The Play's the Thing

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

“ YES, your play is a little masterpiece,” said the publisher to author. “ It has bitten into my bone and made me think, just as a flinty winter night makes me feel. It is grim and relentless and powerful; but somehow, too, it is captive to art.”

“ Yet they won’t act it,” said the author.

“ Of course not; it’s too big for our syndicated stage.”

“ And you won’t print it.”

“ How can we, when the dealers tell us that the dramatic form is anathema to the trade ? I wanted so much to make a book of this that I asked questions of the booksellers, myself. It’s no use, they tell me ; the great public — bless it! — simply won’t touch anything in dialogue. And as for dialogue in verse, you may as well write in Choctaw and expect readers.”

“ But what about Stephen Phillips ? ”

“ Oh, he’s English, you know; he’s found that pearl of great price, a London reputation, and that buys anything over here. And then he goes back to the dark ages and builds up a kind of erotic Presbyterianism on Dante and a Drury Lane passion on the Bible, — two old books which people rather like when they can take them in homœopathic doses. Whereas you, you ’re giving us Chicago ; and who cares about Chicago ? ”

“ They will some day.”

“ Oh yes, and some day, perhaps, they’ll take it from you. You’ve got it, — the very thing; precisely what I’ve felt in dumb sensations out there, but did n’t know how to reduce to words. Go on, my boy, and bless your stars that you write for the few. You ought to when you see what goes down with the many.”

The author looked ruefully at his good clothes, and longed for a return of the day when poor young poets were properly clad in rags. “ But how do you advise me to live ? ”

“ Oh, that does n’t matter! Hug your soul, — it’s a great satisfaction to have one. And if you write anything for the canaille, send it to us.”

“ But this play, this ‘ little masterpiece,’ as you call it, — how is it to find even its few ? Browning was impracticable, — I have never heard that he had many readers at first; bat somehow or other he got into print. Ibsen was the most modern of the moderns, yet little provincial Norwegian theatres staged his plays, and little handfuls of critics heard and stormed at them. In Paris, any dramatic experiment, no matter how bizarre, can get its hearing; in some hole of a hall, perhaps, but its ' few ’ are there. If I put my masterpiece in my trunk, how shall I learn to write better ones ? ”

“ I don’t know, my boy ; that’s your problem,” said the publisher, knitting his brows.

“ And while I am trying to solve it, one of two things will happen : either my body will starve, and my great works die unborn ; or my soul will starve, and I shall be sending you things ‘ for the canaille.’ ”

“ Put up a stiff fight, and it won’t be so bad as that,” said the publisher, offering a glittering generality.

But the poet shrugged his shoulders. “ My country kills its prophets if it can ; and if it can’t, it keeps them under as long as possible.”

The publisher smiled and frowned. “ Youth may be melodramatic, but it sometimes hits the nail on the head. The republic prefers to import its art, and likes it of the good old patterns.”

“ But we are so out of date ! ” cried the poet. " Everywhere else the play’s the thing, and the novel stays in the nineteenth century, where it belongs. America lags at the tail of the procession, and pretty soon we shall see her running to catch up. Look at Germany : there’s no such thing as a novel in Germany. Scores of young men, besides Sudermann and Hauptmann, are writing plays and getting them acted, and selling them by the thousand at railway bookstalls. And France: see how she welcomes Rostand and Brieux and Courtaline and the rest, — all men who have something to say, not mere syndicate puppets. She takes them to her heart, and hears them, and reads them, and laughs and cries over them ; and so they are spurred on, and do their best. And even in slow England, Bernard Shaw ” —

“ You can’t say much for England’s welcome of him,” threw in the publisher.

“ Well, he gets published, if not played, and then we take him up, and ”—

“ People gulp down his plays for the sake of his prefaces,” the man of books explained.

“ When we join the procession, we ’ll swallow them for their own sake,” the poet retorted.

“ When we get into the twentieth century, we shall know a play from a sawmill,” agreed the publisher.

“ When we get into the twentieth century, we shall know that a novel is to a play as a diamond in the rough to the cut and polished brilliant. We shall return to the glorious old dramatic form, which people have neglected of late because they have been living in houses instead of out of doors. How can the art of the closet be anything but paltry, books that are written and read in a stuffy room, alone, by lamplight? We must return to first principles, get out in the open, in the crowd, live and sing again, and act out our tales before the people. Then we shall have poetry again, and comedies and tragedies ” —

“ Well, try it on with those Chicago things of yours.”

“ Ah, with too much closet literature the people are corrupted. The twentieth century is still at the dawn; you show me that I was born too soon. Beware lest the ‘ wise man utter vain knowledge, and fill his belly with the east wind.’ ”