How to Write a Play | Page 5

even of marble, after I am
gone. With such sentiments one never accomplishes anything great.
Besides, I have the capital defect for a man of the theater of never being
able to beat it into my head that the public will be interested in the
marriage of Arthur and Colombe; and nevertheless that is the key to the
whole situation. You simply must suppose the public a trifle naïf,--and
be so yourself.
I should be so willingly, but I can't bring myself to admit that others
are.
For a long time I imagined that the details, if they were ingenious,
would please the public as much as an intrigue of which the ultimate
result is usually given in the first scene. I was absolutely wrong, and I
have suffered for it more than once. But at my age one doesn't reform.
When I have drawn up the plan, I no longer want to write the piece.
You see that I am a detestable collaborator. Say so, if you speak to me,
but don't hold me up as a model.
Edmond Gondinet.

* * * * *

VI.
FROM Eugène Labiche.
Everyone writes in accordance with his inspiration and his
temperament. Some sing a gay note, others find more pleasure in
making people weep.
As for me, this is my procedure:
When I have no idea, I gnaw my nails and invoke the aid of
Providence.
When I have an idea, I still invoke the aid of Providence,--but with less
fervor, because I think I can get along without it.
It is quite human, but quite ungrateful.
I have then an idea, or I think I have one.
I take a quire of white paper, linen paper--on any other kind I can
imagine nothing--and I write on the first page:
PLAN.
By the plan I mean the developed succession, scene by scene, of the
whole piece, from the beginning to the end.
So long as one has not reached the end of his play he has neither the
beginning nor the middle. This part of the work is obviously the most
laborious. It is the creation, the parturition.
As soon as my plan is complete, I go over it and ask concerning each
scene its purpose, whether it prepares for or develops a character or
situation, and then whether it advances the action. A play is a

thousand-legged creature which must keep on going. If it slows up, the
public yawns; if it stops, the public hisses.
To write a sprightly play you must have a good digestion. Sprightliness
resides in the stomach.
Eugène Labiche.
* * * * *

VII.
From Ernest Legouvé.
You ask me how a play is made.
By beginning at the end.
A novel is quite a different matter.
Walter Scott, the great Walter Scott, sat down of a morning at his
study-table, took six sheets of paper and wrote 'Chapter One,' without
knowing anything else about his story than the first chapter. He set
forth his characters, he indicated the situation; then situation and
characters got out of the affair as best they could. They were left to
create themselves by the logic of events.
Eugène Sue often told me that it was impossible for him to draw up a
plan. It benumbed him. His imagination needed the shock of the
unforeseen; to surprize the public he had to be surprized himself. More
than once at the end of an instalment of one of his serial stories he left
his characters in an inextricable situation of which he himself did not
know the outcome.
George Sand frequently started a novel on the strength of a phrase, a
thought, a page, a landscape. It was not she who guided her pen, but her
pen which guided her. She started out with the intention of writing one

volume and she wrote ten. She might intend to write ten and she wrote
only one. She dreamed of a happy ending, and then she concluded with
a suicide.
But never have Scribe, or Dumas père, or Dumas fils, or Augier, or
Labiche, or Sardou, written "Scene One" without knowing what they
were going to put into the last scene. A point of departure was for them
nothing but an interrogation point. "Where are you going to lead me?"
they would ask it; and they would accept it only if it led them to a final
point, or to the central point which determined all the stages of the
route, including the first.
The novel is a journey in a carriage. You make stops, you spend a night
at the inn, you get out to look at the country, you turn aside to take
breakfast in some charming spot. What difference does it make to you
as a traveler? You are