VIPLAYS
Itis a commonplace of dramatic reporting, which in spite of its frequently doubtful application has the truth of an old saw, that the novelist cannot write plays. Certainly, it would seem that the qualities which go to the making of good plays are not precisely those which make good novels; for while it is possible to conceive a novel in terms of narrative, descriptions of abounding nature, psychological analysis, and tableaux, the play has rules more strictly objective and more definitely rigid. Now if we, for the moment, pass over the question of Stevenson’s collaborator in the four printed plays with which his name is associated, and if we, for this occasion, treat them as though they were his work entirely, we shall be better able to distinguish certain remarkable characteristics of these plays, and, anticipating certain general conclusions to be made later, of Stevenson’s talent.
Stevenson, we are all aware, was never, strictly speaking, in spite ofCatrionaandWeir of Hermiston, a novelist. He was a writer of many kinds of stories; but they were not primarily, until we come toWeir, domestic or psychological. Many of them were what no doubt would commonly be called “dramatic,” in the sense that they contained scenes of some violence; but for the most part they were narrative interspersed with tableaux. They were “picturesque,” not because they were startlingly visual, but because Stevenson had thatflairfor the odd, the startling, or the vivid effect of contrast which is generally described by the word “picturesque.” It was the oddness ofDr. Jekyll and Mr. Hydethat allured him before he became oppressed by its symbolism. It was, equally, oddness that always attracted him in character: he had no profound sense of character, for this reason. Passivity he never understood. His characters must forever be in action. That, it might be supposed, was in itself a first reason for turning to the theatre, since, according to modern dramatic reporters, “drama” is a word synonymous with the word “action.” Action, something doing—that, by the recipe, is the certain play. But while action may give a play breathless suspense, while it may providethe kind of play which, in a specifically theatrical sense, is called a “drama,” action is not the whole battle. To action, or at least to the psychological excitement created by a sense of action in progress and a climax pending, must be added a very powerful sense of what is effective in the theatre. A pause, a sound, verbal repetition, an abrupt change—these things are crude examples, chosen at random from among the obvious instances of what contributes to the sense of the theatre. If we think of such things as the tapping of Pew’s stick (inAdmiral Guinea), and, inDeacon Brodie, the appearance of the masked Deacon at the window by which Leslie is watching for him, we shall realise that in some degree, in some very obvious and primitive form, Stevenson was possessed of this attribute. But one thing we shall infallibly discover him to lack, a thing which Mr. Henry James missed inCatriona, a thing which has vital importance in drama—the visual sense. These plays show no real power of visualising a scene. Picturesque they all are; they all have qualities which make them engrossing—as reading. But they are not focussed for the eyes, and they are not well constructed for real dramatic effect.
Deacon Brodieis in five acts and eighttableaux, and its effects are indescribably broken, so that irrelevancies are numerous, distracting side issues over-emphasised, and so that the Deacon is almost a minor character. It is hard to realise that there are only a dozen persons in the play, for their comings and goings are so frequent as to give the effect of a confused number of straggling participants in desultory action. The play itself centres round an historical figure—Deacon Brodie—who was an honest man before the world by day, and by night an expert cracksman. His name is familiar both in criminal history and in the annals of Edinburgh, where his activities became, after his death, notorious. In the play, Brodie at last is eager for reform; but one of his cronies, tempted by a Bow Street runner, and the only one of Brodie’s friends to yield to temptation, betrays him. Though Brodie escapes, his absence from home has been discovered in the excitement consequent upon his father’s death, and, when arrest is imminent, he takes his own life. Stevenson had found the details of Brodie’s life while he was preparing the sketches collected under the titleEdinburgh: Picturesque Notes; and it is conceivable that in some measure the play’s technique was a little influenced by a reading of some eighteenth-century episodicplays, such, for example, as Gay’s “Beggar’s Opera,” which is similarly broken in construction, though more permissibly so, because “The Beggar’s Opera” is no more than a skein in which ballads and satire may be found to provide our entertainment. This mention of “The Beggar’s Opera” must not be taken too seriously, however, because although that play deals with the life of highwaymen and pickpurses and thief-takers in the eighteenth century, asDeacon Brodiedoes, it is profoundly real, whereasDeacon Brodieis only too obviously modern fake. Macheath and Polly Peachum are infinitely more real than Brodie and his doxy. Moreover the ensemble inDeacon Brodieis on the whole poorly conceived. The minor persons are mere figures, introduced to stand here or there, or do this or that, and are labelled with names and idiosyncrasies. The major persons, though more detailed, have an equal lack of vitality. It is necessary to add the further explanation thatDeacon Brodieis the first of the plays, and that it dates from 1880. It is easily the least coherent of them all. Stevenson was to improve uponDeacon Brodiein that respect, at least.
The two lightest plays—Beau AustinandMacaire—are experiments, the one in manner, the other in bizarre or, as it is styled by the authors, “melodramatic farce.” The manner ofBeau Austinis the manner of the costume play. It is highly sophisticated, and its keynote is powder and patches. The beau is at his toilet, and one of the women he has betrayed is in the town, still sick with despair at her soiled virtue. Her true love hears from the lady’s lips the story of her betrayal, and, on being forbidden to challenge the beau, contents himself with demanding a marriage ceremony. His flatteries are effective, the beau consents, and the formal proposal is made, only to be rejected by the lady, whose hauteur is aroused. So matters stand when the lady’s brother, learning by chance of the betrayal, insults the beau before an important personage. As climax, the beau proposes publicly, and is as publicly accepted. It will be seen that the play could not claim, excepting in respect of verbal artifice, to be more than a pretty jig-saw. It could have no effect of reality: the effect desired by the authors was one purely of the stage. Verbally it is exquisitely dexterous. That is its undoing.The attempt is made to convey in words something more than the action of the piece would successfully carry: words are to create an atmosphere of the eighteenth-century fashionable life, to indicate the possibility that calm picturesque heartless exteriors shielded even then hearts that beat warmly beneath lace and brocade. The play was a pretence that nothing was something, a pretty moving picture under the perception of which, beating out in pianissimo airs from appropriate music, and the faint throb of an unseen minuet, was the delicate heart of the period. It was an æsthetic view of the eighteenth century, the century of Fielding and of Smollett, tinkered about to make a perpetualbal masque, or, shall we say, a picture by Watteau or Fragonard. In point of fact the play is too slight to bear its weight of intention: it remains verbal. As drama it is more negligible than “Monsieur Beaucaire” or “The Adventure of Lady Ursula,” because its literary pretensions are so much more elaborate. It has sometimes fine shades of close verbal fence that are Meredithian: it is better to read than it could be to see. But it is an attempt, one might say an almost basely cunning attempt, to capture the theatre as a place where costumes grace a barren play. It failed because its authors were two conscientiousliterary men, bent upon a superficial perfection undreamed of by practical dramatists. Just as Cowper, in translating Homer, made an epic for a tea-party, so Henley and Stevenson made about the rational and cynical eighteenth century a sophisticated play for a boudoir. They concentrated upon the superficial, and only said, but did not show, that the men and women of the eighteenth century had hearts as true and passionate as those of our day. The play lacked realism, and, more disastrously, it lacked reality.
On the other hand,Macairehas a thin air of jocularity which almost carries it through. It has a sententious cleric, a drunken notary, a repetitious father for the bride, a courteous host, a little mystery of the bridegroom’s nurseling days, the facetious Macaire and his companion. It has all these things, and it has an idea, strong enough for a single act, stretched to its thinnest over several acts which demand cuts more severe than the authors allow.
Macaire escaping from justice, threatened each moment, in the face of the audience, with instant arrest, carries himself with unfailingsang-froidthrough all his difficulties but the last. Finding a chance of sport, and possibly of profit, he impersonates an erringfather. The real father appears. Macaire still, after the manner of Mr. Jingle, is imperturbable. Competition follows, until the desire for the genuine father’s money becomes too strong for Macaire. Then only does he show the blackness of his heart, which does not shrink, in such desperate situations, from murder. So Macaire, still talking, still watchful and unscrupulous, is brought to bay. Fiercely turning, in a picturesque situation, upon the stairs, he is shot by a gendarme on the stage. That is a skeleton of the play; but the play is again a literary play, so that sensationalism will not redeem it. By repetitions of catch-phrases and by trivial incidents which (e.g. the exchanging of the wine-bottles) are not unknown to the humbler kinds of drama, the story is continued until its idle joking can no longer be suddenly stirred into flaming melodrama by the noise and zest of bloody crime. It has many shrewd bids for theatrical effectiveness; but it faints for want of a fabric upon which its devices might flourish and triumphantly justify themselves.
The fourth play,Admiral Guinea, has fine qualities, both literary and dramatic; it is the least literary and the most dramatically effectiveof all the plays. It contains one figure, in Pew, which might have been, as far as one may judge in reading, a hauntingly gruesome object; and, in spite of Stevenson’s own subsequent contempt for this play and forMacaire, shows a greater, if conventional, power of simplification than does any of the other plays. Admiral Guinea, a retired and penitent slaver, refuses his daughter her lover, on the ground that the lover is ungodly. Pew, an old associate of Admiral Guinea, become blind for his sins, and still full of vengeful wickedness, arrives in the neighbourhood, catches the lover drunk, leads him back to Admiral Guinea’s cottage, and tries, with his aid, to rob his old captain of certain riches which he supposes to lie in a brass-bound chest. The young man’s reaction, their discovery by Admiral Guinea, the violent death of the unrepentant Pew follow; whereupon the lovers are suitably blessed by Admiral Guinea.
It has been said, above, that this play shows a greater power of simplification than the others; the action of it is certainly quicker, more obvious, less choked with verbal expressiveness, than is the action of the other plays; and in so far as this is so it would appear thatAdmiral Guineais a considerable advance, technically, upon them.
The simplification is, to some considerable extent, effected by a strange poverty of invention, and the play is likest of all to those nondescripts which Stevenson as a little boy must have performed upon his toy stage, with paper figures pushed hither and thither in tin slides upon the boards. In spite of that,Admiral Guineais the best of the plays because, in a higher degree than its fellows, it is truly actable. We cannot regard the confused cramped episodicDeacon Brodieas theatrically effective. Equally it is impossible, from the standpoint of public performance, to consider as satisfactory eitherBeau AustinorMacaire.Admiral Guinea, however, even if it belongs to a class of play which is associated in our minds with such titles as “Black-Eyed Susan,” has its action very largely comprised in the material put upon the stage; it has the obvious stage effects of darkness and the dreadful tapping stick of Pew; and it has picturesque struggles, death, wounded and reasserted honour, and, for these plays, a minimum of soliloquy. More it would be impossible to claim forAdmiral Guineawithout seeing it performed: again we have types roughly “mannered” to serve as persons of the play: but they are types clearly in accordance with tradition, and they preserve their interest fully until they aredone with and put away with the footlight-wicks, and the tin slides, and the other paraphernalia of the toy stage—paper figures, a penny plain, and twopence coloured.
For that brings us to the pathetic final explanation of the failure of the Henley-Stevenson plays. We may say that they are deficient in drama, or that they are trivial in theme, or that they have no visual sense to illumine them for our eyes; but the truth is that they fail because they are false. The theatre has in it much that is false, much to which we deliberately shut our eyes in order that we may accept the dramatist’s formal conventions. We do not, in the theatre, demand that “King Lear” shall be accompanied by a pandemonium of crackling tin and iron and artificial whoopings of wind. Those things we prefer to imagine for ourselves. But somehow the mixture of legitimate convention and the basest imitation of reality has been confused in the theatre. The exaggeration regarded as necessary by an effete system of acting and production has created other unpardonable falsenesses. The stage has been a place upon which actors disported themselves.It was of such a stage that Stevenson thought. In each case he hung a play upon a sensational figure—Brodie, Macaire, Pew, and, in a much lesser degree, upon the picturesque figure of Beau Austin. To him the drama was nothing but play. It was an excuse—nay, a demand, for unreality. He supposed that stage characters really were cardboard figures such as he had known, moralising ranters, virtuous girls, spouters of Latin tags, pious brands from the burning, handsome courageous puppet-like juvenile leads, and so on. It never occurred to him to put a real figure in a play: he never supposed that a character in a play had any end but to be put back in the box with the other playthings. That is really the cause of the shallowness of these four plays. As Stevenson admitted to Mr. Henry James, he heard people talking, and felt them acting, and that seemed to him to be fiction. But to hear people talking and to feel them acting bespeaks a very unmaterial conception of them: if a character in a play talks, however monotonously, without developing any personality save that of verbal mannerism, we are bound to feel that he has not been realised. And just as Stevenson realised none of the characters in his plays, so we are powerless to realise them. We findthem, as Professor Saintsbury pathetically found Catriona herself, bloodless. Professor Saintsbury found Catriona full of sawdust, while of the characters in the plays we have used the word “paper”: very well, the impression of lifelessness is as clearly felt in each case. And such an impression, carried to its logical end, explains why, in at least one department of letters, Stevenson from the first mistook his ground. Not one of the four plays has serious value as an example of dramatic art; it is clear that not one of them so far has commended itself to the public or to the actor-managers. Yet the plays were obviously set to catch the popular taste, and their literary finish, a confession in itself of an absence of dramatic impulse, does not succeed in commending them to those who judge by more exacting standards.