Furthermore, we find in the works of female storytellers not only a lack
of largeness in topic, but also a lack of strictness in treatment. Their
stories, even when they charm us with apt portraiture and with adroit
situation, are likely to lack solidity of structure. 'Castle Rackrent,'
an illuminating picture of human nature in a special environment, is a
straggling sequence of episodes; 'Pride and Prejudice' is almost
plotless, when considered as a whole; and 'Romola' is ill-proportioned
and misshapen. No woman has ever achieved the elaborate solidity of 'Tom
Jones,' the superb structure of the 'Scarlet Letter,' or the simple
unity of 'Smoke.' And here we come close to the most obvious explanation
of the dearth of female dramatists--in the relative incapacity of women
to build a plan, to make a single whole compounded of many parts, and
yet dominated in every detail by but one purpose.
The drama demands a plot, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and
with everything rigorously excluded which does not lead from the
beginning thru the middle to the end. The novel refuses to submit itself
to any such requirement; it can make shift to exist without an
articulated skeleton. There is little or no plot, there is only a casual
succession of more or less unrelated incidents in 'Gil Blas' and
'Tristram Shandy,' in the 'Pickwick Papers,' and in Huckleberry Finn.'
The novel may be invertebrate and yet survive, whereas the play without
a backbone is dead--which is biologic evidence that the drama is higher
in the scale of creation than prose fiction.
"The novel, as practised in English, is the perfect paradise of the
loose end," so Mr. Henry James once pointed out, whereas "the play
consents to the logic of but one way, mathematically right, and with the
loose end as gross an impertinence on its surface and as grave a
dishonor as the dangle of a snippet of silk or wool on the right side of
a tapestry." The action of a story may be what its writer pleases, and
he can reduce it to a minimum or embroider it at will with airy
arabesques of incessant digression; but the plot of a play must be a
straight line, the shortest distance between two points, the point of
departure and the point of arrival. And it is because of this imperative
necessity for integrity of construction that the drama is more difficult
than prose fiction. Since a part of our pleasure in any art is derived
from our consciousness of the obstacles to be overcome by the artist,
and from our recognition of the skill displayed by him in vanquishing
them, we have here added evidence in behalf of the belief in the
artistic superiority of the play over the novel merely as a form of
expression.
The drama may be likened to the sister art of architecture in its
insistent demand for plan and proportion. A play is a poor thing, likely
to expire of inanition, unless its author is possessed of the ability to
build a plot which shall be strong and simple and clear, and unless he
has the faculty of enriching it with abundant accessories in accord with
a scheme thought out in advance and adhered to from start to finish.
With this constructive skill women seem to be less liberally endowed
than men; at least, they have not yet revealed themselves as architects,
altho they have won a warm welcome as decorators--a subordinate art for
which they are fitted by their superior delicacy and by their keener
interest in details. Much of the pervasive charm of many of the
cleverest novels of female authorship lies in the persistent ingenuity
with which the lesser points of character, of conduct, and of manners
are presented. In Jane Austen, in Maria Edgeworth, and often also in
George Eliot, we are delighted by little miracles of observation, and by
little triumphs in the microscopic analysis of subtle and unsuspected
motives. But in these very books, the story, however felicitously
decorated, is not sustained by a severe architectural framework. And it
is this firm certainty of structure that the drama imperatively demands.
In other words, women seem to be less often dowered than men with what
Tyndall called "scientific imagination," with the ability to put
together a whole in which the several parts are never permitted to
distend a disproportionate space. This scientific imagination is
essential to the playwright; and the novelist is fortunate if he also
possesses it, altho it is not essential to him. A novel may be only a
straggling succession of episodes; a play must have fundamental unity. A
novelist may fire with a shot-gun and bring down his bird on the wing,
whereas a playwright needs a rifle to arrest the charging lion.
It is a significant fact that only once was George Sand really
triumphant as a dramatist, and that this single success was won by the
secret aid of the cleverest of contemporary playwrights. She was
passionately devoted to the theater; she had many intimate friends among
the stage-folk; she delighted in private theatricals; and she wrote a
dozen or more plays, several of them dramatized from her own stories.
The sole play which held its own on the stage in rivalry with the best
work of Augier and Dumas _fils_ was the 'Marquis de Villemer,' and it
owed its more fortunate fate to the gratuitous and unacknowledged
collaboration of Dumas _fils_.
For the author of the 'Mariage de Victorine,' the author of the 'Dame
aux Camelias' had a high esteem, which he took occasion to express more
than once in his critical papers; and she regarded him with
semi-maternal affection, often inviting him to join the little parties
at Nohant. On one of his visits he heard her say that she was intending
to dramatize the 'Marquis de Villemer,' but that she did not quite see
her way to compact its leisurely action in conformity with the rigid
restrictions of the stage. That evening he borrowed a copy of the novel
to take up to his own room; and the next morning when he came down to
the late breakfast, he laid before her half a dozen sheets of paper,
whereon she found a complete scenario for her guidance, an adroit
division of her novel into acts and scenes, needing only to be clothed
with dialog. With his intuitive understanding of the principles of
play-making, and with his masterly power of construction, he had solved
her problems for her and made it easy for her to write the play.
Here is an unexampled kind of collaboration, since the invention of the
story, the creation of the characters, the dialog to be spoken--these
were all due to George Sand alone; but the concentrating of the
interest, the heightening of the personages of the narrative to adjust
themselves to the perspective of the theater, the serried and
irresistible momentum of the action--these were the contribution of
Dumas, a freewill offering to his old friend. The piece that she wrote
was hers and hers alone, and yet it had a dramatic vitality lacking in
all her other plays, because a man had intervened at the right moment to
provide the architectural framework which the woman could not have
bestowed upon it, however felicitous she might be in the decoration.