Part 4

The art of play-writing, like the art of story-telling, and, indeed, like all the other arts, demands both a native gift and an acquired craft. Its basic principles are the same ever since the drama began; but its immediate methods vary at different times and in different countries. While every artist must say what it is given him to say, he can say it acceptably only by acquiring the method of speech employed by his immediate predecessors. However original he may prove himself at the end, in the beginning he can only imitate the methods and borrow the processes and avail himself of the practises which the elder craftsmen are employing successfully at the moment when he sets himself to learn their trade. He must--to use the apt term of the engineers--he must keep himself abreast of "state of the art." This is what the great dramatists have ever done; Sophocles follows in the footsteps of AEschylus, as Shakspere emulates Marlowe and Kyd, and as Moliere went to school to the adroit and acrobatic Italian comedians. These great dramatists were perfectly content to begin by taking over the patterns devised by their immediate predecessors in play-making, even if they were soon to enlarge these patterns and so modify them to suit their even larger needs.

Now, the state of the art when Stevenson turned to the theater was in accord with the picture-frame stage of to-day, with a single set to the act, and without the soliloquies and the confidential asides to the audience which may then have been proper enough on the apron-stage of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Even in the lower grade of playhouse, where rude and crude melodramas were performed, the method and the manner of the 'Miller and His Men' had long departed. The pleasure that melodrama can give is perennial; but its processes vary in accord with the changing conditions of the theater. The door was open for Stevenson to write melodrama, if he preferred that species of play, and if he desired to varnish it with literature as he was to varnish the police-novel or mystery-story in the 'Wrecker.' But if he sought to do this, he was bound to inform himself as to the state of the art at the instant of composition. If he shut his eyes to the changed conditions of the theater since the 'Miller and His Men' had won a wide popularity in the playhouse, then he made an unpardonable blunder, for the battle was lost before he could deploy his forces. He might have been forewarned by the failure of Charles Lamb in a like attempt. When Lamb's Elizabethan imitation 'John Woodvil' was rejected for Drury Lane by John Philip Kemble as not "consonant with the taste of the age"; its exasperated author cried: "Hang on the age! I'll write for antiquity!" But those who write for antiquity cannot complain if they do not delight their contemporaries. It is to his contemporaries, and not to antiquity or to posterity, that every true dramatist has appealed.

IV

And as Stevenson might have taken warning from the sad fate of Lamb, so he might have found his profit in considering the happy fortune of Victor Hugo, who also had a taste for melodrama. When the leader of the French romanticists felt that it was incumbent upon him to conquer the theater which the classicists held as their last stronghold, he was swift to consider the state of the art. He sought immediate success upon the stage, and the most successful plays of that period in France were the melodramas of Pixerecourt, and of his followers, and therefore Hugo sat himself down to spy out the secrets of their craft. He made himself master of their methods, and he put together the striking and startling plots of 'Hernani' and 'Ruy Blas' in strict accord with their formulas, certain that he could varnish with literature their melodramatic actions. So glittering was his varnish, so brilliant was his metrical rhetoric, so glowing were his golden verses, that he blinded the spectators and kept the most of them from peering beneath at his arbitrary and artificial skeleton of supporting melodramatic structure. To-day, after fourscore years, we can see just what it is that Hugo did; and his plays, superb as they are in their lyric adornment, stand revealed as frank melodramas, lacking sincerity of motive and veracity of character drawing. But when Hugo wrote them they were in Kemble's phrase "consonant with the taste of the age," and the best of them have not yet worn out their welcome in the theater.

Stevenson did not heed the warning of Lamb, and he did not profit by the example of Hugo. 'Deacon Brodie' was born out of date; so was 'Admiral Guinea'; and all the varnish of literature which the two collaborators applied externally and with loving solicitude availed naught. It is due to his entanglement in the strangling coils of Skeltery that Stevenson did not take the drama seriously. He seemed to have looked at it as something to be tossed off lightly to make money in the interstices of honest work. In his stories, long and short, he strove for effect, no doubt, but he was bent also on achieving sincerity and veracity. In his plays he made little effort for either sincerity or veracity, so far at least as his plot was concerned; and he thought he could lift these concoctions to the level of literature by the polish of his dialog, and by qualities applied on the outside instead of being developed from the inside. He seems to have believed that in the drama, at least, he could attain beauty by constructing his ornament instead of by ornamenting his construction, ignoring or ignorant of the fact that in the drama, the construction, if only it be solid enough, and four square to all the winds that blow, needs no ornament and is most impressive in its stark simplicity.

In his boyhood Goethe had also played with a toy theater, and it was a puppet-show piece which first called his attention to the mighty theme of his supreme poem; but the great German poet, captivated as he may have been by his youthful experience, was able in his manhood to free himself from its shackles. He came in time to have a profound insight into the principles of dramatic art, and of the dramaturgic craft. In his old age he talked about the theater freely and frequently to Eckermann; and there are few of his utterances which do not furnish food for reflection. Here is one of them:

Writing for the stage is something peculiar; and he who does not understand it had better leave it alone. Every one thinks that an interesting fact will appear interesting on the boards--nothing of the kind! Things may be very pretty to read, and very pretty to think about; but as soon as they are put upon the stage the effect is quite different; and that which has charmed us in the closet will probably fall flat on the boards.... Writing for the stage is a trade that one must understand, and requires a talent that one must possess. Both are uncommon, and where they are not combined, we have scarcely any good result.

That Stevenson had the native gift of the dramatist is undisputable, and Sir Arthur Pinero in his lecture was able to make this clear. But "writing for the stage is also a trade that one must acquire"; and when Stevenson sought to acquire it he apprenticed himself to Skelt not to Sardou, to Redington and Pollock, not to Augier and Dumas.

(1914.)

P.S.--After the publication of this paper in _Scribner's Magazine_, a friendly reader in Great Britain was kind enough to copy out for me this Skeltian lyric, which appeared in the London _Fun_ in 1868, and which was probably rimed by Henry S. Leigh:

AN EARLY STAGE

Ah me! since first, long, long ago, I learned to love the British stage, It has--or I have--altered so, It scarce receives my patronage! Where are the villain's spangled tabs, His cloak, his ringlets, and his belt? Where are his scowls, his growls, his stabs, As shown of old by Park and Skelt?

Once was I manager myself, And played the 'Miller and his Men'; My company--ah, happy elf! I had no trouble with them then-- They never sulked, forgot their lines, Threw up their parts, or asked for "gelt"-- For as the reader p'r'aps divines-- I got them all of Park and Skelt.

I stuck them on, and cut them out, I painted them with colors bright; I scattered tinsel-specks about, And made them things of beauty, quite-- Not joys forever--ne'ertheless, They've vanished just as snowflakes melt. None can restore the bliss, I guess, I once derived from Park and Skelt.

How I revered the artist's skill Who did my heroes represent-- With scowls the very soul to thrill-- With one leg straight and one leg bent! I loved his ladies full of grace, And on their beauties fondly dwelt:-- My first pictorial love could trace Her pedigree to Park and Skelt.

Ah me! 'tis many a year since I Those dear old plates--a penny plain And two-pence colored--did espy; I ne'er shall see their like again! The world's with disappointment rife, And I have far too often felt That actors now are less like life Than those I bought of Park and Skelt!

IV

WHY FIVE ACTS?

WHY FIVE ACTS?

I

In the eighteenth century, both in England and in France, every stately and ponderous tragedy and every self-respecting comedy obeyed the obligation imposed by long tradition and duly stretched itself out to the full measure of five acts, no more and no less. It felt bound thus to distend itself, even tho its theme might be far too frail for so huge a frame, and even tho the unfortunate author often found himself at his wit's end to piece out his play's end. Any one who has had occasion to read widely in the works of the eighteenth century playwrights cannot fail to feel abundant sympathy for the harassed poet who plaintively called on Parliament to pass a law abolishing fifth acts altogether. This unduly distressed dramatist was an Englishman; but about the same time a Frenchman, weary of contemplating the frequent emptiness of the contemporary tragic stage, sarcastically remarked that, after all, it must be very easy _not_ to write a tragedy in five acts.

Yet if tragedy was to be written at all, it had to have five acts, since a smaller number would not seem proportionate to a truly tragic subject. But why five acts? Why has five the number sacred to the tragic muse? Why did even the comic muse demand it? Why does George Meredith, discussing comedy, declare that "five is dignity with a trailing robe; whereas one, or two, or three acts would be short skirts, and degrading." Why not three acts, or seven? Why was it that any other number of acts was unthinkable--or at least never thought of?

Questions like these seem to have floated before the mind of the Abbe d'Aubignac, writing in the seventeenth century, and he came very near putting to himself the query which serves as a title for this chapter. "Poets have generally agreed that all Drammas regularly should have neither more nor less than Five Acts; and the Proof of this is the general observation of it; but for the Reason, I do not know whether there be any founded in Nature. Rhetorick has this advantage over Poetry in the Parts of Oration, that the Exord, Narration, Confirmation and Peroration are founded upon a way of discoursing natural to all Men.... But for the Five Acts of the Drammatick Poem, they have not been framed upon any sound ground."

That the division of a drama into five parts was accepted in every civilized country as the only possible division, seems very strange indeed, when we consider that there is really no artistic justification for it, nor any logical necessity. Like every other work of art a play ought to have a single subject, a clearly defined topic; in other words, it ought to have Unity of Action. There is no denying that some of the greatest artists have, now and again, been tempted to deal with two themes at the same time, combining these as best they could in a single work at the risk of leaving us a little in doubt as to their intention; but in the immense majority of acknowledged masterpieces the interest is carefully centered in a single object. In these masterpieces the action is single and unswerving, sweeping forward irresistibly to its inevitable end.

If, therefore, we accept the Unity of Action as a general rule, binding upon all artists, we can hardly deny that the most obviously natural arrangement for the story is to set it forth in one act, without any intermission or subdivision whatsoever--a single action in a single act. Yet it is the play in three acts which we are bound to recognize at once as possessing the ideal form, since it enables the dramatist to set apart the three divisions, which Aristotle declared to be essential to a well-constructed tragedy--the beginning, the middle, and the end--each presented in an act of its own. To put a play into more than three acts is possible only by halving one or another of these three essential parts. In a four-act play, the beginning may be split into two acts; and in a five-act play the middle may also be subdivided.

The logic of the three-act form, and the convenience of it also, are so obvious that ever since the tyranny of the Procrustean framework in five acts was abolished in the middle years of the nineteenth century, practical playwrights of all countries have favored it more and more. The young Dumas used it in his later plays, and so did Ibsen, that consummate master of stagecraft, emancipated from empty traditions, but profiting shrewdly by every available device of his immediate predecessors. If the four-act form is also popular to-day, this seems to be because the modern dramatist, intending a play in three acts, finds himself forced by sheer press of matter, to subdivide one of the essential members, as Sir Arthur Pinero had to do in the 'Second Mrs. Tanqueray' and Mr. Henry Arthur Jones in the 'Liars.' Even the opera, which liked the larger framework of five acts when Scribe was writing librettos for Halevy and Meyerbeer, is now content with only three, since Wagner revealed his skill as a librettist.

It is true that Freytag, in his sadly old-fashioned treatise on 'Technic of the Drama,' accepted without cavil the five-act form, and even attempted to justify it by asserting that there are in fact five divisions of a tragic action. He symbolized the arrangement of a drama in a pyramidal structure, declaring that it ascends from the Introduction to the Climax, and then descends to the Catastrophe. Obviously these are only different terms for the beginning, the middle, and the end. But he vainly imagined two other members, the Rise, which intervenes between the Introduction and the Climax, and the Fall, which he inserted between the Climax and the Catastrophe. Obviously, again, this is an explanation after the event; and it seems to have its origin solely in his acceptance of the five-act form. And Freytag was forced to abandon his own theory when he considered honestly certain of the masterpieces of the modern drama. He admitted it to be "impossible that the single acts should correspond entirely to the five great divisions of the action." He asserted that "in the Rising Action, the first stage was usually in the first act, the last sometimes in the third; of the Falling Action the beginning and the end were sometimes taken in the third and fifth acts." Yet he failed to see that if he made this admission, he cut the ground from under his feet, and that there was no longer any acceptable reason for his insistence upon the five-act form.

Freytag had no doubt at all as to the necessity of the division into five acts. He received it with blind faith, as tho it had been prescribed by divine authority. Yet if he had chosen to explore the early history of the drama in his own tongue, he would have found Hans Sachs sometimes extending his plays into six acts, and even into seven. And if he had cared to consider the drama of the Spaniards he would have seen that the most of the plays of Calderon are in three acts--a division which the great dramatic poet of Spain had taken over, as he had taken over so much else, from his masterful predecessor, Lope de Vega. In his interesting and illuminating little treatise on the art of writing plays, Lope de Vega gave the credit of establishing the three-act form to Virues. Plays had previously been written in four acts; as Lope puts it pleasantly: "The drama had gone on all fours, like a child, and truly it was then in its infancy."

Freytag ignored or was ignorant of Hans Sachs and Calderon. His mind was fixed on Goethe and on Schiller, altho his vision also included Shakspere, upon whom the two German poets had more or less modeled themselves. The tradition of the five-act form might not obtain in the earliest German drama, as it did not obtain in the Spanish; but it was firmly established in the later German drama, in the English, and in the French. It is easy to see that the later Germans derived it from the French and the English; but where did the French and the English get it? Where could they get it? No such division existed in the medieval drama, in the mysteries and in the miracle-plays, out of which the drama of every modern language has been developed. No such division existed in the Greek drama, which has served as a standard and as a stimulus to the drama of every modern literature. A Greek tragedy was represented without any intermission in a single, long unbroken act; and if a sequence of three plays was sometimes performed, one after another, on the same day, and dealing with successive periods of the same story, this trilogy might suggest a division into three parts. Nor is any hint of the duty of dividing a tragedy into five parts to be discovered anywhere in Aristotle.

II

And yet we must go back to the Greek theater if we want to see why it is that the 'Femmes Savantes' of Moliere and the 'School for Scandal' of Sheridan are each of them in five acts. But it is not from a Greek that we get the law that this division was obligatory on all self-respecting dramatists; it is from a Roman, writing at a time when the drama of his own language had been ousted from the stage by pantomimic spectacle and by gladiatorial combat. It is Horace, who, in his epistle on the art of poetry, declares the necessity of five acts:

Ne brevior, neu sit quinto productior actu Fabula quae posci vult et spectata reponi.

Sir Theodore Martin rendered this in an English rimed couplet, which does not completely convey the meaning of the two Latin lines, but which will serve to show the rigidity of the rule laid down by the Roman poet:

Five acts a play must have, nor more nor less, To keep the stage and have a marked success.

But this still leaves us groping in the dark. Why did Horace declare this law? What warrant had he? What put the idea into his head? These are questions answered by a French scholar, M. Weil; in one of his ingenious and learned 'Etudes sur le Drame Antique,' he explains that Horace derived much of his theory of the poetic art from the Alexandrian critics, and more particularly from the writings of a certain Neoptolemus of Parium. Probably the Alexandrian authors of tragedy had been led to adopt a division into five acts by following the example of Euripides, whose practise was not uniform, but who tended to reduce to four the number of the lyric odes in his tragedies, thus separating the purely dramatic passages into five parts.

In Athens the drama had been slowly evolved out of the tragic songs; and in the surviving tragedies of AEschylus, the earliest of the three great dramatic poets of Greece, we discover that the choral odes are more abundant than the dialog which carries on the plot. In the extant plays of his mighty successor, Sophocles, the drama is seen emerging triumphant, but the lyrical passages are still frequent and important. In the later pieces of Euripides, the third and most modern of the Attic tragedians, we note that the drama has almost wholly disengaged itself from the lyric out of which it sprang. In AEschylus and in Sophocles the number of choral odes and the number of episodes, of purely dramatic passages in dialog, is never fixed, varying from play to play as the plot might demand. But in Euripides the choral odes are more detached from the drama; beautiful in themselves, they seem to exist rather for their own sake than in any integral relation to the play itself. And apparently Euripides was far more interested in his play, in his plot, and in his characters, than in these extraneous lyric passages, so he reduced them to the lowest possible number, generally to four, serving, so to speak, as exquisite interact music, separating the pathetic play into five episodes in dialog.

The Alexandrian tragedians came long after Euripides, and to their sophisticated taste his pathetic and emotional plays appealed far more than the austerer and manlier masterpieces of his two great predecessors. Apparently they accepted his form as final; they may even have left out the choruses altogether; and then their tragedies had five separate episodes--in other words, five acts. It is these lost Alexandrian tragedies, composed in the decadent days of the Greek drama, which seem to have served as the model for Seneca, the eloquent rhetorician--even tho he frequently took over the theme and often more or less of the structure of certain of the dramas of Euripides.

The tragedies of Seneca are to be considered rather as dramatic poems than as poetic dramas, since they were intended not really for performance by actors, in a theater, before an audience, but for recitation by a single elocutionist in a private house--much as a professional reader of our own time might recite unaided a more or less dramatic poem by Shelley or Byron or Browning. Coming long after Horace, Seneca unhesitatingly accepted all of the restrictions insisted upon by the Latin lyrist--including the purely academic limitation of the number of speakers taking part in any dialog to three, a limitation absolutely absurd in a poem not intended for actual acting and not forced to conform to the accidental conditions of the Attic stage. Obeying also the other rule which he found in Horace's codification of the laws of dramatic poetry, the Hispano-Roman rhetorician was careful always to cut up his play into five parts. But he saw his profit in retaining the chorus, since this could be made to serve as the appropriate mouthpiece for the elaborate passages of elocutionary splendor in which he delighted.