Arthur Wing Pinero

“ Some of the great men I have mentioned were debarred from success for a reason which is still more simple and obvious—namely, that they had no dramatic talent. But this was not Stevenson's case. No one can doubt that he had in him the ingredients of a dramatist. What is dramatic talent? Is it not the power to project characters, and to cause them to tell an interesting story through the medium of dialogue? This is dramatic talent; and dramatic talent, if I may so express it, is the raw material of theatrical talent. Dramatic, like poetic, talent is born, not made ”

“ When he first attempts drama, what is the theme he chooses? A story of crime, a story of housebreaking, dark lanterns, jemmies, centre-bits, masks, detectives, boozing-kens—in short a melodrama of the deepest dye, exactly after the Surrey, the Coburg, the toy-theatre type. ”

“ If we were as good as we seem, what would the world be? The city has its vizard on, and we—at night we are our naked selves. Trysts are keeping, bottles cracking, knives are stripping; and here is Deacon Brodie flaming forth the man of men he is! How still it is! ... My father and Mary—Well! the day for them, the night for me; the grimy cynical night that makes all cats grey, and all honesties of one complexion. Shall a man not have half a life of his own? ”

“ In short, Admiral Guinea is mainly rhetoric, beautifully done but with no blood in it. The second act—the inn scene—is a monument of long-windedness; while the situation of Gaunt's walking in his sleep—by which Stevenson's friends and admirers, on the occasion of the production of the play in London, set such store—could be cut out of the drama bodily for any bearing it has upon the development of the story or the bringing about of the dénouement. I was a witness of the single performance of this piece in London and can testify to the ineffectiveness of its representation. ”

“ Perhaps you will tell me that the fault lay in some part, not with Stevenson, but with the modern audience. I do not maintain that an individual audience never makes mistakes, or even that the theatrical public in general is a miracle of high intelligence. But I assert unhesitatingly that the instinct by which the public feels that one form of drama, and not another, is what best satisfies its intellectual and spiritual needs at this period or at that is a natural and justified instinct. ”

“ Gaunt was a happy woman, and the saving of yourself into the bargain. Well, now, Captain Gaunt, will you deny another man, and that man a sailor, the very salvation that you had yourself?
Gaunt.
“Salvation, Christopher French, is from above.
Kit.
“Well, sir, that is so; but there’s means, too; and what means so strong as the wife a man has to strive and toil for, and that bears the punishment whenever he goes wrong? Now, sir, I’ve spoke with your old shipmates in the Guinea trade. Hard as nails, they said, and true as the compass: as rough as a slaver but as just as a judge. ”

“ Now, I am not attacking—and I should be sorry if you so understood me—that poetical convention which reigns, for instance, in our great Elizabethan drama. I am not claiming any absolute and inherent superiority for our modern realistic technique, though I do not think it quite so inferior as some critics would have us believe. But what I do say is that the dramatist is bound to select his particular form of technique, master, and stick to it. He must not jumble up two styles and jump from one to the other. This is what the authors of Beau Austin have not realized. ”

“ I prefer, then, to read you, not any single scene, but a whole drama which, as Stevenson assures us in his "Chapter on Dreams," came to him in the visions of the night. He is showing how his Little People—his Brownies, as he calls them; the Brownies of the brain—go on working in sleep, independently of the dreamer's volition, and how in his case they would sometimes hit upon strange felicities. "This dreamer," he says—and by "this dreamer" he means himself—"this dreamer has encountered some trifling vicissitudes of fortune. ”

“ In Beau Austin we have certainly Stevenson's nearest approach to an effective drama. In spite of its inacceptable theme, it is a charming play and really interesting on the stage. A little more careful handling of the last act might have rendered it wholly successful. But still we see traces of the old crudity of technique of the toy-theatre, and still the author evidently conceived that the essence of the drama resides in rhetoric, in fine speeches. ”

“ Fifty years hence the formula of to-day will doubtless be as antiquated and ineffective as the formula of fifty years ago; but it is imposed by a natural fitness upon the dramatist of to-day, just as, if he wants to travel long distances, he must be content to take the railway train, and cannot either ride in a stagecoach or fly in an air-ship. As a personal freak, of course, he may furbish up a stage-coach or construct—at his risk and peril—an airship. Such freaks occur in the dramatic world from time to time, and are often interesting—sometimes, but very rarely, successful. ”

“ This question seems to me all the more worth asking because Stevenson’s case is by no means a singular one. There is hardly a novelist or poet of the whole nineteenth century who does not stand in exactly the same position. They have one and all attempted to write for the stage, and it is scarcely too much to say that they have one and all failed, not only to achieve theatrical success but even, in any appreciable degree, to enrich our dramatic literature. Some people, perhaps, will claim Shelley and Browning as exceptions. ”

“ I say, then, that even in Beau Austin, far superior though it be to his other plays, Stevenson shows that he had not studied and realized the conditions of the problem he was handling—the problem of how to tell a dramatic story truly, convincingly and effectively on the modern stage—-the problem of disclosing the workings of the human heart by methods which shall not destroy the illusion which a modern audience expects to enjoy in the modern theatre. ”

“ When Stevenson says "The theatre is the gold mine," and when Mr. Graham Balfour tells us that Stevenson felt that "the prizes of the dramatist are out of all proportion to the payment of the man of letters," the implication obviously is that the gold mine can be easily worked, that the prizes are disproportionate to the small amount of pains necessary in order to grasp them. That was evidently the belief of these two men of distinguished talent; and that was precisely where they made the mistake. The art of drama, in its higher forms, is not, and can never be, easy ”

“ There are two parts of technique, which I may perhaps call its strategy and its tactics. In strategy—in the general laying out of a play, these transpontine dramatists were often, as I have said, more than tolerably skilful; but in tactics, in the art of getting their characters on and off the stage, of conveying information to the audience, and so forth, they were almost incredibly careless and conventional. They would make a man, as in the Chinese theatre, tell the whole story of his life in a soliloquy ”

“ For theatrical talent consists in the power of making your characters, not only tell a story by means of dialogue, but tell it in such skilfully-devised form and order as shall, within the limits of an ordinary theatrical representation, give rise to the greatest possible amount,of that peculiar kind of emotional effect, the production of which is the one great function of the theatre. Now, dramatic talent Stevenson undoubtedly possessed in abundance ”

“ Now let me recall to your mind in this connection the "mercantile delight" which Stevenson professes to have felt in the dream-drama enacted by the "Brownies of his brain." How exactly that chimes in with his own remark to his father, and with his biographer's frank avowal of the motive which inspired his collaboration with Mr. Henley. Ladies and gentlemen, I am the last to pretend that it is a disgrace to an artist to desire an adequate, an ample, pecuniary reward for his labours. ”

“ It is the height of the author’s art, according to the old maxim, that the ordinary spectator should never be clearly conscious of the skill and travail that have gone to the making of the finished product. But the artist who would achieve a like feat must realize its difficulties, or what are his chances of success? Stevenson, with all his genius, made the mistake of approaching the theatre as a toy to be played with. The facts of the case were against him, for the theatre is not a toy ”

“ There is only one exception to the rule that during the nineteenth century no poet or novelist of the slightest eminence made any success upon the stage, and even that solitary exception is a dubious one. ”

“ I'm a man once more till morning."
But it is needless to dwell long on Deacon Brodie—ripeness of stagecraft is not to be looked for in a first attempt, a prentice piece. The play is chiefly interesting as exemplifying the boyish spirit of gleeful bravado in which Stevenson approached the stage. Again I say his instinct was to play with it, as he had played, when a boy, with his pasteboard theatre.
In Admiral Guinea—a much better drama—the influence of his penny-plain-twopence-coloured studies is, if possible, still more apparent. Deacon Brodie was the melodrama of crime ”

“ I know I did him good; I will still believe I did him good; I made him honest and kind and a true man; alas, and could not guide myself! And now, how will he despise me! For he shall know; if I die, he shall know all; I could not live, and not be true with him."
She produces a necklace which she has discovered in the possession of the maid, a necklace with which the woman has been bribed by Beau Austin as an inducement to her to keep out of the way upon a certain occasion. Dorothy contemplates the trinket and says ”

“ No amount of talent, of genius, will, under modern conditions at any rate, enable the dramatist to dispense with a concentration of thought, a sustained intensity of mental effort, very different, if I may venture to say so, from the exertion demanded in turning out an ordinary novel. ”

“ How artless, for instance, is the scene of exposition, between the heroine's aunt, Miss Foster, and the maid, Barbara, in which half the time Miss Foster is telling Barbara things she knows perfectly well already, and the other half saying things she would never have said to a maid. Then, when it comes to revealing to us the recesses of Dorothy's heart, what do the authors do? ”

“ Three plays? More—four, five. But two of the five I propose to disregard entirely. One, The Hanging Judge, written in collaboration with Mrs. Stevenson, has never been published and may therefore be regarded as exempt from criticism. The other, Macaire, does not profess to be an original work except in details of dialogue. We will, therefore, with your permission, put that, also, aside and concentrate our attention on the three original plays—Deacon Brodie, Beau Austin, and Admiral Guinea—which Stevenson produced in collaboration with Mr. ”