Page:Robert Louis Stevenson, the dramatist.pdf/14

12 "or Long Tom Coffin, or Grindoff, 2d dress? O, how I would long to see the rest! how—if the name by chance were hidden—I would wonder in what play he figured, and what immortal legend justified his attitude and strange apparel!" He then goes on to describe the joy that attended the colouring of the "penny plain" plates—"nor can I quite forgive," he says, "that child who, wilfully foregoing pleasure, stoops to 'twopence coloured.' With crimson lake (hark to the sound of it—crimson lake!—the horns of elf-land are not richer on the ear)—with crimson lake and Prussian blue a certain purple is to be compounded which, for cloaks especially, Titian could not equal. The latter colour with gamboge, a hated name, though an exquisite pigment, supplied a green of such savoury greenness that to-day my heart regrets it. Nor can I recall without a tender weakness the very aspect of the water where I dipped my brush." All this is delightful—is it not?—deliciously and admirably Stevensonian. The unfortunate thing is that even to his dying day he continued to regard the actual theatre as only an enlarged form of the toy theatres which had fascinated his childhood—he continued to use in his dramatic colouring the crimson lake and Prussian blue of transpontine romance—he considered his function as a dramatist very little more serious than that child's-play with paint-box and pasteboard on which his memory dwelt so fondly. He played at being a playwright; and, ladies and gentlemen, he was fundamentally in error in regarding the drama as a matter of child's-play.

Observe, too, that these dramas of the toy theatre were, before they reached the toy theatre, designed for almost the lowest class of theatrical audiences. They were stark and staring melodramas. Most of them were transpontine in the literal sense of the word—that is to say, they had originally seen the light at the humbler theatres beyond the bridges—the Surrey and the Coburg. Many of them were unacknowledged adaptations from the French—for in