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 Eugene 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.