and mountaineers, and not with kings in Mykenai, or by
the thrones of Tamburlaine and Aurungzebe, or with great lords and
broken nobles and thanes....

... I know one who can evoke modern dramatic scenes by the mere
iterance of the great musical names of the imagination. Menelaos,
Helen, Klytemaistra, Andromache, Kassandra, Orestes, Blind Oidipus,
Elektra, Kreusa, and the like. This is not because these names are in
themselves esoteric symbols. My friend has not seen any representation
of the _Agamemnon_ or the _Choephoroi_, of _Aias_ or _Oidipus at
Kolonos_, of _Elektra_ or _Ion_, or indeed of any Greek play. But he
knows the story of every name mentioned in each of the dramas of the
three kings of Greek Tragedy.... And here, he says, is his delight.
"For I do not live only in the past but in the present, in these
dramas of the mind. The names stand for the elemental passions, and I
can come to them through my own gates of today as well as through the
ancient portals of Aischylos or Sophocles or Euripides." ...

It is no doubt in this attitude that Racine, so French in the accent
of his classical genius, looked at the old drama which was his
inspiration: that Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Bridges, so English in the
accent of their genius, have looked at it; that Echegaray in Spain,
looked at it before he produced his troubled modern _Elektra_ which is
so remote in shapen thought and coloured semblance from the colour and
idea of its prototype; that Gabriele D'Annunzio looked at it before he
became obsessed with the old terrible idea of the tangled feet of
Destiny, so that a tuft of grass might withhold or a breath from
stirred dust empoison, and wrote that most perturbing of all modern
dramas, _La Citta Morta_.[25]

The drama must, then, go on treating over and over emotions the same in kind. Real novelty comes in presenting them as they affect men and women who are in ideas, habits, costume, speech, and environment distinctly of their time. Their expression of the old elemental emotions brings genuine novelty. Usually it is not through an incident or an episode, obviously dramatic, but through the characters involved that one understands and presents what is novel in the dramatic. Feeling this strongly, Mr. Galsworthy asserts "Character is plot."[26]

So long as characters, ideas, and treatment seem to the public fresh, they even have a weakness for a story they have heard before. Recall the drama of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in which the dramatists shared with their audiences a knowledge of the stories of the gods which was theirs by education and from repeated treatment by the dramatists of the day. That public asked, not new stories, but newness of effect because old stories which were almost fixed subjects for their dramatists were given individuality of treatment. In a modified sense this was true of the Elizabethan public. _Romeo and Juliet_, _Lear_, probably _Titus Andronicus_, and possibly _Julius Caesar_ Londoners had known as plays just passing from popularity when Shakespeare made them over. Here again, it was freshness of treatment through better characterization, richer poetry, and finer technique, not creative story, which won the public to Shakespeare. Nor is this attitude a thing of the past. Think of the delight with which the public today watches the rejuggling of old elements of plot in the rapid succession of popular musical comedies, grateful for whatever element of freshness they may find in the total product. Was it the story, or the characterization and setting, indeed all that went with the treatment of the story, which in _Peg o' My Heart_ and _Bunty Pulls the Strings_ won these plays popularity? Seek for novelty, then, not by trying to invent some new story, but in an idea, the setting of the play, the technical treatment given it, above all the characters. The last, when studied, are likely so to reshape the story which first presents itself to the imagination as to make it really novel. Does the freshness of the story of the Duke, Olivia, and Viola in _Twelfth Night_ rest on the story as Shakespeare found it in Barnabe Riche's book,[27] or on the characterization Shakespeare gave these suggested figures and the effect of their developed characters on the story as he found it? Surely the latter.

Another common fallacy of young dramatists is that what has happened is better dramatic material than what is imagined. Among the trite maxims a dramatist should remember, however, is: "Truth is often stranger than fiction." The test for a would-be writer of plays, choosing among several starting points, should be, not, "Is this true?" but "Will my audience believe it true on sight or because of the treatment I can give it?" "Aristotle long ago decided how far the tragic poet need regard historical accuracy. He does not make use of an event because it really happened, but because it happened so convincingly that for his present purpose he cannot invent conditions more convincing."[28] Any reader of manuscript plays knows that again and again, when he has objected to something as entirely improbable, he has been told indignantly: "Why, you must accept that, for it happened exactly like that to my friend, Smith." On the other hand, who refuses to see _The Merchant of Venice_ because of the inherent improbability of the exaction of the pound of flesh by Shylock? Highly improbable it is, but Shakespeare makes this demand come from a figure so human in all other respects that we accept it. A subject is not to be rejected because true or false. Every dramatic subject must be presented with the probable human experience, the ethical ideas, and the imaginativeness of the public in mind. To a dramatist all subjects are possible till, after long wrestling with the subject chosen, he is forced to admit that, whether originally true or false, he cannot make it seem probable to an audience. Facts are, of course, of very great value in drama, but if they are to convince a theatrical public, the dramatist must so present them that they shall not run completely counter to what an audience thinks it knows about life.

Nor should a person who knows absolutely nothing of the theatre attempt to write plays. He should go to see plays enough to know how long a performance usually lasts, waits between the acts included, say two hours and a half to two hours and three quarters; to know about how long an act usually takes in playing; to gain some idea of the relation in time between the written or printed page and the time in acting; to understand that, in general, a small cast is preferable to a large one; to know that the limited space of the stage makes some effects so difficult as to be undesirable. This is to have ordinary common sense about the theatre. Otherwise, what he puts on paper will be practically sure of immediate rejection because the manuscript proves that the writer has either not been in the theatre, or being there, has been wholly unobservant. The following quotation seems almost fantastic, but the experience of the writer in reading dramatic manuscripts fully bears it out:

Many of the manuscripts that are sent to the New York managers are
such impossible oddities that few readers would regard a description
of them as really accurate. It was the privilege of the writer to look
over a collection of "plays" that have been mailed recently to several
of the theatrical offices, and, among the number, he came across a
dozen that were each about fifteen to twenty pages in length. This
included the scenic descriptions and stage directions. Such "plays,"
if enacted, would be of about ten to eleven minutes' duration instead
of two and a quarter hours. Three manuscripts called for from ninety
to one hundred characters, and from nine to fourteen different scenes.
Eight manuscripts were divided into nine acts each and, judging from
their thickness, would have run on for days, after the fashion of a
Chinese drama. One "play" was laid in the year 2200 A.D., and called
for twelve actors to portray "the new race of men"--each man to be at
least seven feet tall. These characters were to make all their
entrances and exits in airships. Several manuscripts that the writer
examined would have required professional strong men in their
enactment, so difficult were the physical feats outlined for some of
the actors. A great number of "modern dramas" included a ream of
colloquialisms and anachronisms intermixed with Louis XV situations.
And one manuscript, entitled "Love in All Ages" called for twelve
different acts with a new group of nine differently built actors in
each.[29]

A stage direction which ran something like this is the most naive in the experience of the writer. "Germs of a locomotive, a cathedral, etc., detach themselves in an unknown manner from the walls and float airily, merrily about the room." Impossible? Possibly not for a genius of a stage manager. Likely to recommend the play to a manager trying to judge from a manuscript the dramatic sense of its unknown author? Hardly.

Granted then that a would-be playwright has acquired ordinary common sense about the theatre and has some point of departure, how does he move from it to plot? First, by taking time enough, by avoiding hurry. Let any would-be dramatist get rid promptly of the idea that good plays are written in a rush. It is perfectly true that the mere writing out of a play has often been done in what seems an amazingly short time,--a few weeks, days, or even hours. However, in every case of rapid composition, as for instance Sheridan's _Rivals_, which was put on paper in very brief time, the author has either mulled his material for a long time or was so thoroughly conversant with it that it required no careful thinking out at the moment of composition. In _The Rivals_ Sheridan drew upon his intimate knowledge for many years of the people and the gossip of the Pump Room at Bath. Mr. H. A. Jones has more than once testified, "I mull long on my plot, sometimes a year, but when I have it, the rest (the mere writing out) is easy." Sardou turned out a very large number of plays. Nor are his plays, seemingly, such as to demand the careful preparation required for the drama of ideas or the drama more dependent on characterization than incident. Yet he worked very carefully at all stages, from point of departure to final draft. "Whenever an idea occurred to Sardou, he immediately made a memorandum of it. These notes he classified and filed. For example, years before the production of _Thermidor_ he had the thought of one day writing such a play. Gradually the character of Fabienne shaped itself; Labussiere was devised later to fit Coquelin. Everything that he read about that epoch of the French Revolution, and the ideas which his reading inspired, he wrote down in the form of rough notes. Engravings, maps, prints, and other documents of the time he carefully collected. Memoirs and histories he annotated and indexed, filing away the index references in his file cases, or dossiers. At the time of his death, Sardou had many hundreds of these dossiers, old and new. Some of the older ones had been worked up into plays, while the newer ones were merely raw material for future dramas. When the idea of a play had measurably shaped itself in his mind he wrote out a skeleton plot which he placed in its dossier. There it might lie indefinitely. In this shape _Thermidor_ remained for nearly twenty years, and _Theodora_ for ten. When he considered that the time was ripe for one of his embryonic plays, Sardou would take out that particular dossier, read over the material, and lay it aside again. After it had fermented in his brain for a time, he would, if the inspiration seized him, write out a scenario. After this, he began the actual writing of the play."[30]

Late in the seventeenth century, one of the most prolific of English playwrights, John Dryden, contracted to turn out four plays a year. He failed completely to carry out his promise. Some dramatists of a much more recent day should attribute to the speed with which they have turned out plays their repeated failures, or, after early successes, their waning hold on the public. Every dramatist should keep steadily in mind the words of the old French adage: "Time spares not that on which time hath been spared." Time, again time, and yet again time is the chief element in successful writing of plays.

A wandering, erratic career is forbidden the dramatist. Back in the eighteenth century Diderot stated admirably the qualities a dramatist must have if he is to plot well. "He must get at the heart of his material. He must consider order and unity. He must discern clearly the moment at which the action should begin. He must recognize the situations which will help his audience, and know what it is expedient to leave unsaid. He must not be rebuffed by difficult scenes or long labor. Throughout he must have the aid of a rich imagination."[31] Selection, Proportion, Emphasis, Movement,--all making for clearness,--these as the words of Diderot suggest, are what the dramatist studies in developing his play from Subject, through Story, to Plot.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Auteurs Dramatiques, Pailleron._ A. Binet and J. Passey.
_L'Annee Psychologique_, 1894, pp. 98-99.

[2] _Sardou and the Sardou Plays_, p. 127. Jerome A. Hart. J. B.
Lippincott Co., Philadelphia.

[3] _Auteurs Dramatiques, Dumas fils_, p. 77.

[4] _Five Plays_, p. 86. Lord Dunsany. Mitchell Kennerley, New York.

[5] _Auteurs Dramatiques, Sardou, L'Annee Psychologique_, 1894, p.
66.

[6] _Play-Making,_ pp. 18-19, note. William Archer. Small, Maynard &
Co., Boston.

[7] _Auteurs Dramatiques, Sardou_, p. 66.

[8] _Auteurs Dramatiques, M. de Curel_, p. 121.

[9] From _Ibsen's Workshop. Works_, vol. x, pp. 91-92. Chas.
Scribner's Sons, New York.

[10] Consult the pages of W. C. Hazlitt's _Shakespeare Library_, a
source book of his plays for proof of this.

[11] Belles-Lettres Series. F. E. Schelling, ed. D. C. Heath & Co.,
Boston and New York.

[12] Mermaid Series or Everyman's Library.

[13] Published in translation by Brentano; also in _Chief
Contemporary Dramatists_. Thomas H. Dickinson. Houghton Mifflin Co.,
Boston.

[14] _Note_, p. 49.

[15] J. W. Luce & Co., Boston; Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd., London.

[16] _Dramatic Works_, vol. I. Ed. Ludwig Lewisohn. B. Huebach., New
York.

[17] For purposes of useful comparison the lines of Whittier which
suggested the subject to Mr. Fitch are appended.

On that pleasant morn of the early fall
When Lee marched over the mountain wall;

Over the mountains winding down,
Horse and foot, into Frederick town.

Forty flags with their silver stars,
Forty flags with their crimson bars,

Flapped in the morning wind: the sun
Of noon looked down and saw not one.

Up rose old Barbara Frietchie then,
Bowed with her fourscore years and ten;

Bravest of all in Frederick town,
She took up the flag the men hauled down

In her attic window the staff she set,
To show that one heart was loyal yet.

Up the street came the rebel tread,
Stonewall Jackson riding ahead.

Under his slouched hat left and right
He glanced; the old flag met his sight.

"Halt!"--the dust-brown ranks stood fast
"Fire!"--out blazed the rifle-blast.

It shivered the window, pane and sash;
It rent the banner with seam and gash.

Quick, as it fell from the broken staff
Dame Barbara snatched the silken scarf.

She leaned far out on the window-sill,
And shook it forth with a royal will.

"Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,
But spare your country's flag," she said.

A shade of sadness, a blush of shame,
Over the face of the leader came;

The nobler nature within him stirred
To life at that woman's deed and word:

"Who touches a hair of yon gray head
Dies like a dog! March on!" he said.

All day long through Frederick street
Sounded the tread of marching feet;

All day long that free flag tost
Over the heads of the rebel host.

[18] _The Stage in America_, p. 90. Norman Hapgood. The Macmillan
Co., New York.

[19] _Barbara Frietchie_, p. 126. Clyde Fitch. Life Publishing Co.,
New York.

[20] _Play-Making_, pp. 24-25. William Archer. Small, Maynard & Co.,
Boston.

[21] _Les 36 Situations Dramatiques._ Georges Polti. Edition du
_Mercure de France_, 1895, p. 1.

[22] For texts of _The Careless Husband_ and _The Provoked Husband_,
both plays by Colley Cibber, see _Works_, vols. II and IV, 1777.

[23] Methuen & Co., Ltd., London.

[24] Not translated. Edition in French, P. V. Stock, Paris.

[25] Foreword to _The House of Usna_. Fiona Macleod. Published by
Thomas B. Mosher, Portland, Maine, 1903.

[26] _Some Platitudes Concerning Drama._ John Galsworthy. _Atlantic
Monthly_, December, 1909.

[27] _Shakespeare Library_, vol. I, pp. 387-412. Ed. W. C. Hazlitt.

[28] _Hamburg Dramaturgy_, p. 279. Lessing. Bohn ed.

[29] _The United States of Playwrights_, Henry Savage. _The Bookman_,
September, 1909.

[30] _De la Poesie Dramatique._ Diderot. _Oeuvres_, vol. VII, p. 321.
Garnier Freres, Paris.

[31] _Sardou and the Sardou Plays_, p. 125. J. A. Hart. J. B.
Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia.