But what I should, in little, be inclined to say, in answer to the "concentration" idea is that, unless you have first some firm hold on the broad bed-rock facts of human nature specially appealed to or called forth by the drama, you may concentrate as much as you please, but you will not write a successful acting drama, not to speak of a great one.Mr Pinero's magnifications of the immense effort demanded from him must in the end come to mean that he himself does not instinctively and with natural ease and spontaneity secure this, but secures it only after great conscious effort; and hence, perhaps, it is that he as well as so many other modern playwrights fall so far behind alike in the amount turned out, and also in its quality as compared with the products of many playwrights in the past.
The problem drama, in every phase and turn of it, endeavours to dispense with these fundamental demands implied in the common and instinctive sense or consciousness of the mass of men and women, and to substitute for that interest something which will artificially supersede it, or, at any rate, take its place.The interest is transferred from the crises necessarily worked up to in the one case, with all of situation and dialogue directed to it, and without which it would not be strictly explicable, to something abnormal, odd, artificial or inverted, or exceptional in the characters themselves.Having thus, instead of natural process and sequence, if we may put it so, the problem dramatist has a double task - he must gain what unity he can, and reach such crises as he may by artificial aids and inventions which the more he uses the more makes natural simplicity unattainable; and next he must reduce and hide as far as he can the abnormality he has, after all, in the long run, created and presented.He cannot maintain it to the full, else his work would become a mere medical or psychological treatise under the poorest of disguises; and the very necessity for the action and reaction of characters upon each other is a further element against him.In a word no one character can stand alone, and cannot escape influencing others, and also the action.Thus it is that he cannot isolate as a doctor does his patient for scientific examination.The healthy and normal must come in to modify on all sides what is presented of unhealthy and abnormal, and by its very presence expose the other, while at the same time it, by its very presence, ministers improvement, exactly as the sunlight disperses mist and all unhealthy vapours, germs, and microbes.
The problem dramatist, in place of broad effect and truth to nature, must find it in stress of invention and resource of that kind.Thus care and concentration must be all in all with him - he must never let himself go, or get so interested and taken with his characters that THEY, in a sense, control or direct him.He is all too conscious a "maker" and must pay for his originality by what in the end is really painful and overweighted work.This, I take it, is the reason why so many of the modern dramatists find their work so hard, and are, comparatively, so slow in the production of it, while they would fain, by many devices, secure the general impression or appeal made to all classes alike by the natural or what we may call spontaneous drama, they are yet, by the necessity of subject matter and methods of dealing with it, limited to the real interest of a special class - to whom is finally given up what was meant for mankind - and the troublesome and trying task laid on them, to try as best they may to reconcile two really conflicting tendencies which cannot even by art be reconciled but really point different ways and tend to different ends.As the impressionist and the pre-Raphaelite, in the sister-art of painting cannot be combined and reconciled in one painter - so it is here; by conception and methods they go different ways, and if they SEEK the same end, it is by opposing processes - the original conception alike of nature and of art dictating the process.
As for Stevenson, it was no lack of care or concentration in anything that he touched; these two were never lacking, but because his subtlety, mystical bias and dreaminess, and theorising on human nature made this to him impossible.He might have concentrated as much as he pleased, concentrated as much as even Mr Pinero desires, but he would not have made a successful drama, because he was Robert Louis Stevenson, and not Mr Pinero, and too long, as he himself confessed, had a tendency to think bad-heartedness was strength; while the only true and enduring joy attainable in this world - whether by deduction from life itself, or from IMPRESSIONS
of art or of the drama, is simply the steady, unassailable, and triumphant consciousness that it is not so, but the reverse, that goodness and self-sacrifice and self-surrender are the only strength in the universe.Just as Byron had it with patriotism:-
"Freedom's battle once begun, Bequeathed from bleeding sire to son, Tho' baffled oft is ever won."
To go consciously either in fiction or in the drama for bad-
heartedness as strength, is to court failure - the broad, healthy, human heart, thank Heaven, is so made as to resent the doctrine;
and if a fiction or a play based on this idea for the moment succeeds, it can only be because of strength in other elements, or because of partial blindness and partially paralysed moral sense in the case of those who accept it and joy in it.If Mr Pinero directly disputes this, then he and I have no common standing-
ground, and I need not follow the matter any further.Of course, the dramatist may, under mistaken sympathy and in the midst of complex and bewildering concatenations, give wrong readings to his audience, but he must not be always doing even that, or doing it on principle or system, else his work, however careful and concentrated, will before long share the fate of the Stevenson-
Henley dramas confessedly wrought when the authors all too definitely held bad-heartedness was strength.
