A Playwright's Novitiate

IF not the last, at least one of the most inevitable infirmities of noble minds — that is, noble literary minds — seems to be the ambition to write a play. Who has nut written a play, or tried to write one ? Strange to say, authors do not seem to feel ashamed of having had their plays rejected. Indeed, they feel regarding it as people feel about their ignorance of American history or the Old Testament. They speak of it with the charming frankness that persons display in the confession of some of their favorite faults : pride, for instance, or self-indulgence. They never tell you that they are mean or inclined to take advantage of their fellows, or that they are jealous of their wives or husbands as the case may be. So no author ever tells you that the magazines reject his articles, or that he cannot find a publisher for his novel; but he is no more mortified in telling you that he has failed to get his play accepted than that he cannot tell you in which of our not very numerous wars the battle of the Brandywine was fought, or in which book of the Old Testament to find Ahasuerus.

This buoyant acknowledgment of failure probably proceeds from two causes, the knowledge of the universal prevalence of such failure, and the conviction that it does not require very high talent to succeed, — that it is rather good luck than good work that achieves success. We all feel sure that we could get ourselves up in American history or the Old Testament if we made a business of it, and that it would not be difficult to eradicate the vice of pride if we seriously found it was not justifiable ; and by the same rule, that we could unquestionably write a play that would not fail if we really went at it with a will.

But is it as easy as American history and the Old Testament ? It is said there are between two and three thousand plays written annually in the United States, and we all know how few are produced, and that fewer succeed. Of all trades, the dramatist’s needs the most assiduous apprenticeship. One may almost say, it takes three generations to produce a playwright. The very spirit of the theatre must animate you ; its traditions, its unwritten law, fill your mind and mould your thoughts. You must see things with the optique du théâtre. Nobody can tell you what to read, how to “ study up,” if you approach this work unprofessionally as a lay person. The only advice you will get is, Read everything that appears in current literature about the stage, and go to see every play that is produced. Saturate yourself with the theatre, give your nights and days to the study of the French dramatists, and feel confident that if you have any dramatic talent, in the course of a decade or two you may write a play which, with a good deal of alteration, may be found worthy to be put upon the stage.

In point of fact, there is no more disagreeable business than that of writing for the stage, and none more difficult. The disappointments are manifold, the chances of success minute. There are many experiences entailed that are very vexatious ; one is brought in contact with capricious managers, self - willed actors, personal spite, and envy inconceivable. One must have courage and not much pride. A novitiate of hard blows seems inevitable to the career. Some one was expressing to Boucicault sympathy for an author who had had five plays rejected. “ Five plays ? ” said Boucicault. “ I wrote seventeen before I had one accepted.”

This being the case, why do people keep on writing plays ? Certainly not for fame, for it is the actor who gets the glory, not the author. There are some admirable playwrights in this age, and even some in this country, but of these the average play-goer knows scarcely the names. Of course “ the profession ” knows the rank and standing of each playwright, just as the publishers know the rank and standing of each story-writer ; but the general public cares very little for the playwright, and very much for the actor who interprets him. Every shop-girl knows Ouida and the Duchess, because she sees their names on the covers of the books she reads ; but she could not tell you whether Dumas or Sardou, Belasco or Bronson Howard, wrote the plays over which she has shed briny tears. One is not likely to write plays, therefore, for fame, if one can write anything else.

It is probably the hope of the pudding, and not the praise, that drives the three thousand pens over the paper annually. No doubt the reports of the remuneration are very much exaggerated, but it is certain that the profits of a successful play are vastly in excess of the profits of a successful novel. A play that makes a hit is a fortune to its writer. It may take two months to write a play, and, perhaps, two years to write a novel, The play, if decidedly successful, might bring one a hundred thousand dollars, and the novel would be doing brilliantly if it brought five thousand. I am told by a reputable publisher that twelve hundred dollars is the average profit to an author in good standing of a fairly successful novel. I am told by a well-known playwright that two hundred and fifty thousand dollars has not uufrequently been received in royalties on a very popular play. There is therefore some excuse for the dramatic efforts of the three thousand ; but their constant disappointments prove that there is no royal road to fortune. When the two months’ scribbling brings in two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, there must be the preparation for the scribbling, the long apprenticeship, to be taken into account. But beside the positive pudding and the possible praise, there is perhaps in the heart of the three thousand an inborn love of the drama. “ Dramatic literature,” says Lewes, “ may be extinct, but the dramatic instinct is ineradicable.”

The church seems always to have had a quarrel with the drama, ever since it passed from a religious ceremony into an art. Now, some one says, it is passing rapidly from an art into an amusement. And it is true that people do not go to the theatre to have a sermon preached to them ; but preach it as Sardou preached it in Fedora, and they will listen. And you need not give them your text; they will know for themselves that it is, “ Vengeance is mine ; I will repay, saith the Lord.” Give them an object lesson like The School for Scandal, and they will not reproach you that they are being taught to hate hypocrisy and cant. The drama is such a mighty means of moving man, that no time and brains need be grudged in its service.

A play should be more than a sketch of character, the picture of an epoch, a vague airy vehicle for a piece of good acting. It ought to be the essence of something ; it ought to have some one thought that will bear repetition, and give the thing strength, a sermon that will preach itself, a highly concentrated bit of life. Anything less than this seems an unjustifiable trespassing upon the time of the public. “ The dramatic instinct is ineradicable ; ” we must have plays. Let us give of our best to make them good.

The art of the playwright, though ho has no textbooks, and only chance masters, must still be learned in some way. There must be some rough general rules, by which one can hew one’s marble out and make a beginning. The most elementary of these seems to be a concentration of mind on the construction of your play, and a noble disregard of your dialogue. Do not be betrayed into trying to get in some pretty incident or some clever mot.

If you allow yourself to be led unduly by incident or phrase, you will go upon the rocks. A play looks so easy to make; all you seem to need is a strong dramatic situation or two, and a terse, vigorous pen at dialogue. But the dialogue is the last of your requirements. Everything comes before it, — the motive, the action, the characters, and above all the construction. You must make a play that a deaf man could enjoy if he came to the theatre. Of course good dialogue is good, but it is the least important part of an acting play. Fine literary skill is said to be thrown away in the modern play, but everything else being there it would probably not hurt the piece. It might be something of a waste to have a drop curtain painted by Fortuny, but perhaps it would be a pleasanter thing to look at than those we generally contemplate during the entr’actes. However, scene-painting, in a certain sense, is what the playwright has to do. He needs freedom and breadth, and must do rather coarse work. He must exaggerate; he need not hope to have any but great actors catch his delicate touches, and bring out his nuances. He must remember that be is not going to have a company of Bernhardts and Ellon Terrys and Salvinis to interpret him to the world. He must write a play that will go of itself, that will do to put upon the road, to produce in the provinces with third-rate actors ; that is, if he is hoping to make a “ popular success,” and that, we have seen, is generally the only motive he has.

Correct construction requires one to have everything in definite form in one’s mind before beginning to work. Most dramatists construct the last act, some of them write it out even to the minutest detail, before putting pen to paper on the others. This working up to an end, so indispensable to the dramatist, would be very hampering and very unnecessary to the writer of a romance. While I cannot conceive of a story being patched up and pieced out and changed materially in the course of its construction, it is easy to see how many minor incidents may bloom out of the original stem and add to its graceful completeness. In writing a romance, the words slip off one’s pen in some mysterious way; one seems to think from its nib. In writing a play, au contraire, one picks the thoughts out of the box of one’s brain and sets them up with rigid precision. It is like the difference between an orator speaking and a lawyer preparing his brief. The orator thinks on his legs, with a sea of faces before him ; the lawyer thinks in his study, with a pile of books upon his table. At the same time, it is not well to be without preparation in anything, “ and to trust to the inspiration of the moment is like trusting to a shipwreck for one’s first swimming lesson.”

Say to yourself: “In my first act I must show my audience what I am going to do. In my second I must show them that I am doing it. In my third I must show them that I have done it.” Each act, they tell you, must he wound up with a situation, a sort of pyrotechnic explosion ; the third act to end with the strongest dynamite of all. The fourth act is generally a sort of smoothing out, straightening up, reconciliation, compensation, and all that, which does not interfere with the putting on of wraps and ordering of carriages. The act next the last should always be the strongest one, but the last must not be without its climax.

They say that in all writing the more left out the better. In writing for the stage it is eminently so. One never knows, until after trying to write a play, how many unnecessary words are used in the telling of an ordinary story ; how one can condense and condense, and not lose the sense, but only make it stronger. Whatever you have learned to become a writer of novels you must unlearn if you are to become a writer of plays. The methods are absolutely opposed. In the novel you have unbounded liberty, a most demoralizing freedom in the length of your conversations, in the amplitude of your descriptions ; in your analysis of character you can “ talk about it, goddess, and about it,” and your reader can skip if he wants to, and cannot hiss you if he does not like it. But in the play you must not talk at all. You cannot describe anything, you cannot analyze anything. Action, action, action,—that is all that is allowed you. You must boil down your pilot into a triple extract of explanation. It is very poor work that necessitates long histories, and most of all monologues. The story must be told, but the condensation must be very skillful ; every least word must tell, every statement must carry a ton’s weight of force. And as to analysis or description of character, it is totally défendu. The characters describe themselves; you analyze them in action, in a skillful ejaculation here or there, a moment of hesitation, an impulse of dissimulation, a glance of distrust. It is very poor work to label your characters before they appear : as, for instance, a bell rings; one of the servants (who generally occupy the stage for the first few minutes while the people are seating themselves) starts and exclaims, “ Ah, there ’s master ! He ’ll be in a temper. He always is in a temper.” Let the master appear, and let him show his temper if he has one, but it is bad form to ticket him. You must drive home names and relationships and the few absolutely indispensable antecedent facts, but in the fewest words conceivable and the strongest.

And whereas in the novel you conceal your plot from your reader, and spring upon him surprise after surprise, in the play you take the audience into your confidence, you and the house must be en rapport. You may befog your characters as much as you like, set them by the ears, make them puzzle and torment one another in every way known to science, but you must not so treat your audience. The audience you have buttonholed. You are whispering in its ear, and making clear to it all that is going forward on the stage. You must not, of course, make it all too plain to your hearer. You must give him dénoûments, but you must prepare him for them. Dumas calls the first law of the theatre l’art des préparations. Legouvé says : “ The public is a creature at once very exacting, very strange, and very inconséquent. It demands that, on the stage, everything should be, at one and the same time, carefully prepared and absolutely impromptu. If anything falls from the skies, it is shocked; if a fact is too much announced, it is bored. We must, to please it, take it at the same time as confidant and dupe ; that is, we must let drop here and there a careless, suggestive word which will enter its ears without arresting its full attention, and which, when the coup de théâtre comes, will draw from it an exclamation of delight and wonder, as who should say, ‘ That’s true. He told us as much. What fools not to have guessed at it! ’ ”

While you are very much hampered by the rules for putting a play together, it is consoling to remember that there is no paucity of materials for its creation ; that, in fact, the whole boundless universe is yours ; that you can draw from all nature. If you cannot use one thing,"you can another; and if you think long enough, it is marvelous how many situations, incidents, and devices will come to you.

The mise en scène, above all in comedy, is a modern art. It is not so very long ago that the actors of the Theatre Frangais would stand side by side, before the prompter’s box, reciting their tirades. The author wrote on his manuscript, “ The scene takes place in a drawing-room,” but in point of fact nothing took place as it does in a drawingroom. Legouvé says : “ Scribe was one of the first to throw upon the scene all the animation of real life. A manuscript of his contains but a part of his work, — the speaking part; the rest plays itself ; the gestures complete the words, the silences form part of the dialogue, and dashes end the phrases. Scribe inaugurated the dash, — the petit point. In one monologue, a page long, in one of his plays, there are eighty-three dashes. To he sure, this monologue, full of abrupt reticences, he puts in the month of a young girl, and young girls, we know, never say more than half they think.”

It certainly is a point gained, and not a small point, when the actors in a play speak the language of common life. But it must he an idealized common life ; it must he lifted out of the rank of a photograph, and put on the plane of a picture. You must give it the flavor of the present, but you must have the fine art to take out of it the commonplace, the perishable. Your language must be easy, but not “free and easy.” We have got to be “ natural ” nowadays; there is a loud cry for that; but to be natural does not mean to be prosaic and to be forbidden idealization. Realism is desirable, if one has the art of being typically real, and not in the usual manner of the stage business of the day. How many matches has one seen struck, how many cigars lighted, how many feet warmed at fenders, how many afternoon tea-tables laid !

These things are all very well in their way, but they are not the drama. “ More belongs to riding than a pair of boots,” the German proverb says, and more belongs to a play than the lighting of cigars and the drinking of teas. If your afternoon tea emphasizes anything, the hour, the intimacy of the people meeting, the presentness of the date, it is legitimate enough, though it is not novel. Stage business should grow naturally out of the play ; the play must not grow out of the stage business.

Above all, have your motif, your central idea, and keep to it, and illustrate it, and rub it in pretty deeply. It is surprising how much accentuation may help people’s appreciation of a character. In a story, even, this is so ; in a play very much more. In your story, if you give your heroine a nez retroussé, it is not enough to say so when you describe her, but you must insist upon it, and repeat it in various ways and on many occasions. By such means your reader gets the feature fixed in his mind, which perhaps he overlooked in the first description, and the picture is strengthened. An accomplished critic might object to the repetition ; but one is not writing for the accomplished critic so much as for the average reader, who is in a hurry, and who is not studying the book to make an article about it.

The average play-goer is even more superficial in his estimate of the work before him. He catches little more than the salient points; therefore be careful to provide him with plenty of salient points to catch. Of course this playing to the gallery must be regulated by good taste and judgment; one cannot afford to be vulgar even to be successful, but it is a mistake to feel that everybody must know what you have in your mind as well as you know it yourself. As the art of story-telling consists largely in the power of making clear to your hearers what you have to tell, do not be afraid of making it too clear. The human mind resents unnecessary labor from which it might have been saved by the clearer thinking and better writing of the person who has assumed to amuse or instruct.

Another difference between storywriting and play-writing is the fact that two people can write a better play than one. To talk over the plot of a play will develop it wonderfully. I doubt if consultation over the writing of a story would help it materially. A story is a more personal emanation of the fancy ; in all the delicacy of its shades, its intentions. its implications, it is uniquely yours, and if you change it to suit another you are not unlikely to spoil it.

But a play is of necessity a mechanically constructed thing. Your ideas must he poured into moulds. There is nothing between you and your reader, but between you and your audience there is that cumbrous stage to whose rules you must submit yourself. If you are able to keep the central thought of your play intact, you will be very fortunate. Everything else about it you must reconcile yourself to seeing torn to bits and pasted on here and there as stage rules require. If any two managers agreed about stage rules, it would be a comparatively easy thing to conform to them ; but as it is, the Talmud is an easy study in comparison. It is almost a waste of time, for any purpose but that of improving one’s style and sharpening one’s wits, for a lay person to attempt to write a play alone ; some one thoroughly familiar with the theatre is a necessary collaborator. The difficulty then is, that the person who could be of any use to you would not take the trouble, and the person who would take the trouble could not be of any use to you.

One wonders that any plays are written, since there are so many difficulties surrounding the process. Yet managers have hundreds of plays on their shelves unread. It is only through personal interest that they can be got to read a play by a new writer. They do not like to “ exploit ” new plays, the chances of failure and the expense of producing them are so great. They wait for something that has been tested abroad ; and they are not to be blamed for their caution. A play is a lottery. The cleverest critics are unable to say how it is going to take. A playwright who has since made some success told me that after the last rehearsal of a play of his the manager (a noted one) said to him thoughtfully, "I have the greatest confidence in this play. It is the sort of play we want for our house, and it is going to he a hit.” The next night it was produced, failed absolutely, and had to be withdrawn within a week.

With a play it is immediate success or failure, there is no middle course; it is life or death, and no lingering on the confines. With a novel, on the contrary, it is a long time before the last returns are in. You are let down gently; you find gradually that you have not carried the world with you, but there is much egotistical sophistry possible, and hope tells a flattering tide for a good while. There are always, also, a certain number of people to whom you have appealed ; even in your unpopularity you are popular with a sympathetic minority, and you try to make yourself believe that the minority are the true critics, and that the failure is only a seeming one. There are numberless things, in fact, that you can make yourself believe, and which save your feelings. But about a play there is no peradventure. If you have failed you have failed, and that is all there is about it. All your work is lost. There is absolutely nothing you can do with it; it is not worth the paper it is written upon ; there is no sympathetic minority who can see it and keep your spirits up by their applause. It is dead and buried, and will not ever see the light again. It is perhaps quite fitting that the début of a play should be so dramatic, and its failure so tragic ; nevertheless it must be a very unpleasant experience for the author, and the prospect does not recruit the ranks of the playwrights. And nobody can tell you why it has failed. There is something uncanny in the will and the won’t of it. The best critics cannot predict with any certainty, the most astute managers may make the greatest mistakes. Take, for instance, such an unqualified money success as Little Lord Fauntleroy. Who would have prophesied for it anything hut a goody - goody, Washington’s Birthday, Saturday matinee sort of popularity ? It was in the first place a dramatized story, which is said to be always a doubtful experiment, very few dramatized stories having succeeded. It has not a word of love in it, pure or impure; it is, begging its pardon, eminently unnatural, decidedly priggish, highly improbable, very sentimental ; and yet it has been successful, and what is more, it is a pleasant and attractive little play. Why it is a pleasant and attractive little play will always be a puzzle. Why it was especially popular with the general public is perhaps that the public taste was just ripe for the infant phenomenon; and also it is possible that the human heart in this republic will always throb responsive to any touches of nature or art portraying the lifting of one of its citizens into the ranlcs of the aristocracy of other lands.

A practical point in the making of a play is the number of characters to be introduced. The old dinner rule, “ never less than the Graces, nor more than the Muses,” does not need much stretching to fit the case. From the charming little one-act comedy of three, like Delicate Ground, up to the fullest blown society play, the Graces and the Muses numerically suffice. A novice will be wise to content himself with eight or nine characters ; to do them justice and keep them well in hand he will find quite enough for him. A greater number is confusing and unmanageable. It is well not to drive four-in-hand till you have got all there is to be learned of the art of driving out of the gray pony before the village cart. In the choice of characters sharp contrasts are needed, and a range of eight or nine types is enough to illustrate a good deal of human nature.

The manager of a stock company sometimes says to an author, “ Think of the members of my company, and write a play that will suit each one and give each one something to do.” But that seems rather a mechanical process. It is like that “ writing to cuts,” which I am told is done in magazines: the editor sends the writer some pictures, out of which he is to construct a story which the pictures shall illustrate. Writing a play for an actor or actress who has delighted you would be a different matter and much more tolerable, but even that would be rather hampering to one’s fancy. An actor naturally likes a part to be written for him, but requires that it fit him like a glove. It is conceivable that this process of fitting an actor with a play is not a sinecure. In fact, it appears that the path of the playwright is in no sense strewn with roses.

Miriam Coles Harris.