The Autobiography of a Play | Page 7

same moment; he has no choice in the matter; he must do
this. And it is only when he deals with the love of the sexes that his
work is most interesting to that aggregation of human hearts we call the
audience. This very play was successful in Chicago; but, as soon as that
part of the public had been exhausted which could weep with pleasure,
if I may use the expression, over the tenderness of a mother's love, its
success would have been at an end. Furthermore--and here comes in
another law of dramatic construction--a play must be, in one way or

another, "satisfactory" to the audience. This word has a meaning which
varies in different countries, and even in different parts of the same
country; but, whatever audience you are writing for, your work must be
"satisfactory" to it. In England and America, the death of a pure woman
on the stage is not "satisfactory," except when the play rises to the
dignity of tragedy. The death, in an ordinary play, of a woman who is
not pure, as in the case of 'Frou-Frou,' is perfectly satisfactory, for the
reason that it is inevitable. Human nature always bows gracefully to the
inevitable. The only griefs in our own lives to which we could never
reconcile ourselves are those which might have been averted. The wife
who has once taken the step from purity to impurity can never reinstate
herself in the world of art on this side of the grave; and so an audience
looks with complacent tears on the death of an erring woman. But
Lilian had not taken the one fatal step which would have reconciled an
audience to her death. She was still pure, and every one left the theatre
wishing she had lived. I yielded, therefore, to the sound logic, based on
sound dramatic principle, of my New York manager, Mr. A. M. Palmer,
and the piece was altered.
I have called the play, as produced in New York and afterward in
London, the "same play" as the one produced in Chicago. That one
doubt, which age does not conquer--which comes down to us from the
remotest antiquity of our own youth, which will still exist in our minds
as we listen to the music of the spheres, thru countless ages, when all
other doubts are at rest; that never-to-be answered doubt: Whether it
was the same jack-knife, or another one, after all its blades and handle
had been changed--must ever linger in my own mind as to the identity
of this play. But a dramatic author stops worrying himself about doubts
of this kind very early in his career. The play which finally takes its
place on the stage usually bears very little resemblance to the play
which first suggested itself to his mind. In some cases the public has
abundant reason to congratulate itself on this fact, and especially on the
way plays are often built up, so to speak, by the authors, with advice
and assistance from other intelligent people interested in their success.
The most magnificent figure in the English drama of this century was a
mere faint outline, merely a fatherly old man, until the suggestive mind
of Macready stimulated the genius of Bulwer Lytton, and the great

author, eagerly acknowledging the assistance rendered him, made
Cardinal Richelieu the colossal central figure of a play that was written
as a pretty love-story. Bulwer Lytton had an eye single, as every
dramatist ought to have--as every successful dramatist must have--to
the final artistic result; he kept before him the one object of making the
play of 'Richelieu' as good a play as he possibly could make it. The first
duty of a dramatist is to put upon the stage the very best work he can,
in the light of whatever advice and assistance may come to him. Fair
acknowledgment afterward is a matter of mere ordinary personal
honesty. It is not a question of dramatic art.
So Lilian is to live, and not die, in the last act. The first question for us
to decide--I say "us"--the New York manager, the literary attaché of the
theatre, and myself--the first practical question before us was: As Lilian
is to live, which of the two men who love her is to die? There are
axioms among the laws of dramatic construction, as in mathematics.
One of them is this--three hearts cannot beat as one. The world is not
large enough, from an artistic point of view, for three good human
hearts to continue to exist, if two of them love the third. If one of the
two hearts is a bad one, art assigns it to the hell on earth of
disappointed love; but if it is good and tender and gentle, art is