Page:Robert Louis Stevenson, the dramatist.pdf/15

13 the early years of the nineteenth century the English dramatist had not acquired that nice conscientiousness which he has since displayed. Yet a drama which was sufficiently popular to be transferred to the toy theatres was almost certain to have a sort of rude merit in its construction. The characterization would be hopelessly conventional, the dialogue bald and despicable—but the situations would be artfully arranged, the story told adroitly and with spirit. Unfortunately these merits did not come within Stevenson's ken. I don't know whether any one could have discovered them in the text-books issued with the sheets of characters; he, at any rate, did not, for he tells us so. "The fable," he says, "as set forth in the play-book, proved to be not worthy of the scenes and characters &hellip; Indeed, as literature, these dramas did not much appeal to me. I forget the very outline of the plots." In other words, what little merit there was in the plays escaped him. What he remembered and delighted in was simply their absurdities—the crude inconsistencies of their characters, the puerilities of their technique. But here we must distinguish. There are two parts of technique, which I may perhaps call its strategy and its tactics. In strategy—in the general laying out of a play, these transpontine dramatists were often, as I have said, more than tolerably skilful; but in tactics, in the art of getting their characters on and off the stage, of conveying information to the audience, and so forth, they were almost incredibly careless and conventional. They would make a man, as in the Chinese theatre, tell the whole story of his life in a soliloquy; or they would expound their plot to the audience in pages of conversation between characters who acquaint each other with nothing that is not already perfectly well known to both. Well, his childish studies accustomed Stevenson to the miserable tactics of these plays. Keenly as he afterwards realized their absurdities, he had nevertheless in a measure become inured to them. For the merits of their strategy, on the other hand, he had naturally, as a mere child,