How to Write a Play | Page 7

a vain and puerile thing.
Ah! if I had the time--but I haven't the time. So it's just as well, or better, that I stop. To talk too much about art is not a good sign in an artist. It is like a lover's talking too much about love; if I were a woman I should have my doubts.
Well, do you wish me to disengage the philosophy of this garrulity? It is found whole and entire in an apolog of my son--he too a philosopher without knowing it. He was then seven. As a result of learning fables he was seized with the ambition of writing one, which he brought to me one fine day. It is called the 'Donkey and the Canary.' The verses are perhaps a trifle long, but there are only two. That's the compensation. Here they are.
The canary once sang; and the ass askt him how he could learn this to do?
"I open my bill," said the bird; "and I say you, you, you!"
Well, the ass, that's you--don't get angry. The canary, that's I. When I sing I open my bill and I say, "you, you, you!"
That's all that I can tell you.
��douard Pailleron.
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IX.
From Victorien Sardou.
My dear friend:
It's not so easy to answer you as you think. ...There is no one necessary way of writing a play for the theater. Everyone has his own, according to his temperament, his type of intellect, and his habits of work. If you ask me for mine, I should tell you that it is not so easy to formulate as the recipe for duck �� la rouennaise or spring chicken au gros sel. Not fifty lines are needed, but two or three hundred, and even then I should have told you only my way of working, which has no general significance and makes no pretense to being the best. It's natural with me, that's all. Besides, you will find it indicated in part in the preface to 'La Haine' and in a letter which I wrote to La Pommeraye about 'F��dora.'
In brief, my dear friend, tho there are rules, and rules that are invariable, precise, and eternal for the dramatic art, rules which only the impotent, the ignorant, blockheads, and fools misunderstand, and from which only they wish to be freed, yet there is only one true method for the conception and parturition of a play--which is, to know quite exactly where you are going and to take the best road that leads there. However, some walk, others ride in a carriage, some go by train, X hobbles along, Hugo sails in a balloon. Some drop behind on the way, others run past the goal. This one rolls in the ditch, that one wanders along a cross-road.
In short, that one goes straight to the mark who has the most common sense. It is the gift which I wish for you--and myself also.
Victorien Sardou.
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X.
From ��mile Zola.
My dear Comrade:
You ask how I write my plays. Alas! I should rather tell you how I do not write them.
Have you noticed the small number of new writers who take their chances in the theater? The explanation is that in reality, for our generation of free artists, the theater is repugnant, with its cookery, its hobbles, its demand for immediate and brutal success, its army of collaborators, to which one must submit, from the imposing leading man down to the prompter. How much more independent are we in the novel! And that's why, when the glamor of the footlights makes the blood dance, we prefer to exercise it by keeping aloof and to remain the absolute masters of our works. In the theater we are asked to submit to too much.
Let me add that in my own case I have harnessed myself to a group of novels which will take twenty-five years of my life. The theater is a dissipation which I shall doubtless not permit myself until I am very old.
After all, if I could indulge in the theater. I should try to make plays much less than is the custom. In literature truth is always in inverse proportion to the construction. I mean this: The comedies of Moli��re are sometimes of a structure hardly adequate, while those of Scribe are often Parisian articles of marvellous manufacture.
Very cordially yours,
��mile Zola.
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NOTES
ABRAHAM DREYFUS (1847-) was the author of half a dozen ingenious little plays, mostly confined to a single act. One of them, 'Un Crane sans un Temp��te,' adapted into English as the 'Silent System,' was acted in New York by Coquelin and Agnes Booth. Dreyfus was also the author of two volumes of lively sketches lightly satirizing different aspects of the French stage,--'Sc��nes de la vie de th��atre' (1880) and 'L'Incendie des Folies-Plastiques' (1886).
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