Of all the various forms of thought, the stage is that which nearest
approaches the plastic arts--inasmuch as we cannot work in it unless
we know its material processes; but with this difference: that in the
other arts one learns these processes, while in play-writing one
guesses them; or to speak more accurately, they are in us to begin
with.
One can become a painter, a sculptor, a musician, by sheer study: one
does not become a dramatic author in this fashion. A caprice of
nature makes your eye in such a way that you can see a thing after a
particular manner, not absolutely correct, but which must nevertheless
appear, to any other persons that you wish to have so think, the only
correct point of view. The man really called to write for the stage
reveals what is an extremely rare faculty, in his very first
attempts,--say in a farce in school, or a drawing-room charade. There
is a sort of science of optics and of perspective that enables one to
draw a personage, a character, a passion, an impulse of the soul, with
a single stroke of the pen. Dramatic _cheating of the eye_ is so
complete that often the spectator, when he is a mere reader of the
play, desiring to give himself once more the same emotion that he has
felt as one of the audience, not only cannot recapture that emotion in
the written words before him, but often cannot even distinguish the
passage where the emotion lies hid. It was a word, a look, a silence,
a gesture, a purely atmospheric combination, that held him spellbound.
So comes in the genius of the playwright's trade, if those two words
can be associated. One may compare writing for the stage in relation
to other phases of literature, as we compare ceiling painters with
[painters of] pictures for the wall or the easel. Woe to the painter
if he forget that his composition is to be looked at from a distance,
with a light below it!
A man without merit as a thinker, a moralist, a philosopher, an
author, may turn out to be a dramatic author of the first class; that
is to say, in the work of setting in motion before you the purely
external movements of mankind; and on the other hand, to become in the
theatre the thinker, the moralist, the philosopher, or the author to
whom one listens, one must indispensably be furnished with the
particular and natural qualities of a man of much lower grade. In
short, to be a master in the art of writing for the stage, you must be
a poor hand in the superior art....
That dramatic author who shall know mankind like Balzac, and who shall
know the theatre like Scribe, will be the greatest dramatic author
that has ever existed.
Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature,'
by E. Irenaeus Stevenson