Page:Robert Louis Stevenson, the dramatist.pdf/7

5 or less abortive kind. Some of Byron's plays, which he justly declared to be unsuited for the stage, were forced by fine acting and elaborate scenic embellishment into a sort of success; but how dead they are to-day! and how low a place they hold among the poet's works! Dickens and Thackeray both loved the theatre, and both wrote for it without the smallest success. Of Lord Tennyson's plays, two, The Cup and Becket, in the second of which Sir Henry Irving has given us one of his noblest performances, were so admirably mounted and rendered by that great actor that they enjoyed considerable prosperity in the theatre; but no critic ever dreamt of assigning either to them or to any other of Tennyson's dramas a place co-equal with his non-dramatic poems. Mr. Swinburne has written many plays—has any one of them the smallest chance of being remembered along with "Poems and Ballads" and "Songs before Sunrise"? There is only one exception to the rule that during the nineteenth century no poet or novelist of the slightest eminence made any success upon the stage, and even that solitary exception is a dubious one. I refer, as you may surmise, to Bulwer Lytton. There is no doubt as to his success; but what does the twentieth century think of his eminence?

If we can lay our finger on the reason of Stevenson's—I will not say failure, but inadequate success—as a playwright, perhaps it may help us to understand the still more inadequate success of greater men.

And here let me follow the example of that agreeable essayist, Euclid, and formulate my theorem in advance—or in other words indicate the point towards which I hope to lead you. We shall find, I think, that Stevenson, with all his genius, failed to realize that the art of drama is not stationary, but progressive. By this I do not mean that it is always improving; what I do mean is that its conditions are always changing, and that every dramatist whose ambition it is