In the illuminating lecture on Stevenson as a writer of plays delivered
by Sir Arthur Pinero in 1903 before the members of the Edinburgh
Philosophical Institution, the confessions contained in 'A Penny Plain
and Two Pence Colored' are skilfully employed to explain Stevenson's
flat failure as a playwright. Many of his ardent admirers must have
wondered why it was that he adventured four times into dramatic
authorship, only to undergo a fourfold shipwreck. Yet Sir James Barrie
and Mr. John Galsworthy, essayists and novelists at first, as Stevenson
was, strayed successfully from prose fiction into the acted drama. Was
not Stevenson as anxious for this theatrical triumph as any one of
these? Was he not as richly dowered with dramatic power, as inventive,
as responsive to opportunity, as ready to master a new craft? Why, then,
did he fail where they have succeeded?
For these baffling questions Sir Arthur Pinero has an acceptable answer.
Stevenson was unable to establish himself as a play-maker, first,
because he did not take the art of play-making seriously; he did not put
his full strength in it, mind and soul and body, contenting himself when
he was a man with playing at play-making as he had played with his toy
theater when he was a boy. The second cause of his disappointment as a
dramatist was due to the abiding influence of this toy theater, and to
the fact that the pieces he attempted were planned in rivalry with the
'Miller and His Men,' and therefore that they were hopelessly out of
date before they were conceived. (There is a third reason, not mentioned
by Sir Arthur, and yet suggesting itself irresistibly to any one who
knew the editor of the _Magazine of Art_ personally; all four of
Stevenson's attempts at play-writing were made in collaboration with
Henley, who was the least equipped by temper and by temperament for the
practise of dramaturgy.)
_Scene II_ POLLOCK'S SCENES _IN THE MILLER AND HIS MEN. No.9_
[Illustration: _London. Published by B Pollock,73 Hoxton Street Hoxton_
Explosion of the mill. A back drop in the 'Miller and His Men,' Scene
II]
Yet even if Stevenson had worked alone, and even if he had taken the new
art seriously, he could never have won a place among the playwrights
until he had fought himself free from the sinuous coils of Skeltery. In
his youth he had saved his pence to purchase the accessories of Skelt's
Juvenile Drama with boyish delight in the acquisition of things longed
for to be possessed at last. When he had purchased plate 7 and scene 11,
No. 9, he thought they were his possessions. But, of a truth, he was
their possession, even if he did not know his slavery. As a man he was
subdued to what he had worked in as a boy; and when he wanted to write
plays of his own, he had no freedom to follow the better models of his
own day; he was a bondman to Skelt, a thrall to Park, a minion to Webb,
a chattel to Redington and to Pollock. "What am I?" he asked in his
self-revelatory essay, humorously exaggerating, no doubt, yet
subconsciously stating the exact truth; "What am I? What are life, art,
letters, the world, but what my Skelt has made them? He stamped himself
upon my immaturity." And the impression was then so deep that it could
not be effaced in maturity. The boy in Stevenson survived, instead of
dying when the man was born.
The art of play-writing, like the art of story-telling, and, indeed,
like all the other arts, demands both a native gift and an acquired
craft. Its basic principles are the same ever since the drama began; but
its immediate methods vary at different times and in different
countries. While every artist must say what it is given him to say, he
can say it acceptably only by acquiring the method of speech employed by
his immediate predecessors. However original he may prove himself at the
end, in the beginning he can only imitate the methods and borrow the
processes and avail himself of the practises which the elder craftsmen
are employing successfully at the moment when he sets himself to learn
their trade. He must--to use the apt term of the engineers--he must keep
himself abreast of "state of the art." This is what the great dramatists
have ever done; Sophocles follows in the footsteps of AEschylus, as
Shakspere emulates Marlowe and Kyd, and as Moliere went to school to the
adroit and acrobatic Italian comedians. These great dramatists were
perfectly content to begin by taking over the patterns devised by their
immediate predecessors in play-making, even if they were soon to enlarge
these patterns and so modify them to suit their even larger needs.
[Illustration: POLLOCK'S CHARACTERS IN THE MILLER AND HIS MEN. _Plate
7_
Plate No. 7, complete as published, ready to be cut out and put into
use in the toy theater]
Now, the state of the art when Stevenson turned to the theater was in
accord with the picture-frame stage of to-day, with a single set to the
act, and without the soliloquies and the confidential asides to the
audience which may then have been proper enough on the apron-stage of
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Even in the lower grade
of playhouse, where rude and crude melodramas were performed, the method
and the manner of the 'Miller and His Men' had long departed. The
pleasure that melodrama can give is perennial; but its processes vary in
accord with the changing conditions of the theater. The door was open
for Stevenson to write melodrama, if he preferred that species of play,
and if he desired to varnish it with literature as he was to varnish the
police-novel or mystery-story in the 'Wrecker.' But if he sought to do
this, he was bound to inform himself as to the state of the art at the
instant of composition. If he shut his eyes to the changed conditions of
the theater since the 'Miller and His Men' had won a wide popularity in
the playhouse, then he made an unpardonable blunder, for the battle was
lost before he could deploy his forces. He might have been forewarned by
the failure of Charles Lamb in a like attempt. When Lamb's Elizabethan
imitation 'John Woodvil' was rejected for Drury Lane by John Philip
Kemble as not "consonant with the taste of the age"; its exasperated
author cried: "Hang on the age! I'll write for antiquity!" But those who
write for antiquity cannot complain if they do not delight their
contemporaries. It is to his contemporaries, and not to antiquity or to
posterity, that every true dramatist has appealed.