From Ernest Legouvé.
You ask me how a play is made.
By beginning at the end.
A novel is quite a different matter.
Walter Scott, the great Walter Scott, sat down of a morning at his
study-table, took six sheets of paper and wrote 'Chapter One,' without
knowing anything else about his story than the first chapter. He set
forth his characters, he indicated the situation; then situation and
characters got out of the affair as best they could. They were left to
create themselves by the logic of events.
Eugène Sue often told me that it was impossible for him to draw up a
plan. It benumbed him. His imagination needed the shock of the
unforeseen; to surprize the public he had to be surprized himself. More
than once at the end of an instalment of one of his serial stories he
left his characters in an inextricable situation of which he himself did
not know the outcome.
George Sand frequently started a novel on the strength of a phrase, a
thought, a page, a landscape. It was not she who guided her pen, but her
pen which guided her. She started out with the intention of writing one
volume and she wrote ten. She might intend to write ten and she wrote
only one. She dreamed of a happy ending, and then she concluded with a
suicide.
But never have Scribe, or Dumas _père_, or Dumas _fils_, or Augier, or
Labiche, or Sardou, written "Scene One" without knowing what they were
going to put into the last scene. A point of departure was for them
nothing but an interrogation point. "Where are you going to lead me?"
they would ask it; and they would accept it only if it led them to a
final point, or to the central point which determined all the stages of
the route, including the first.
The novel is a journey in a carriage. You make stops, you spend a night
at the inn, you get out to look at the country, you turn aside to take
breakfast in some charming spot. What difference does it make to you as
a traveler? You are in no hurry. Your object is not to arrive anywhere,
but to find amusement while on the road. Your true goal is the trip
itself.
A play is a railway journey by an express train--forty miles an hour,
and from time to time ten minutes stop for the intermissions; and if the
locomotive ceases rushing and hissing you hiss.
All this does not mean that there are no dramatic masterpieces which do
not run so fast or that there was not an author of great talent,
Molière, who often brought about his ending by the grace of God. Only,
let me add that to secure absolution for the last act of 'Tartuffe' you
must have written the first four.
Ernest Legouvé.
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