Altho this effort to kill two birds with one stone is more frequent of late than it used to be, it is not at all new—indeed it existed before the rise of prose fiction. The dramatic poets of Greece borrowed episodes from the earliest epic poets. Centuries later Shakspere laid violent hands on Italian tales and on English romances. On the other hand, while it must be admitted that the dramatizing of novels has been far more prevalent in the past than the novelizing of plays, this latter practise, suddenly popular in the twentieth century, was not unknown in the centuries that preceded ours. For example, Le Sage levied upon the Spanish playwrights for many of the characters and the situations he needed, for his rambling, picaresque novels, 'Gil Blas' and its sister stories. Another illustration can be found in England earlier than any in France; and before the play of 'Pericles,' which Shakspere seems to have edited and improved, was printed and perhaps even before it was performed, it was novelized by an obscure writer named Wilkins, who was very probably the author of the original version of the straggling piece that Shakspere revised. Thru the long years prose fiction and the drama have struggled with each other for the favor of the public, and each of them has always been willing to borrow from its rival whenever it found material fitted for its own special purpose.
II
But altho the dramatizing of novels was less uncommon a century or two ago than the novelizing of plays, neither was frequent and neither of them was in any way prohibited by law. That is to say, the novel and the play were held to be so different that the novelist could not prevent the dramatist from borrowing his stories, and the playwright could not forbid the writer of prose fiction from taking over his plots. Even the dramatizing of novels was so uncommon that the earlier story-tellers were not moved to protest when they saw their fictions employed by the playwrights; in fact, they were often inclined to accept this as a compliment to their original invention. Marmontel, for instance, in the preface to a late edition of his 'Moral Tales,' pointed with pride to the fact that one of these prose narratives had been turned into a play, and suggested complacently that there were other stories in his collection worthy of the same fate. Tennyson borrowed the story of his 'Dora' from Miss Mitford; and Charles Reade had no scruple in making a play out of Tennyson's poem. It must be admitted that Reade's attitude was rather inconsistent, for he writhed in pain when one of his own novels was cut into dialog and put on the stage without his permission, and yet he himself made plays out of novels by Anthony Trollope and by Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett without asking their leave, and without heed to their subsequent protests against his high-handed proceeding. Apparently, when he was the aggressor he thought that he was doing a service to his victims.
When Reade was guilty of this offense against the developing literary morals of the nineteenth century, he was probably within his legal rights, since the British law had not then advanced to the point of recognizing the author's complete ownership of the fiction he had created. This defect has been remedied at last, and in the existing copyright and stage-right legislation of Great Britain and the United States authors are assumed to reserve to themselves every privilege which they do not specifically deprive themselves of; and they need no longer announce that they desire to retain all rights for their own profit. Both in the British code and in the American the novelist has now the sole privilege of making a play out of his story, and the dramatist has the sole privilege of making a novel out of his play.Dramatizationis a word of respectable antiquity, and the corresponding word,novelization, has now been legally recognized as a distinctive term. The authors had felt a wrong when others could legally make money out of a plot they had invented; and they asserted a moral right to control their own works whatever might be the form of presentation. The progress of legal reform was slow, as it usually is, but it was also certain. The moral right has now become a legal right of which the original author may avail himself or not, as he pleases. He may, if he chooses, dramatize his own novel and novelize his own play; or, if he prefers, he can sell the permission to rehandle his material to a professional playwright or to a professional storyteller.
III
There is one peculiar distinction between the novel and the play which Professor Bliss Perry did not emphasize. A novel may please long, and please many when it is only a study of character, like the 'Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard' of M. Anatole France, or when it is only the record of a series of adventures and misadventures passing before the eyes of the chief personage, like the 'Huckleberry Finn' of Mark Twain. A play, on the other hand, is likely to fail to please audiences in the theater unless it sets before the spectators a clearly defined struggle, a conflict of desires, a stark assertion of the human will. That is to say, the drama must deal with a struggle, and the novel need not. The drama must be dynamic and the novel may be static—if these scientific terms may be employed without pedantry. Therefore, while any play may be novelized, with more or less chance of pleasing its new public, if the task is skilfully accomplished, only those novels can be successfully dramatized which happen to present an essential struggle and to display the collision of contending volitions. Any dramatization of the 'Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard' or of 'Huckleberry Finn,' of 'Gil Blas' or of the 'Pickwick Papers,' is foredoomed to failure, for these prose fictions do not contain the stuff out of which a vital play could be made. But 'Jane Eyre,' for example, and the 'Tale of Two Cities,' and 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' do possess this necessary dramatic element, and they can be made into plays with a prospect of pleasing audiences in the theater.
Even when the novel chances to have the essential struggle which the drama demands, the task of adapting it to the stage is not so easy as the non-expert supposes. At first sight it may seem as if there ought to be very little difficulty in turning a novel into a play. There is a story ready-made, situations in abundance, and characters endowed with the breath of life. Yet as a matter of fact, it is harder to make a play out of a novel than it is to write an original play. The immediate danger before the theatrical adapter is that he may be tempted to serve up the story merely as a panorama of successive episodes instead of casting out resolutely everything, however good in itself, which does not bear directly upon the fundamental conflict. This is one reason why the novelist had better leave the work of dramatization to an experienced playwright, who will ruthlessly omit many an episode that the story-teller could not bring himself to discard. In fact, it is hard even for the expert adapter to disentangle the special situations of a novel which alone are available in a play, and he is often tempted to retain much that he had better leave out.
Perhaps it is not too daring a paradox to suggest that a prose fiction is most likely to be made into a good play when the playwright has not read the book he is dramatizing, but has only been told the story, so that he is free to handle the situations afresh in accord with the conditions of dramatic art, and free to discard the special developments chosen by the novelist in accord with the very different conditions of narrative art. The best version of Mrs. Henry Wood's 'East Lynne' is the French play, 'Miss Multon,' by Adolphe Belot and Eugène Nus; and neither of the French collaborators knew any more about the English novel than its bare story, which was told to one of them by a French actress, who could read English. Now and again a clever playwright, even when he has the disadvantage of complete familiarity with the novel, can break loose from it and yet preserve its full flavor; and this is what Mr. George M. Cohan was able to do in the play wherein he presented the leading characters of Mr. George Randolph Chester's 'Get-Rich-Quick-Wallingford' in a set of situations very different from those in the original story.
Thus we see that only a few novels are really fit to be dramatized, and that even these are often dramatized ineffectively because the playwright has followed the story-teller too closely instead of putting the plot back into solution, so to speak, and letting it recrystallize in dramatic form. The novelizer has a larger liberty since every play contains a story and characters capable of being transferred to prose fiction. But his task has its equivalent danger, and the writer of the narrative may be content merely to tread in the footsteps of the dramatist, and to do no more than write out more amply the dialog and the stage business, instead of reconceiving the plot afresh to tell it more in accord with the divergent principles of the art of prose fiction. The limitations of time to "the two hours' traffic of the stage" compel the dramatist to extreme compression; his dialogs must be far compacter and more pregnant than is becoming in the more leisurely novel, where the author can take all the time there is. Moreover, the playwright often does no more than allude to episodes which it would profit the novelist to present in detail to his readers; and the adroit novelizer will be quick to seize upon hints of this sort to amplify into chapters containing interesting material for which the original play supplied only the most summary suggestion.
IV
The novelizing of plays is frequent and profitable in America in these early years of the twentieth century; and it had been attempted infrequently even in the seventeenth century. Yet only one of these novelized plays has succeeded in winning an honorable place for itself in prose fiction. This is the charming tale of theatrical life in the eighteenth century, 'Peg Woffington,' which Charles Reade made out of the comedy of 'Masks and Faces,' written by him in collaboration with Tom Taylor. Reade took the liberty of novelizing this comedy without asking Taylor's permission, and even without consulting his collaborator; and all the comment that need be made is that the procedure was truly characteristic of Reade's lordly attitude toward others—an attitude taken by him on many other occasions. But whatever injustice he did to his fellow worker, he did none to the joint product of their invention; he transmuted a play into a novel with due appreciation of the demands of the other art, and he produced a fascinating tale with a fascinating heroine, which has been read by thousands who have had no suspicion that Peg Woffington had originally figured in a comedy.
Charles Reade was able to accomplish this feat because he was more skilful as a novelist than as a dramatist, altho he fancied himself rather as a maker of plays than as a writer of stories. More than once did he attempt to repeat this early success in winning two prizes with the same horse. He took the 'Pauvres de Paris' of Brisebarre and Nus—the same play which Dion Boucicault had adapted as the 'Streets of New York'—and made a version which he called 'Gold,' under which name it had a few performances. He had materially modified the French plot in his English play; and he got still further away from Brisebarre and Nus, when he novelized 'Gold,' and called it 'Hard Cash,' a matter-of-fact romance. Later he dramatized this novel of his, and the resulting play did not bear any close resemblance to the 'Pauvres de Paris.'
Reade also collaborated a few years later with Henry Pettitt in a piece called 'Singleheart and Doubleface,' which he promptly proceeded to novelize—again without consulting his partner. For this indelicacy, swift vengeance followed, as the British novel, being then unprotected by copyright in the United States, was immediately dramatized by Messrs. George H. Jessop and William Gill. It may be noted here casually that another of Reade's romances, 'White Lies,' afterward dramatized by him, had been originally novelized from a French play called the 'Château de Grantier,' written by Auguste Maquet (the ally of Dumas in the 'Three Guardsmen' and 'Monte Cristo'). It is not a little surprising that a man like Reade, who prided himself on his originality, and who even went so far as to accuse George Eliot of stealing his thunder, should have been willing to call so frequently on the aid of collaborators, and to derive so much of his material from foreign sources.
The only other author who has ventured to turn a play into a novel, and then back into a play varying widely from the original piece, is Sir James Barrie, and what he did was not quite what Reade had done. Sir James wrote a charming story, called the 'Little White Bird,' and he found in his own prose fiction part of the material out of which he was moved later to make a charming play, called 'Peter Pan.' For reasons best known to himself, but deplored by all who are interested in the progress of the English drama, Sir James Barrie has chosen to publish only a few of his comedies. Yet he met the demands of a multitude of readers by borrowing from his fantastic piece a part of the material which he made into a delightful tale, called 'Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens.' These successive rehandlings of an idea, first in prose fiction, then in dramatic form, and finally again in prose fiction, were possible only to a novelist who was also a dramatist—to an author who had mastered the secrets of two different methods of story-telling, the method of the theater and the method of the library.
V
The novelist-dramatist of this type is a comparatively new figure in literature. Formerly there was a sharp line of cleavage between the man who wrote novels and the man who wrote plays, altho one or the other might be lured on occasion into a sporadic raid into the territory of the other. During three-quarters of the nineteenth century prose fiction reigned supreme in every modern literature except that of France, and the novelists were rather inclined to look down on the playwrights, and to dismiss the drama as an inferior form, likely to be absolutely superseded by prose fiction. But toward the end of the century there began to be visible signs of an awakening interest in the drama, and also of a slackening interest in prose fiction. The novelists of the twentieth century, so far from holding the drama to be an inferior form, are discovering that it is at least a more difficult form, and therefore artistically more attractive. As a result of this discovery not a few novelists have turned playwrights, taking the pains to learn the principles of the more dangerous art of play-making. Sir James Barrie in England, M. Paul Hervieu in France, Herr Sudermann in Germany, and Signor d'Annunzio in Italy may not have abandoned altogether the prose fiction in which they first won fame, but at least they now devote the major part of their energies to the drama. It may be recalled that Clyde Fitch began his literary career as a writer of short stories, and that Mr. Bernard Shaw originally emerged to view as the author of a novel.
On the other hand, it must be noted as significant that the playwrights are not tempted to turn novelists; they seem to be satisfied with their own art as the more exacting, and therefore the more interesting. M. Rostand and M. Maeterlinck, Sir Arthur Pinero and Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, Mr. William Gillette and Mr. Augustus Thomas have not been lured from the drama into prose fiction. The novel is a loose form which makes only lax demands on its practitioners, and which does not require an artist always to do his best. The play has a severe technic, and it tolerates no carelessness of construction. The more gifted a story-teller may be, and the more artistic, the more probable it is that in the immediate future he will seek to express himself in the drama, even if he is also moved now and again to return to the easier path of prose fiction.
And this raises another interesting point. Now that the drama is rising again into rivalry with prose fiction, is not the playwright who allows his piece to be novelized a traitor to his cause? Is he not, in fact, confessing that he esteems the play inferior to the novel? Apparently this is the attitude taken by the more prominent dramatists of the day; most of them publish their plays to be read, and few of them allow these plays to be novelized—altho they might find a superior profit if they descended to this. It is an unfortunate fact that the public which is eager to read prose fiction is not so eager to read the drama. In the dearth of dramatic literature in our language during the nineteenth century, the public lost the habit of reading plays, a habit possessed by the public of the eighteenth century before the vogue of the novel had been established in consequence of the overwhelming popularity of Scott, followed speedily by that of Dickens and Thackeray.
Yet there are signs that the general reader is slowly recovering the ability to find pleasure in the perusal of a play. The social dramas of Ibsen have, most of them, been performed here and there in the theaters of Great Britain and the United States; but they have been read by thousands who have had no opportunity to see them on the stage. So it is with the plays of Mr. Bernard Shaw, most of which have also appeared in our playhouses. So it is with the plays of M. Maeterlinck, only a few of which have been produced in the American theater. In time, it seems highly probable that the reading public will extend as glad a welcome to a play by Mr. Galsworthy or by Mr. Booth Tarkington as to one of their novels. But this happy state can be brought about only if the dramatists resolutely refrain from novelizing their plays themselves, and from authorizing novelization by others.
(1913.)
VIIWOMEN DRAMATISTS
WOMEN DRAMATISTSI
Tosome of the more ardent advocates of the theory that women are capable of rivaling men in every one of the arts it is a little surprising, not to say disconcerting, that there are so few female playwrights. The drama is closely akin to the novel, since it is another form of story-telling; and in the telling of stories women have been abundantly productive from a time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary. And as performers on the stage women have achieved indisputable eminence; in fact, acting is probably the earliest of the arts (as possibly it is still the only one) in which women have won their way to the very front rank; and in the nineteenth century there were two tragic actresses, Mrs. Siddons and Rachel, certainly not inferior in power and in elevation to the most distinguished of tragic actors. Why is it, then, that women story-tellers have not thrust themselves thru the open stage door to become more effective competitors of the men playwrights?
Before considering this question, it may be well to record that women playwrights have appeared sporadically both in French literature and in English. In France Madeleine Béjart, whose sister Molière married, was credited with the authorship of more than one play; and in the last hundred years George Sand and Mme. de Girardin brought out comedies and dramas, several of which succeeded in establishing themselves in the repertory of the Comédie-Française. In England at one time or another plays of an immediate popularity were produced by Mrs. Aphra Behn, Mrs. Centlivre, and Mrs. Inchbald; and in America Mrs. Bateman's 'Self,' and Mrs. Mowatt's 'Fashion' held the stage for several seasons, while few of recent successes in the New York theaters had a more delightful freshness or a more alluring fantasy than Mrs. Gates's 'Poor Little Rich Girl,' and few of them have dealt more boldly with a burning question than Miss Ford's 'Polygamy.' These examples of woman's competence to compose plays with vitality enough to withstand the ordeal by fire before the footlights are evidence that if there exists any prejudice against the female dramatist it can be overcome. They are evidence, also, that women are not debarred from the competition; and fairness requires the record here that, when Mr. Winthrop Ames proffered a prize for an American play, this was awarded to a woman.
But to grant equality of opportunity is not to confer equality of ability, and when we call the roll of the dramatists who have given luster to French literature and to English, we discover that this list is not enriched by the name of any woman. The fame of George Sand is not derived from her contributions to dramatic literature, and the contributions of Mrs. Behn, Mrs. Centlivre, and Mrs. Inchbald, of Mrs. Bateman and Mrs. Mowatt, entitle them to take rank only among the minor playwrights of their own generations; and to say this is to say that their plays are now familiar only to devoted specialists in the annals of the stage, and that the general reader could not give the name of a single piece from the pen of any one of these enterprising ladies. In other words, the female playwrights are so few and so unimportant that a conscientious historian of either French or English dramatic literature might almost neglect them altogether without seriously invalidating his survey. Perhaps the only English titles that are more than mere items in a barren catalog are Mrs. Centlivre's 'Wonder' and Mrs. Cowley's 'Belle's Stratagem'; and the French pieces of female authorship which might protest against exclusion are almost as few—Mme. de Girardin's 'La Joie fait Peur,' and George Sand's 'Marquis de Villemer' and 'Mariage de Victorine.'
Indeed, the women playwrights of the past and of the present might be two or three times more numerous than they are, and two or three times more important without even treading upon the heels of the male play-makers. This is an incontrovertible fact; yet it is equally indisputable that as performers in the theater women are competitors whom men respect and with whom they have to reckon, and that as story-tellers women are as popular and as prolific as men. And here we are brought back again to the question with which this inquiry began: Why is it then that women have not been as popular and as prolific in telling stories on the stage? Why cannot they write a play as well as they can act in it?
One answer to this question has been volunteered by a woman who succeeded as an actress, and who did not altogether fail as a dramatic poetess, altho she came in later life to have little esteem for her earlier attempts at play-writing. It is in her 'Records of a Girlhood' that Fanny Kemble expressed the conviction that it was absolutely impossible for a woman ever to be a great dramatist, because "her physical organization" was against it. "After all, it is great nonsense saying that intellect is of no sex. The brain is, of course, of the same sex as the rest of the creature; beside the original female nature, the whole of our training and education, our inevitable ignorance of common life and general human nature, and the various experiences of existence from which we are debarred with the most sedulous care, is insuperably against it"—that is, against the possibility of a really searching tragedy, or of a really liberal comedy ever being composed by a woman. To this rather sweeping denial of the dramaturgic gift to women Fanny Kemble added an apt suggestion, that "perhaps some of the manly, wicked queens, Semiramis, Cleopatra, could have written plays—but they lived their tragedies instead of writing of them."
II
At first sight it may seem as if one of Fanny Kemble's assertions—that no woman can be a dramatist because of her inevitable ignorance of life and of the experiences of existence from which she is debarred—is disproved by the undeniable triumphs of women in acting, and by the indisputable victories won by women in the field of prose fiction, achieved in spite of these admitted limitations. But on a more careful consideration it will appear that as an actress woman is called upon only to embody and to interpret characters conceived by man with the aid of his wider and deeper knowledge of life. And when we analyze the most renowned of the novels by which women have attained fame, we discover that the best of these deal exclusively with the narrower regions of conduct, and with the more restricted areas of life with which she is most familiar as a woman, and that when she seeks to go outside her incomplete experience of existence she soon makes us aware of the gaps in her equipment.
One of the strongest stories ever written by a woman is the 'Jane Eyre' of Charlotte Brontë; and the inexperience of the forlorn and lonely spinster is almost ludicrously made manifest in her portrayal of Rochester, a superbly projected figure, not sustained by intimate knowledge of the type to which he belongs. Charlotte Brontë knew Jane Eyre inside and out; but she did not know even the outside of Rochester. Because women are debarred with the most sedulous care from various experiences of existence they can never know men as men can know women. This is the basis for the shrewd remark that in dealing with affairs of the heart men novelists rarely tell all they know, whereas women novelists are often tempted to tell more than they know. Even women like George Eliot and George Sand, who have more or less broken out of bounds, are still more or less confined to their individual associations with the other sex; and they lack the inexhaustible fund of information about life which is the common property of men.
Women have most satisfactorily displayed their special endowment for fiction not in what must be called the dramatic novel, not in soul-searching studies like the 'Scarlet Letter' and 'Anna Karénine,' but rather in less solidly supported inquiries into the interrelation of character and social convention, as in 'Pride and Prejudice' and 'Castle Rackrent.' It would be unfair to assert that Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen are superficial; yet it is not unfair to say that they do not explore deeply, and that they do not deal with what Stevenson called the great passionate crises of existence, "when duty and inclination come nobly to the grapple." This is the essential struggle of the drama; and the authoress of 'Jane Eyre' sought to present it boldly, even if she was handicapped by insufficient information; and this essential struggle was what Charlotte Brontë herself missed in Jane Austen: "The passions are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood. What sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study; but what throbs fast and full, tho hidden, what the blood rushes thru, what is the unseen seat of life, and the sentient target of death—this Miss Austen ignores."
Jane Austen spent her great gift on the carving of cherry-stones, laboring with exquisite art to lift into temporary importance the eternally unimportant; and Charlotte Brontë, in her ampler endeavor, was ever hampered by inadequacy of knowledge. George Eliot, with wider opportunity than either of these predecessors, profited by both of them and borrowed their processes in turn; she was broader than they were, and bolder in her attack on life; her effort is more strenuously intellectual than theirs, and therefore a little fatiguing, and this is perhaps why her vogue seems now to be evaporating slowly. And when all is said, no one of these clever story-tellers really attains to an altitude of accomplishment where she can fairly be considered as a competitor of the mighty masters of prose fiction. No woman novelist is to be ranked among the supreme leaders, worthy to stand by the side of Cervantes and Fielding, Balzac and Tolstoi. The merits of the women novelists are many and they are beyond cavil; but no one of them has yet been able to handle a large theme powerfully and to interpret life with the unhasting and unresting strength which is the distinguishing mark of the mightier masters of fiction.
III
Furthermore, we find in the works of female storytellers not only a lack of largeness in topic, but also a lack of strictness in treatment. Their stories, even when they charm us with apt portraiture and with adroit situation, are likely to lack solidity of structure. 'Castle Rackrent,' an illuminating picture of human nature in a special environment, is a straggling sequence of episodes; 'Pride and Prejudice' is almost plotless, when considered as a whole; and 'Romola' is ill-proportioned and misshapen. No woman has ever achieved the elaborate solidity of 'Tom Jones,' the superb structure of the 'Scarlet Letter,' or the simple unity of 'Smoke.' And here we come close to the most obvious explanation of the dearth of female dramatists—in the relative incapacity of women to build a plan, to make a single whole compounded of many parts, and yet dominated in every detail by but one purpose.
The drama demands a plot, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and with everything rigorously excluded which does not lead from the beginning thru the middle to the end. The novel refuses to submit itself to any such requirement; it can make shift to exist without an articulated skeleton. There is little or no plot, there is only a casual succession of more or less unrelated incidents in 'Gil Blas' and 'Tristram Shandy,' in the 'Pickwick Papers,' and in Huckleberry Finn.' The novel may be invertebrate and yet survive, whereas the play without a backbone is dead—which is biologic evidence that the drama is higher in the scale of creation than prose fiction.
"The novel, as practised in English, is the perfect paradise of the loose end," so Mr. Henry James once pointed out, whereas "the play consents to the logic of but one way, mathematically right, and with the loose end as gross an impertinence on its surface and as grave a dishonor as the dangle of a snippet of silk or wool on the right side of a tapestry." The action of a story may be what its writer pleases, and he can reduce it to a minimum or embroider it at will with airy arabesques of incessant digression; but the plot of a play must be a straight line, the shortest distance between two points, the point of departure and the point of arrival. And it is because of this imperative necessity for integrity of construction that the drama is more difficult than prose fiction. Since a part of our pleasure in any art is derived from our consciousness of the obstacles to be overcome by the artist, and from our recognition of the skill displayed by him in vanquishing them, we have here added evidence in behalf of the belief in the artistic superiority of the play over the novel merely as a form of expression.
The drama may be likened to the sister art of architecture in its insistent demand for plan and proportion. A play is a poor thing, likely to expire of inanition, unless its author is possessed of the ability to build a plot which shall be strong and simple and clear, and unless he has the faculty of enriching it with abundant accessories in accord with a scheme thought out in advance and adhered to from start to finish. With this constructive skill women seem to be less liberally endowed than men; at least, they have not yet revealed themselves as architects, altho they have won a warm welcome as decorators—a subordinate art for which they are fitted by their superior delicacy and by their keener interest in details. Much of the pervasive charm of many of the cleverest novels of female authorship lies in the persistent ingenuity with which the lesser points of character, of conduct, and of manners are presented. In Jane Austen, in Maria Edgeworth, and often also in George Eliot, we are delighted by little miracles of observation, and by little triumphs in the microscopic analysis of subtle and unsuspected motives. But in these very books, the story, however felicitously decorated, is not sustained by a severe architectural framework. And it is this firm certainty of structure that the drama imperatively demands.
In other words, women seem to be less often dowered than men with what Tyndall called "scientific imagination," with the ability to put together a whole in which the several parts are never permitted to distend a disproportionate space. This scientific imagination is essential to the playwright; and the novelist is fortunate if he also possesses it, altho it is not essential to him. A novel may be only a straggling succession of episodes; a play must have fundamental unity. A novelist may fire with a shot-gun and bring down his bird on the wing, whereas a playwright needs a rifle to arrest the charging lion.
It is a significant fact that only once was George Sand really triumphant as a dramatist, and that this single success was won by the secret aid of the cleverest of contemporary playwrights. She was passionately devoted to the theater; she had many intimate friends among the stage-folk; she delighted in private theatricals; and she wrote a dozen or more plays, several of them dramatized from her own stories. The sole play which held its own on the stage in rivalry with the best work of Augier and Dumasfilswas the 'Marquis de Villemer,' and it owed its more fortunate fate to the gratuitous and unacknowledged collaboration of Dumasfils.
For the author of the 'Mariage de Victorine,' the author of the 'Dame aux Camélias' had a high esteem, which he took occasion to express more than once in his critical papers; and she regarded him with semi-maternal affection, often inviting him to join the little parties at Nohant. On one of his visits he heard her say that she was intending to dramatize the 'Marquis de Villemer,' but that she did not quite see her way to compact its leisurely action in conformity with the rigid restrictions of the stage. That evening he borrowed a copy of the novel to take up to his own room; and the next morning when he came down to the late breakfast, he laid before her half a dozen sheets of paper, whereon she found a complete scenario for her guidance, an adroit division of her novel into acts and scenes, needing only to be clothed with dialog. With his intuitive understanding of the principles of play-making, and with his masterly power of construction, he had solved her problems for her and made it easy for her to write the play.
Here is an unexampled kind of collaboration, since the invention of the story, the creation of the characters, the dialog to be spoken—these were all due to George Sand alone; but the concentrating of the interest, the heightening of the personages of the narrative to adjust themselves to the perspective of the theater, the serried and irresistible momentum of the action—these were the contribution of Dumas, a freewill offering to his old friend. The piece that she wrote was hers and hers alone, and yet it had a dramatic vitality lacking in all her other plays, because a man had intervened at the right moment to provide the architectural framework which the woman could not have bestowed upon it, however felicitous she might be in the decoration.
IV
Thus it is that we can supply two answers to the two questions posed at the beginning of this inquiry: Why is it that there are so few women playwrights? And why is it that the infrequent plays produced by women playwrights rarely attain high rank? The explanation is to be found in two facts: first, the fact that women are likely to have only a definitely limited knowledge of life, and, second, the fact that they are likely also to be more or less deficient in the faculty of construction. The first of these disabilities may tend to disappear if ever the feminist movement shall achieve its ultimate victory; and the second may depart also whenever women submit themselves to the severe discipline which has compelled men to be more or less logical.
(1915.)
VIIITHE EVOLUTION OF SCENE-PAINTING
THE EVOLUTION OF SCENE-PAINTINGI
Onlyrecently have students of the stage seized the full significance of the fact that dramatic literature is always conditioned by the circumstances of the special theater for which it was designed. They are at last beginning to perceive that they need to know how a play was originally represented by actors before an audience and in a theater to enable them to appreciate adequately the technical skill of the playwright who composed it. The dramatist is subdued to what he works in; and he can accomplish only that which is possible in the particular playhouse for which his pieces were destined. For the immense open air auditorium of ancient Athens, with its orchestra leveled at the foot of the curving hillside whereon thousands of spectators took their places, the dramatic poet had to select a simple story and to build massively. For the unadorned platform of the Tudor theater, with its arras pendent from the gallery above the stage, and with its restless groundlings standing in the yard, the playwright was compelled to heap up swift episodes violent with action. For the eighteenth-century playhouse, with its apron projecting far beyond the line of the curtain, the dramatist was tempted to revel in ornate eloquence and in elaborate wit. And nowadays the dramatic author utilizes skilfully all the manifold resources of the twentieth-century picture-frame stage, not only to give external reality to the several places where his story is supposed to be laid, but also to lend to these stage-sets the characteristic atmosphere demanded by his theme.
Merely literary critics, secluded in their studies, intent upon the poetry of a play and desirous of deducing its philosophy, rarely seek to visualize a performance on the stage, and they are, therefore, inclined to be disdainful of the purely theatrical conditions to which its author has had, perforce, to adjust his work. As a result they sometimes misunderstand the dramatic poet's endeavors, and they often misinterpret his intentions. On the other hand, purely theatrical critics may be inclined to pay too much attention to stage-arrangements, stage-business, and stage-settings, and even on occasion to disregard the dramatist's message and his power of creating character to consider his technic alone. And yet it can scarcely be denied that the theatrical critics are nearer to the proper method of approach than the literary critics who neglect the light which a careful consideration of stage-conditions and of stage-traditions may cast upon the masterpieces of the drama.
Since all these masterpieces of the drama were devised to be heard and to be seen rather than to be read, the great dramatic poets have always been solicitous about the visual appeal of their plays. They have ever been anxious to garnish their pieces with the utmost scenic embellishment and the utmost spectacular accompaniment of the special kind that a play of that particular type could profit by. In view of the importance of this scenic embellishment and of its influence upon the methods of the successive playwrights, there is cause for wonder that we have no satisfactory attempt to tell the history of the art of the scene-painter as this has been developed thru the long ages. The materials for this narrative are abundant, even if they still lie in confusion. Certain parts of the field have been surveyed here and there; but no substantial treatise has yet been devoted to this alluring investigation. The scholar who shall hereafter undertake the task will need a double qualification; he must master the annals of painting in Renascence Italy, and later in France and in England, and he must familiarize himself with the circumstances of the theater at the several periods when the art of the scene-painter made its successive steps in advance.
It is partly because we have no manual covering the whole field that we find so many unwarranted assertions in the studies of the scholars who confine their criticism to a single period of the development of the drama. Partly also is this due to the fact that we are each of us so accustomed to the theaters of our own century and of our own country that we find it difficult not to assume similar conditions in the theaters of other centuries and other countries. Thus the Shaksperian commentators of the early eighteenth century seem not to have doubted that the English playhouse in the days of Elizabeth was not unlike the English playhouse in the days of Anne; and as a result they cut up the plays of Shakspere into acts and into scenes, each supposed to take place in a different spot, in accord with the eighteenth-century stage practise, and absolutely without any justification from the customs of the Tudor theater. This was the result of looking back and of believing that the late sixteenth-century stage must have resembled the early eighteenth-century stage. We are now beginning to see that, in any effort to recapture the methods of the Elizabethan theater, we must first understand the customs of the medieval stage, and then look forward from that point. Of all places in the world the playhouse is, perhaps, the most conservative, and the most reluctant to relinquish anything which has proved its utility in the past and which is accepted by the public in the present; and many of the peculiarities of the Tudor theater are survivals from the medieval performances.
There are still to be found classical scholars who accept the existence of a raised stage in the theater of Dionysus at Athens, and even of painted scenery such as we moderns know; and they find support in the assertion of Aristotle that among the improvements due to Sophocles was the introduction of "scenery." But what did the Greek word in the text of Aristotle which is rendered into English as "scenery" really mean? At least, what did it connote to an Athenian? Something very different, we may be sure, from what the term "scenery" connotes to us. Certainly, the physical conditions of the stageless Attic theater precluded the possibilities of painted scenes such as we are now familiar with. That there were no methods of representing realistically, or even summarily, the locality where the action is taking place is proved by the detailed descriptions of these localities which the dramatic poet was careful to put into the mouths of his characters whenever he wished the audience to visualize the appropriate background of the action. We may be assured that the dramatists would never have wasted time in describing what the spectators had before their eyes. Ibsen and Rostand and d'Annunzio are poets, each in his own fashion, but their plays are devoid of all descriptions of the special locality where the action passes—that task has been spared them by the labors of the modern scene-painter working upon their specific directions.
As there was no scenery in the Greek theater so there was little or none in the Roman. M. Camille Saint-Saëns once suggested that certain airy scaffoldings in the Pompeian wall-paintings were perhaps derived from scenic accessories. But this seems unlikely enough; and the surviving Latin playhouses have a wide and shallow stage closed in by a sumptuous architectural background, suggesting the front of a palace with three portals, often conveniently utilized as the entrances to the separate dwellings of the several characters. Again, we may infer the absence of scenery from the elaboration with which Plautus, for one, localizes the habitations of his leading characters. In Rome, as in Athens, some kind of a summary indication of locality, some easily understood symbol, may have been employed; but of scene-painting, as we moderns know the art, there is not a trace.
II
It is not until we come to the mysteries of the Middle Ages that we find the beginnings of the modern art, and even here it is only a most rudimentary attempt that we can discover. The mystery probably developed earliest in France, as it certainly flourished there most abundantly; and the French represented the dramatized Bible story on a long, shallow platform, at the back of which they strung along a row of summary indications of certain necessary places, beginning with Heaven on the spectator's left, and ending with Hell on his right, and including the Temple, the house of the high priest and the palace of Herod. These necessary places were called "mansions," and they served to localize the action whenever this was deemed advisable, the front of the platform remaining a neutral ground which might be anywhere. But these mansions do not prove the existence of scene-painters; they were very slight erections, a canopy over an altar serving to indicate the Temple, and a little portico sufficing to represent a palace; and they were probably built by house-carpenters and painted by housepainters, just as any boat which might be called for would be constructed by the shipwrights.
The Roman Theater at Orange From the model at the Paris Opéra The multiple set of the French medieval stage From the model in the Dramatic Museum of Columbia University The set of the Italian comedy of masks
And as we need not assume the forming of a guild of scene-painters because of these mansions which performed some of the functions of our modern scenery, so also we must not assume it because the medieval artisans invented a variety of elaborate spectacular devices, flying angels, for example, and roaring flames from Hell-Mouth. Even in the stageless and sceneless Attic theater, there had been many mechanical effects of one kind or another, especially in the plays of Euripides—the soaring dragon-chariot of Medea, for instance, and the similar contrivance whereby a god might descend from the skies. Mechanical tricks even when they are most ingenious, do not imply the aid of the scene-painter; and even to-day they are the special task of the property-man, or of the master-mechanic, altho the scene-painter's aid may be invoked also to make them more effective. That there were property-makers in the Middle Ages admits of no doubt, and also highly skilled artificers delighting in the daring ingenuity of their inventions. There were abundant properties, it may be noted, on the Elizabethan stage, well-heads, thrones, and arbors; and Henslow's diary records payment for a variety of such accessories. But there is not in that invaluable document a single entry indicating any payment for anything equivalent to the work of the scene-painter.
Adroit as were the French mechanics who prepared the abundant spectacular effects of the medieval mysteries, they were surpassed in skill by the Italian engineers of the Renascence, who lent their aid to the superb outdoor festivals wherein the expanding artistic energy of the period was most magnificently displayed. Leonardo da Vinci did not disdain to design machines disclosing a surprising fertility of resource. It was from those outdoor spectacles of the Italians that the French court-ballets are directly descended, and also the English masks, which demanded the collaboration of Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson. But at first the Italians got along without the aid of the yet unborn scene-painter, and the inventions of the engineer were carried out by the mechanic and the decorator. Even as late as the seventeenth century a magnificent spectacle presented in the garden of the Pitti Palace in Florence relied mainly upon the ingenious engineer and scarcely at all upon the scene-painter. It seems probable that it is here in Italy in the Renascence, and at first as an accompaniment of the outdoor spectacle, or of its indoor rival, that the art of the actual scene-painter had its birth. The engineers required the aid of the artists—indeed, in those days, when there was little specialization of function, the engineers were almost always artists themselves, capable of their own decoration.