There is a modern French dramatist who writes, with success, such plays
as I might have written had I combined a strong philosophical faculty
with great rhetorical force and fluency. The dramas of M. Paul Hervieu
have all the neatness and cogency of a geometrical demonstration. One
imagines that, for M. Hervieu, the act of composition means merely the
careful filling in of a scenario as neat and complete as a schedule.[8]
But for that very reason, despite their undoubted intellectual power, M.
Hervieu's dramas command our respect rather than our enthusiasm. The
dramatist should aim at _being_ logical without _seeming_ so.[9]
It is sometimes said that a playwright ought to construct his play
backwards, and even to write his last act first.[10] This doctrine
belongs to the period of the well-made play, when climax was regarded as
the one thing needful in dramatic art, and anticlimax as the
unforgivable sin. Nowadays, we do not insist that every play should end
with a tableau, or with an emphatic _mot de la fin_.
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