Robert Louis Stevenson as a Dramatist PAPERS ON PLAY-MAKING IV Robert Louis Stevenson as a Dramatist BY ARTHUR WING PINERO WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY CLAYTON HAMILTON Printed for the Dramatic Museum of Columbia University in the City of New York MCMXIV COPYRIGHT 1914 BY DRAMATIC MUSEUM OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY CONTENTS Introduction by Clayton Hamilton, Robert Louis Stevenson as a Dramatist by Arthur Wing Pinero, 25 Bibliographical Appendix by C, H 75 INTRODUCTION I. In the preface to his Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, Mr. Graham Balfour has re minded us of the traditional opinion that All Biography would be Autobiography if it could. On similar grounds, it might be stated that all dramatic criticism should be written by dramatists. No one but a dra matist can fully appreciate the difficulty of achieving that compression of life which the stage undoubtedly demands without falsi fication and no one else is fitted to under stand so well the infinitude of technical de vices that must be employed strategically to overcome this difficulty. It is unfortunate for criticism that most dramatists are kept so busy putting plays to gether that they are left no leisure for pulling plays apart, in order to explain the method of their making, for the benefit of students of the craft. Aristotle is rightly considered one of the greatest of dramatic critics but how much more instructive than even the Poetics might have been an analysis of GEdipus the King from the pen, say, of Euri pides, or best of all, from that of Sophocles himself. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule that great dramatists have rarely writ ten criticisms. The most notable instance is that of Lessing, who attained an equal eminence in literary history as a dramatist and as a critic. In our own day, Mr. Bernard Shaw has written a great deal of spirited dra matic criticism, and Mr. Henry Arthur Jones has labored earnestly in many lectures to in crease the public understanding of the funda mental principles of the modern drama. The critical utterances of professional play makers such as these are especially to be com mended to the attention of students of stage craft. Sir Arthur Pinero has appeared before the public only once as a dramatic critic. This was on the twenty-fourth of February, 1903, when he delivered his lecture on Rob ert Louis Stevenson The Dramatist to the members of the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh at the Music Hall in Stevensons native city. TMs lecture has been printed only privately, because Sir Arthur has an in eradicable habit of reserving the lime-light for his plays and keeping out of it himself but It is greatly to be regretted that so sound a piece of criticism has not been made acces sible to all who are interested in the technic of the drama. There are four points in this lecture that are especially pertinent to the study of the drama at large. The first of these Is that One of the great rules perhaps the only universal rule of the drama is that you cannot pour new wine into old skins. The art of drama is not stationary but pro gressive… . Its conditions are al ways changing, and … every dra matist whose ambition it is to produce live plays is absolutely bound to study carefully, and I may even add respectfully at any rate not contemptuously the conditions that hold good for his own age and generation. The tendency of most men of letters who remain out of touchwith the theater of their time is to write plays in imitation of outworn models. Thus, in the nineteenth century, most of the great English poets wrote plays in imitation 3 of the Elizabethan dramatists, and instead of showing the age and body of the time his form and pressure, produced mere curiosi ties of literature that were essentially ana chronistic. Stevenson himself, instead of imitating Shakspere, imitated the transpontine melodramatists of the early nineteenth cen tury…