Dramatic Technique Part 91

In all this discussion of the difference between truckling to an audience and necessary regard for its interests and prejudices, of changing public taste, the important point is that until a dramatist has considered his material in relation to the public, his play is by no means ready for production. Just because the persuasive side of dramatic art is so often neglected, play after play goes on the boards in such condition that it must be greatly changed before it can succeed. Often before these ample changes can be made, the public has lost interest in the piece. If a general principle might be laid down here it would be something like this. "If you wish, first write your play so that to you it is something clear and convincing as well as something that moves to laughter or to tears. Before, however, it is tried on the stage, make sure that you have considered it in all details in so detached a way that you have a right to believe that, as a result of your careful revising, it will produce with the public the same interest, and the same emotions to the same degree as the original version did with you."

Just here arises the ever present query, "Why struggle to write what the public does not readily and quickly accept? Why not study their unthinking likes and dislikes and give them what they want?" Certainly write in that way if it brings contentment, as it surely will bring monetary success if the play thus written really hits popular approval.

However, aiming to hit popular taste is like shooting at a shifting target and a play so made may be staged just as the public makes one of its swift changes in theatrical mood. Of course, too, he who writes in this way is in no sense a leader but merely the slave of his public. In any case, his play is but an imitation, not an expression of the author's individuality.

Even would-be dramatists who do not hold the opportunist ideas just considered may draw back after reading what has been stated in this book, saying: "How difficult and painstaking is this art of the drama which I have thought so fascinating and spontaneous." Of course, it is a difficult art. A good many years ago Sir Arthur Pinero said of it:

"When you sit in your stall at the theatre and see a play moving across the stage, it all seems so easy and so natural, you feel as though the author had improvised it. The characters, being, let us hope, ordinary human beings, say nothing very remarkable, nothing, you think (thereby paying the author the highest possible compliment) that might not quite well have occurred to you. When you take up a play-book (if you ever do take one up) it strikes you as being a very trifling thing--a mere insubstantial pamphlet beside the imposing bulk of the latest six-shilling novel. Little do you guess that every page of the play has cost more care, severer mental tension, if not more actual manual labor, than any chapter of a novel, though it be fifty pages long. It is the height of the author's art, according to the old maxim, that the ordinary spectator should never be clearly conscious of the skill and travail that have gone to the making of the finished product. But the artist who would achieve a like feat must realize that no ingots are to be got out of this mine, save after sleepless nights, days of gloom and discouragement, and other days, again, of feverish toil the result of which proves in the end to be misapplied and has to be thrown to the winds."

Nevertheless, this difficult art remains fascinating; and in practice, if rightly understood, it rapidly grows easier. In the understanding of any art there must be two stages. First comes the spontaneous doing of work very encouraging to the author and sufficiently good to warrant a person more experienced in encouraging him to proceed. Then begins the second stage, when he learns what can be taught him of technique in his chosen field. It is bound to be a time when consciousness of rules first learned and limitations first perceived make writing far less attractive and often so irksome that the worker is tempted to throw his task aside for good. He who does not really love his art will cast away his work.

He who really cares cannot do this. He may from the hampering of these newly recognized rules become irritable, have his moments of self-doubt and despair, but he cannot stop practicing his art. With each new effort, the rules which have been so troublesome will become more and more a matter of habit. Little by little the writer will gain a curious subconscious power of using almost unthinkingly the principles he needs, giving no thought to those not needed. Then, and then only, will he write with the art that conceals art; and it is only when he has attained to delight in the difficulties of the art he practices that he is in any true sense an artist.

What ultimately happens is probably this. The critical att.i.tude is strong in the scenario period, perhaps predominant as the dramatist works out construction, emphasis, proportion, etc., but when, with the scenario before him, he takes his pen in hand, he lets the creative impulse swamp completely the critical sense and loses himself in his task. Or he reverses the process. He writes in pure creative abandon, until at least an act of a play lies completed before him. Then, with his critical training brought to the front, he goes over and over the ma.n.u.script until what was a pure creative effort has been chastened and sublimated by his trained critical sense. The main point is: Don't stultify your creative instincts by trying to use critical training at the same time. As far as possible, let one precede the other. Write creatively. Then correct. Or write with the critical instinct strongly to the front until all plans are made. Then forget everything except the spirit of creation. Where dramatists in training waste their nervous energy and often stultify their best desires is in keeping critical tab upon themselves as they create. Writing something with pure delight, they are suddenly blocked by the critical spirit saying: "This or that is bad. You cannot keep this or that as you have written it," and presto! no more creative work that day. Unless the critical and creative faculties interwork sympathetically and cooperatively, keep them separate.

Whoever aims to write plays chiefly or wholly because he would like fame or money or because he wishes to show that he is as strong in one fictional art as another,--the story, the essay, the poem, whatever it may be,--in fact he who writes plays for any other reason than that he cannot be happy except in writing plays, better give over such writing.

Play-making is an exceedingly difficult art, and in so far as it is in any sense a transcript from life or a beautified presentation of life past, present, or imagined, it grows more difficult as the years pa.s.s because of the acc.u.mulating ma.s.s of dramatic masterpieces. Yet for him who cares for dramatic writing more than any form of self-expression, no time has been more promising than the present. There has been more good drama in the past twenty-five years the world over than at any time in the history of the stage. It has been more varied in subject and form, more individual in treatment. The drama is today more flexible, more daring and experimental, than ever before. It is in closer relation to all the subtlest and most advanced of man's thinking. It has been breaking new ways for itself, and it has new ways yet to break. All that has been said in this book concerns merely the historic foundations of this very great art. Accept these principles as stated or quarrel with most of them; but realize that any principles, whether accepted from others or self-taught, should be but the beginning of a life-long training by which the individual will pa.s.s from what he shares of general dramatic experience to what is peculiarly his own expression.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _L'Annee Psychologique_, 1894.

[2] _Play-Making_, p. 14. William Archer. Small, Maynard & Co.

[3] See pp. 248-276.

[4] See pp. 62-67.

[5] See pp. 474-507.