Yet Stevenson, at least, perceived clearly enough what ought to be the
more evident advantages of collaboration, that it focused "two minds
together on the stuff," thus producing "an extraordinarily greater
richness of purview, consideration, and invention." Collaboration will
probably always produce a greater richness of invention, since each of
the partners is likely to stimulate the other, their two minds striking
sparks like flint and steel. But it can produce a greater richness of
consideration only when each is willing both to yield and to oppose.
Neither must yield too easily; each of them must stand out for his own
suggestions; and each of them must insist on weighing and measuring the
suggestions of his ally. If they are too sympathetic, if their two
hearts beat as one, then the advantage of their having two heads is
diminished. If the two partners always think alike, then there will be
no greater richness of purview.
When a play composed by two of his friends failed to find the success on
the stage which had been anticipated for it, Mr. Augustus Thomas made
the shrewd remark that the two authors had probably been "too polite to
each other"--that is to say, that they had not insisted upon criticising
the successive suggestions made by each in turn. On the other hand, the
collaborators must be broad-minded enough not to resent this necessary
criticism. Like any other partnership, collaboration is a ticklish
experiment, and it can be profitable only when the two partners are
willing to give and take. They need more than usual self-control; they
must be able, each of them, to preserve his own self-respect while full
of regard for the self-respect of the other. It is not surprising that
the long collaborations of Erckmann-Chatrain and of Meilhac and Halevy
finally came to a sudden end because of an abrupt quarrel. That
disagreement is likely to arise out of the discussions inherent in any
profitable literary partnership is evidenced by a retort credited to the
younger Dumas, who was a rather authoritative partner, and who did not
always succeed in keeping on good terms with those whose plays he had
bettered. A friend once suggested a theme for a play, and invited the
collaboration of Dumas. "But why should I wish to quarrel with you?" was
answer of the witty dramatist.
Perhaps the most remarkable instance of self-control in all the long
history of collaboration is that of Theodore Barriere, the author of the
once-famous play called the 'Marble Heart,' one of the latest of whose
pieces (adapted by Augustin Daly as 'Alixe') was composed in
collaboration with his mother-in-law!
Sometimes the breach between the two partners is postponed until after
the play is completed and produced. Charles Reade and Tom Taylor joined
forces in the composition of the long-popular comedy called 'Masks and
Faces,' and after it had established itself upon the stage, Charles
Reade took its plot and its characters and utilized them in his charming
novel, 'Peg Woffington,' and as he had taken the liberty of thus making
a private profit out of the property of the partnership, it is not to be
wondered at that Tom Taylor was distinctly displeased. But Charles
Reade, altho he collaborated with Tom Taylor, with Paul Merritt, and
with Dion Boucicault, was more or less deficient in the courtesy and
consideration that a man ought to possess to fit him for partnership.
When he allied himself with Dion Boucicault in the writing of the novel
of 'Foul Play,' the collaborators quarreled so violently that they felt
themselves justified in preparing rival dramatizations of the story they
had written in conjunction, so that London playgoers had the opportunity
of choosing between two different theatrical adaptations of the same
tale.
When the two partners are courteous to each other but not too yielding,
when they are sympathetic but not too much alike in their
characteristics and qualifications, when each of them supplements the
weaker points of the other, then collaboration ought to result in plays
of more variety of invention, and of more ingenuity of construction than
is likely to be possessed by the average play due to a single mind. This
much must be admitted; and it is the final justification for
collaboration. But altho these partnerships in play-making spread abroad
a knowledge of the principles of the art, and altho they raise the
probable value of the average play, it must be admitted also, and with
equal frankness, that the possibilities of collaboration are sharply
limited.
No single one of the mightiest masterpieces of dramatic literature,
ancient and modern, is to be credited to collaboration; and the only
possible exception to this sweeping statement would be urged by the
critics who hold that the 'Gendre de M. Poirier' of Augier and Sandeau
is the masterpiece of French comedy in the nineteenth century. Those who
have climbed to the loftiest height of dramatic art have always done so
alone, sustained by enthusiasm and supported by imagination. In spite of
the greater "richness of purview, consideration, and invention" that
collaboration undoubtedly bestows, the man of surpassing genius, the
great master of the drama, Sophocles or Shakspere or Moliere, works best
alone. It is true that he may now and again take to himself an ally, as
Shakspere condescended to the assistance of Fletcher in 'Henry VIII,'
and as Moliere invoked the aid of Corneille in 'Psyche,' but it is true
also that these plays, written in collaboration by Shakspere and by
Moliere, are not the plays which establish and confirm their fame.
Indeed, these plays are not even among the more important pieces of
Shakspere and Moliere, and the reputation of the authors would be no
lower if these plays had never come into existence.
It is by the comedies and tragedies which Shakspere wrote alone that the
Elizabethan stage is made glorious, and not by the dramatic romances
that go under the joint names of Beaumont and Fletcher. It is by the
lyrical melodramas of which Victor Hugo was sole author that we recall
the Romanticist revolt in the French theater in 1830, and immediately
thereafter, and not by the perfervidly passionate pieces that the elder
Dumas put together in partnership with a group of now-forgotten
auxiliaries. It is by the comedies that Augier and the younger Dumas
wrote, each of them expressing himself in his own fashion, that the
drama of France is illumined a score or more years later, and not by the
comedies in the composition of which Scribe had the aid of an army of
allies.
In any period of abundant fertility we can observe growing together at
the same time from the soil, a fairly large number of trees rising above
the underbrush, and we can also perceive here and there a tree of
conspicuous eminence towering above these clumps of average height. In
the luxuriant forest of the drama many of the trees of average height
may be ticketed with two names, but the monarchs of the wood, those
whose tops lift themselves high above their neighbors--these will be
found to bear only single signature.
(1914.)