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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Autobiography of a Play, by Bronson Howard
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Autobiography of a Play
+       Papers on Play-Making, II
+
+Author: Bronson Howard
+
+Commentator: Augustus Thomas
+
+Release Date: July 6, 2006 [EBook #18769]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PLAY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was
+produced from scanned images of public domain material
+from the Google Print project)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PAPERS ON PLAY-MAKING
+
+II
+
+The Autobiography of a Play
+
+by
+
+BRONSON HOWARD
+
+WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
+
+AUGUSTUS THOMAS
+
+Printed for the Dramatic Museum of Columbia University
+
+_in the City of New York_
+
+MCMXIV
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+Introduction by Augustus Thomas
+The Autobiography of a Play by Bronson Howard
+Notes by B. M.
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+The qualities that made Bronson Howard a dramatist, and then made him
+the first American dramatist of his day, were his human sympathy, his
+perception, his sense of proportion, and his construction. With his
+perception, his proportion, and his construction, respectively, he could
+have succeeded as a detective, as an artist, or as a general. It was his
+human sympathy, his wish and his ability to put himself in the other
+man's place, that made play-writing definitely attractive to him. As a
+soldier he would have shown the courage of the dogged defender in the
+trench or the calmly supervising general at headquarters, rather than
+the mad bravery that carried the flag at the front of a forlorn hope.
+His gifts were intellectual. His writing was more disciplined than
+inspired. If we shall claim for him genius, it must be preferably the
+genius of infinite pains.
+
+He saw intimately and clearly. His proportion made him write with
+discretion and a proper sense of cumulative emphasis, and his
+construction enabled him so to combine his materials as to secure this
+effect. He was intensely self-critical; and while almost without conceit
+concerning his own work, he had an accuracy of detached estimation that
+enabled him to stand by his own opinion with a proper inflexibility when
+his judgment convinced him that the opinion was correct.
+
+He worked slowly. At one time, in his active period, it was his custom
+to go from New York, where he lived, to New Rochelle, where he had
+formerly lived. There, upon the rear end of a suburban lot, he had a
+plain board cabin not more than ten feet square. In it were a deal
+table, a hard chair, and a small stove. He would go to this cabin in the
+morning when the tide of suburban travel was setting the other way, and
+spend his entire day there with his manuscript and his cigars. He
+carried a small lunch from his home. He once told me he was satisfied
+with his day's work if it provided him with ten good lines that would
+not have to be abandoned. I did not take that statement to imply that
+there were not in his experience the more profitable days that are in
+the work of every writer--days when the subject seems to command the
+pen and when the hand cannot keep pace with the vision. He was often too
+saturated with his story, too much the prisoner of his people, for it to
+have been otherwise; but his training had verified for him the truth
+that easy writing is hard reading.
+
+Then, too, while Bronson Howard arranged his characters for the eye and
+built his story for the judgment, he wrote his speeches for the ear.
+This attention to the cadence of a line was so essential to him that
+when writing as he sometimes did for a magazine he studied the sound of
+his phrase as if the print were to be read aloud. This same care for the
+dialog would retard its production; and critical revision would enforce
+still further delay.
+
+William Gillette once said to an interviewer that "plays were not
+written, but were rewritten." The experience of many play-wrights would
+support that statement. In the case of Bronson Howard, the autobiography
+of his 'Banker's Daughter' certainly does so. His most profitable play,
+perhaps, and the one which also brought him the greatest popular
+recognition, was 'Shenandoah'. That play was produced by a manager, who,
+after its first performance, believed that it would not succeed. A
+younger and more hopeful one saw in it its great elements of popularity,
+and encouraged him to rewrite it.
+
+Mr. William H. Crane, in a recent felicitous talk to the Society of
+American Dramatists, said that the 'Henrietta' was played exactly as its
+author had delivered it to the actors, without the change or the need of
+change in a single word, and with only the repetition late in the play
+of a line that had been spoken in an early act. That fact does not
+exclude the possibility of rewritings before the manuscript came to the
+company, but rather, in view of Bronson Howard's thoroness as a workman
+and his masterly sense of proportion, makes such rewritings the more
+probable. The effect, however, of his rewriting, wherever it may have
+been, and the slow additions of his daily contributions, was that of
+spontaneity.
+
+Some philosopher tells us that a factor of greatness in any field is the
+power to generalize, the ability to discover the principle underlying
+apparently discordant facts. Bronson Howard's plays are notable for
+their evidence of this power. He saw causes, tendencies, results. His
+plays are expositions of this chemistry. 'Shenandoah' dealt broadly with
+the forces and feelings behind the Civil War; the 'Henrietta' with the
+American passion for speculation--the money-madness that was dividing
+families. 'Aristocracy' was a very accurate, altho satirical, seizure of
+the disposition, then in its strongest manifestation, of a newly-rich
+and Western family of native force to break into the exclusive social
+set of New York and to do so thru a preparatory European alliance.
+
+He has a human story in every instance. There is always dramatic
+conflict between interesting characters, of course, but behind them is
+always the background of some considerable social tendency--some
+comprehensive generalization--that includes and explains them all. The
+commander from his eminence saw all the combatants: he knew what the
+fight was about, and it always was about something worth while. Bronson
+Howard never dramatized piffle.
+
+He was an observer of human nature and events, a traveler, a thinker, a
+student of the drama of all ages. He had been a reporter and an
+editorial writer. His plays were written by a watchful, sympathetic, and
+artistic military general turned philosopher.
+
+                    AUGUSTUS THOMAS.
+
+(June 1914).
+
+
+
+
+The Autobiography of a Play
+
+As read before the Shakspere Club _of_ Harvard University
+
+
+I have not come to Newcastle with a load of coals; and I shall not try
+to tell the faculty and students of Harvard University anything about
+the Greek drama or the classical unities. I will remind you of only one
+thing in that direction; and say even this merely because it has a
+direct bearing upon some of the practical questions connected with
+play-writing which I purpose to discuss. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and
+Euripides--perhaps we should give the entire credit, as some authorities
+do, to Aeschylus--taught the future world the art of writing a play. But
+they did not create the laws of dramatic construction. Those laws exist
+in the passions and sympathies of the human race. They existed thousands
+of years before the Father of the Drama was born: waiting, like the
+other laws of nature, to be discovered and utilized by man.
+
+A lecturer on "Animal Magnetism" failed to make his appearance one
+night, many years ago, in the public hall of a little town in Michigan,
+and a gentleman from Detroit consented to fill the vacant place. His
+lecture began and ended as follows: "Animal magnetism is a great
+subject, and the less said about it the better; we will proceed to
+experiments."
+
+I will take that wise man as my own exemplar today, and I will begin by
+echoing his words: The drama in general is a great subject, and the less
+I say about it the better; we will proceed to experiments.
+
+It happens that one of my own plays has had a very curious history. It
+has appeared before the American public in two forms, so radically
+different that a description of the changes made, and of the reasons for
+making them, will involve the consideration of some very interesting
+laws of dramatic construction. I shall ask you to listen very carefully
+to the story, or plot, of the piece as it was first produced in Chicago
+in 1873. Then I shall trace the changes that were made in this story
+before the play was produced in New York five years later. And after
+that, to follow the very odd adventures of the same play still further,
+I shall point out briefly the changes which were made necessary by
+adapting it to English life with English characters, for its production
+at the Court Theater, London, in 1879. All the changes which I shall
+describe to you were forced upon me (as soon as I had decided to make
+the general alterations in the play) by the laws of dramatic
+construction; and it is to the experimental application of these laws to
+a particular play that I ask your attention. The learned professors of
+Harvard University know much more about them than I do, so far as a
+study of dramatic literature, from the outside, can give them that
+knowledge; and the great modern authorities on the subject--Hallam,
+Lessing, Schlegel and many others--are open to the students of Harvard
+in her library; or, rather, shall I say, they lie closed on its shelves.
+But I invite you today to step into a little dramatic workshop, instead
+of a scientific library; and to see an humble workman in the craft,
+trying, with repeated experiments--not to elucidate the laws of dramatic
+construction, but to obey them, exactly as an inventor (deficient, it
+may be, in all scientific knowledge) tries to apply the general laws of
+mechanics to the immediate necessities of the machine he is working out
+in his mind. The moment a professor of chemistry has expressed a
+scientific truth, he must illustrate it at once by an experiment, or the
+truth will evaporate. An immense amount of scientific truth is
+constantly evaporating, for want of practical application; the air above
+every university in the world is charged with it. But what are the laws
+of dramatic construction? No one man knows much about them. As I have
+already reminded you, they bear about the same relation to human
+character and human sympathies as the laws of nature bear to the
+material universe. When all the mysteries of humanity have been solved,
+the laws of dramatic construction can be codified and clearly explained;
+not until then. But every scientific man can tell you a little about
+nature, and every dramatist can tell you a little about dramatic truth.
+A few general principles have been discovered by experiment and
+discussion. These few principles can be brought to your attention. But
+after you have learned all that has yet been learned by others, the
+field of humanity will still lie before you, as the field of nature lies
+before the scientist, with millions of times more to be discovered, by
+you or by some one else, than has ever yet been known. All I purpose
+to-night is to show you how certain laws of dramatic construction
+asserted themselves from time to time as we were making the changes in
+this play; how they thrust themselves upon our notice; how we could not
+possibly ignore them. And you will see how a man comes to understand any
+particular law, after he has been forced to obey it, altho, perhaps, he
+has never heard of it or dreamed of it before.
+
+And let me say here, to the students of Harvard--I do not presume to
+address words of advice to the faculty--it is to you and to others who
+enjoy the high privileges of liberal education that the American stage
+ought to look for honest and good dramatic work in the future. Let me
+say to you, then: Submit yourselves truly and unconditionally to the
+laws of dramatic truth, so far as you can discover them by honest mental
+exertion and observation. Do not mistake any mere defiance of these laws
+for originality. You might as well show your originality by defying the
+law of gravitation. Keep in mind the historical case of Stephenson. When
+a member of the British Parliament asked him, concerning his newfangled
+invention, the railroad, whether it would not be very awkward if a cow
+were on the track when a train came along, he answered: "Very ark'ard,
+indeed--for the cow." When you find yourself standing in the way of
+dramatic truth, my young friends--clear the track! If you don't, the
+truth can stand it; you can't. Even if you feel sometimes that your
+genius--that's always the word in the secret vocabulary of our own
+minds--even if your genius seems to be hampered by these dramatic laws,
+resign yourself to them at once, with that simple form of Christian
+resignation so beautifully illustrated by the poor German woman on her
+deathbed. Her husband being asked, afterward, if she were resigned to
+her death, responded with that touching and earnest recognition of
+eternal law: "Mein Gott, she had to be!"
+
+The story of the play, as first produced in Chicago, may be told as
+follows:
+
+Act first--Scene, New York. A young girl and a young man are in love,
+and engaged to be married. The striking originality of this idea will
+startle any one who has never heard of such a thing before. Lilian
+Westbrook and Harold Routledge have a lover's quarrel. Never mind what
+the cause of it. To quote a passage from the play itself: "A woman never
+quarrels with a man she doesn't love"--that is one of the minor laws of
+dramatic construction--"and she is never tired of quarreling with a man
+she does love." I dare not announce this as another law of female human
+nature; it is merely the opinion of one of my characters--a married man.
+Of course, there are women who do not quarrel with any one; and there
+are angels; but, as a rule, the women we feel at liberty to fall in love
+with do quarrel now and then; and they almost invariably quarrel with
+their husbands or lovers first, their other acquaintances must often be
+content with their smiles. But, when Lilian announces to Harold
+Routledge that their engagement is broken forever, he thinks she means
+to imply that she doesn't intend to marry him.
+
+Women are often misunderstood by our more grossly practical sex; we are
+too apt to judge of what they mean by what they say. The relations, if
+there are any, between a woman's tongue and her thoughts form the least
+understood section, perhaps, of dramatic law. You will get some idea of
+the intricacies of this subject, if one of your literary professors will
+draw you a diagram of what a woman doesn't mean when she uses the
+English language. Harold Routledge, almost broken-hearted, bids Lilian
+farewell, and leaves her presence. Lilian herself, proud and angry,
+allows him to go; waits petulantly a moment for him to return; then,
+forlorn and wretched, she bursts into the flood of tears which she
+intended to shed upon his breast. Under ordinary circumstances, those
+precious drops would not have been wasted. Young girls, when they
+quarrel with their lovers, are not extravagant with their tears; they
+put them carefully to the best possible use; and, I dare say, some of
+Lilian's tears would have fallen on a sheet of notepaper; and the
+stained lines of a letter would have reached Harold by the next post,
+begging him to come back, and to let her forgive him for all the
+spiteful things she had said to him. Unfortunately, however, just at
+this critical juncture in the affairs of love--while Cupid was waiting,
+hat in hand, to accompany the letter to its destination and keep an eye
+on the postman--Lilian's father enters. He is on the verge of financial
+ruin, and he has just received a letter from Mr. John Strebelow, a man
+of great wealth, asking him for his daughter's hand in marriage. Mr.
+Westbrook urges her to accept him, not from any selfish motives, but
+because he dreads to leave, in his old age, a helpless girl, trained
+only to luxury and extravagance, to a merciless world. Lilian, on her
+part, shudders at the thought of her father renewing the struggle of
+life when years have exhausted his strength. She knows that she will be
+the greatest burden that will fall upon him; she remembers her dead
+mother's love for them both; and she sacrifices her own heart. Mr.
+Strebelow is a man of about forty years, of unquestioned honor, of noble
+personal character in every way. Lilian had loved him, indeed, when she
+was a little child, and she feels that she can at least respect and
+reverence him as her husband. Mr. Strebelow marries her without knowing
+that she does not love him; much less, that she loves another.
+
+Act second--Paris. Lilian has been married five years, and is residing
+with her husband in the French capital. As the curtain rises, Lilian is
+teaching her little child, Natalie, her alphabet. All the warm affection
+of a woman's nature, suppressed and thrown back upon her own heart, has
+concentrated itself upon this child. Lilian has been a good wife, and
+she does reverence her husband as she expected to do. He is a kind,
+generous and noble man. But she does not love him as a wife. Mr.
+Strebelow now enters, and, after a little domestic scene, the French
+nurse is instructed to dress the child for a walk with its mother.
+Strebelow then tells Lilian that he has just met an old friend of hers
+and of himself--the American artist, Mr. Harold Routledge, passing thru
+Paris on his way from his studio in Rome. He has insisted on a visit
+from Mr. Routledge, and the two parted lovers are brought face to face
+by the husband. They are afterwards left alone together. Routledge has
+lived a solitary life, nursing his feelings toward a woman who had
+heartlessly cast him off, as he thinks, to marry a man merely for his
+wealth. He is bitter and cruel. But the cruelty to a woman which is born
+of love for her has a wonderful, an almost irresistible fascination for
+the female heart. Under the spell of this fascination, Lilian's old love
+reasserts its authority against that of his will. She forgets everything
+except the moment when her lover last parted from her. She is again the
+wayward girl that waited for his return; he has returned!--and she does
+what she would have done five years before; she turns, passionately, to
+throw herself into his arms. At this moment, her little child, Natalie,
+runs in. Lilian is a mother again, and a wife. She falls to her knees
+and embraces her child at the very feet of her former lover. Harold
+Routledge bows his head reverently, and leaves them together.
+
+Act third. The art of breaking the tenth commandment--thou shalt not
+covet they neighbor's wife--has reached its highest perfection in
+France. One of the most important laws of dramatic construction might be
+formulated in this way. If you want a particular thing done, choose a
+character to do it that an audience will naturally expect to do it. I
+wanted a man to fall in love with my heroine after she was a married
+woman, and I chose a French count for that purpose. I knew that an
+American audience would not only expect him to fall in love with another
+man's wife, but it would be very much surprised if he didn't. This saved
+much explanation and unnecessary dialog. Harold Routledge overhears the
+Count de Carojac, a hardened roué and a duellist, speaking of Lilian in
+such terms as no honorable man should speak of a modest woman.
+Routledge, with a studio in Rome, and having been educated at a German
+university, is familiar with the use of the rapier. A duel is arranged.
+Lilian hears of it thru a female friend, and Strebelow, also, thru the
+American second of Mr. Routledge. The parties meet at the Château
+Chateaubriand, in the suburbs of Paris, at midnight, by the light of the
+moon, in winter. A scream from Lilian, as she reaches the scene in
+breathless haste, throws Routledge off his guard; he is wounded and
+falls. Strebelow, too, has come on the field, not knowing the cause of
+the quarrel; but anxious to prevent a meeting between two of his own
+personal friends. Lilian is ignorant of her husband's presence, and she
+sees only the bleeding form of the man she loves lying upon the snow.
+She falls at his side, and words of burning passion, checked a few hours
+before by the innocent presence of her child, spring to her lips. The
+last of these words are as follows: "I have loved you--and you
+only--Harold, from the first."
+
+These words, clear, unmistakable, carrying their terrible truth straight
+to his heart, come to John Strebelow as the very first intimation that
+his wife did not love him when she married him. Crushed by this sudden
+blow, an expression of agony on his face, he stands for a moment
+speechless. When his voice returns, he has become another man. He is
+hard and cold, still generous, so far as those things a generous man
+cares least for are concerned. He will share all his wealth with her;
+but, in the awful bitterness of a great heart, at that moment, he feels
+that the woman who has deceived him so wickedly has no natural right to
+be the guardian of their child. "Return to our home, madam; it will be
+yours, not mine, hereafter; but our child will not be there." Ungenerous
+words! But if we are looking in our own hearts, where we must find
+nearly all the laws of dramatic construction, how many of us would be
+more generous, with such words as John Strebelow had just heard ringing
+in our ears? As the act closes, the startled love of a mother has again
+and finally asserted itself in Lilian's heart, its one overmastering
+passion of her nature. With the man she has loved lying near her,
+wounded, and, for aught she knows, dying, she is thinking only of her
+lost child. Maternal love, thruout the history of the world, has had
+triumphs over all the other passions; triumphs over destitution and
+trials and tortures; over all the temptations incident to life; triumphs
+to which no other impulse of the human heart--not even the love of man
+for woman--has ever risen. One of the most brilliant men I had ever
+known once said in court; "Woman, alone, shares with the Creator the
+privilege of communing with an unborn human being"; and, with this
+privilege, the Creator seems to have shared with woman a part of His own
+great love. All other love in our race is merely human. The play, from
+this time on, becomes the story of a mother's love.
+
+Acts fourth and fifth. Two years later Lilian is at the home of her
+father in New York. Her husband has disappeared. His name was on the
+passenger list of a wrecked steamer; and no other word of him or of the
+child has been heard. If he had left the little girl in the care of
+others, it is unknown to whom or where. So Lilian is a widow and
+childless. She is fading, day by day, and is hardly expected to live.
+Her mind, tortured by the suspense, which, worse than certainty, is
+gradually yielding to hallucinations which keep her little one ever
+present to her fancy. Harold Routledge was wounded seriously in the
+duel, but not killed; he is near Lilian; seeing her every day; but he is
+her friend, rather than her lover, now; she talks with him of her child,
+and he feels how utterly hopeless his own passion is in the presence of
+an all-absorbing mother's love. It is discovered that the child is
+living peacefully among kind guardians in a French convent; and
+Routledge determines to cross the ocean with the necessary evidence and
+bring the little one back to its mother. He breaks the news to Lilian
+tenderly and gently. A gleam of joy illuminates her face for the first
+time since the terrible night, two years before, and Routledge feels
+that the only barrier to his own happiness has been removed. But the
+sudden return and reappearance of the husband falls like a stroke of
+fate upon both. As the curtain descends on the fourth act, Lilian lies
+fainting on the floor, with Natalie at her side, while the two men stand
+face to face above the unconscious woman whom they both love. Three
+lives ruined--because Lilian's father, having lost his wealth, in his
+old age, dared not, as he himself expressed it, leave a tenderly
+nurtured daughter to a merciless world. The world is merciless, perhaps,
+but it is not so utterly and hopelessly merciless to any man or woman as
+one's heart may be.
+
+Lilian comes back to consciousness on her deathbed. Her child had
+returned to her only as a messenger from heaven, summoning her home. But
+the message had been whispered in unconscious ears; for she had not seen
+the little girl, who was removed before the mother had recovered from
+her swoon. They dare not tell her now that Natalie is on this side of
+the ocean and asleep in the next room. Mr. Strebelow had heard in a
+distant land, travelling to distract his mind from the great sorrow of
+his own life, of Lilian's condition, and he hastened back to undo the
+wrong he felt that he had committed. She asks to see him; she kisses his
+hand with tenderness and gratitude, when he tells her that Natalie shall
+be her own hereafter; his manly tears are tears of repentance, mingled
+with a now generous love. The stroke of death comes suddenly; they have
+only a moment's time to arouse the little one from its sleep; but they
+are not too late, and Lilian dies at last, a smile of perfect happiness
+on her face, with her child in her arms.
+
+The Mississippi darky, in Mark Twain's story, being told that his heroic
+death on the field of battle would have made but little difference to
+the nation at large, remarked, with deep philosophy; "It would have made
+a great deal of difference to me, sah." The radical change made in the
+story I have just related to you, before the production of the play in
+New York, was this: Lilian lives, instead of dying, in the last act. It
+would have made very little difference to the American nation what she
+did; but it made a great deal of difference to her, as you will see,
+and to the play also in nearly every part. My reasons for making the
+change were based upon one of the most important principles of the
+dramatic art, namely: A dramatist should deal, so far as possible, with
+subjects of universal interest, instead of with such as appeal strongly
+to a part of the public only. I do not mean that he may not appeal to
+certain classes of people, and depend upon those classes for success;
+but, just so far as he does this, he limits the possibilities of that
+success. I have said that the love of offspring in woman has shown
+itself the strongest of all human passions; and it is the most nearly
+allied to the boundless love of Deity. But the one absolutely universal
+passion of the race--which underlies all other passions--on which,
+indeed, the very existence of the race depends--the very fountain of
+maternal love itself, is the love of the sexes. The dramatist must
+remember that his work cannot, like that of the novelist or the poet,
+pick out the hearts, here and there, that happen to be in sympathy with
+its subject. He appeals to a thousand hearts at the same moment; he has
+no choice in the matter; he must do this. And it is only when he deals
+with the love of the sexes that his work is most interesting to that
+aggregation of human hearts we call the audience. This very play was
+successful in Chicago; but, as soon as that part of the public had been
+exhausted which could weep with pleasure, if I may use the expression,
+over the tenderness of a mother's love, its success would have been at
+an end. Furthermore--and here comes in another law of dramatic
+construction--a play must be, in one way or another, "satisfactory" to
+the audience. This word has a meaning which varies in different
+countries, and even in different parts of the same country; but,
+whatever audience you are writing for, your work must be "satisfactory"
+to it. In England and America, the death of a pure woman on the stage is
+not "satisfactory," except when the play rises to the dignity of
+tragedy. The death, in an ordinary play, of a woman who is not pure, as
+in the case of 'Frou-Frou,' is perfectly satisfactory, for the reason
+that it is inevitable. Human nature always bows gracefully to the
+inevitable. The only griefs in our own lives to which we could never
+reconcile ourselves are those which might have been averted. The wife
+who has once taken the step from purity to impurity can never reinstate
+herself in the world of art on this side of the grave; and so an
+audience looks with complacent tears on the death of an erring woman.
+But Lilian had not taken the one fatal step which would have reconciled
+an audience to her death. She was still pure, and every one left the
+theatre wishing she had lived. I yielded, therefore, to the sound logic,
+based on sound dramatic principle, of my New York manager, Mr. A. M.
+Palmer, and the piece was altered.
+
+I have called the play, as produced in New York and afterward in London,
+the "same play" as the one produced in Chicago. That one doubt, which
+age does not conquer--which comes down to us from the remotest antiquity
+of our own youth, which will still exist in our minds as we listen to
+the music of the spheres, thru countless ages, when all other doubts are
+at rest; that never-to-be answered doubt: Whether it was the same
+jack-knife, or another one, after all its blades and handle had been
+changed--must ever linger in my own mind as to the identity of this
+play. But a dramatic author stops worrying himself about doubts of this
+kind very early in his career. The play which finally takes its place on
+the stage usually bears very little resemblance to the play which first
+suggested itself to his mind. In some cases the public has abundant
+reason to congratulate itself on this fact, and especially on the way
+plays are often built up, so to speak, by the authors, with advice and
+assistance from other intelligent people interested in their success.
+The most magnificent figure in the English drama of this century was a
+mere faint outline, merely a fatherly old man, until the suggestive mind
+of Macready stimulated the genius of Bulwer Lytton, and the great
+author, eagerly acknowledging the assistance rendered him, made Cardinal
+Richelieu the colossal central figure of a play that was written as a
+pretty love-story. Bulwer Lytton had an eye single, as every dramatist
+ought to have--as every successful dramatist must have--to the final
+artistic result; he kept before him the one object of making the play of
+'Richelieu' as good a play as he possibly could make it. The first duty
+of a dramatist is to put upon the stage the very best work he can, in
+the light of whatever advice and assistance may come to him. Fair
+acknowledgment afterward is a matter of mere ordinary personal honesty.
+It is not a question of dramatic art.
+
+So Lilian is to live, and not die, in the last act. The first question
+for us to decide--I say "us"--the New York manager, the literary attaché
+of the theatre, and myself--the first practical question before us was:
+As Lilian is to live, which of the two men who love her is to die? There
+are axioms among the laws of dramatic construction, as in mathematics.
+One of them is this--three hearts cannot beat as one. The world is not
+large enough, from an artistic point of view, for three good human
+hearts to continue to exist, if two of them love the third. If one of
+the two hearts is a bad one, art assigns it to the hell on earth of
+disappointed love; but if it is good and tender and gentle, art is
+merciful to it, and puts it out of its misery by death. Routledge was
+wounded in a duel. Strebelow was supposed to be lost in the wreck of a
+steamer. It was easy enough to kill either of them, but which? We argued
+this question for three weeks. Mere romance was on the side of the
+young artist. But to have had him live would have robbed the play of all
+its meaning. Its moral, in the original form, is this: It is a dangerous
+thing to marry, for any reason, without the safeguard of love, even when
+the person one marries is worthy of one's love in every possible way. If
+we had decided in favor of Routledge, the play would have had no moral
+at all, or rather a very bad one. If a girl marries the wrong man, she
+need only wait for him to die; and if her lover waits, too, it'll be all
+right. If, on the other hand, we so reconstruct the whole play that the
+husband and wife may at last come together with true affection, we shall
+have the moral: Even if a young girl makes the worst of all mistakes,
+and accepts the hand of one man when her heart belongs to another,
+fidelity to the duty of a wife on her side, and a manly, generous
+confidence on the part of her husband, may, in the end, correct even
+such a mistake. The dignity of this moral saved John Strebelow's life,
+and Harold Routledge was killed in the duel with the Count de Carojac.
+
+All that was needed to affect this first change in the play was to
+instruct the actor who played Routledge to lie still when the curtain
+fell at the end of the third act, and to go home afterward. But there
+are a number of problems under the laws of dramatic construction which
+we must solve before the play can now be made to reach the hearts of an
+audience as it did before. Let us see what they are.
+
+The love of Lilian for Harold Routledge cannot now be the one grand
+passion of her life. It must be the love of a young girl, however
+sincere and intense, which yields, afterward, to the stronger and deeper
+love of a woman for her husband. The next great change, therefore, which
+the laws of dramatic construction forced upon us was this: Lilian must
+now control her own passion, and when she meets her lover in the second
+act she must not depend for her moral safety on the awakening of a
+mother's love by the appearance of her child. Her love for Harold is no
+longer such an all-controlling force as will justify a woman--justify
+her dramatically, I mean--yielding to it. For her to depend on an
+outside influence would be to show a weakness of character that would
+make her uninteresting. Instead, therefore, of receiving her former
+lover with dangerous pent-up fires, Lilian now feels pity for him. She
+hardly yet knows her own feelings toward her husband; but his manhood
+and kindness are gradually forcing their way to her heart. Routledge, in
+his own passion, forgets himself, and she now repels him. She even
+threatens to strike the bell, when the Count de Carojac appears, and
+warns his rival to desist. This is now the end of the second act, a very
+different end, you see, from the other version, where the little girl
+runs in, and, in her innocence, saves the mother from herself.
+
+Here let me tell a curious experience, which illustrates how stubbornly
+persistent the dramatic laws are, in having their own way. We were all
+three of us--manager, literary attaché, and author--so pleased with the
+original ending of the second act the picture of the little girl in her
+mother's arms, and the lover bowing his head in its presence of
+innocence, that we retained it. The little girl ran on the stage at
+every rehearsal at the usual place. But no one knew what to do with her.
+The actress who played the part of Lilian caught her in her arms, in
+various attitudes; but none of them seemed right. The actor who played
+Routledge tried to drop his head, according to instructions, but he
+looked uncomfortable, not reverential. The next day we had the little
+girl run on from another entrance. She stopped in the center of the
+stage. Lilian stared at her a moment and then exclaimed: "Mr. Howard,
+what shall I do with this child?" Routledge, who had put his hands in
+his pocket, called out: "What's the girl doing here, anyway, Howard?" I
+could only answer: "She used to be all right; I don't know what's the
+matter with her now." And I remember seeing an anxious look on the face
+of the child's mother, standing at the side of the stage. She feared
+there was something wrong about her own little darling who played the
+part of Natalie. I reassured her on this point; for the fact that I was
+in error was forcing itself on my mind, in spite of my desire to retain
+the scene. You will hardly believe that I am speaking literally, when I
+tell you that it was not until the 19th rehearsal that we yielded to the
+inevitable, and decided not to have the child come on at all at that
+point. The truth was this: now that Lilian saved herself in her own
+strength, the child had no dramatic function to fulfill. So strongly did
+we all feel the force of a dramatic law which we could not, and would
+not, see. Our own natural human instinct--the instinct which the
+humblest member of an audience feels, without knowing anything of
+dramatic law--got the better of three men, trained in dramatic work,
+only by sheer force, and against our own determined opposition. We were
+three of Stephenson's cows--or shall I say three calves?--standing on
+the track, and we could not succeed where Jumbo failed.
+
+The third step, in the changes forced upon us by the laws of dramatic
+construction, was a very great one; and it was made necessary by the
+fact, just mentioned, that the child, Natalie, had no dramatic function
+to fulfill in the protection of her mother's virtue. In other words,
+there is no point in the play, now, where sexual love is, or can be,
+replaced by maternal love, as the controlling passion of the play.
+Consequently, the last two acts in their entirety, so far as the serious
+parts are concerned, disappear; one new scene and a new act taking their
+place. The sad mother, playing with a little shoe or toy, passes out of
+our view. The dying woman, kissing the hand of the man she has wronged;
+the husband, awe-stricken in the presence of a mother's child; the child
+clasped in Lilian's arms; her last look on earth, a smile, and her last
+breath, the final expression of maternal tenderness--these scenes belong
+only to the original version of the play, as it lies in its author's
+desk. With an author's sensitive interest in his own work, I wasted many
+hours in trying to save these scenes. But I was working directly against
+the laws of dramatic truth, and I gave up the impossible task.
+
+The fourth great change--forced on us, as the others were--concerns the
+character of John Strebelow. As he is now to become the object of a
+wife's mature affection, he must not merely be a noble and generous man;
+he must do something worthy of the love which is to be bestowed on him.
+He must command a woman's love. When, therefore, he hears his wife,
+kneeling over her wounded lover, use words which tell him of their
+former relations, he does not what most of us would do, but what an
+occasional hero among us would do. Of course, the words of Lilian
+cannot be such, now, as to close the gates to all hopes of love, as they
+were before. She still utters a wild cry, but her words merely show the
+awakened tenderness and pity of a woman for a man she had once loved.
+They are uttered, however, in the presence of others, and they
+compromise her husband's honor. At that moment he takes her gently in
+his arms, and becomes her protector, warning the French roué and
+duellist that he will call him to account for the insults which the arm
+of the dead man had failed to avenge. He afterward does this, killing
+the count--not in the action of the play; this is only told. John
+Strebelow thus becomes the hero of the play, and it is only necessary to
+follow the workings of Lilian's heart and his a little further, until
+they come together at last, loving each other truly, the early love of
+the wife for another man being only a sad memory in her mind. There is a
+tender scene of explanation and a parting, until Lilian's heart shall
+recall her husband. This scene, in my opinion, is one of the most
+beautiful scenes ever written for the stage. At the risk of breaking the
+tenth commandment myself, I do not hesitate to say, I wish I had
+written it. As I did not, however, I can express the hope that the name
+of Mr. A. R. Cazauran, who did write it, will never be forgotten in
+connection with this play as long as the play itself may be remembered.
+I wrote the scene myself first; but when he wrote it according to his
+own ideas, it was so much more beautiful than my own that I would have
+broken a law of dramatic art if I had not accepted it. I should not have
+been giving the public the best play I could, under the circumstances.
+Imbued, as my own mind was, with all the original motives of the piece,
+it would have been impossible for me to have made changes within a few
+weeks without the assistance Mr. Cazauran could give me; this assistance
+was invaluable to me in all parts of the revised piece. In the fifth act
+the husband and wife come together again, the little child acting as the
+immediate cause of their reconciliation; the real cause lies in their
+own true hearts.
+
+Before we leave the subject, another change which I was obliged to make
+will interest you, because it shows very curiously what queer turns
+these laws of dramatic construction may take. As soon as it was decided
+to have Lilian live, in the fifth act, and love John Strebelow, I was
+compelled to cut out the quarrel-scene between Lilian and Harold
+Routledge in the first act. This is a little practical matter, very much
+like taking out a certain wheel at one end of a machine because you have
+decided to get a different mechanical result at the other end. I was
+very fond of this quarrel-scene, but I lost no time in trying to save
+it, for I saw at once that Harold Routledge must not appear in the first
+act at all. He could only be talked about as Lilian's lover. John
+Strebelow must be present alone in the eyes and sympathy of the
+audience. If Routledge did not appear until the second act, the audience
+would regard him as an interloper; it would rather resent his presence
+than otherwise, and would be easily reconciled to his death in the next
+act. It was taking an unfair advantage of a young lover; but there was
+no help for it. Even if Harold had appeared in the first act, the
+quarrel-scene would have been impossible. He might have made love to
+Lilian, perhaps, or even kissed her, and the audience would have
+forgiven me reluctantly for having her love another man afterward. But
+if the two young people had a lover's quarrel in the presence of the
+audience, no power on earth could have convinced any man or woman in the
+house that they were not intended for each other by the eternal decrees
+of divine Providence.
+
+I have now given you the revised story of this play as it was produced
+at the Union Square Theater in New York, under the name of the 'Banker's
+Daughter.' I have said nothing about the comic scenes or characters,
+because the various changes did not affect them in any way that concerns
+the principles of dramatic art. They are almost identically the same in
+both versions. Now, if you please, we will cross the ocean. I have had
+many long discussions with English managers on the practice in London of
+adapting foreign plays, not merely to the English stage, but to English
+life, with English characters. The Frenchmen of a French play become, as
+a rule, Englishmen; so do Italians and Spaniards and Swedes. They
+usually, however, continue to express foreign ideas and to act like
+foreigners. In speaking of such a transplanted character, I may be
+permitted to trifle with a sacred text:
+
+    The manager has said it,
+    But it's hardly to his credit,
+      That he is an Englishman!
+    For he ought to have been a Roosian,
+    A French, or Turk, or Proosian,
+      Or perhaps I-tali-an!
+    But in spite of Art's temptations,
+    To belong to other nations,
+      He becomes an Englishman!
+
+Luckily, the American characters of the 'Banker's Daughter', with one
+exception, could be twisted into very fair Englishmen, with only a faint
+suspicion of our Yankee accent. Mr. James Alberry, one of the most
+brilliant men in England, author of the 'Two Roses,' was engaged to make
+them as nearly English as he could. The friendship, cemented as Alberry
+and I were discussing for some weeks the international social questions
+involved, is among the dearest and tenderest friendships I have ever
+made; and I learned more about the various minor differences of social
+life in England and American while we were thus at work together than I
+could have learned in a residence there of five years. I have time to
+give you only a few of the points. Take the engagement of Lilian, broken
+in act first. An engagement in England is necessarily a family matter,
+and it could neither be made or broken by the mere fiat of a young girl,
+without consultation with others, leaving the way open for the immediate
+acceptance of another man's hand. In the English version, therefore,
+there is no engagement with Harold Routledge. It is only an
+understanding between them that they love each other. Not even the most
+rigid customs of Europe can prevent such an understanding between two
+young people, if they can once look into each other's eyes. They could
+fall in love through a pair of telescopes. Then the duel--it is next to
+impossible to persuade an English audience that a duel is justifiable or
+natural with an Englishman as one of the principles. So we played a
+rather sharp artistic trick on our English audience. In the American
+version, I assume that, if a plucky young American in France insults a
+Frenchman purposely, he will abide by the local customs, and give him
+satisfaction, if called upon to do so. So would a young Englishman,
+between you and me; but the laws of dramatic construction deal with the
+sympathies of the audience as well as with the natural motives and
+actions of the characters in a play; and an English audience would think
+the French count ought to be perfectly satisfied if Routledge knocked
+him down. How did we get over the difficulty? First, we made Routledge a
+British officer returning from India, instead of an artist on his way
+from Rome--a fighting man by profession; and then we made the Count de
+Carojac pile so many sneers and insults on this British officer, and on
+the whole British nation, that I verily believe a London audience would
+have mobbed him if he hadn't tried to kill him. The English public
+walked straight into the trap, although they abhor nothing on earth more
+than the duelling system. I said that the comic characters were not
+affected by the changes made in America; the change of nationality did
+affect them to a certain extent. A young girl, Florence St. Vincent,
+afterward Mrs. Browne, represents, here, with dramatic exaggeration, of
+course, a type of young girl more or less familiar to all of us. In
+England she is not a type, but an eccentric personality, with which the
+audience must be made acquainted by easy stages. It was necessary,
+therefore, to introduce a number of preliminary speeches for her, before
+she came to the lines of the original version. After that, she ran on
+without any further change, except a few excisions. Mrs. Browne is
+married to a very old man, who afterward dies, and in the last act she
+illustrates the various grades of affliction endured by every young
+widow, from the darkness of despair to the becoming twilight of
+sentimental sadness. This was delicate ground in England. They have not
+that utter horror of marriage between a very old man and a very young
+woman which, in this country, justifies all the satire which a dramatist
+can heap upon the man who commits this crime, even after he is in the
+grave. And the English people do not share with us--I say it to their
+credit--our universal irreverence for what is solemn and sacred. One
+must not, either in social life or on the stage, speak too lightly there
+of any serious subject; of course, they can laugh, however, at an old
+man that makes a fool of himself. So we merely toned down the levity by
+leaving old Mr. Browne out of the cast entirely. There is a great
+difference, as in the case of Routledge left out of the first act,
+between what the audience sees and what it only hears talked about; and
+none of the laws of dramatic construction are more important than those
+which concern the questions whether you shall appeal to the ear of an
+audience, to its eye, or both. Old Mr. Browne was only talked about
+then, and as long as the English audience did not know him personally,
+it was perfectly willing to laugh at him after Mrs. Browne was a widow.
+Another change made for the London version will interest American
+business men. In our own version, Lilian's father and his partner close
+up their affairs in the last act and retire from their business as
+private bankers. "That will never do in England," said Mr. Alberry. "An
+old established business like that might be worth £100,000. We must sell
+it to some one, not close it." So we sold it to Mr. George Washington
+Phipps. This last character illustrates, again, the stubbornness of
+dramatic law. Mr. Alberry and I tried to make him an Irishman, or a
+Scotchman, or some kind of an Englishman. But we could not. He remains
+an American in England in 1886, as he was in Chicago in 1873. He
+declined to change either his citizenship or his name; "G.
+Washington--Father of his Country--Phipps."
+
+The peculiar history of the play is my only justification for giving you
+all these details of its otherwise unimportant career. I only trust that
+I have shown you how very practical the laws of dramatic construction
+are in the way they influence a dramatist. The art of obeying them is
+merely the art of using your common sense in the study of your own and
+other people's emotions. All I now add is, if you want to write a play,
+be honest and sincere in using your common sense. A prominent lawyer
+once assured me that there was only one man he trembled before in the
+presence of a jury--not the learned man, nor the eloquent man; it was
+the sincere man. The public will be your jury. That public often
+condescends to be trifled with by mere tricksters, but, believe me, it
+is only a condescension and very contemptuous. In the long run, the
+public will judge you, and respect you, according to your artistic
+sincerity.
+
+
+
+
+NOTES
+
+
+This lecture was originally delivered in March, 1886, in the Sanders
+Theater, before the Shakspere Society of Harvard University; and it was
+repeated before the Nineteenth Century Club in New York in December,
+1889. On the latter occasion two other dramatic authors were requested
+to debate the points made by the speaker; and as a result he added a few
+supplementary remarks:
+
+     The Nineteenth Century Club looks for a discussion, I believe, on
+     the subject brought forward in the paper of this evening. If the
+     word "discussion" implies "argument," I fear there is nothing in
+     the mere struggles of a dramatist in his workshop to justify that
+     difference of opinion which is necessary to an argument. My
+     American colleague, Mr. Brander Matthews, must feel like a man
+     whose wife persists from day to day in saying nothing that he can
+     object to, thereby making his home a desert and driving him to the
+     club. As for the great Irish dramatist, this paper leaves him still
+     wishing that some one would tread on the tail of his coat. But,
+     with all true Irishmen, the second party in a quarrel is merely a
+     convenience, not a necessity. Whenever Mr. Boucicault feels that a
+     public discussion is desirable for any reason, he can always tread
+     on the tail of his own coat, and make quite as good a fight of it
+     all by himself as if some one was assisting him.
+
+And he ended with this reference to the constructive skill of Ibsen:
+
+     Another thing strikes me in connection with this subject: the
+     praise of Ibsen, the Scandinavian dramatist, is abroad in England;
+     and again, as so often before, mine eyes have seen the glory of the
+     coming of the Lord in the direction of Boston. But some of the
+     loudest worshippers of this truly great man in both countries
+     either wilfully ignore, or else they know nothing about, his real
+     greatness.
+
+     Ibsen holds in his hand the terrible power, in dealing with the
+     evils of society, which dramatic construction gives to a genius
+     like his; he has not laid this power aside and reduced his own
+     stage to a mere lecture platform. A man armed with a sword who
+     should lay it down in the heat of battle and take up a wisp of
+     straw to fight with, would be a fool. Ibsen, like his great
+     predecessors and contemporaries in France, deals his vigorous blows
+     at social wrongs thru dramatic effects and the true dramatic
+     relations of his characters. I know of no writer for the stage,
+     past or present, who depends for his moral power more continuously
+     at all points on the art of dramatic construction than Ibsen does.
+     He, himself, would be the first to smile at those who praise him as
+     if he were a writer of moral dialogs or the self-appointed lecturer
+     for one of those psychological panoramas which are unrolled in
+     acts, at a theater, or in monthly parts in a periodical.
+
+     In conclusion: to all who argue that careful construction is
+     unnecessary in literary art, I will say only this: it is extremely
+     easy not to construct.
+
+It may be noted also that Bronson Howard returned to the topic of his
+lecture in a contribution to the _Dramatic Mirror_ in 1900; he called
+this
+
+     _A MERE SUGGESTION_.
+
+     So much is written in critical notices of plays, about their
+     "construction," that I should like to suggest a few of the
+     considerations which that term involves. It is possible that some
+     of the beginners, who are to become the future dramatists of
+     America, will see the necessity of thinking twice before using the
+     term at all. Some of the more general considerations to be kept in
+     view, when a careful and properly educated critic feels justified
+     in using the word "construction," may be jotted down as follows:
+
+     I. The actual strength of the main incident of a play.
+
+     II. Relative strength of the main incident, in reference to the
+     importance of the subject; and also to the length of the play.
+
+     III. Adequacy of the story in relation to the importance and
+     dignity of the main incident and of the subject.
+
+     IV. Adequacy of the original motives on which the rest of the play
+     depends.
+
+     V. Logical sequence of events by which the main incident is
+     reached.
+
+     VI. Logical results of the story after the main incident is passed.
+
+     VII. The choice of the characters by which the sequence of events
+     is developed.
+
+     VIII. Logical, otherwise natural, use of motives in these
+     particular characters, in leading from one incident to another.
+
+     IX. The use of such human emotions and passions as are universally
+     recognized as true, without those special explanations which
+     belong to general fiction and not to the stage.
+
+     X. The relation of the story and incidents to the sympathies of the
+     audience as a collection of human beings.
+
+     XI. The relation of the story and incidents to the sympathies of
+     the particular audience for which the play is written; to its
+     knowledge and ignorance; its views of life; its social customs; and
+     to its political institutions, so far as they may modify its social
+     views, as in the case of a democracy or an aristocracy.
+
+     Minor matters--such as the use of comic relief, the relation of
+     dialog to action, the proper use of superfluous characters to
+     prevent an appearance of artificiality in the treatment, and a
+     thousand other details belonging to the constructive side of a
+     play--must also be within the critic's view; but a list of them
+     here would be too long for the space available. When the young
+     critic has made a careful study of the standard English drama, with
+     a special view to the proper considerations above indicated, his
+     opinion on the "construction" of a play will be of more or less
+     value to American dramatic literature.
+
+There is, of course, no overt novelty in the theory advanced by Bronson
+Howard in his address. The same theory was held by Francisque Sarcey,
+who declared that all the principles of playmaking might be deduced from
+the fact that a piece is always intended for performance before an
+audience. And Marmontel, dramatist as well as dramatic theorist,
+asserted that the first rule the play-wright must obey is "to move the
+spectators, and the second is to move them only in so far as they are
+willing to be moved.... This depends on the disposition and the manners
+of the people to whom appeal is made and on the degree of sensibility
+they bring to the theater.... This is therefore a point in which tragedy
+is not invariable."
+
+The same principle underlies George Meredith's statement in regard to
+Comedy: "There are plain reasons why the comic poet is not a frequent
+apparition; and why the great comic poet remains without a fellow. A
+society of cultivated men and women is required wherein ideas are
+current and the perception quick, that he may be supplied with matter
+and an audience."
+
+                    B. M.
+
+OF THIS BOOK THREE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-THREE COPIES WERE PRINTED FROM
+TYPE BY CORLIES, MACY AND COMPANY IN NOVEMBER: MCMXIV
+
+
+
+
+PUBLICATIONS
+
+_of the_
+
+Dramatic Museum
+of Columbia University
+
+IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK
+
+_First Series_
+
+Papers on Playmaking:
+
+     I THE NEW ART OF WRITING PLAYS. By Lope de Vega. Translated by
+     William T. Brewster. With an Introduction and Notes by Brander
+     Matthews.
+
+     II THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PLAY. By Bronson Howard. With an
+     Introduction by Augustus Thomas.
+
+     III THE LAW OF THE DRAMA. By Ferdinand Brunetière. Translated by
+     Philip M. Hayden. With an Introduction by Henry Arthur Jones.
+
+     IV ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON AS A DRAMATIST. By Arthur Wing Pinero.
+     With an Introduction and Bibliographical Appendix by Clayton
+     Hamilton.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Autobiography of a Play, by Bronson Howard
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PLAY ***
+
+***** This file should be named 18769-8.txt or 18769-8.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/1/8/7/6/18769/
+
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+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Autobiography of a Play, by Bronson Howard
+    </title>
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Autobiography of a Play, by Bronson Howard
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Autobiography of a Play
+       Papers on Play-Making, II
+
+Author: Bronson Howard
+
+Commentator: Augustus Thomas
+
+Release Date: July 6, 2006 [EBook #18769]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PLAY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was
+produced from scanned images of public domain material
+from the Google Print project)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<h1>PAPERS ON PLAY-MAKING</h1>
+<h3>II</h3>
+<h1>The Autobiography of a Play</h1>
+<h3>by</h3>
+<h1><span class="smcap">Bronson Howard</span></h1>
+<h3>WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY</h3>
+<h3>Augustus Thomas</h3>
+<h3>Printed for the Dramatic Museum of Columbia University</h3>
+<h3><i>in the City of New York</i></h3>
+<h3>MCMXIV</h3>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3>CONTENTS</h3>
+<p><a name="table" id="table"></a></p>
+<table summary="contents">
+<tr><td>
+<a href="#INTRODUCTION"><b>Introduction by Augustus Thomas</b></a><br />
+<a href="#The_Autobiography_of_a_Play"><b>The Autobiography of a Play by Bronson Howard</b></a><br />
+<a href="#NOTES"><b>Notes by B. M.</b></a><br />
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="INTRODUCTION" id="INTRODUCTION"></a><a href="#table">INTRODUCTION</a></h2>
+
+
+<p>The qualities that made Bronson Howard a dramatist, and then made him
+the first American dramatist of his day, were his human sympathy, his
+perception, his sense of proportion, and his construction. With his
+perception, his proportion, and his construction, respectively, he could
+have succeeded as a detective, as an artist, or as a general. It was his
+human sympathy, his wish and his ability to put himself in the other
+man's place, that made play-writing definitely attractive to him. As a
+soldier he would have shown the courage of the dogged defender in the
+trench or the calmly supervising general at headquarters, rather than
+the mad bravery that carried the flag at the front of a forlorn hope.
+His gifts were intellectual. His writing was more disciplined than
+inspired. If we shall claim for him genius, it must be preferably the
+genius of infinite pains.</p>
+
+<p>He saw intimately and clearly. His proportion made him write with
+discretion and a proper sense of cumulative emphasis, and his
+construction enabled him so to combine his materials as to secure this
+effect. He was intensely self-critical; and while almost without conceit
+concerning his own work, he had an accuracy of detached estimation that
+enabled him to stand by his own opinion with a proper inflexibility when
+his judgment convinced him that the opinion was correct.</p>
+
+<p>He worked slowly. At one time, in his active period, it was his custom
+to go from New York, where he lived, to New Rochelle, where he had
+formerly lived. There, upon the rear end of a suburban lot, he had a
+plain board cabin not more than ten feet square. In it were a deal
+table, a hard chair, and a small stove. He would go to this cabin in the
+morning when the tide of suburban travel was setting the other way, and
+spend his entire day there with his manuscript and his cigars. He
+carried a small lunch from his home. He once told me he was satisfied
+with his day's work if it provided him with ten good lines that would
+not have to be abandoned. I did not take that statement to imply that
+there were not in his experience the more profitable days that are in
+the work of every writer&mdash;days when the subject seems to command the
+pen and when the hand cannot keep pace with the vision. He was often too
+saturated with his story, too much the prisoner of his people, for it to
+have been otherwise; but his training had verified for him the truth
+that easy writing is hard reading.</p>
+
+<p>Then, too, while Bronson Howard arranged his characters for the eye and
+built his story for the judgment, he wrote his speeches for the ear.
+This attention to the cadence of a line was so essential to him that
+when writing as he sometimes did for a magazine he studied the sound of
+his phrase as if the print were to be read aloud. This same care for the
+dialog would retard its production; and critical revision would enforce
+still further delay.</p>
+
+<p>William Gillette once said to an interviewer that "plays were not
+written, but were rewritten." The experience of many play-wrights would
+support that statement. In the case of Bronson Howard, the autobiography
+of his 'Banker's Daughter' certainly does so. His most profitable play,
+perhaps, and the one which also brought him the greatest popular
+recognition, was 'Shenandoah'. That play was produced by a manager, who,
+after its first performance, believed that it would not succeed. A
+younger and more hopeful one saw in it its great elements of popularity,
+and encouraged him to rewrite it.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. William H. Crane, in a recent felicitous talk to the Society of
+American Dramatists, said that the 'Henrietta' was played exactly as its
+author had delivered it to the actors, without the change or the need of
+change in a single word, and with only the repetition late in the play
+of a line that had been spoken in an early act. That fact does not
+exclude the possibility of rewritings before the manuscript came to the
+company, but rather, in view of Bronson Howard's thoroness as a workman
+and his masterly sense of proportion, makes such rewritings the more
+probable. The effect, however, of his rewriting, wherever it may have
+been, and the slow additions of his daily contributions, was that of
+spontaneity.</p>
+
+<p>Some philosopher tells us that a factor of greatness in any field is the
+power to generalize, the ability to discover the principle underlying
+apparently discordant facts. Bronson Howard's plays are notable for
+their evidence of this power. He saw causes, tendencies, results. His
+plays are expositions of this chemistry. 'Shenandoah' dealt broadly with
+the forces and feelings behind the Civil War; the 'Henrietta' with the
+American passion for speculation&mdash;the money-madness that was dividing
+families. 'Aristocracy' was a very accurate, altho satirical, seizure of
+the disposition, then in its strongest manifestation, of a newly-rich
+and Western family of native force to break into the exclusive social
+set of New York and to do so thru a preparatory European alliance.</p>
+
+<p>He has a human story in every instance. There is always dramatic
+conflict between interesting characters, of course, but behind them is
+always the background of some considerable social tendency&mdash;some
+comprehensive generalization&mdash;that includes and explains them all. The
+commander from his eminence saw all the combatants: he knew what the
+fight was about, and it always was about something worth while. Bronson
+Howard never dramatized piffle.</p>
+
+<p>He was an observer of human nature and events, a traveler, a thinker, a
+student of the drama of all ages. He had been a reporter and an
+editorial writer. His plays were written by a watchful, sympathetic, and
+artistic military general turned philosopher.</p>
+
+<p class="smcap right">
+Augustus Thomas.</p>
+
+<p>(June 1914).</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="The_Autobiography_of_a_Play" id="The_Autobiography_of_a_Play"></a><a href="#table">The Autobiography of a Play</a></h2>
+
+<p>As read before the Shakspere Club <i>of</i> Harvard University</p>
+
+
+<p>I have not come to Newcastle with a load of coals; and I shall not try
+to tell the faculty and students of Harvard University anything about
+the Greek drama or the classical unities. I will remind you of only one
+thing in that direction; and say even this merely because it has a
+direct bearing upon some of the practical questions connected with
+play-writing which I purpose to discuss. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and
+Euripides&mdash;perhaps we should give the entire credit, as some authorities
+do, to Aeschylus&mdash;taught the future world the art of writing a play. But
+they did not create the laws of dramatic construction. Those laws exist
+in the passions and sympathies of the human race. They existed thousands
+of years before the Father of the Drama was born: waiting, like the
+other laws of nature, to be discovered and utilized by man.</p>
+
+<p>A lecturer on "Animal Magnetism" failed to make his appearance one
+night, many years ago, in the public hall of a little town in Michigan,
+and a gentleman from Detroit consented to fill the vacant place. His
+lecture began and ended as follows: "Animal magnetism is a great
+subject, and the less said about it the better; we will proceed to
+experiments."</p>
+
+<p>I will take that wise man as my own exemplar today, and I will begin by
+echoing his words: The drama in general is a great subject, and the less
+I say about it the better; we will proceed to experiments.</p>
+
+<p>It happens that one of my own plays has had a very curious history. It
+has appeared before the American public in two forms, so radically
+different that a description of the changes made, and of the reasons for
+making them, will involve the consideration of some very interesting
+laws of dramatic construction. I shall ask you to listen very carefully
+to the story, or plot, of the piece as it was first produced in Chicago
+in 1873. Then I shall trace the changes that were made in this story
+before the play was produced in New York five years later. And after
+that, to follow the very odd adventures of the same play still further,
+I shall point out briefly the changes which were made necessary by
+adapting it to English life with English characters, for its production
+at the Court Theater, London, in 1879. All the changes which I shall
+describe to you were forced upon me (as soon as I had decided to make
+the general alterations in the play) by the laws of dramatic
+construction; and it is to the experimental application of these laws to
+a particular play that I ask your attention. The learned professors of
+Harvard University know much more about them than I do, so far as a
+study of dramatic literature, from the outside, can give them that
+knowledge; and the great modern authorities on the subject&mdash;Hallam,
+Lessing, Schlegel and many others&mdash;are open to the students of Harvard
+in her library; or, rather, shall I say, they lie closed on its shelves.
+But I invite you today to step into a little dramatic workshop, instead
+of a scientific library; and to see an humble workman in the craft,
+trying, with repeated experiments&mdash;not to elucidate the laws of dramatic
+construction, but to obey them, exactly as an inventor (deficient, it
+may be, in all scientific knowledge) tries to apply the general laws of
+mechanics to the immediate necessities of the machine he is working out
+in his mind. The moment a professor of chemistry has expressed a
+scientific truth, he must illustrate it at once by an experiment, or the
+truth will evaporate. An immense amount of scientific truth is
+constantly evaporating, for want of practical application; the air above
+every university in the world is charged with it. But what are the laws
+of dramatic construction? No one man knows much about them. As I have
+already reminded you, they bear about the same relation to human
+character and human sympathies as the laws of nature bear to the
+material universe. When all the mysteries of humanity have been solved,
+the laws of dramatic construction can be codified and clearly explained;
+not until then. But every scientific man can tell you a little about
+nature, and every dramatist can tell you a little about dramatic truth.
+A few general principles have been discovered by experiment and
+discussion. These few principles can be brought to your attention. But
+after you have learned all that has yet been learned by others, the
+field of humanity will still lie before you, as the field of nature lies
+before the scientist, with millions of times more to be discovered, by
+you or by some one else, than has ever yet been known. All I purpose
+to-night is to show you how certain laws of dramatic construction
+asserted themselves from time to time as we were making the changes in
+this play; how they thrust themselves upon our notice; how we could not
+possibly ignore them. And you will see how a man comes to understand any
+particular law, after he has been forced to obey it, altho, perhaps, he
+has never heard of it or dreamed of it before.</p>
+
+<p>And let me say here, to the students of Harvard&mdash;I do not presume to
+address words of advice to the faculty&mdash;it is to you and to others who
+enjoy the high privileges of liberal education that the American stage
+ought to look for honest and good dramatic work in the future. Let me
+say to you, then: Submit yourselves truly and unconditionally to the
+laws of dramatic truth, so far as you can discover them by honest mental
+exertion and observation. Do not mistake any mere defiance of these laws
+for originality. You might as well show your originality by defying the
+law of gravitation. Keep in mind the historical case of Stephenson. When
+a member of the British Parliament asked him, concerning his newfangled
+invention, the railroad, whether it would not be very awkward if a cow
+were on the track when a train came along, he answered: "Very ark'ard,
+indeed&mdash;for the cow." When you find yourself standing in the way of
+dramatic truth, my young friends&mdash;clear the track! If you don't, the
+truth can stand it; you can't. Even if you feel sometimes that your
+genius&mdash;that's always the word in the secret vocabulary of our own
+minds&mdash;even if your genius seems to be hampered by these dramatic laws,
+resign yourself to them at once, with that simple form of Christian
+resignation so beautifully illustrated by the poor German woman on her
+deathbed. Her husband being asked, afterward, if she were resigned to
+her death, responded with that touching and earnest recognition of
+eternal law: "Mein Gott, she had to be!"</p>
+
+<p>The story of the play, as first produced in Chicago, may be told as
+follows:</p>
+
+<p>Act first&mdash;Scene, New York. A young girl and a young man are in love,
+and engaged to be married. The striking originality of this idea will
+startle any one who has never heard of such a thing before. Lilian
+Westbrook and Harold Routledge have a lover's quarrel. Never mind what
+the cause of it. To quote a passage from the play itself: "A woman never
+quarrels with a man she doesn't love"&mdash;that is one of the minor laws of
+dramatic construction&mdash;"and she is never tired of quarreling with a man
+she does love." I dare not announce this as another law of female human
+nature; it is merely the opinion of one of my characters&mdash;a married man.
+Of course, there are women who do not quarrel with any one; and there
+are angels; but, as a rule, the women we feel at liberty to fall in love
+with do quarrel now and then; and they almost invariably quarrel with
+their husbands or lovers first, their other acquaintances must often be
+content with their smiles. But, when Lilian announces to Harold
+Routledge that their engagement is broken forever, he thinks she means
+to imply that she doesn't intend to marry him.</p>
+
+<p>Women are often misunderstood by our more grossly practical sex; we are
+too apt to judge of what they mean by what they say. The relations, if
+there are any, between a woman's tongue and her thoughts form the least
+understood section, perhaps, of dramatic law. You will get some idea of
+the intricacies of this subject, if one of your literary professors will
+draw you a diagram of what a woman doesn't mean when she uses the
+English language. Harold Routledge, almost broken-hearted, bids Lilian
+farewell, and leaves her presence. Lilian herself, proud and angry,
+allows him to go; waits petulantly a moment for him to return; then,
+forlorn and wretched, she bursts into the flood of tears which she
+intended to shed upon his breast. Under ordinary circumstances, those
+precious drops would not have been wasted. Young girls, when they
+quarrel with their lovers, are not extravagant with their tears; they
+put them carefully to the best possible use; and, I dare say, some of
+Lilian's tears would have fallen on a sheet of notepaper; and the
+stained lines of a letter would have reached Harold by the next post,
+begging him to come back, and to let her forgive him for all the
+spiteful things she had said to him. Unfortunately, however, just at
+this critical juncture in the affairs of love&mdash;while Cupid was waiting,
+hat in hand, to accompany the letter to its destination and keep an eye
+on the postman&mdash;Lilian's father enters. He is on the verge of financial
+ruin, and he has just received a letter from Mr. John Strebelow, a man
+of great wealth, asking him for his daughter's hand in marriage. Mr.
+Westbrook urges her to accept him, not from any selfish motives, but
+because he dreads to leave, in his old age, a helpless girl, trained
+only to luxury and extravagance, to a merciless world. Lilian, on her
+part, shudders at the thought of her father renewing the struggle of
+life when years have exhausted his strength. She knows that she will be
+the greatest burden that will fall upon him; she remembers her dead
+mother's love for them both; and she sacrifices her own heart. Mr.
+Strebelow is a man of about forty years, of unquestioned honor, of noble
+personal character in every way. Lilian had loved him, indeed, when she
+was a little child, and she feels that she can at least respect and
+reverence him as her husband. Mr. Strebelow marries her without knowing
+that she does not love him; much less, that she loves another.</p>
+
+<p>Act second&mdash;Paris. Lilian has been married five years, and is residing
+with her husband in the French capital. As the curtain rises, Lilian is
+teaching her little child, Natalie, her alphabet. All the warm affection
+of a woman's nature, suppressed and thrown back upon her own heart, has
+concentrated itself upon this child. Lilian has been a good wife, and
+she does reverence her husband as she expected to do. He is a kind,
+generous and noble man. But she does not love him as a wife. Mr.
+Strebelow now enters, and, after a little domestic scene, the French
+nurse is instructed to dress the child for a walk with its mother.
+Strebelow then tells Lilian that he has just met an old friend of hers
+and of himself&mdash;the American artist, Mr. Harold Routledge, passing thru
+Paris on his way from his studio in Rome. He has insisted on a visit
+from Mr. Routledge, and the two parted lovers are brought face to face
+by the husband. They are afterwards left alone together. Routledge has
+lived a solitary life, nursing his feelings toward a woman who had
+heartlessly cast him off, as he thinks, to marry a man merely for his
+wealth. He is bitter and cruel. But the cruelty to a woman which is born
+of love for her has a wonderful, an almost irresistible fascination for
+the female heart. Under the spell of this fascination, Lilian's old love
+reasserts its authority against that of his will. She forgets everything
+except the moment when her lover last parted from her. She is again the
+wayward girl that waited for his return; he has returned!&mdash;and she does
+what she would have done five years before; she turns, passionately, to
+throw herself into his arms. At this moment, her little child, Natalie,
+runs in. Lilian is a mother again, and a wife. She falls to her knees
+and embraces her child at the very feet of her former lover. Harold
+Routledge bows his head reverently, and leaves them together.</p>
+
+<p>Act third. The art of breaking the tenth commandment&mdash;thou shalt not
+covet they neighbor's wife&mdash;has reached its highest perfection in
+France. One of the most important laws of dramatic construction might be
+formulated in this way. If you want a particular thing done, choose a
+character to do it that an audience will naturally expect to do it. I
+wanted a man to fall in love with my heroine after she was a married
+woman, and I chose a French count for that purpose. I knew that an
+American audience would not only expect him to fall in love with another
+man's wife, but it would be very much surprised if he didn't. This saved
+much explanation and unnecessary dialog. Harold Routledge overhears the
+Count de Carojac, a hardened rou&eacute; and a duellist, speaking of Lilian in
+such terms as no honorable man should speak of a modest woman.
+Routledge, with a studio in Rome, and having been educated at a German
+university, is familiar with the use of the rapier. A duel is arranged.
+Lilian hears of it thru a female friend, and Strebelow, also, thru the
+American second of Mr. Routledge. The parties meet at the Ch&acirc;teau
+Chateaubriand, in the suburbs of Paris, at midnight, by the light of the
+moon, in winter. A scream from Lilian, as she reaches the scene in
+breathless haste, throws Routledge off his guard; he is wounded and
+falls. Strebelow, too, has come on the field, not knowing the cause of
+the quarrel; but anxious to prevent a meeting between two of his own
+personal friends. Lilian is ignorant of her husband's presence, and she
+sees only the bleeding form of the man she loves lying upon the snow.
+She falls at his side, and words of burning passion, checked a few hours
+before by the innocent presence of her child, spring to her lips. The
+last of these words are as follows: "I have loved you&mdash;and you
+only&mdash;Harold, from the first."</p>
+
+<p>These words, clear, unmistakable, carrying their terrible truth straight
+to his heart, come to John Strebelow as the very first intimation that
+his wife did not love him when she married him. Crushed by this sudden
+blow, an expression of agony on his face, he stands for a moment
+speechless. When his voice returns, he has become another man. He is
+hard and cold, still generous, so far as those things a generous man
+cares least for are concerned. He will share all his wealth with her;
+but, in the awful bitterness of a great heart, at that moment, he feels
+that the woman who has deceived him so wickedly has no natural right to
+be the guardian of their child. "Return to our home, madam; it will be
+yours, not mine, hereafter; but our child will not be there." Ungenerous
+words! But if we are looking in our own hearts, where we must find
+nearly all the laws of dramatic construction, how many of us would be
+more generous, with such words as John Strebelow had just heard ringing
+in our ears? As the act closes, the startled love of a mother has again
+and finally asserted itself in Lilian's heart, its one overmastering
+passion of her nature. With the man she has loved lying near her,
+wounded, and, for aught she knows, dying, she is thinking only of her
+lost child. Maternal love, thruout the history of the world, has had
+triumphs over all the other passions; triumphs over destitution and
+trials and tortures; over all the temptations incident to life; triumphs
+to which no other impulse of the human heart&mdash;not even the love of man
+for woman&mdash;has ever risen. One of the most brilliant men I had ever
+known once said in court; "Woman, alone, shares with the Creator the
+privilege of communing with an unborn human being"; and, with this
+privilege, the Creator seems to have shared with woman a part of His own
+great love. All other love in our race is merely human. The play, from
+this time on, becomes the story of a mother's love.</p>
+
+<p>Acts fourth and fifth. Two years later Lilian is at the home of her
+father in New York. Her husband has disappeared. His name was on the
+passenger list of a wrecked steamer; and no other word of him or of the
+child has been heard. If he had left the little girl in the care of
+others, it is unknown to whom or where. So Lilian is a widow and
+childless. She is fading, day by day, and is hardly expected to live.
+Her mind, tortured by the suspense, which, worse than certainty, is
+gradually yielding to hallucinations which keep her little one ever
+present to her fancy. Harold Routledge was wounded seriously in the
+duel, but not killed; he is near Lilian; seeing her every day; but he is
+her friend, rather than her lover, now; she talks with him of her child,
+and he feels how utterly hopeless his own passion is in the presence of
+an all-absorbing mother's love. It is discovered that the child is
+living peacefully among kind guardians in a French convent; and
+Routledge determines to cross the ocean with the necessary evidence and
+bring the little one back to its mother. He breaks the news to Lilian
+tenderly and gently. A gleam of joy illuminates her face for the first
+time since the terrible night, two years before, and Routledge feels
+that the only barrier to his own happiness has been removed. But the
+sudden return and reappearance of the husband falls like a stroke of
+fate upon both. As the curtain descends on the fourth act, Lilian lies
+fainting on the floor, with Natalie at her side, while the two men stand
+face to face above the unconscious woman whom they both love. Three
+lives ruined&mdash;because Lilian's father, having lost his wealth, in his
+old age, dared not, as he himself expressed it, leave a tenderly
+nurtured daughter to a merciless world. The world is merciless, perhaps,
+but it is not so utterly and hopelessly merciless to any man or woman as
+one's heart may be.</p>
+
+<p>Lilian comes back to consciousness on her deathbed. Her child had
+returned to her only as a messenger from heaven, summoning her home. But
+the message had been whispered in unconscious ears; for she had not seen
+the little girl, who was removed before the mother had recovered from
+her swoon. They dare not tell her now that Natalie is on this side of
+the ocean and asleep in the next room. Mr. Strebelow had heard in a
+distant land, travelling to distract his mind from the great sorrow of
+his own life, of Lilian's condition, and he hastened back to undo the
+wrong he felt that he had committed. She asks to see him; she kisses his
+hand with tenderness and gratitude, when he tells her that Natalie shall
+be her own hereafter; his manly tears are tears of repentance, mingled
+with a now generous love. The stroke of death comes suddenly; they have
+only a moment's time to arouse the little one from its sleep; but they
+are not too late, and Lilian dies at last, a smile of perfect happiness
+on her face, with her child in her arms.</p>
+
+<p>The Mississippi darky, in Mark Twain's story, being told that his heroic
+death on the field of battle would have made but little difference to
+the nation at large, remarked, with deep philosophy; "It would have made
+a great deal of difference to me, sah." The radical change made in the
+story I have just related to you, before the production of the play in
+New York, was this: Lilian lives, instead of dying, in the last act. It
+would have made very little difference to the American nation what she
+did; but it made a great deal of difference to her, as you will see,
+and to the play also in nearly every part. My reasons for making the
+change were based upon one of the most important principles of the
+dramatic art, namely: A dramatist should deal, so far as possible, with
+subjects of universal interest, instead of with such as appeal strongly
+to a part of the public only. I do not mean that he may not appeal to
+certain classes of people, and depend upon those classes for success;
+but, just so far as he does this, he limits the possibilities of that
+success. I have said that the love of offspring in woman has shown
+itself the strongest of all human passions; and it is the most nearly
+allied to the boundless love of Deity. But the one absolutely universal
+passion of the race&mdash;which underlies all other passions&mdash;on which,
+indeed, the very existence of the race depends&mdash;the very fountain of
+maternal love itself, is the love of the sexes. The dramatist must
+remember that his work cannot, like that of the novelist or the poet,
+pick out the hearts, here and there, that happen to be in sympathy with
+its subject. He appeals to a thousand hearts at the same moment; he has
+no choice in the matter; he must do this. And it is only when he deals
+with the love of the sexes that his work is most interesting to that
+aggregation of human hearts we call the audience. This very play was
+successful in Chicago; but, as soon as that part of the public had been
+exhausted which could weep with pleasure, if I may use the expression,
+over the tenderness of a mother's love, its success would have been at
+an end. Furthermore&mdash;and here comes in another law of dramatic
+construction&mdash;a play must be, in one way or another, "satisfactory" to
+the audience. This word has a meaning which varies in different
+countries, and even in different parts of the same country; but,
+whatever audience you are writing for, your work must be "satisfactory"
+to it. In England and America, the death of a pure woman on the stage is
+not "satisfactory," except when the play rises to the dignity of
+tragedy. The death, in an ordinary play, of a woman who is not pure, as
+in the case of 'Frou-Frou,' is perfectly satisfactory, for the reason
+that it is inevitable. Human nature always bows gracefully to the
+inevitable. The only griefs in our own lives to which we could never
+reconcile ourselves are those which might have been averted. The wife
+who has once taken the step from purity to impurity can never reinstate
+herself in the world of art on this side of the grave; and so an
+audience looks with complacent tears on the death of an erring woman.
+But Lilian had not taken the one fatal step which would have reconciled
+an audience to her death. She was still pure, and every one left the
+theatre wishing she had lived. I yielded, therefore, to the sound logic,
+based on sound dramatic principle, of my New York manager, Mr. A. M.
+Palmer, and the piece was altered.</p>
+
+<p>I have called the play, as produced in New York and afterward in London,
+the "same play" as the one produced in Chicago. That one doubt, which
+age does not conquer&mdash;which comes down to us from the remotest antiquity
+of our own youth, which will still exist in our minds as we listen to
+the music of the spheres, thru countless ages, when all other doubts are
+at rest; that never-to-be answered doubt: Whether it was the same
+jack-knife, or another one, after all its blades and handle had been
+changed&mdash;must ever linger in my own mind as to the identity of this
+play. But a dramatic author stops worrying himself about doubts of this
+kind very early in his career. The play which finally takes its place on
+the stage usually bears very little resemblance to the play which first
+suggested itself to his mind. In some cases the public has abundant
+reason to congratulate itself on this fact, and especially on the way
+plays are often built up, so to speak, by the authors, with advice and
+assistance from other intelligent people interested in their success.
+The most magnificent figure in the English drama of this century was a
+mere faint outline, merely a fatherly old man, until the suggestive mind
+of Macready stimulated the genius of Bulwer Lytton, and the great
+author, eagerly acknowledging the assistance rendered him, made Cardinal
+Richelieu the colossal central figure of a play that was written as a
+pretty love-story. Bulwer Lytton had an eye single, as every dramatist
+ought to have&mdash;as every successful dramatist must have&mdash;to the final
+artistic result; he kept before him the one object of making the play of
+'Richelieu' as good a play as he possibly could make it. The first duty
+of a dramatist is to put upon the stage the very best work he can, in
+the light of whatever advice and assistance may come to him. Fair
+acknowledgment afterward is a matter of mere ordinary personal honesty.
+It is not a question of dramatic art.</p>
+
+<p>So Lilian is to live, and not die, in the last act. The first question
+for us to decide&mdash;I say "us"&mdash;the New York manager, the literary attach&eacute;
+of the theatre, and myself&mdash;the first practical question before us was:
+As Lilian is to live, which of the two men who love her is to die? There
+are axioms among the laws of dramatic construction, as in mathematics.
+One of them is this&mdash;three hearts cannot beat as one. The world is not
+large enough, from an artistic point of view, for three good human
+hearts to continue to exist, if two of them love the third. If one of
+the two hearts is a bad one, art assigns it to the hell on earth of
+disappointed love; but if it is good and tender and gentle, art is
+merciful to it, and puts it out of its misery by death. Routledge was
+wounded in a duel. Strebelow was supposed to be lost in the wreck of a
+steamer. It was easy enough to kill either of them, but which? We argued
+this question for three weeks. Mere romance was on the side of the
+young artist. But to have had him live would have robbed the play of all
+its meaning. Its moral, in the original form, is this: It is a dangerous
+thing to marry, for any reason, without the safeguard of love, even when
+the person one marries is worthy of one's love in every possible way. If
+we had decided in favor of Routledge, the play would have had no moral
+at all, or rather a very bad one. If a girl marries the wrong man, she
+need only wait for him to die; and if her lover waits, too, it'll be all
+right. If, on the other hand, we so reconstruct the whole play that the
+husband and wife may at last come together with true affection, we shall
+have the moral: Even if a young girl makes the worst of all mistakes,
+and accepts the hand of one man when her heart belongs to another,
+fidelity to the duty of a wife on her side, and a manly, generous
+confidence on the part of her husband, may, in the end, correct even
+such a mistake. The dignity of this moral saved John Strebelow's life,
+and Harold Routledge was killed in the duel with the Count de Carojac.</p>
+
+<p>All that was needed to affect this first change in the play was to
+instruct the actor who played Routledge to lie still when the curtain
+fell at the end of the third act, and to go home afterward. But there
+are a number of problems under the laws of dramatic construction which
+we must solve before the play can now be made to reach the hearts of an
+audience as it did before. Let us see what they are.</p>
+
+<p>The love of Lilian for Harold Routledge cannot now be the one grand
+passion of her life. It must be the love of a young girl, however
+sincere and intense, which yields, afterward, to the stronger and deeper
+love of a woman for her husband. The next great change, therefore, which
+the laws of dramatic construction forced upon us was this: Lilian must
+now control her own passion, and when she meets her lover in the second
+act she must not depend for her moral safety on the awakening of a
+mother's love by the appearance of her child. Her love for Harold is no
+longer such an all-controlling force as will justify a woman&mdash;justify
+her dramatically, I mean&mdash;yielding to it. For her to depend on an
+outside influence would be to show a weakness of character that would
+make her uninteresting. Instead, therefore, of receiving her former
+lover with dangerous pent-up fires, Lilian now feels pity for him. She
+hardly yet knows her own feelings toward her husband; but his manhood
+and kindness are gradually forcing their way to her heart. Routledge, in
+his own passion, forgets himself, and she now repels him. She even
+threatens to strike the bell, when the Count de Carojac appears, and
+warns his rival to desist. This is now the end of the second act, a very
+different end, you see, from the other version, where the little girl
+runs in, and, in her innocence, saves the mother from herself.</p>
+
+<p>Here let me tell a curious experience, which illustrates how stubbornly
+persistent the dramatic laws are, in having their own way. We were all
+three of us&mdash;manager, literary attach&eacute;, and author&mdash;so pleased with the
+original ending of the second act the picture of the little girl in her
+mother's arms, and the lover bowing his head in its presence of
+innocence, that we retained it. The little girl ran on the stage at
+every rehearsal at the usual place. But no one knew what to do with her.
+The actress who played the part of Lilian caught her in her arms, in
+various attitudes; but none of them seemed right. The actor who played
+Routledge tried to drop his head, according to instructions, but he
+looked uncomfortable, not reverential. The next day we had the little
+girl run on from another entrance. She stopped in the center of the
+stage. Lilian stared at her a moment and then exclaimed: "Mr. Howard,
+what shall I do with this child?" Routledge, who had put his hands in
+his pocket, called out: "What's the girl doing here, anyway, Howard?" I
+could only answer: "She used to be all right; I don't know what's the
+matter with her now." And I remember seeing an anxious look on the face
+of the child's mother, standing at the side of the stage. She feared
+there was something wrong about her own little darling who played the
+part of Natalie. I reassured her on this point; for the fact that I was
+in error was forcing itself on my mind, in spite of my desire to retain
+the scene. You will hardly believe that I am speaking literally, when I
+tell you that it was not until the 19th rehearsal that we yielded to the
+inevitable, and decided not to have the child come on at all at that
+point. The truth was this: now that Lilian saved herself in her own
+strength, the child had no dramatic function to fulfill. So strongly did
+we all feel the force of a dramatic law which we could not, and would
+not, see. Our own natural human instinct&mdash;the instinct which the
+humblest member of an audience feels, without knowing anything of
+dramatic law&mdash;got the better of three men, trained in dramatic work,
+only by sheer force, and against our own determined opposition. We were
+three of Stephenson's cows&mdash;or shall I say three calves?&mdash;standing on
+the track, and we could not succeed where Jumbo failed.</p>
+
+<p>The third step, in the changes forced upon us by the laws of dramatic
+construction, was a very great one; and it was made necessary by the
+fact, just mentioned, that the child, Natalie, had no dramatic function
+to fulfill in the protection of her mother's virtue. In other words,
+there is no point in the play, now, where sexual love is, or can be,
+replaced by maternal love, as the controlling passion of the play.
+Consequently, the last two acts in their entirety, so far as the serious
+parts are concerned, disappear; one new scene and a new act taking their
+place. The sad mother, playing with a little shoe or toy, passes out of
+our view. The dying woman, kissing the hand of the man she has wronged;
+the husband, awe-stricken in the presence of a mother's child; the child
+clasped in Lilian's arms; her last look on earth, a smile, and her last
+breath, the final expression of maternal tenderness&mdash;these scenes belong
+only to the original version of the play, as it lies in its author's
+desk. With an author's sensitive interest in his own work, I wasted many
+hours in trying to save these scenes. But I was working directly against
+the laws of dramatic truth, and I gave up the impossible task.</p>
+
+<p>The fourth great change&mdash;forced on us, as the others were&mdash;concerns the
+character of John Strebelow. As he is now to become the object of a
+wife's mature affection, he must not merely be a noble and generous man;
+he must do something worthy of the love which is to be bestowed on him.
+He must command a woman's love. When, therefore, he hears his wife,
+kneeling over her wounded lover, use words which tell him of their
+former relations, he does not what most of us would do, but what an
+occasional hero among us would do. Of course, the words of Lilian
+cannot be such, now, as to close the gates to all hopes of love, as they
+were before. She still utters a wild cry, but her words merely show the
+awakened tenderness and pity of a woman for a man she had once loved.
+They are uttered, however, in the presence of others, and they
+compromise her husband's honor. At that moment he takes her gently in
+his arms, and becomes her protector, warning the French rou&eacute; and
+duellist that he will call him to account for the insults which the arm
+of the dead man had failed to avenge. He afterward does this, killing
+the count&mdash;not in the action of the play; this is only told. John
+Strebelow thus becomes the hero of the play, and it is only necessary to
+follow the workings of Lilian's heart and his a little further, until
+they come together at last, loving each other truly, the early love of
+the wife for another man being only a sad memory in her mind. There is a
+tender scene of explanation and a parting, until Lilian's heart shall
+recall her husband. This scene, in my opinion, is one of the most
+beautiful scenes ever written for the stage. At the risk of breaking the
+tenth commandment myself, I do not hesitate to say, I wish I had
+written it. As I did not, however, I can express the hope that the name
+of Mr. A. R. Cazauran, who did write it, will never be forgotten in
+connection with this play as long as the play itself may be remembered.
+I wrote the scene myself first; but when he wrote it according to his
+own ideas, it was so much more beautiful than my own that I would have
+broken a law of dramatic art if I had not accepted it. I should not have
+been giving the public the best play I could, under the circumstances.
+Imbued, as my own mind was, with all the original motives of the piece,
+it would have been impossible for me to have made changes within a few
+weeks without the assistance Mr. Cazauran could give me; this assistance
+was invaluable to me in all parts of the revised piece. In the fifth act
+the husband and wife come together again, the little child acting as the
+immediate cause of their reconciliation; the real cause lies in their
+own true hearts.</p>
+
+<p>Before we leave the subject, another change which I was obliged to make
+will interest you, because it shows very curiously what queer turns
+these laws of dramatic construction may take. As soon as it was decided
+to have Lilian live, in the fifth act, and love John Strebelow, I was
+compelled to cut out the quarrel-scene between Lilian and Harold
+Routledge in the first act. This is a little practical matter, very much
+like taking out a certain wheel at one end of a machine because you have
+decided to get a different mechanical result at the other end. I was
+very fond of this quarrel-scene, but I lost no time in trying to save
+it, for I saw at once that Harold Routledge must not appear in the first
+act at all. He could only be talked about as Lilian's lover. John
+Strebelow must be present alone in the eyes and sympathy of the
+audience. If Routledge did not appear until the second act, the audience
+would regard him as an interloper; it would rather resent his presence
+than otherwise, and would be easily reconciled to his death in the next
+act. It was taking an unfair advantage of a young lover; but there was
+no help for it. Even if Harold had appeared in the first act, the
+quarrel-scene would have been impossible. He might have made love to
+Lilian, perhaps, or even kissed her, and the audience would have
+forgiven me reluctantly for having her love another man afterward. But
+if the two young people had a lover's quarrel in the presence of the
+audience, no power on earth could have convinced any man or woman in the
+house that they were not intended for each other by the eternal decrees
+of divine Providence.</p>
+
+<p>I have now given you the revised story of this play as it was produced
+at the Union Square Theater in New York, under the name of the 'Banker's
+Daughter.' I have said nothing about the comic scenes or characters,
+because the various changes did not affect them in any way that concerns
+the principles of dramatic art. They are almost identically the same in
+both versions. Now, if you please, we will cross the ocean. I have had
+many long discussions with English managers on the practice in London of
+adapting foreign plays, not merely to the English stage, but to English
+life, with English characters. The Frenchmen of a French play become, as
+a rule, Englishmen; so do Italians and Spaniards and Swedes. They
+usually, however, continue to express foreign ideas and to act like
+foreigners. In speaking of such a transplanted character, I may be
+permitted to trifle with a sacred text:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The manager has said it,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But it's hardly to his credit,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That he is an Englishman!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For he ought to have been a Roosian,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A French, or Turk, or Proosian,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Or perhaps I-tali-an!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But in spite of Art's temptations,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To belong to other nations,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">He becomes an Englishman!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Luckily, the American characters of the 'Banker's Daughter', with one
+exception, could be twisted into very fair Englishmen, with only a faint
+suspicion of our Yankee accent. Mr. James Alberry, one of the most
+brilliant men in England, author of the 'Two Roses,' was engaged to make
+them as nearly English as he could. The friendship, cemented as Alberry
+and I were discussing for some weeks the international social questions
+involved, is among the dearest and tenderest friendships I have ever
+made; and I learned more about the various minor differences of social
+life in England and American while we were thus at work together than I
+could have learned in a residence there of five years. I have time to
+give you only a few of the points. Take the engagement of Lilian, broken
+in act first. An engagement in England is necessarily a family matter,
+and it could neither be made or broken by the mere fiat of a young girl,
+without consultation with others, leaving the way open for the immediate
+acceptance of another man's hand. In the English version, therefore,
+there is no engagement with Harold Routledge. It is only an
+understanding between them that they love each other. Not even the most
+rigid customs of Europe can prevent such an understanding between two
+young people, if they can once look into each other's eyes. They could
+fall in love through a pair of telescopes. Then the duel&mdash;it is next to
+impossible to persuade an English audience that a duel is justifiable or
+natural with an Englishman as one of the principles. So we played a
+rather sharp artistic trick on our English audience. In the American
+version, I assume that, if a plucky young American in France insults a
+Frenchman purposely, he will abide by the local customs, and give him
+satisfaction, if called upon to do so. So would a young Englishman,
+between you and me; but the laws of dramatic construction deal with the
+sympathies of the audience as well as with the natural motives and
+actions of the characters in a play; and an English audience would think
+the French count ought to be perfectly satisfied if Routledge knocked
+him down. How did we get over the difficulty? First, we made Routledge a
+British officer returning from India, instead of an artist on his way
+from Rome&mdash;a fighting man by profession; and then we made the Count de
+Carojac pile so many sneers and insults on this British officer, and on
+the whole British nation, that I verily believe a London audience would
+have mobbed him if he hadn't tried to kill him. The English public
+walked straight into the trap, although they abhor nothing on earth more
+than the duelling system. I said that the comic characters were not
+affected by the changes made in America; the change of nationality did
+affect them to a certain extent. A young girl, Florence St. Vincent,
+afterward Mrs. Browne, represents, here, with dramatic exaggeration, of
+course, a type of young girl more or less familiar to all of us. In
+England she is not a type, but an eccentric personality, with which the
+audience must be made acquainted by easy stages. It was necessary,
+therefore, to introduce a number of preliminary speeches for her, before
+she came to the lines of the original version. After that, she ran on
+without any further change, except a few excisions. Mrs. Browne is
+married to a very old man, who afterward dies, and in the last act she
+illustrates the various grades of affliction endured by every young
+widow, from the darkness of despair to the becoming twilight of
+sentimental sadness. This was delicate ground in England. They have not
+that utter horror of marriage between a very old man and a very young
+woman which, in this country, justifies all the satire which a dramatist
+can heap upon the man who commits this crime, even after he is in the
+grave. And the English people do not share with us&mdash;I say it to their
+credit&mdash;our universal irreverence for what is solemn and sacred. One
+must not, either in social life or on the stage, speak too lightly there
+of any serious subject; of course, they can laugh, however, at an old
+man that makes a fool of himself. So we merely toned down the levity by
+leaving old Mr. Browne out of the cast entirely. There is a great
+difference, as in the case of Routledge left out of the first act,
+between what the audience sees and what it only hears talked about; and
+none of the laws of dramatic construction are more important than those
+which concern the questions whether you shall appeal to the ear of an
+audience, to its eye, or both. Old Mr. Browne was only talked about
+then, and as long as the English audience did not know him personally,
+it was perfectly willing to laugh at him after Mrs. Browne was a widow.
+Another change made for the London version will interest American
+business men. In our own version, Lilian's father and his partner close
+up their affairs in the last act and retire from their business as
+private bankers. "That will never do in England," said Mr. Alberry. "An
+old established business like that might be worth &pound;100,000. We must sell
+it to some one, not close it." So we sold it to Mr. George Washington
+Phipps. This last character illustrates, again, the stubbornness of
+dramatic law. Mr. Alberry and I tried to make him an Irishman, or a
+Scotchman, or some kind of an Englishman. But we could not. He remains
+an American in England in 1886, as he was in Chicago in 1873. He
+declined to change either his citizenship or his name; "G.
+Washington&mdash;Father of his Country&mdash;Phipps."</p>
+
+<p>The peculiar history of the play is my only justification for giving you
+all these details of its otherwise unimportant career. I only trust that
+I have shown you how very practical the laws of dramatic construction
+are in the way they influence a dramatist. The art of obeying them is
+merely the art of using your common sense in the study of your own and
+other people's emotions. All I now add is, if you want to write a play,
+be honest and sincere in using your common sense. A prominent lawyer
+once assured me that there was only one man he trembled before in the
+presence of a jury&mdash;not the learned man, nor the eloquent man; it was
+the sincere man. The public will be your jury. That public often
+condescends to be trifled with by mere tricksters, but, believe me, it
+is only a condescension and very contemptuous. In the long run, the
+public will judge you, and respect you, according to your artistic
+sincerity.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="NOTES" id="NOTES"></a><a href="#table">NOTES</a></h2>
+
+
+<p>This lecture was originally delivered in March, 1886, in the Sanders
+Theater, before the Shakspere Society of Harvard University; and it was
+repeated before the Nineteenth Century Club in New York in December,
+1889. On the latter occasion two other dramatic authors were requested
+to debate the points made by the speaker; and as a result he added a few
+supplementary remarks:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Nineteenth Century Club looks for a discussion, I believe, on
+the subject brought forward in the paper of this evening. If the
+word "discussion" implies "argument," I fear there is nothing in
+the mere struggles of a dramatist in his workshop to justify that
+difference of opinion which is necessary to an argument. My
+American colleague, Mr. Brander Matthews, must feel like a man
+whose wife persists from day to day in saying nothing that he can
+object to, thereby making his home a desert and driving him to the
+club. As for the great Irish dramatist, this paper leaves him still
+wishing that some one would tread on the tail of his coat. But,
+with all true Irishmen, the second party in a quarrel is merely a
+convenience, not a necessity. Whenever Mr. Boucicault feels that a
+public discussion is desirable for any reason, he can always tread
+on the tail of his own coat, and make quite as good a fight of it
+all by himself as if some one was assisting him.</p></div>
+
+<p>And he ended with this reference to the constructive skill of Ibsen:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Another thing strikes me in connection with this subject: the
+praise of Ibsen, the Scandinavian dramatist, is abroad in England;
+and again, as so often before, mine eyes have seen the glory of the
+coming of the Lord in the direction of Boston. But some of the
+loudest worshippers of this truly great man in both countries
+either wilfully ignore, or else they know nothing about, his real
+greatness.</p>
+
+<p>Ibsen holds in his hand the terrible power, in dealing with the
+evils of society, which dramatic construction gives to a genius
+like his; he has not laid this power aside and reduced his own
+stage to a mere lecture platform. A man armed with a sword who
+should lay it down in the heat of battle and take up a wisp of
+straw to fight with, would be a fool. Ibsen, like his great
+predecessors and contemporaries in France, deals his vigorous blows
+at social wrongs thru dramatic effects and the true dramatic
+relations of his characters. I know of no writer for the stage,
+past or present, who depends for his moral power more continuously
+at all points on the art of dramatic construction than Ibsen does.
+He, himself, would be the first to smile at those who praise him as
+if he were a writer of moral dialogs or the self-appointed lecturer
+for one of those psychological panoramas which are unrolled in
+acts, at a theater, or in monthly parts in a periodical.</p>
+
+<p>In conclusion: to all who argue that careful construction is
+unnecessary in literary art, I will say only this: it is extremely
+easy not to construct.</p></div>
+
+<p>It may be noted also that Bronson Howard returned to the topic of his
+lecture in a contribution to the <i>Dramatic Mirror</i> in 1900; he called
+this</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<h3><i>A MERE SUGGESTION</i>.</h3>
+
+<p>So much is written in critical notices of plays, about their
+"construction," that I should like to suggest a few of the
+considerations which that term involves. It is possible that some
+of the beginners, who are to become the future dramatists of
+America, will see the necessity of thinking twice before using the
+term at all. Some of the more general considerations to be kept in
+view, when a careful and properly educated critic feels justified
+in using the word "construction," may be jotted down as follows:</p>
+
+<p>I. The actual strength of the main incident of a play.</p>
+
+<p>II. Relative strength of the main incident, in reference to the
+importance of the subject; and also to the length of the play.</p>
+
+<p>III. Adequacy of the story in relation to the importance and
+dignity of the main incident and of the subject.</p>
+
+<p>IV. Adequacy of the original motives on which the rest of the play
+depends.</p>
+
+<p>V. Logical sequence of events by which the main incident is
+reached.</p>
+
+<p>VI. Logical results of the story after the main incident is passed.</p>
+
+<p>VII. The choice of the characters by which the sequence of events
+is developed.</p>
+
+<p>VIII. Logical, otherwise natural, use of motives in these
+particular characters, in leading from one incident to another.</p>
+
+<p>IX. The use of such human emotions and passions as are universally
+recognized as true, without those special explanations which
+belong to general fiction and not to the stage.</p>
+
+<p>X. The relation of the story and incidents to the sympathies of the
+audience as a collection of human beings.</p>
+
+<p>XI. The relation of the story and incidents to the sympathies of
+the particular audience for which the play is written; to its
+knowledge and ignorance; its views of life; its social customs; and
+to its political institutions, so far as they may modify its social
+views, as in the case of a democracy or an aristocracy.</p>
+
+<p>Minor matters&mdash;such as the use of comic relief, the relation of
+dialog to action, the proper use of superfluous characters to
+prevent an appearance of artificiality in the treatment, and a
+thousand other details belonging to the constructive side of a
+play&mdash;must also be within the critic's view; but a list of them
+here would be too long for the space available. When the young
+critic has made a careful study of the standard English drama, with
+a special view to the proper considerations above indicated, his
+opinion on the "construction" of a play will be of more or less
+value to American dramatic literature.</p></div>
+
+<p>There is, of course, no overt novelty in the theory advanced by Bronson
+Howard in his address. The same theory was held by Francisque Sarcey,
+who declared that all the principles of playmaking might be deduced from
+the fact that a piece is always intended for performance before an
+audience. And Marmontel, dramatist as well as dramatic theorist,
+asserted that the first rule the play-wright must obey is "to move the
+spectators, and the second is to move them only in so far as they are
+willing to be moved.... This depends on the disposition and the manners
+of the people to whom appeal is made and on the degree of sensibility
+they bring to the theater.... This is therefore a point in which tragedy
+is not invariable."</p>
+
+<p>The same principle underlies George Meredith's statement in regard to
+Comedy: "There are plain reasons why the comic poet is not a frequent
+apparition; and why the great comic poet remains without a fellow. A
+society of cultivated men and women is required wherein ideas are
+current and the perception quick, that he may be supplied with matter
+and an audience."</p>
+
+<p class="right">B. M.
+</p>
+
+<h3>OF THIS BOOK THREE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-THREE COPIES WERE PRINTED FROM
+TYPE BY CORLIES, MACY AND COMPANY IN NOVEMBER: MCMXIV</h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h3>
+PUBLICATIONS</h3>
+<h4><i>of the</i></h4>
+<h3>Dramatic Museum</h3>
+<h4><span class="smcap">of Columbia University</span></h4>
+<h4>IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK</h4>
+<h4><i>First Series</i></h4>
+
+<p>Papers on Playmaking:</p>
+
+<table summary="ad" cellpadding="8">
+<tr><td align="left">I</td><td align="left">THE NEW ART OF WRITING PLAYS. By Lope de Vega. Translated by
+William T. Brewster. With an Introduction and Notes by Brander
+Matthews.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left">II</td><td align="left">THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PLAY. By Bronson Howard. With an
+Introduction by Augustus Thomas.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left">III</td><td align="left">THE LAW OF THE DRAMA. By Ferdinand Bruneti&egrave;re. Translated by
+Philip M. Hayden. With an Introduction by Henry Arthur Jones.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left">IV</td><td align="left">ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON AS A DRAMATIST. By Arthur Wing Pinero.
+With an Introduction and Bibliographical Appendix by Clayton
+Hamilton.</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Autobiography of a Play, by Bronson Howard
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Autobiography of a Play, by Bronson Howard
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Autobiography of a Play
+       Papers on Play-Making, II
+
+Author: Bronson Howard
+
+Commentator: Augustus Thomas
+
+Release Date: July 6, 2006 [EBook #18769]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PLAY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was
+produced from scanned images of public domain material
+from the Google Print project)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PAPERS ON PLAY-MAKING
+
+II
+
+The Autobiography of a Play
+
+by
+
+BRONSON HOWARD
+
+WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
+
+AUGUSTUS THOMAS
+
+Printed for the Dramatic Museum of Columbia University
+
+_in the City of New York_
+
+MCMXIV
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+Introduction by Augustus Thomas
+The Autobiography of a Play by Bronson Howard
+Notes by B. M.
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+The qualities that made Bronson Howard a dramatist, and then made him
+the first American dramatist of his day, were his human sympathy, his
+perception, his sense of proportion, and his construction. With his
+perception, his proportion, and his construction, respectively, he could
+have succeeded as a detective, as an artist, or as a general. It was his
+human sympathy, his wish and his ability to put himself in the other
+man's place, that made play-writing definitely attractive to him. As a
+soldier he would have shown the courage of the dogged defender in the
+trench or the calmly supervising general at headquarters, rather than
+the mad bravery that carried the flag at the front of a forlorn hope.
+His gifts were intellectual. His writing was more disciplined than
+inspired. If we shall claim for him genius, it must be preferably the
+genius of infinite pains.
+
+He saw intimately and clearly. His proportion made him write with
+discretion and a proper sense of cumulative emphasis, and his
+construction enabled him so to combine his materials as to secure this
+effect. He was intensely self-critical; and while almost without conceit
+concerning his own work, he had an accuracy of detached estimation that
+enabled him to stand by his own opinion with a proper inflexibility when
+his judgment convinced him that the opinion was correct.
+
+He worked slowly. At one time, in his active period, it was his custom
+to go from New York, where he lived, to New Rochelle, where he had
+formerly lived. There, upon the rear end of a suburban lot, he had a
+plain board cabin not more than ten feet square. In it were a deal
+table, a hard chair, and a small stove. He would go to this cabin in the
+morning when the tide of suburban travel was setting the other way, and
+spend his entire day there with his manuscript and his cigars. He
+carried a small lunch from his home. He once told me he was satisfied
+with his day's work if it provided him with ten good lines that would
+not have to be abandoned. I did not take that statement to imply that
+there were not in his experience the more profitable days that are in
+the work of every writer--days when the subject seems to command the
+pen and when the hand cannot keep pace with the vision. He was often too
+saturated with his story, too much the prisoner of his people, for it to
+have been otherwise; but his training had verified for him the truth
+that easy writing is hard reading.
+
+Then, too, while Bronson Howard arranged his characters for the eye and
+built his story for the judgment, he wrote his speeches for the ear.
+This attention to the cadence of a line was so essential to him that
+when writing as he sometimes did for a magazine he studied the sound of
+his phrase as if the print were to be read aloud. This same care for the
+dialog would retard its production; and critical revision would enforce
+still further delay.
+
+William Gillette once said to an interviewer that "plays were not
+written, but were rewritten." The experience of many play-wrights would
+support that statement. In the case of Bronson Howard, the autobiography
+of his 'Banker's Daughter' certainly does so. His most profitable play,
+perhaps, and the one which also brought him the greatest popular
+recognition, was 'Shenandoah'. That play was produced by a manager, who,
+after its first performance, believed that it would not succeed. A
+younger and more hopeful one saw in it its great elements of popularity,
+and encouraged him to rewrite it.
+
+Mr. William H. Crane, in a recent felicitous talk to the Society of
+American Dramatists, said that the 'Henrietta' was played exactly as its
+author had delivered it to the actors, without the change or the need of
+change in a single word, and with only the repetition late in the play
+of a line that had been spoken in an early act. That fact does not
+exclude the possibility of rewritings before the manuscript came to the
+company, but rather, in view of Bronson Howard's thoroness as a workman
+and his masterly sense of proportion, makes such rewritings the more
+probable. The effect, however, of his rewriting, wherever it may have
+been, and the slow additions of his daily contributions, was that of
+spontaneity.
+
+Some philosopher tells us that a factor of greatness in any field is the
+power to generalize, the ability to discover the principle underlying
+apparently discordant facts. Bronson Howard's plays are notable for
+their evidence of this power. He saw causes, tendencies, results. His
+plays are expositions of this chemistry. 'Shenandoah' dealt broadly with
+the forces and feelings behind the Civil War; the 'Henrietta' with the
+American passion for speculation--the money-madness that was dividing
+families. 'Aristocracy' was a very accurate, altho satirical, seizure of
+the disposition, then in its strongest manifestation, of a newly-rich
+and Western family of native force to break into the exclusive social
+set of New York and to do so thru a preparatory European alliance.
+
+He has a human story in every instance. There is always dramatic
+conflict between interesting characters, of course, but behind them is
+always the background of some considerable social tendency--some
+comprehensive generalization--that includes and explains them all. The
+commander from his eminence saw all the combatants: he knew what the
+fight was about, and it always was about something worth while. Bronson
+Howard never dramatized piffle.
+
+He was an observer of human nature and events, a traveler, a thinker, a
+student of the drama of all ages. He had been a reporter and an
+editorial writer. His plays were written by a watchful, sympathetic, and
+artistic military general turned philosopher.
+
+                    AUGUSTUS THOMAS.
+
+(June 1914).
+
+
+
+
+The Autobiography of a Play
+
+As read before the Shakspere Club _of_ Harvard University
+
+
+I have not come to Newcastle with a load of coals; and I shall not try
+to tell the faculty and students of Harvard University anything about
+the Greek drama or the classical unities. I will remind you of only one
+thing in that direction; and say even this merely because it has a
+direct bearing upon some of the practical questions connected with
+play-writing which I purpose to discuss. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and
+Euripides--perhaps we should give the entire credit, as some authorities
+do, to Aeschylus--taught the future world the art of writing a play. But
+they did not create the laws of dramatic construction. Those laws exist
+in the passions and sympathies of the human race. They existed thousands
+of years before the Father of the Drama was born: waiting, like the
+other laws of nature, to be discovered and utilized by man.
+
+A lecturer on "Animal Magnetism" failed to make his appearance one
+night, many years ago, in the public hall of a little town in Michigan,
+and a gentleman from Detroit consented to fill the vacant place. His
+lecture began and ended as follows: "Animal magnetism is a great
+subject, and the less said about it the better; we will proceed to
+experiments."
+
+I will take that wise man as my own exemplar today, and I will begin by
+echoing his words: The drama in general is a great subject, and the less
+I say about it the better; we will proceed to experiments.
+
+It happens that one of my own plays has had a very curious history. It
+has appeared before the American public in two forms, so radically
+different that a description of the changes made, and of the reasons for
+making them, will involve the consideration of some very interesting
+laws of dramatic construction. I shall ask you to listen very carefully
+to the story, or plot, of the piece as it was first produced in Chicago
+in 1873. Then I shall trace the changes that were made in this story
+before the play was produced in New York five years later. And after
+that, to follow the very odd adventures of the same play still further,
+I shall point out briefly the changes which were made necessary by
+adapting it to English life with English characters, for its production
+at the Court Theater, London, in 1879. All the changes which I shall
+describe to you were forced upon me (as soon as I had decided to make
+the general alterations in the play) by the laws of dramatic
+construction; and it is to the experimental application of these laws to
+a particular play that I ask your attention. The learned professors of
+Harvard University know much more about them than I do, so far as a
+study of dramatic literature, from the outside, can give them that
+knowledge; and the great modern authorities on the subject--Hallam,
+Lessing, Schlegel and many others--are open to the students of Harvard
+in her library; or, rather, shall I say, they lie closed on its shelves.
+But I invite you today to step into a little dramatic workshop, instead
+of a scientific library; and to see an humble workman in the craft,
+trying, with repeated experiments--not to elucidate the laws of dramatic
+construction, but to obey them, exactly as an inventor (deficient, it
+may be, in all scientific knowledge) tries to apply the general laws of
+mechanics to the immediate necessities of the machine he is working out
+in his mind. The moment a professor of chemistry has expressed a
+scientific truth, he must illustrate it at once by an experiment, or the
+truth will evaporate. An immense amount of scientific truth is
+constantly evaporating, for want of practical application; the air above
+every university in the world is charged with it. But what are the laws
+of dramatic construction? No one man knows much about them. As I have
+already reminded you, they bear about the same relation to human
+character and human sympathies as the laws of nature bear to the
+material universe. When all the mysteries of humanity have been solved,
+the laws of dramatic construction can be codified and clearly explained;
+not until then. But every scientific man can tell you a little about
+nature, and every dramatist can tell you a little about dramatic truth.
+A few general principles have been discovered by experiment and
+discussion. These few principles can be brought to your attention. But
+after you have learned all that has yet been learned by others, the
+field of humanity will still lie before you, as the field of nature lies
+before the scientist, with millions of times more to be discovered, by
+you or by some one else, than has ever yet been known. All I purpose
+to-night is to show you how certain laws of dramatic construction
+asserted themselves from time to time as we were making the changes in
+this play; how they thrust themselves upon our notice; how we could not
+possibly ignore them. And you will see how a man comes to understand any
+particular law, after he has been forced to obey it, altho, perhaps, he
+has never heard of it or dreamed of it before.
+
+And let me say here, to the students of Harvard--I do not presume to
+address words of advice to the faculty--it is to you and to others who
+enjoy the high privileges of liberal education that the American stage
+ought to look for honest and good dramatic work in the future. Let me
+say to you, then: Submit yourselves truly and unconditionally to the
+laws of dramatic truth, so far as you can discover them by honest mental
+exertion and observation. Do not mistake any mere defiance of these laws
+for originality. You might as well show your originality by defying the
+law of gravitation. Keep in mind the historical case of Stephenson. When
+a member of the British Parliament asked him, concerning his newfangled
+invention, the railroad, whether it would not be very awkward if a cow
+were on the track when a train came along, he answered: "Very ark'ard,
+indeed--for the cow." When you find yourself standing in the way of
+dramatic truth, my young friends--clear the track! If you don't, the
+truth can stand it; you can't. Even if you feel sometimes that your
+genius--that's always the word in the secret vocabulary of our own
+minds--even if your genius seems to be hampered by these dramatic laws,
+resign yourself to them at once, with that simple form of Christian
+resignation so beautifully illustrated by the poor German woman on her
+deathbed. Her husband being asked, afterward, if she were resigned to
+her death, responded with that touching and earnest recognition of
+eternal law: "Mein Gott, she had to be!"
+
+The story of the play, as first produced in Chicago, may be told as
+follows:
+
+Act first--Scene, New York. A young girl and a young man are in love,
+and engaged to be married. The striking originality of this idea will
+startle any one who has never heard of such a thing before. Lilian
+Westbrook and Harold Routledge have a lover's quarrel. Never mind what
+the cause of it. To quote a passage from the play itself: "A woman never
+quarrels with a man she doesn't love"--that is one of the minor laws of
+dramatic construction--"and she is never tired of quarreling with a man
+she does love." I dare not announce this as another law of female human
+nature; it is merely the opinion of one of my characters--a married man.
+Of course, there are women who do not quarrel with any one; and there
+are angels; but, as a rule, the women we feel at liberty to fall in love
+with do quarrel now and then; and they almost invariably quarrel with
+their husbands or lovers first, their other acquaintances must often be
+content with their smiles. But, when Lilian announces to Harold
+Routledge that their engagement is broken forever, he thinks she means
+to imply that she doesn't intend to marry him.
+
+Women are often misunderstood by our more grossly practical sex; we are
+too apt to judge of what they mean by what they say. The relations, if
+there are any, between a woman's tongue and her thoughts form the least
+understood section, perhaps, of dramatic law. You will get some idea of
+the intricacies of this subject, if one of your literary professors will
+draw you a diagram of what a woman doesn't mean when she uses the
+English language. Harold Routledge, almost broken-hearted, bids Lilian
+farewell, and leaves her presence. Lilian herself, proud and angry,
+allows him to go; waits petulantly a moment for him to return; then,
+forlorn and wretched, she bursts into the flood of tears which she
+intended to shed upon his breast. Under ordinary circumstances, those
+precious drops would not have been wasted. Young girls, when they
+quarrel with their lovers, are not extravagant with their tears; they
+put them carefully to the best possible use; and, I dare say, some of
+Lilian's tears would have fallen on a sheet of notepaper; and the
+stained lines of a letter would have reached Harold by the next post,
+begging him to come back, and to let her forgive him for all the
+spiteful things she had said to him. Unfortunately, however, just at
+this critical juncture in the affairs of love--while Cupid was waiting,
+hat in hand, to accompany the letter to its destination and keep an eye
+on the postman--Lilian's father enters. He is on the verge of financial
+ruin, and he has just received a letter from Mr. John Strebelow, a man
+of great wealth, asking him for his daughter's hand in marriage. Mr.
+Westbrook urges her to accept him, not from any selfish motives, but
+because he dreads to leave, in his old age, a helpless girl, trained
+only to luxury and extravagance, to a merciless world. Lilian, on her
+part, shudders at the thought of her father renewing the struggle of
+life when years have exhausted his strength. She knows that she will be
+the greatest burden that will fall upon him; she remembers her dead
+mother's love for them both; and she sacrifices her own heart. Mr.
+Strebelow is a man of about forty years, of unquestioned honor, of noble
+personal character in every way. Lilian had loved him, indeed, when she
+was a little child, and she feels that she can at least respect and
+reverence him as her husband. Mr. Strebelow marries her without knowing
+that she does not love him; much less, that she loves another.
+
+Act second--Paris. Lilian has been married five years, and is residing
+with her husband in the French capital. As the curtain rises, Lilian is
+teaching her little child, Natalie, her alphabet. All the warm affection
+of a woman's nature, suppressed and thrown back upon her own heart, has
+concentrated itself upon this child. Lilian has been a good wife, and
+she does reverence her husband as she expected to do. He is a kind,
+generous and noble man. But she does not love him as a wife. Mr.
+Strebelow now enters, and, after a little domestic scene, the French
+nurse is instructed to dress the child for a walk with its mother.
+Strebelow then tells Lilian that he has just met an old friend of hers
+and of himself--the American artist, Mr. Harold Routledge, passing thru
+Paris on his way from his studio in Rome. He has insisted on a visit
+from Mr. Routledge, and the two parted lovers are brought face to face
+by the husband. They are afterwards left alone together. Routledge has
+lived a solitary life, nursing his feelings toward a woman who had
+heartlessly cast him off, as he thinks, to marry a man merely for his
+wealth. He is bitter and cruel. But the cruelty to a woman which is born
+of love for her has a wonderful, an almost irresistible fascination for
+the female heart. Under the spell of this fascination, Lilian's old love
+reasserts its authority against that of his will. She forgets everything
+except the moment when her lover last parted from her. She is again the
+wayward girl that waited for his return; he has returned!--and she does
+what she would have done five years before; she turns, passionately, to
+throw herself into his arms. At this moment, her little child, Natalie,
+runs in. Lilian is a mother again, and a wife. She falls to her knees
+and embraces her child at the very feet of her former lover. Harold
+Routledge bows his head reverently, and leaves them together.
+
+Act third. The art of breaking the tenth commandment--thou shalt not
+covet they neighbor's wife--has reached its highest perfection in
+France. One of the most important laws of dramatic construction might be
+formulated in this way. If you want a particular thing done, choose a
+character to do it that an audience will naturally expect to do it. I
+wanted a man to fall in love with my heroine after she was a married
+woman, and I chose a French count for that purpose. I knew that an
+American audience would not only expect him to fall in love with another
+man's wife, but it would be very much surprised if he didn't. This saved
+much explanation and unnecessary dialog. Harold Routledge overhears the
+Count de Carojac, a hardened roue and a duellist, speaking of Lilian in
+such terms as no honorable man should speak of a modest woman.
+Routledge, with a studio in Rome, and having been educated at a German
+university, is familiar with the use of the rapier. A duel is arranged.
+Lilian hears of it thru a female friend, and Strebelow, also, thru the
+American second of Mr. Routledge. The parties meet at the Chateau
+Chateaubriand, in the suburbs of Paris, at midnight, by the light of the
+moon, in winter. A scream from Lilian, as she reaches the scene in
+breathless haste, throws Routledge off his guard; he is wounded and
+falls. Strebelow, too, has come on the field, not knowing the cause of
+the quarrel; but anxious to prevent a meeting between two of his own
+personal friends. Lilian is ignorant of her husband's presence, and she
+sees only the bleeding form of the man she loves lying upon the snow.
+She falls at his side, and words of burning passion, checked a few hours
+before by the innocent presence of her child, spring to her lips. The
+last of these words are as follows: "I have loved you--and you
+only--Harold, from the first."
+
+These words, clear, unmistakable, carrying their terrible truth straight
+to his heart, come to John Strebelow as the very first intimation that
+his wife did not love him when she married him. Crushed by this sudden
+blow, an expression of agony on his face, he stands for a moment
+speechless. When his voice returns, he has become another man. He is
+hard and cold, still generous, so far as those things a generous man
+cares least for are concerned. He will share all his wealth with her;
+but, in the awful bitterness of a great heart, at that moment, he feels
+that the woman who has deceived him so wickedly has no natural right to
+be the guardian of their child. "Return to our home, madam; it will be
+yours, not mine, hereafter; but our child will not be there." Ungenerous
+words! But if we are looking in our own hearts, where we must find
+nearly all the laws of dramatic construction, how many of us would be
+more generous, with such words as John Strebelow had just heard ringing
+in our ears? As the act closes, the startled love of a mother has again
+and finally asserted itself in Lilian's heart, its one overmastering
+passion of her nature. With the man she has loved lying near her,
+wounded, and, for aught she knows, dying, she is thinking only of her
+lost child. Maternal love, thruout the history of the world, has had
+triumphs over all the other passions; triumphs over destitution and
+trials and tortures; over all the temptations incident to life; triumphs
+to which no other impulse of the human heart--not even the love of man
+for woman--has ever risen. One of the most brilliant men I had ever
+known once said in court; "Woman, alone, shares with the Creator the
+privilege of communing with an unborn human being"; and, with this
+privilege, the Creator seems to have shared with woman a part of His own
+great love. All other love in our race is merely human. The play, from
+this time on, becomes the story of a mother's love.
+
+Acts fourth and fifth. Two years later Lilian is at the home of her
+father in New York. Her husband has disappeared. His name was on the
+passenger list of a wrecked steamer; and no other word of him or of the
+child has been heard. If he had left the little girl in the care of
+others, it is unknown to whom or where. So Lilian is a widow and
+childless. She is fading, day by day, and is hardly expected to live.
+Her mind, tortured by the suspense, which, worse than certainty, is
+gradually yielding to hallucinations which keep her little one ever
+present to her fancy. Harold Routledge was wounded seriously in the
+duel, but not killed; he is near Lilian; seeing her every day; but he is
+her friend, rather than her lover, now; she talks with him of her child,
+and he feels how utterly hopeless his own passion is in the presence of
+an all-absorbing mother's love. It is discovered that the child is
+living peacefully among kind guardians in a French convent; and
+Routledge determines to cross the ocean with the necessary evidence and
+bring the little one back to its mother. He breaks the news to Lilian
+tenderly and gently. A gleam of joy illuminates her face for the first
+time since the terrible night, two years before, and Routledge feels
+that the only barrier to his own happiness has been removed. But the
+sudden return and reappearance of the husband falls like a stroke of
+fate upon both. As the curtain descends on the fourth act, Lilian lies
+fainting on the floor, with Natalie at her side, while the two men stand
+face to face above the unconscious woman whom they both love. Three
+lives ruined--because Lilian's father, having lost his wealth, in his
+old age, dared not, as he himself expressed it, leave a tenderly
+nurtured daughter to a merciless world. The world is merciless, perhaps,
+but it is not so utterly and hopelessly merciless to any man or woman as
+one's heart may be.
+
+Lilian comes back to consciousness on her deathbed. Her child had
+returned to her only as a messenger from heaven, summoning her home. But
+the message had been whispered in unconscious ears; for she had not seen
+the little girl, who was removed before the mother had recovered from
+her swoon. They dare not tell her now that Natalie is on this side of
+the ocean and asleep in the next room. Mr. Strebelow had heard in a
+distant land, travelling to distract his mind from the great sorrow of
+his own life, of Lilian's condition, and he hastened back to undo the
+wrong he felt that he had committed. She asks to see him; she kisses his
+hand with tenderness and gratitude, when he tells her that Natalie shall
+be her own hereafter; his manly tears are tears of repentance, mingled
+with a now generous love. The stroke of death comes suddenly; they have
+only a moment's time to arouse the little one from its sleep; but they
+are not too late, and Lilian dies at last, a smile of perfect happiness
+on her face, with her child in her arms.
+
+The Mississippi darky, in Mark Twain's story, being told that his heroic
+death on the field of battle would have made but little difference to
+the nation at large, remarked, with deep philosophy; "It would have made
+a great deal of difference to me, sah." The radical change made in the
+story I have just related to you, before the production of the play in
+New York, was this: Lilian lives, instead of dying, in the last act. It
+would have made very little difference to the American nation what she
+did; but it made a great deal of difference to her, as you will see,
+and to the play also in nearly every part. My reasons for making the
+change were based upon one of the most important principles of the
+dramatic art, namely: A dramatist should deal, so far as possible, with
+subjects of universal interest, instead of with such as appeal strongly
+to a part of the public only. I do not mean that he may not appeal to
+certain classes of people, and depend upon those classes for success;
+but, just so far as he does this, he limits the possibilities of that
+success. I have said that the love of offspring in woman has shown
+itself the strongest of all human passions; and it is the most nearly
+allied to the boundless love of Deity. But the one absolutely universal
+passion of the race--which underlies all other passions--on which,
+indeed, the very existence of the race depends--the very fountain of
+maternal love itself, is the love of the sexes. The dramatist must
+remember that his work cannot, like that of the novelist or the poet,
+pick out the hearts, here and there, that happen to be in sympathy with
+its subject. He appeals to a thousand hearts at the same moment; he has
+no choice in the matter; he must do this. And it is only when he deals
+with the love of the sexes that his work is most interesting to that
+aggregation of human hearts we call the audience. This very play was
+successful in Chicago; but, as soon as that part of the public had been
+exhausted which could weep with pleasure, if I may use the expression,
+over the tenderness of a mother's love, its success would have been at
+an end. Furthermore--and here comes in another law of dramatic
+construction--a play must be, in one way or another, "satisfactory" to
+the audience. This word has a meaning which varies in different
+countries, and even in different parts of the same country; but,
+whatever audience you are writing for, your work must be "satisfactory"
+to it. In England and America, the death of a pure woman on the stage is
+not "satisfactory," except when the play rises to the dignity of
+tragedy. The death, in an ordinary play, of a woman who is not pure, as
+in the case of 'Frou-Frou,' is perfectly satisfactory, for the reason
+that it is inevitable. Human nature always bows gracefully to the
+inevitable. The only griefs in our own lives to which we could never
+reconcile ourselves are those which might have been averted. The wife
+who has once taken the step from purity to impurity can never reinstate
+herself in the world of art on this side of the grave; and so an
+audience looks with complacent tears on the death of an erring woman.
+But Lilian had not taken the one fatal step which would have reconciled
+an audience to her death. She was still pure, and every one left the
+theatre wishing she had lived. I yielded, therefore, to the sound logic,
+based on sound dramatic principle, of my New York manager, Mr. A. M.
+Palmer, and the piece was altered.
+
+I have called the play, as produced in New York and afterward in London,
+the "same play" as the one produced in Chicago. That one doubt, which
+age does not conquer--which comes down to us from the remotest antiquity
+of our own youth, which will still exist in our minds as we listen to
+the music of the spheres, thru countless ages, when all other doubts are
+at rest; that never-to-be answered doubt: Whether it was the same
+jack-knife, or another one, after all its blades and handle had been
+changed--must ever linger in my own mind as to the identity of this
+play. But a dramatic author stops worrying himself about doubts of this
+kind very early in his career. The play which finally takes its place on
+the stage usually bears very little resemblance to the play which first
+suggested itself to his mind. In some cases the public has abundant
+reason to congratulate itself on this fact, and especially on the way
+plays are often built up, so to speak, by the authors, with advice and
+assistance from other intelligent people interested in their success.
+The most magnificent figure in the English drama of this century was a
+mere faint outline, merely a fatherly old man, until the suggestive mind
+of Macready stimulated the genius of Bulwer Lytton, and the great
+author, eagerly acknowledging the assistance rendered him, made Cardinal
+Richelieu the colossal central figure of a play that was written as a
+pretty love-story. Bulwer Lytton had an eye single, as every dramatist
+ought to have--as every successful dramatist must have--to the final
+artistic result; he kept before him the one object of making the play of
+'Richelieu' as good a play as he possibly could make it. The first duty
+of a dramatist is to put upon the stage the very best work he can, in
+the light of whatever advice and assistance may come to him. Fair
+acknowledgment afterward is a matter of mere ordinary personal honesty.
+It is not a question of dramatic art.
+
+So Lilian is to live, and not die, in the last act. The first question
+for us to decide--I say "us"--the New York manager, the literary attache
+of the theatre, and myself--the first practical question before us was:
+As Lilian is to live, which of the two men who love her is to die? There
+are axioms among the laws of dramatic construction, as in mathematics.
+One of them is this--three hearts cannot beat as one. The world is not
+large enough, from an artistic point of view, for three good human
+hearts to continue to exist, if two of them love the third. If one of
+the two hearts is a bad one, art assigns it to the hell on earth of
+disappointed love; but if it is good and tender and gentle, art is
+merciful to it, and puts it out of its misery by death. Routledge was
+wounded in a duel. Strebelow was supposed to be lost in the wreck of a
+steamer. It was easy enough to kill either of them, but which? We argued
+this question for three weeks. Mere romance was on the side of the
+young artist. But to have had him live would have robbed the play of all
+its meaning. Its moral, in the original form, is this: It is a dangerous
+thing to marry, for any reason, without the safeguard of love, even when
+the person one marries is worthy of one's love in every possible way. If
+we had decided in favor of Routledge, the play would have had no moral
+at all, or rather a very bad one. If a girl marries the wrong man, she
+need only wait for him to die; and if her lover waits, too, it'll be all
+right. If, on the other hand, we so reconstruct the whole play that the
+husband and wife may at last come together with true affection, we shall
+have the moral: Even if a young girl makes the worst of all mistakes,
+and accepts the hand of one man when her heart belongs to another,
+fidelity to the duty of a wife on her side, and a manly, generous
+confidence on the part of her husband, may, in the end, correct even
+such a mistake. The dignity of this moral saved John Strebelow's life,
+and Harold Routledge was killed in the duel with the Count de Carojac.
+
+All that was needed to affect this first change in the play was to
+instruct the actor who played Routledge to lie still when the curtain
+fell at the end of the third act, and to go home afterward. But there
+are a number of problems under the laws of dramatic construction which
+we must solve before the play can now be made to reach the hearts of an
+audience as it did before. Let us see what they are.
+
+The love of Lilian for Harold Routledge cannot now be the one grand
+passion of her life. It must be the love of a young girl, however
+sincere and intense, which yields, afterward, to the stronger and deeper
+love of a woman for her husband. The next great change, therefore, which
+the laws of dramatic construction forced upon us was this: Lilian must
+now control her own passion, and when she meets her lover in the second
+act she must not depend for her moral safety on the awakening of a
+mother's love by the appearance of her child. Her love for Harold is no
+longer such an all-controlling force as will justify a woman--justify
+her dramatically, I mean--yielding to it. For her to depend on an
+outside influence would be to show a weakness of character that would
+make her uninteresting. Instead, therefore, of receiving her former
+lover with dangerous pent-up fires, Lilian now feels pity for him. She
+hardly yet knows her own feelings toward her husband; but his manhood
+and kindness are gradually forcing their way to her heart. Routledge, in
+his own passion, forgets himself, and she now repels him. She even
+threatens to strike the bell, when the Count de Carojac appears, and
+warns his rival to desist. This is now the end of the second act, a very
+different end, you see, from the other version, where the little girl
+runs in, and, in her innocence, saves the mother from herself.
+
+Here let me tell a curious experience, which illustrates how stubbornly
+persistent the dramatic laws are, in having their own way. We were all
+three of us--manager, literary attache, and author--so pleased with the
+original ending of the second act the picture of the little girl in her
+mother's arms, and the lover bowing his head in its presence of
+innocence, that we retained it. The little girl ran on the stage at
+every rehearsal at the usual place. But no one knew what to do with her.
+The actress who played the part of Lilian caught her in her arms, in
+various attitudes; but none of them seemed right. The actor who played
+Routledge tried to drop his head, according to instructions, but he
+looked uncomfortable, not reverential. The next day we had the little
+girl run on from another entrance. She stopped in the center of the
+stage. Lilian stared at her a moment and then exclaimed: "Mr. Howard,
+what shall I do with this child?" Routledge, who had put his hands in
+his pocket, called out: "What's the girl doing here, anyway, Howard?" I
+could only answer: "She used to be all right; I don't know what's the
+matter with her now." And I remember seeing an anxious look on the face
+of the child's mother, standing at the side of the stage. She feared
+there was something wrong about her own little darling who played the
+part of Natalie. I reassured her on this point; for the fact that I was
+in error was forcing itself on my mind, in spite of my desire to retain
+the scene. You will hardly believe that I am speaking literally, when I
+tell you that it was not until the 19th rehearsal that we yielded to the
+inevitable, and decided not to have the child come on at all at that
+point. The truth was this: now that Lilian saved herself in her own
+strength, the child had no dramatic function to fulfill. So strongly did
+we all feel the force of a dramatic law which we could not, and would
+not, see. Our own natural human instinct--the instinct which the
+humblest member of an audience feels, without knowing anything of
+dramatic law--got the better of three men, trained in dramatic work,
+only by sheer force, and against our own determined opposition. We were
+three of Stephenson's cows--or shall I say three calves?--standing on
+the track, and we could not succeed where Jumbo failed.
+
+The third step, in the changes forced upon us by the laws of dramatic
+construction, was a very great one; and it was made necessary by the
+fact, just mentioned, that the child, Natalie, had no dramatic function
+to fulfill in the protection of her mother's virtue. In other words,
+there is no point in the play, now, where sexual love is, or can be,
+replaced by maternal love, as the controlling passion of the play.
+Consequently, the last two acts in their entirety, so far as the serious
+parts are concerned, disappear; one new scene and a new act taking their
+place. The sad mother, playing with a little shoe or toy, passes out of
+our view. The dying woman, kissing the hand of the man she has wronged;
+the husband, awe-stricken in the presence of a mother's child; the child
+clasped in Lilian's arms; her last look on earth, a smile, and her last
+breath, the final expression of maternal tenderness--these scenes belong
+only to the original version of the play, as it lies in its author's
+desk. With an author's sensitive interest in his own work, I wasted many
+hours in trying to save these scenes. But I was working directly against
+the laws of dramatic truth, and I gave up the impossible task.
+
+The fourth great change--forced on us, as the others were--concerns the
+character of John Strebelow. As he is now to become the object of a
+wife's mature affection, he must not merely be a noble and generous man;
+he must do something worthy of the love which is to be bestowed on him.
+He must command a woman's love. When, therefore, he hears his wife,
+kneeling over her wounded lover, use words which tell him of their
+former relations, he does not what most of us would do, but what an
+occasional hero among us would do. Of course, the words of Lilian
+cannot be such, now, as to close the gates to all hopes of love, as they
+were before. She still utters a wild cry, but her words merely show the
+awakened tenderness and pity of a woman for a man she had once loved.
+They are uttered, however, in the presence of others, and they
+compromise her husband's honor. At that moment he takes her gently in
+his arms, and becomes her protector, warning the French roue and
+duellist that he will call him to account for the insults which the arm
+of the dead man had failed to avenge. He afterward does this, killing
+the count--not in the action of the play; this is only told. John
+Strebelow thus becomes the hero of the play, and it is only necessary to
+follow the workings of Lilian's heart and his a little further, until
+they come together at last, loving each other truly, the early love of
+the wife for another man being only a sad memory in her mind. There is a
+tender scene of explanation and a parting, until Lilian's heart shall
+recall her husband. This scene, in my opinion, is one of the most
+beautiful scenes ever written for the stage. At the risk of breaking the
+tenth commandment myself, I do not hesitate to say, I wish I had
+written it. As I did not, however, I can express the hope that the name
+of Mr. A. R. Cazauran, who did write it, will never be forgotten in
+connection with this play as long as the play itself may be remembered.
+I wrote the scene myself first; but when he wrote it according to his
+own ideas, it was so much more beautiful than my own that I would have
+broken a law of dramatic art if I had not accepted it. I should not have
+been giving the public the best play I could, under the circumstances.
+Imbued, as my own mind was, with all the original motives of the piece,
+it would have been impossible for me to have made changes within a few
+weeks without the assistance Mr. Cazauran could give me; this assistance
+was invaluable to me in all parts of the revised piece. In the fifth act
+the husband and wife come together again, the little child acting as the
+immediate cause of their reconciliation; the real cause lies in their
+own true hearts.
+
+Before we leave the subject, another change which I was obliged to make
+will interest you, because it shows very curiously what queer turns
+these laws of dramatic construction may take. As soon as it was decided
+to have Lilian live, in the fifth act, and love John Strebelow, I was
+compelled to cut out the quarrel-scene between Lilian and Harold
+Routledge in the first act. This is a little practical matter, very much
+like taking out a certain wheel at one end of a machine because you have
+decided to get a different mechanical result at the other end. I was
+very fond of this quarrel-scene, but I lost no time in trying to save
+it, for I saw at once that Harold Routledge must not appear in the first
+act at all. He could only be talked about as Lilian's lover. John
+Strebelow must be present alone in the eyes and sympathy of the
+audience. If Routledge did not appear until the second act, the audience
+would regard him as an interloper; it would rather resent his presence
+than otherwise, and would be easily reconciled to his death in the next
+act. It was taking an unfair advantage of a young lover; but there was
+no help for it. Even if Harold had appeared in the first act, the
+quarrel-scene would have been impossible. He might have made love to
+Lilian, perhaps, or even kissed her, and the audience would have
+forgiven me reluctantly for having her love another man afterward. But
+if the two young people had a lover's quarrel in the presence of the
+audience, no power on earth could have convinced any man or woman in the
+house that they were not intended for each other by the eternal decrees
+of divine Providence.
+
+I have now given you the revised story of this play as it was produced
+at the Union Square Theater in New York, under the name of the 'Banker's
+Daughter.' I have said nothing about the comic scenes or characters,
+because the various changes did not affect them in any way that concerns
+the principles of dramatic art. They are almost identically the same in
+both versions. Now, if you please, we will cross the ocean. I have had
+many long discussions with English managers on the practice in London of
+adapting foreign plays, not merely to the English stage, but to English
+life, with English characters. The Frenchmen of a French play become, as
+a rule, Englishmen; so do Italians and Spaniards and Swedes. They
+usually, however, continue to express foreign ideas and to act like
+foreigners. In speaking of such a transplanted character, I may be
+permitted to trifle with a sacred text:
+
+    The manager has said it,
+    But it's hardly to his credit,
+      That he is an Englishman!
+    For he ought to have been a Roosian,
+    A French, or Turk, or Proosian,
+      Or perhaps I-tali-an!
+    But in spite of Art's temptations,
+    To belong to other nations,
+      He becomes an Englishman!
+
+Luckily, the American characters of the 'Banker's Daughter', with one
+exception, could be twisted into very fair Englishmen, with only a faint
+suspicion of our Yankee accent. Mr. James Alberry, one of the most
+brilliant men in England, author of the 'Two Roses,' was engaged to make
+them as nearly English as he could. The friendship, cemented as Alberry
+and I were discussing for some weeks the international social questions
+involved, is among the dearest and tenderest friendships I have ever
+made; and I learned more about the various minor differences of social
+life in England and American while we were thus at work together than I
+could have learned in a residence there of five years. I have time to
+give you only a few of the points. Take the engagement of Lilian, broken
+in act first. An engagement in England is necessarily a family matter,
+and it could neither be made or broken by the mere fiat of a young girl,
+without consultation with others, leaving the way open for the immediate
+acceptance of another man's hand. In the English version, therefore,
+there is no engagement with Harold Routledge. It is only an
+understanding between them that they love each other. Not even the most
+rigid customs of Europe can prevent such an understanding between two
+young people, if they can once look into each other's eyes. They could
+fall in love through a pair of telescopes. Then the duel--it is next to
+impossible to persuade an English audience that a duel is justifiable or
+natural with an Englishman as one of the principles. So we played a
+rather sharp artistic trick on our English audience. In the American
+version, I assume that, if a plucky young American in France insults a
+Frenchman purposely, he will abide by the local customs, and give him
+satisfaction, if called upon to do so. So would a young Englishman,
+between you and me; but the laws of dramatic construction deal with the
+sympathies of the audience as well as with the natural motives and
+actions of the characters in a play; and an English audience would think
+the French count ought to be perfectly satisfied if Routledge knocked
+him down. How did we get over the difficulty? First, we made Routledge a
+British officer returning from India, instead of an artist on his way
+from Rome--a fighting man by profession; and then we made the Count de
+Carojac pile so many sneers and insults on this British officer, and on
+the whole British nation, that I verily believe a London audience would
+have mobbed him if he hadn't tried to kill him. The English public
+walked straight into the trap, although they abhor nothing on earth more
+than the duelling system. I said that the comic characters were not
+affected by the changes made in America; the change of nationality did
+affect them to a certain extent. A young girl, Florence St. Vincent,
+afterward Mrs. Browne, represents, here, with dramatic exaggeration, of
+course, a type of young girl more or less familiar to all of us. In
+England she is not a type, but an eccentric personality, with which the
+audience must be made acquainted by easy stages. It was necessary,
+therefore, to introduce a number of preliminary speeches for her, before
+she came to the lines of the original version. After that, she ran on
+without any further change, except a few excisions. Mrs. Browne is
+married to a very old man, who afterward dies, and in the last act she
+illustrates the various grades of affliction endured by every young
+widow, from the darkness of despair to the becoming twilight of
+sentimental sadness. This was delicate ground in England. They have not
+that utter horror of marriage between a very old man and a very young
+woman which, in this country, justifies all the satire which a dramatist
+can heap upon the man who commits this crime, even after he is in the
+grave. And the English people do not share with us--I say it to their
+credit--our universal irreverence for what is solemn and sacred. One
+must not, either in social life or on the stage, speak too lightly there
+of any serious subject; of course, they can laugh, however, at an old
+man that makes a fool of himself. So we merely toned down the levity by
+leaving old Mr. Browne out of the cast entirely. There is a great
+difference, as in the case of Routledge left out of the first act,
+between what the audience sees and what it only hears talked about; and
+none of the laws of dramatic construction are more important than those
+which concern the questions whether you shall appeal to the ear of an
+audience, to its eye, or both. Old Mr. Browne was only talked about
+then, and as long as the English audience did not know him personally,
+it was perfectly willing to laugh at him after Mrs. Browne was a widow.
+Another change made for the London version will interest American
+business men. In our own version, Lilian's father and his partner close
+up their affairs in the last act and retire from their business as
+private bankers. "That will never do in England," said Mr. Alberry. "An
+old established business like that might be worth L100,000. We must sell
+it to some one, not close it." So we sold it to Mr. George Washington
+Phipps. This last character illustrates, again, the stubbornness of
+dramatic law. Mr. Alberry and I tried to make him an Irishman, or a
+Scotchman, or some kind of an Englishman. But we could not. He remains
+an American in England in 1886, as he was in Chicago in 1873. He
+declined to change either his citizenship or his name; "G.
+Washington--Father of his Country--Phipps."
+
+The peculiar history of the play is my only justification for giving you
+all these details of its otherwise unimportant career. I only trust that
+I have shown you how very practical the laws of dramatic construction
+are in the way they influence a dramatist. The art of obeying them is
+merely the art of using your common sense in the study of your own and
+other people's emotions. All I now add is, if you want to write a play,
+be honest and sincere in using your common sense. A prominent lawyer
+once assured me that there was only one man he trembled before in the
+presence of a jury--not the learned man, nor the eloquent man; it was
+the sincere man. The public will be your jury. That public often
+condescends to be trifled with by mere tricksters, but, believe me, it
+is only a condescension and very contemptuous. In the long run, the
+public will judge you, and respect you, according to your artistic
+sincerity.
+
+
+
+
+NOTES
+
+
+This lecture was originally delivered in March, 1886, in the Sanders
+Theater, before the Shakspere Society of Harvard University; and it was
+repeated before the Nineteenth Century Club in New York in December,
+1889. On the latter occasion two other dramatic authors were requested
+to debate the points made by the speaker; and as a result he added a few
+supplementary remarks:
+
+     The Nineteenth Century Club looks for a discussion, I believe, on
+     the subject brought forward in the paper of this evening. If the
+     word "discussion" implies "argument," I fear there is nothing in
+     the mere struggles of a dramatist in his workshop to justify that
+     difference of opinion which is necessary to an argument. My
+     American colleague, Mr. Brander Matthews, must feel like a man
+     whose wife persists from day to day in saying nothing that he can
+     object to, thereby making his home a desert and driving him to the
+     club. As for the great Irish dramatist, this paper leaves him still
+     wishing that some one would tread on the tail of his coat. But,
+     with all true Irishmen, the second party in a quarrel is merely a
+     convenience, not a necessity. Whenever Mr. Boucicault feels that a
+     public discussion is desirable for any reason, he can always tread
+     on the tail of his own coat, and make quite as good a fight of it
+     all by himself as if some one was assisting him.
+
+And he ended with this reference to the constructive skill of Ibsen:
+
+     Another thing strikes me in connection with this subject: the
+     praise of Ibsen, the Scandinavian dramatist, is abroad in England;
+     and again, as so often before, mine eyes have seen the glory of the
+     coming of the Lord in the direction of Boston. But some of the
+     loudest worshippers of this truly great man in both countries
+     either wilfully ignore, or else they know nothing about, his real
+     greatness.
+
+     Ibsen holds in his hand the terrible power, in dealing with the
+     evils of society, which dramatic construction gives to a genius
+     like his; he has not laid this power aside and reduced his own
+     stage to a mere lecture platform. A man armed with a sword who
+     should lay it down in the heat of battle and take up a wisp of
+     straw to fight with, would be a fool. Ibsen, like his great
+     predecessors and contemporaries in France, deals his vigorous blows
+     at social wrongs thru dramatic effects and the true dramatic
+     relations of his characters. I know of no writer for the stage,
+     past or present, who depends for his moral power more continuously
+     at all points on the art of dramatic construction than Ibsen does.
+     He, himself, would be the first to smile at those who praise him as
+     if he were a writer of moral dialogs or the self-appointed lecturer
+     for one of those psychological panoramas which are unrolled in
+     acts, at a theater, or in monthly parts in a periodical.
+
+     In conclusion: to all who argue that careful construction is
+     unnecessary in literary art, I will say only this: it is extremely
+     easy not to construct.
+
+It may be noted also that Bronson Howard returned to the topic of his
+lecture in a contribution to the _Dramatic Mirror_ in 1900; he called
+this
+
+     _A MERE SUGGESTION_.
+
+     So much is written in critical notices of plays, about their
+     "construction," that I should like to suggest a few of the
+     considerations which that term involves. It is possible that some
+     of the beginners, who are to become the future dramatists of
+     America, will see the necessity of thinking twice before using the
+     term at all. Some of the more general considerations to be kept in
+     view, when a careful and properly educated critic feels justified
+     in using the word "construction," may be jotted down as follows:
+
+     I. The actual strength of the main incident of a play.
+
+     II. Relative strength of the main incident, in reference to the
+     importance of the subject; and also to the length of the play.
+
+     III. Adequacy of the story in relation to the importance and
+     dignity of the main incident and of the subject.
+
+     IV. Adequacy of the original motives on which the rest of the play
+     depends.
+
+     V. Logical sequence of events by which the main incident is
+     reached.
+
+     VI. Logical results of the story after the main incident is passed.
+
+     VII. The choice of the characters by which the sequence of events
+     is developed.
+
+     VIII. Logical, otherwise natural, use of motives in these
+     particular characters, in leading from one incident to another.
+
+     IX. The use of such human emotions and passions as are universally
+     recognized as true, without those special explanations which
+     belong to general fiction and not to the stage.
+
+     X. The relation of the story and incidents to the sympathies of the
+     audience as a collection of human beings.
+
+     XI. The relation of the story and incidents to the sympathies of
+     the particular audience for which the play is written; to its
+     knowledge and ignorance; its views of life; its social customs; and
+     to its political institutions, so far as they may modify its social
+     views, as in the case of a democracy or an aristocracy.
+
+     Minor matters--such as the use of comic relief, the relation of
+     dialog to action, the proper use of superfluous characters to
+     prevent an appearance of artificiality in the treatment, and a
+     thousand other details belonging to the constructive side of a
+     play--must also be within the critic's view; but a list of them
+     here would be too long for the space available. When the young
+     critic has made a careful study of the standard English drama, with
+     a special view to the proper considerations above indicated, his
+     opinion on the "construction" of a play will be of more or less
+     value to American dramatic literature.
+
+There is, of course, no overt novelty in the theory advanced by Bronson
+Howard in his address. The same theory was held by Francisque Sarcey,
+who declared that all the principles of playmaking might be deduced from
+the fact that a piece is always intended for performance before an
+audience. And Marmontel, dramatist as well as dramatic theorist,
+asserted that the first rule the play-wright must obey is "to move the
+spectators, and the second is to move them only in so far as they are
+willing to be moved.... This depends on the disposition and the manners
+of the people to whom appeal is made and on the degree of sensibility
+they bring to the theater.... This is therefore a point in which tragedy
+is not invariable."
+
+The same principle underlies George Meredith's statement in regard to
+Comedy: "There are plain reasons why the comic poet is not a frequent
+apparition; and why the great comic poet remains without a fellow. A
+society of cultivated men and women is required wherein ideas are
+current and the perception quick, that he may be supplied with matter
+and an audience."
+
+                    B. M.
+
+OF THIS BOOK THREE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-THREE COPIES WERE PRINTED FROM
+TYPE BY CORLIES, MACY AND COMPANY IN NOVEMBER: MCMXIV
+
+
+
+
+PUBLICATIONS
+
+_of the_
+
+Dramatic Museum
+of Columbia University
+
+IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK
+
+_First Series_
+
+Papers on Playmaking:
+
+     I THE NEW ART OF WRITING PLAYS. By Lope de Vega. Translated by
+     William T. Brewster. With an Introduction and Notes by Brander
+     Matthews.
+
+     II THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PLAY. By Bronson Howard. With an
+     Introduction by Augustus Thomas.
+
+     III THE LAW OF THE DRAMA. By Ferdinand Brunetiere. Translated by
+     Philip M. Hayden. With an Introduction by Henry Arthur Jones.
+
+     IV ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON AS A DRAMATIST. By Arthur Wing Pinero.
+     With an Introduction and Bibliographical Appendix by Clayton
+     Hamilton.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Autobiography of a Play, by Bronson Howard
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PLAY ***
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