PROLOGUE

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

There are no rules for writing a play.  It is easy, indeed, to lay down negative recommendations—­to instruct the beginner how not to do it.  But most of these “don’ts” are rather obvious; and those which are not obvious are apt to be questionable.  It is certain, for instance, that if you want your play to be acted, anywhere else than in China, you must not plan it in sixteen acts of an hour apiece; but where is the tyro who needs a text-book to tell him that?  On the other hand, most theorists of to-day would make it an axiom that you must not let your characters narrate their circumstances, or expound their motives, in speeches addressed, either directly to the audience, or ostensibly to their solitary selves.  But when we remember that, of all dramatic openings, there is none finer than that which shows Richard Plantagenet limping down the empty stage to say—­

  “Now is the winter of our discontent
  Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
  And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
  In the deep bosom of the ocean buried”—­

we feel that the axiom requires large qualifications.  There are no absolute rules, in fact, except such as are dictated by the plainest common sense.  Aristotle himself did not so much dogmatize as analyse, classify, and generalize from, the practices of the Attic dramatists.  He said, “you had better” rather than “you must.”  It was Horace, in an age of deep dramatic decadence, who re-stated the pseudo-Aristotelian formulas of the Alexandrians as though they were unassailable dogmas of art.

How comes it, then, that there is a constant demand for text-books of the art and craft of drama?  How comes it that so many people—­and I among the number—­who could not write a play to save their lives, are eager to tell others how to do so?  And, stranger still, how comes it that so many people are willing to sit at the feet of these instructors?  It is not so with the novel.  Popular as is that form of literature, guides to novel-writing, if they exist at all, are comparatively rare.  Why are people possessed with the idea that the art of dramatic fiction differs from that of narrative fiction, in that it can and must be taught?

The reason is clear, and is so far valid as to excuse, if not to justify, such works as the present.  The novel, as soon as it is legibly written, exists, for what it is worth.  The page of black and white is the sole intermediary between the creative and the perceptive brain.  Even the act of printing merely widens the possible appeal:  it does not alter its nature.  But the drama, before it can make its proper appeal at all, must be run through a highly complex piece of mechanism—­the theatre—­the precise conditions of which are, to most beginners, a fascinating mystery.