Page:Robert Louis Stevenson, the dramatist.pdf/6

4 Henley. Now, I wish to enquire why it is that these two men, both, in their different ways, of distinguished talent, combining, with great gusto and hopefulness, to produce acting dramas, should have made such small mark with them, either on or off the stage. Deacon Brodie was acted a good many times in America, but only once, I believe, in Great Britain. Beau Austin has been publicly presented some score of times; Admiral Guinea has enjoyed but a single performance. Nor have these pieces produced a much greater effect in the study, as the phrase goes. They have their admirers, of whom i in many respects, I am one. I hope to draw your attention, before we part this evening—if you will allow me to do so—to some of the sterling beauties they contain. But no one, I think, gives even Beau Austin a very high place among Stevenson’s works as a whole; and many people who have probably read every other line that Stevenson wrote, have, as I say, scarcely realized the existence of his dramas. Why should Stevenson the dramatist take such a back seat, if you will pardon the expression, in comparison with Stevenson the novelist, the essayist, the poet?

This question seems to me all the more worth asking because Stevenson’s case is by no means a singular one. There is hardly a novelist or poet of the whole nineteenth century who does not stand in exactly the same position. They have one and all attempted to write for the stage, and it is scarcely too much to say that they have one and all failed, not only to achieve theatrical success but even, in any appreciable degree, to enrich our dramatic literature. Some people, perhaps, will claim Shelley and Browning as exceptions. Well, I won’t attempt to argue the point—I will content myself with asking you what rank Shelley would have held among our poets had he written nothing but The Cenci, or Browning if his fame rested solely on Strafford and A Blot on the 'Scutcheon. For the rest,

Scott, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, all produced dramas of a more