Chapter II: Prologue: Chapter I (2)

What, then, is the essence of drama, if conflict be not it? What is the common quality of themes, scenes, and incidents, which we recognize as specifically dramatic? Perhaps we shall scarcely come nearer to a helpful definition than if we say that the essence of drama is _crisis_. A play is a more or less rapidly-developing crisis in destiny or circumstance, and a dramatic scene is a crisis within a crisis, clearly furthering the ultimate event. The drama may be called the art of crises, as fiction is the art of gradual developments. It is the slowness of its processes which differentiates the typical novel from the typical play. If the novelist does not take advantage of the facilities offered by his form for portraying gradual change, whether in the way of growth or of decay, he renounces his own birthright, in order to trespass on the domain of the dramatist. Most great novels embrace considerable segments of many lives; whereas the drama gives us only the culminating points--or shall we say the intersecting culminations?--two or three destinies. Some novelists have excelled precisely in the art with which they have made the gradations of change in character or circumstance so delicate as to be imperceptible from page to page, and measurable, as in real life, only when we look back over a considerable period. The dramatist, on the other hand, deals in rapid and startling changes, the "peripeties," as the Greeks called them, which may be the outcome of long, slow processes, but which actually occur in very brief spaces of time. Nor is this a merely mechanical consequence of the narrow limits of stage presentation. The crisis is as real, though not as inevitable, a part of human experience as the gradual development. Even if the material conditions of the theatre permitted the presentation of a whole _Middlemarch_ or _Anna Karénine_--as the conditions of the Chinese theatre actually do--some dramatists, we cannot doubt, would voluntarily renounce that license of prolixity, in order to cultivate an art of concentration and crisis. The Greek drama "subjected to the faithful eyes," as Horace phrases it, the culminating points of the Greek epic; the modern drama places under the lens of theatrical presentment the culminating points of modern experience.

But, manifestly, it is not every crisis that is dramatic. A serious illness, a law-suit, a bankruptcy, even an ordinary prosaic marriage, may be a crisis in a man's life, without being necessarily, or even probably, material for drama. How, then, do we distinguish a dramatic from a non-dramatic crisis? Generally, I think, by the fact that it develops, or can be made naturally to develop, through a series of minor crises, involving more or less emotional excitement, and, if possible, the vivid manifestation of character. Take, for instance, the case of a bankruptcy. Most people, probably, who figure in the _Gazette_ do not go through any one, or two, or three critical moments of special tension, special humiliation, special agony. They gradually drift to leeward in their affairs, undergoing a series of small discouragements, small vicissitudes of hope and fear, small unpleasantnesses, which they take lightly or hardly according to their temperament, or the momentary state of their liver. In this average process of financial decline, there may be--there has been--matter for many excellent novels, but scarcely for a drama. That admirable chapter in _Little Dorrit,_ wherein Dickens describes the gradual degradation of the Father of the Marshalsea, shows how a master of fiction deals with such a subject; but it would be quite impossible to transfer this chapter to the stage. So, too, with the bankruptcy of Colonel Newcome--certain emotional crises arising from it have, indeed, been placed on the stage, but only after all Thackeray's knowledge of the world and fine gradations of art had been eliminated. Mr. Hardy's _Mayor of Casterbridge_ has, I think, been dramatized, but not, I think, with success. A somewhat similar story of financial ruin, the grimly powerful _House with the Green Shutters_, has not even tempted the dramatiser. There are, in this novel, indeed, many potentially dramatic crises; the trouble is that they are too numerous and individually too small to be suitable for theatrical presentment. Moreover, they are crises affecting a taciturn and inarticulate race,[3] a fact which places further difficulties in the way of the playwright. In all these cases, in short, the bankruptcy portrayed is a matter of slow development, with no great outstanding moments, and is consequently suited for treatment in fiction rather than in drama.

But bankruptcy sometimes occurs in the form of one or more sudden, sharp crises, and has, therefore, been utilized again and again as a dramatic motive. In a hundred domestic dramas or melodramas, we have seen the head of a happy household open a newspaper or a telegram announcing the failure of some enterprise in which all his fortune is embarked. So obviously dramatic is this incident that it has become sadly hackneyed. Again, we have bankruptcy following upon a course of gambling, generally in stocks. Here there is evident opportunity, which has been frequently utilized, for a series of crises of somewhat violent and commonplace emotion. In American drama especially, the duels of Wall Street, the combats of bull and bear, form a very popular theme, which clearly falls under the Brunetière formula. Few American dramatists can resist the temptation of showing some masterful financier feverishly watching the "ticker" which proclaims him a millionaire or a beggar. The "ticker" had not been invented in the days when Ibsen wrote _The League of Youth_, otherwise he would doubtless have made use of it in the fourth act of that play. The most popular of all Björnson's plays is specifically entitled _A Bankruptcy_. Here the poet has had the art to select a typical phase of business life, which naturally presents itself in the form of an ascending curve, so to speak, of emotional crises. We see the energetic, active business man, with a number of irons in the fire, aware in his heart that he is insolvent, but not absolutely clear as to his position, and hoping against hope to retrieve it. We see him give a great dinner-party, in order to throw dust in the eyes of the world, and to secure the support of a financial magnate, who is the guest of honour. The financial magnate is inclined to "bite," and goes off, leaving the merchant under the impression that he is saved. This is an interesting and natural, but scarcely a thrilling, crisis. It does not, therefore, discount the supreme crisis of the play, in which a cold, clear-headed business man, who has been deputed by the banks to look into the merchant's affairs, proves to him, point by point, that it would be dishonest of him to flounder any longer in the swamp of insolvency, into which he can only sink deeper and drag more people down with him. Then the bankrupt produces a pistol and threatens murder and suicide if the arbiter of his fate will not consent to give him one more chance; but his frenzy breaks innocuous against the other's calm, relentless reason. Here we have, I repeat, a typically dramatic theme: a great crisis, bringing out vivid manifestations of character, not only in the bankrupt himself, but in those around him, and naturally unfolding itself through a series of those lesser crises, which we call interesting and moving scenes. The play is scarcely a great one, partly because its ending is perfunctory, partly because Björnson, poet though he was, had not Ibsen's art of "throwing in a little poetry" into his modern dramas. I have summarized it up to its culminating point, because it happened to illustrate the difference between a bankruptcy, dramatic in its nature and treatment, and those undramatic bankruptcies to which reference has been made. In _La Douloureuse_, by Maurice Donnay, bankruptcy is incidentally employed to bring about a crisis of a different order. A ball is proceeding at the house of a Parisian financier, when the whisper spreads that the host is ruined, and has committed suicide in a room above; whereupon the guests, after a moment of flustered consternation, go on supping and dancing![4] We are not at all deeply interested in the host or his fortunes. The author's purpose is to illustrate, rather crudely, the heartlessness of plutocratic Bohemia; and by means of the bankruptcy and suicide he brings about what may be called a crisis of collective character.[5]

* * * * *

As regards individual incidents, it may be said in general that the dramatic way of treating them is the crisp and staccato, as opposed to the smooth or legato, method. It may be thought a point of inferiority in dramatic art that it should deal so largely in shocks to the nerves, and should appeal by preference, wherever it is reasonably possible, to the cheap emotions of curiosity and surprise. But this is a criticism, not of dramatic art, but of human nature. We may wish that mankind took more pleasure in pure apprehension than in emotion; but so long as the fact is otherwise, that way of handling an incident by which the greatest variety of poignancy of emotion can be extracted from it will remain the specifically dramatic way.

We shall have to consider later the relation between what may be called primary and secondary suspense or surprise--that is to say between suspense or surprise actually experienced by the spectator to whom the drama is new, and suspense or surprise experienced only sympathetically, on behalf of the characters, by a spectator who knows perfectly what is to follow. The two forms of emotion are so far similar that we need not distinguish between them in considering the general content of the term "dramatic." It is plain that the latter or secondary form of emotion must be by far the commoner, and the one to which the dramatist of any ambition must make his main appeal; for the longer his play endures, the larger will be the proportion of any given audience which knows it beforehand, in outline, if not in detail.

As a typical example of a dramatic way of handling an incident, so as to make a supreme effect of what might else have been an anti-climax, one may cite the death of Othello. Shakespeare was faced by no easy problem. Desdemona was dead, Emilia dead, Iago wounded and doomed to the torture; how was Othello to die without merely satiating the audience with a glut of blood? How was his death to be made, not a foregone conclusion, a mere conventional suicide, but the culminating moment of the tragedy? In no single detail, perhaps, did Shakespeare ever show his dramatic genius more unmistakably than in his solution of this problem. We all remember how, as he is being led away, Othello stays his captors with a gesture, and thus addresses them:

"Soft you; a word or two, before you go.
I have done the state some service, and they know 't;
No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice, then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
Perplex'd in the extreme; of one whose hand,
Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,
Albeit unused to the melting mood,
Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their medicinal gum. Set you down this;
And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
And smote him--thus!"

What is the essence of Shakespeare's achievement in this marvellous passage? What is it that he has done? He has thrown his audience, just as Othello has thrown his captors, off their guard, and substituted a sudden shock of surprise for a tedious fulfilment of expectation. In other words, he has handled the incident crisply instead of flaccidly, and so given it what we may call the specific accent of drama.

Another consummate example of the dramatic handling of detail may be found in the first act of Ibsen's _Little Eyolf_. The lame boy, Eyolf, has followed the Rat-wife down to the wharf, has fallen into the water, and been drowned. This is the bare fact: how is it to be conveyed to the child's parents and to the audience?

A Greek dramatist would probably have had recourse to a long and elaborately worked-up "messenger-speech," a pathetic recitation. That was the method best suited to the conditions, and to what may be called the prevailing tempo, of the Greek theatre. I am far from saying that it was a bad method: no method is bad which holds and moves an audience. But in this case it would have had the disadvantage of concentrating attention on the narrator instead of on the child's parents, on the mere event instead of on the emotions it engendered. In the modern theatre, with greater facilities for reproducing the actual movement of life, the dramatist naturally aims at conveying to the audience the growing anxiety, the suspense and the final horror, of the father and mother. The most commonplace playwright would have seen this opportunity and tried to make the most of it. Every one can think of a dozen commonplace ways in which the scene could be arranged and written; and some of them might be quite effective. The great invention by which Ibsen snatches the scene out of the domain of the commonplace, and raises it to the height of dramatic poetry, consists in leaving it doubtful to the father and mother what is the meaning of the excitement on the beach and the confused cries which reach their ears, until one cry comes home to them with terrible distinctness, "The crutch is floating!" It would be hard to name any single phrase in literature in which more dramatic effect is concentrated than in these four words--they are only two words in the original. However dissimilar in its nature and circumstances, this incident is comparable with the death of Othello, inasmuch as in each case the poet, by a supreme felicity of invention, has succeeded in doing a given thing in absolutely the most dramatic method conceivable. Here we recognize in a consummate degree what has been called the "fingering of the dramatist"; and I know not how better to express the common quality of the two incidents than in saying that each is touched with extraordinary crispness, so as to give to what in both cases has for some time been expected and foreseen a sudden thrill of novelty and unexpectedness. That is how to do a thing dramatically.[6]

And now, after all this discussion of the "dramatic" in theme and incident, it remains to be said that the tendency of recent theory, and of some recent practice, has been to widen the meaning of the word, until it bursts the bonds of all definition. Plays have been written, and have found some acceptance, in which the endeavour of the dramatist has been to depict life, not in moments of crisis, but in its most level and humdrum phases, and to avoid any crispness of touch in the presentation of individual incidents. "Dramatic," in the eyes of writers of this school, has become a term of reproach, synonymous with "theatrical." They take their cue from Maeterlinck's famous essay on "The Tragic in Daily Life," in which he lays it down that: "An old man, seated in his armchair, waiting patiently, with his lamp beside him--submitting with bent head to the presence of his soul and his destiny--motionless as he is, does yet live in reality a deeper, more human, and more universal life than the lover who strangles his mistress, the captain who conquers in battle, or the husband who 'avenges his honour.'" They do not observe that Maeterlinck, in his own practice, constantly deals with crises, and often with violent and startling ones.

At the same time, I am far from suggesting that the reaction against the traditional "dramatic" is a wholly mistaken movement. It is a valuable corrective of conventional theatricalism; and it has, at some points, positively enlarged the domain of dramatic art. Any movement is good which helps to free art from the tyranny of a code of rules and definitions. The only really valid definition of the dramatic is: Any representation of imaginary personages which is capable of interesting an average audience assembled in a theatre. We must say "representation of imaginary personages" in order to exclude a lecture or a prize-fight; and we must say "an average audience" (or something to that effect) in order to exclude a dialogue of Plato or of Landor, the recitation of which might interest a specially selected public. Any further attempt to limit the content of the term "dramatic" is simply the expression of an opinion that such-and-such forms of representation will not be found to interest an audience; and this opinion may always be rebutted by experiment. In all that I have said, then, as to the dramatic and the non-dramatic, I must be taken as meaning: "Such-and-such forms and methods have been found to please, and will probably please again. They are, so to speak, safer and easier than other forms and methods. But it is the part of original genius to override the dictates of experience, and nothing in these pages is designed to discourage original genius from making the attempt." We have already seen, indeed, that in a certain type of play--the broad picture of a social phenomenon or environment--it is preferable that no attempt should be made to depict a marked crisis. There should be just enough story to afford a plausible excuse for raising and for lowering the curtain.[7]

Let us not, however, seem to grant too much to the innovators and the quietists. To say that a drama should be, or tends to be, the presentation of a crisis in the life of certain characters, is by no means to insist on a mere arbitrary convention. It is to make at once an induction from the overwhelming majority of existing dramas, and a deduction from the nature and inherent conditions of theatrical presentation. The fact that theatrical conditions often encourage a violent exaggeration of the characteristically dramatic elements in life does not make these elements any the less real or any the less characteristically dramatic. It is true that crispness of handling may easily degenerate into the pursuit of mere picture-poster situation; but that is no reason why the artist should not seek to achieve crispness within the bounds prescribed by nature and common sense. There is a drama--I have myself seen it--in which the heroine, fleeing from the villain, is stopped by a yawning chasm. The pursuer is at her heels, and it seems as though she has no resource but to hurl herself into the abyss. But she is accompanied by three Indian servants, who happen, by the mercy of Providence, to be accomplished acrobats. The second climbs on the shoulders of the first, the third on the shoulders of the second; and then the whole trio falls forward across the chasm, the top one grasping some bush or creeper on the other side; so that a living bridge is formed, on which the heroine (herself, it would seem, something of an acrobat) can cross the dizzy gulf and bid defiance to the baffled villain. This is clearly a dramatic crisis within our definition; but, no less clearly, it is not a piece of rational or commendable drama. To say that such-and-such a factor is necessary, or highly desirable, in a dramatic scene, is by no means to imply that every scene which contains this factor is good drama. Let us take the case of another heroine--Nina in Sir Arthur Pinero's _His House in Order_. The second wife of Filmer Jesson, she is continually being offered up as a sacrifice on the altar dedicated to the memory of his adored first wife. Not only her husband, but the relatives of the sainted Annabel, make her life a burden to her. Then it comes to her knowledge--she obtains absolute proof--that Annabel was anything but the saint she was believed to be. By a single word she can overturn the altar of her martyrdom, and shatter the dearest illusion of her persecutors. Shall she speak that word, or shall she not? Here is a crisis which comes within our definition just as clearly as the other;[8] only it happens to be entirely natural and probable, and eminently illustrative of character. Ought we, then, to despise it because of the element it has in common with the picture-poster situation of preposterous melodrama? Surely not. Let those who have the art--the extremely delicate and difficult art--of making drama without the characteristically dramatic ingredients, do so by all means; but let them not seek to lay an embargo on the judicious use of these ingredients as they present themselves in life.

* * * * *

[Footnote 1: _Etudes Critiques_, vol. vii, pp. 153 and 207.]

[Footnote 2: In the most aggravated cases, the misunderstanding is maintained by a persevering use of pronouns in place of proper names: "he" and "she" being taken by the hearer to mean A. and B., when the speaker is in fact referring to X. and Y. This ancient trick becomes the more irritating the longer the _quiproquo_ is dragged out.]

[Footnote 3: The Lowland Scottish villager. It is noteworthy that Mr. J.M. Barrie, who himself belongs to this race, has an almost unique gift of extracting dramatic effect out of taciturnity, and even out of silence.]

[Footnote 4: There is a somewhat similar incident in Clyde Fitch's play, _The Moth and the Flame_.]

[Footnote 5: _Les Corbeaux_, by Henri Becque, might perhaps be classed as a bankruptcy play, though the point of it is that the Vigneron family is not really bankrupt at all, but is unblushingly fleeced by the partner and the lawyer of the deceased Vigneron, who play into each other's hands.]

[Footnote 6: "Dramatic" has recently become one of the most overworked words in the vocabulary of journalism. It constantly appears, not only in the text of the picturesque reporter, but in head-lines and on bulletin-boards. When, on July 20, 1911, Mr. Asquith wrote to Mr. Balfour to inform him that the King had guaranteed the creation of peers, should it prove necessary for the passing of the Parliament Bill, one paper published the news under this head-line: "DRAMATIC ANNOUNCEMENT BY THE PRIME MINISTER," and the parliamentary correspondent of another paper wrote: "With dramatic suddenness and swiftness, the Prime Minister hurled his thunderbolt at the wavering Tory party yesterday." As a matter of fact, the letter was probably not "hurled" more suddenly or swiftly than the most ordinary invitation to dinner: nor can its contents have been particularly surprising to any one. It was probably the conclusiveness, the finality, of the announcement that struck these writers as "dramatic." The letter put an end to all dubiety with a "short, sharp shock." It was, in fact, crisp. As a rule, however, "dramatic" is employed by the modern journalist simply as a rather pretentious synonym for the still more hackneyed "startling."]

[Footnote 7: As a specimen, and a successful specimen, of this new technic, I may cite Miss Elizabeth Baker's very interesting play, _Chains_. There is absolutely no "story" in it, no complication of incidents, not even any emotional tension worth speaking of. Another recent play of something the same type, _The Way the Money Goes_, by Lady Bell, was quite thrilling by comparison. There we saw a workman's wife bowed down by a terrible secret which threatened to wreck her whole life--the secret that she had actually run into debt to the amount of £30. Her situation was dramatic in the ordinary sense of the word, very much as Nora's situation is dramatic when she knows that Krogstad's letter is in Helmer's hands. But in _Chains_ there is not even this simple form of excitement and suspense. A city clerk, oppressed by the deadly monotony and narrowness of his life, thinks of going to Australia--and doesn't go: that is the sum and substance of the action. Also, by way of underplot, a shopgirl, oppressed by the deadly monotony and narrowness of her life, thinks of escaping from it by marrying a middle-aged widower--and doesn't do it. If any one had told the late Francisque Sarcey, or the late Clement Scott, that a play could be made out of this slender material, which should hold an audience absorbed through four acts, and stir them to real enthusiasm, these eminent critics would have thought him a madman. Yet Miss Baker has achieved this feat, by the simple process of supplementing competent observation with a fair share of dramatic instinct.]

[Footnote 8: If the essence of drama is crisis, it follows that nothing can be more dramatic than a momentous choice which may make or mar both the character and the fortune of the chooser and of others. There is an element of choice in all action which is, or seems to be, the product of free will; but there is a peculiar crispness of effect when two alternatives are clearly formulated, and the choice is made after a mental struggle, accentuated, perhaps, by impassioned advocacy of the conflicting interests. Such scenes are _Coriolanus_, v. 3, the scene between Ellida, Wangel, and the Stranger in the last act of _The Lady from the Sea_, and the concluding scene of _Candida_.]

_CHAPTER IV_

THE ROUTINE OF COMPOSITION

As no two people, probably, ever did, or ever will, pursue the same routine in play-making, it is manifestly impossible to lay down any general rules on the subject. There are one or two considerations, however, which it may not be wholly superfluous to suggest to beginners.

An invaluable insight into the methods of a master is provided by the scenarios and drafts of plays published in Henrik Ibsen's _Efterladte Skrifter_. The most important of these "fore-works," as he used to call them, have now been translated under the title of _From Ibsen's Workshop_ (Scribner), and may be studied with the greatest profit. Not that the student should mechanically imitate even Ibsen's routine of composition, which, indeed, varied considerably from play to play. The great lesson to be learnt from Ibsen's practice is that the play should be kept fluid or plastic as long as possible, and not suffered to become immutably fixed, either in the author's mind or on paper, before it has had time to grow and ripen. Many, if not most, of Ibsen's greatest individual inspirations came to him as afterthoughts, after the play had reached a point of development at which many authors would have held the process of gestation ended, and the work of art ripe for birth. Among these inspired afterthoughts may be reckoned Nora's great line, "Millions of women have done that"--the most crushing repartee in literature--Hedvig's threatened blindness, with all that ensues from it, and Little Eyolf's crutch, used to such purpose as we have already seen.

This is not to say that the drawing-up of a tentative scenario ought not to be one of the playwright's first proceedings. Indeed, if he is able to dispense with a scenario on paper, it can only be because his mind is so clear, and so retentive of its own ideas, as to enable him to carry in his head, always ready for reference, a more or less detailed scheme. Go-as-you-please composition may be possible for the novelist, perhaps even for the writer of a one-act play, a mere piece of dialogue; but in a dramatic structure of any considerable extent, proportion, balance, and the interconnection of parts are so essential that a scenario is almost as indispensable to a dramatist as a set of plans to an architect. There is one dramatist of note whom one suspects of sometimes working without any definite scenario, and inventing as he goes along. That dramatist, I need scarcely say, is Mr. Bernard Shaw. I have no absolute knowledge of his method; but if he schemed out any scenario for _Getting Married_ or _Misalliance_, he has sedulously concealed the fact--to the detriment of the plays.[1]

The scenario or skeleton is so manifestly the natural ground-work of a dramatic performance that the playwrights of the Italian _commedia dell' arte_ wrote nothing more than a scheme of scenes, and left the actors to do the rest. The same practice prevailed in early Elizabethan days, as one or two MS. "Plats," designed to be hung up in the wings, are extant to testify. The transition from extempore acting regulated by a scenario to the formal learning of parts falls within the historical period of the German stage. It seems probable that the romantic playwrights of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, both in England and in Spain, may have adopted a method not unlike that of the drama of improvisation, that is to say, they may have drawn out a scheme of entrances and exits, and then let their characters discourse (on paper) as their fancy prompted. So, at least, the copious fluency of their dialogue seems to suggest. But the typical modern play is a much more close-knit organism, in which every word has to be weighed far more carefully than it was by playwrights who stood near to the days of improvisation, and could indulge in "the large utterance of the early gods." Consequently it would seem that, until a play has been thought out very clearly and in great detail, any scheme of entrances and exits ought to be merely provisional and subject to indefinite modification. A modern play is not a framework of story loosely draped in a more or less gorgeous robe of language. There is, or ought to be, a close interdependence between action, character and dialogue, which forbids a playwright to tie his hands very far in advance.

As a rule, then, it would seem to be an unfavourable sign when a drama presents itself at an early stage with a fixed and unalterable outline. The result may be a powerful, logical, well-knit piece of work; but the breath of life will scarcely be in it. Room should be left as long as possible for unexpected developments of character. If your characters are innocent of unexpected developments, the less characters they.[2] Not that I, personally, have any faith in those writers of fiction, be they playwrights or novelists, who contend that they do not speak through the mouths of their personages, but rather let their personages speak through them. "I do not invent or create" I have heard an eminent novelist say: "I simply record; my characters speak and act, and I write down their sayings and doings." This author may be a fine psychologist for purposes of fiction, but I question his insight into his own mental processes. The apparent spontaneity of a character's proceedings is a pure illusion. It means no more than that the imagination, once set in motion along a given line, moves along that line with an ease and freedom which seems to its possessor preternatural and almost uncanny.[3]

Most authors, however, who have any real gift for character-creation probably fall more or less under this illusion, though they are sane enough and modest enough to realize that an illusion it is.[4] A character will every now and then seem to take the bit between his teeth and say and do things for which his creator feels himself hardly responsible. The playwright's scheme should not, then, until the latest possible moment, become so hard and fast as to allow his characters no elbow room for such manifestations of spontaneity. And this is only one of several forms of afterthought which may arise as the play develops. The playwright may all of a sudden see that a certain character is superfluous, or that a new character is needed, or that a new relationship between two characters would simplify matters, or that a scene that he has placed in the first act ought to be in the second, or that he can dispense with it altogether, or that it reveals too much to the audience and must be wholly recast.[5]

These are only a few of the re-adjustments which have constantly to be made if a play is shaping itself by a process of vital growth; and that is why the playwright may be advised to keep his material fluid as long as he can. Ibsen had written large portions of the play now known to us as _Rosmersholm_ before he decided that Rebecca should not be married to Rosmer. He also, at a comparatively late stage, did away with two daughters whom he had at first given to Rosmer, and decided to make her childlessness the main cause of Beata's tragedy.

Perhaps I insist too strongly on the advisability of treating a dramatic theme as clay to be modelled and remodelled, rather than as wood or marble to be carved unalterably and once for all. If so, it is because of a personal reminiscence. In my early youth, I had, like everybody else, ambitions in the direction of play-writing; and it was my inability to keep a theme plastic that convinced me of my lack of talent. It pleased me greatly to draw out a detailed scenario, working up duly to a situation at the end of each act; and, once made, that scenario was like a cast-iron mould into which the dialogue had simply to be poured. The result was that the play had all the merits of a logical, well-ordered essay. My situations worked out like the Q.E.D.'s of Euclid. My characters obstinately refused to come to life, or to take the bit between their teeth. They were simply cog-wheels in a pre-arranged mechanism. In one respect, my two or three plays were models--in respect of brevity and conciseness. I was never troubled by the necessity of cutting down--so cruel a necessity to many playwrights.[6] My difficulty was rather to find enough for my characters to say--for they never wanted to say anything that was not strictly germane to the plot. It was this that made me despair of play-writing, and realize that my mission was to teach other people how to write plays. And, similarly, the aspirant who finds that his people never want to say more than he can allow them to say--that they never rush headlong into blind alleys, or do things that upset the balance of the play and have to be resolutely undone--that aspirant will do well not to be over-confident of his dramatic calling and election. There may be authors who can write vital plays, as Shakespeare is said (on rather poor evidence)[7] to have done, without blotting a line; but I believe them to be rare. In our day, the great playwright is more likely to be he who does not shrink, on occasion, from blotting an act or two.

There is a modern French dramatist who writes, with success, such plays as I might have written had I combined a strong philosophical faculty with great rhetorical force and fluency. The dramas of M. Paul Hervieu have all the neatness and cogency of a geometrical demonstration. One imagines that, for M. Hervieu, the act of composition means merely the careful filling in of a scenario as neat and complete as a schedule.[8] But for that very reason, despite their undoubted intellectual power, M. Hervieu's dramas command our respect rather than our enthusiasm. The dramatist should aim at _being_ logical without _seeming_ so.[9]

It is sometimes said that a playwright ought to construct his play backwards, and even to write his last act first.[10] This doctrine belongs to the period of the well-made play, when climax was regarded as the one thing needful in dramatic art, and anticlimax as the unforgivable sin. Nowadays, we do not insist that every play should end with a tableau, or with an emphatic _mot de la fin_. We are more willing to accept a quiet, even an indecisive, ending.[11] Nevertheless it is and must ever be true that, at a very early period in the scheming of his play, the playwright ought to assure himself that his theme is capable of a satisfactory ending. Of course this phrase does not imply a "happy ending," but one which satisfies the author as being artistic, effective, inevitable (in the case of a serious play), or, in one word, "right." An obviously makeshift ending can never be desirable, either from the ideal or from the practical point of view. Many excellent plays have been wrecked on this rock. The very frequent complaint that "the last act is weak" is not always or necessarily a just reproach; but it is so when the author has clearly been at a loss for an ending, and has simply huddled his play up in a conventional and perfunctory fashion. It may even be said that some apparently promising themes are deceptive in their promise, since they are inherently incapable of a satisfactory ending. The playwright should by all means make sure that he has not run up against one of these blind-alley themes.[12] He should, at an early point, see clearly the end for which he is making, and be sure that it is an end which he actively desires, not merely one which satisfies convention, or which "will have to do."

Some dramatists, when a play is provisionally mapped out, do not attempt to begin at the beginning and write it as a coherent whole, but make a dash first at the more salient and critical scenes, or those which specially attract their imagination. On such a point every author must obviously be a law unto himself. From the theoretical point of view, one can only approve the practice, since it certainly makes for plasticity. It is evident that a detached scene, written while those that lead up to it are as yet but vaguely conceived, must be subject to indefinite modification.[13] In several of Ibsen's very roughest drafts, we find short passages of dialogue sketched out even before the names have been assigned to the characters, showing that some of his earliest ideas came to him, as it were, ready dramatized. One would be tempted to hope much of an author who habitually and unaffectedly thus "lisped in dialogue for the dialogue came."

Ought the playwright, at an early stage in the process of each act, to have the details of its scene clearly before him? Ought he to draw out a scene-plot, and know, from moment to moment, just where each character is, whether He is standing on the hearthrug and She sitting on the settee, or _vice versa_? There is no doubt that furniture, properties, accidents of environment, play a much larger part in modern drama than they did on the Elizabethan, the eighteenth century, or even the early-Victorian stage. Some of us, who are not yet centenarians, can remember to have seen rooms on the stage with no furniture at all except two or three chairs "painted on the flat." Under such conditions, it was clearly useless for the playwright to trouble his head about furniture, and even "positions" might well be left for arrangement at rehearsal. This carelessness of the environment, however, is no longer possible. Whether we like it or no (and some theorists do not like it at all), scenery has ceased to be a merely suggestive background against which the figures stand out in high relief. The stage now aims at presenting a complete picture, with the figures, not "a little out of the picture," but completely in it. This being so, the playwright must evidently, at some point in the working out of his theme, visualize the stage-picture in considerable detail; and we find that almost all modern dramatists do, as a matter of fact, pay great attention to what may be called the topography of their scenes, and the shifting "positions" of their characters. The question is: at what stage of the process of composition ought this visualization to occur? Here, again, it would be absurd to lay down a general rule; but I am inclined to think, both theoretically and from what can be gathered of the practice of the best dramatists, that it is wisest to reserve it for a comparatively late stage. A playwright of my acquaintance, and a very remarkable playwright too, used to scribble the first drafts of his play in little notebooks, which he produced from his pocket whenever he had a moment to spare--often on the top of an omnibus. Only when the first draft was complete did he proceed to set the scenes, as it were, and map out the stage-management. On the other hand, one has heard of playwrights whose first step in setting to work upon a particular act was to construct a complete model of the scene, and people it with manikins to represent the characters. As a general practice, this is scarcely to be commended. It is wiser, one fancies, to have the matter of the scene pretty fully roughed-out before details of furniture, properties, and position are arranged.[14] It may happen, indeed, that some natural phenomenon, some property or piece of furniture, is the very pivot of the scene; in which case it must, of course, be posited from the first. From the very moment of his conceiving the fourth act of _Le Tartufe_, Molière must have had clearly in view the table under which Orgon hides; and Sheridan cannot have got very far with the Screen Scene before he had mentally placed the screen. But even where a great deal turns on some individual object, the detailed arrangements of the scene may in most cases be taken for granted until a late stage in its working out.

One proviso, however, must be made; where any important effect depends upon a given object, or a particular arrangement of the scene, the playwright cannot too soon assure himself that the object comes well within the physical possibilities of the stage, and that the arrangement is optically[15] possible and effective. Few things, indeed, are quite impossible to the modern stage; but there are many that had much better not be attempted. It need scarcely be added that the more serious a play is, or aspires to be, the more carefully should the author avoid any such effects as call for the active collaboration of the stage-carpenter, machinist, or electrician. Even when a mechanical effect can be produced to perfection, the very fact that the audience cannot but admire the ingenuity displayed, and wonder "how it is done," implies a failure of that single-minded attention to the essence of the matter in hand which the dramatist would strive to beget and maintain. A small but instructive example of a difficult effect, such as the prudent playwright will do well to avoid, occurs in the third act of Ibsen's _Little Eyolf_. During the greater part of the act, the flag in Allmers's garden is hoisted to half-mast in token of mourning; until at the end, when he and Rita attain a serener frame of mind, he runs it up to the truck. Now, from the poetic and symbolic point of view, this flag is all that can be desired; but from the practical point of view it presents grave difficulties. Nothing is so pitifully ineffective as a flag in a dead calm, drooping nervelessly against the mast; and though, no doubt, by an ingenious arrangement of electric fans, it might be possible to make this flag flutter in the breeze, the very fact of its doing so would tend to set the audience wondering by what mechanism the effect was produced, instead of attending to the soul-struggles of Rita and Allmers. It would be absurd to blame Ibsen for overriding theatrical prudence in such a case; I merely point out to beginners that it is wise, before relying on an effect of this order, to make sure that it is, not only possible, but convenient from the practical point of view. In one or two other cases Ibsen strained the resources of the stage. The illumination in the last act of _Pillars of Society_ cannot be carried out as he describes it; or rather, if it were carried out on some exceptionally large and well-equipped stage, the feat of the mechanician would eclipse the invention of the poet. On the other hand, the abode of the Wild Duck in the play of that name is a conception entirely consonant with the optics of the theatre; for no detail at all need be, or ought to be, visible, and a vague effect of light is all that is required. Only in his last melancholy effort did Ibsen, in a play designed for representation, demand scenic effects entirely beyond the resources of any theatre not specially fitted for spectacular drama, and possible, even in such a theatre, only in some ridiculously makeshift form.

There are two points of routine on which I am compelled to speak in no uncertain voice--two practices which I hold to be almost equally condemnable. In the first place, no playwright who understands the evolution of the modern theatre can nowadays use in his stage-directions the abhorrent jargon of the early nineteenth century. When one comes across a manuscript bespattered with such cabalistic signs as "R.2.E.," "R.C.," "L.C.," "L.U.E.," and so forth, one sees at a glance that the writer has neither studied dramatic literature nor thought out for himself the conditions of the modern theatre, but has found his dramatic education between the buff covers of _French's Acting Edition_. Some beginners imagine that a plentiful use of such abbreviations will be taken as a proof of their familiarity with the stage; whereas, in fact, it only shows their unfamiliarity with theatrical history. They might as well set forth to describe a modern battleship in the nautical terminology of Captain Marryat. "Right First Entrance," "Left Upper Entrance," and so forth, are terms belonging to the period when there were no "box" rooms or "set" exteriors on the stage, when the sides of each scene were composed of "wings" shoved on in grooves, and entrances could be made between each pair of wings. Thus, "R. 1 E." meant the entrance between the proscenium and the first "wing" on the right, "R. 2 E." meant the entrance between the first pair of "wings," and so forth. "L.U.E." meant the entrance at the left between the last "wing" and the back cloth. Now grooves and "wings" have disappeared from the stage. The "box" room is entered, like any room in real life, by doors or French windows; and the only rational course is to state the position of your doors in your opening stage-direction, and thereafter to say in plain language by which door an entrance or an exit is to be made. In exterior scenes where, for example, trees or clumps of shrubbery answer in a measure to the old "wings," the old terminology may not be quite meaningless; but it is far better eschewed. It is a good general rule to avoid, so far as possible, expressions which show that the author has a stage scene, and not an episode of real life, before his eyes. Men of the theatre are the last to be impressed by theatrical jargon; and when the play comes to be printed, the general reader is merely bewildered and annoyed by technicalities, which tend, moreover, to disturb his illusion.

A still more emphatic warning must be given against another and more recent abuse in the matter of stage-directions. The "L.U.E.'s," indeed, are bound very soon to die a natural death. The people who require to be warned against them are, as a rule, scarcely worth warning. But it is precisely the cleverest people (to use clever in a somewhat narrow sense) who are apt to be led astray by Mr. Bernard Shaw's practice of expanding his stage-directions into essays, disquisitions, monologues, pamphlets. This is a practice which goes far to justify the belief of some foreign critics that the English, or, since Mr. Shaw is in question, let us say the inhabitants of the British Islands, are congenitally incapable of producing a work of pure art. Our novelists--Fielding, Thackeray, George Eliot--have been sufficiently, though perhaps not unjustly, called over the coals for their habit of coming in front of their canvas, and either gossiping with the reader or preaching at him. But, if it be a sound maxim that the novelist should not obtrude his personality on his reader, how much more is this true of the dramatist! When the dramatist steps to the footlights and begins to lecture, all illusion is gone. It may be said that, as a matter of fact, this does not occur: that on the stage we hear no more of the disquisitions of Mr. Shaw and his imitators than we do of the curt, and often non-existent, stage-directions of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. To this the reply is twofold. First, the very fact that these disquisitions are written proves that the play is designed to be printed and read, and that we are, therefore, justified in applying to it the standard of what may be called literary illusion. Second, when a playwright gets into the habit of talking around his characters, he inevitably, even if unconsciously, slackens his endeavour to make them express themselves as completely as may be in their own proper medium of dramatic action and dialogue. You cannot with impunity mix up two distinct forms of art--the drama and the sociological essay or lecture. To Mr. Shaw, of course, much may, and must, be forgiven. His stage-directions are so brilliant that some one, some day, will assuredly have them spoken by a lecturer in the orchestra while the action stands still on the stage. Thus, he will have begotten a bastard, but highly entertaining, form of art. My protest has no practical application to him, for he is a standing exception to all rules. It is to the younger generation that I appeal not to be misled by his seductive example. They have little chance of rivalling him as sociological essayists; but if they treat their art seriously, and as a pure art, they may easily surpass him as dramatists. By adopting his practice they will tend to produce, not fine works of art, but inferior sociological documents. They will impair their originality and spoil their plays in order to do comparatively badly what Mr. Shaw has done incomparably well.

The common-sense rule as to stage directions is absolutely plain; be they short, or be they long, they ought always to be _impersonal_. The playwright who cracks jokes in his stage-directions, or indulges in graces of style, is intruding himself between the spectator and the work of art, to the inevitable detriment of the illusion. In preparing a play for the press, the author should make his stage-directions as brief as is consistent with clearness. Few readers will burden their memory with long and detailed descriptions. When a new character of importance appears, a short description of his or her personal appearance and dress may be helpful to the reader; but even this should be kept impersonal. Moreover, as a play has always to be read before it can be rehearsed or acted, it is no bad plan to make the stage-directions, from the first, such as tend to bring the play home clearly to the reader's mental vision. And here I may mention a principle, based on more than mere convenience, which some playwrights observe with excellent results. Not merely in writing stage-directions, but in visualizing a scene, the idea of the stage should, as far as possible, be banished from the author's mind. He should see and describe the room, the garden, the sea-shore, or whatever the place of his action may be, not as a stage-scene, but as a room, garden, or sea-shore in the real world. The cultivation of this habit ought to be, and I believe is in some cases, a safeguard against theatricality.

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