Part 3 (1/2)

edouard Pailleron.

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 _a 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 'Fedora.'

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.

X.

From emile 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 Moliere are sometimes of a structure hardly adequate, while those of Scribe are often Parisian articles of marvellous manufacture.

Very cordially yours,

emile Zola.

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 Tempete,' 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,--'Scenes de la vie de theatre' (1880) and 'L'Incendie des Folies-Plastiques' (1886).

In the Spring of 1884 he delivered an address on the art of playmaking before the Cercle Artistique et Litteraire of Brussels. This lecture was ent.i.tled 'Comment se fait une piece de theatre;' and it was printed privately in an edition limited to fifty copies, (Paris: A. Quantin, 1884). In the course of this address he read letters received by him from ten or twelve of the most distinguisht dramatists of France in response to his request for information as to their methods of composition. It was to these letters that the lecture owed its interest and its value. What M. Dreyfus contributed himself was little more than a running commentary on the correspondence that he had collected. This commentary was characteristically clever, brisk, bright and amusing; but its interest was partly personal, partly local, and partly contemporary.

The interest of the letters themselves is permanent; and this is the reason why it has seemed advisable to select the most significant of them and to present them here uninc.u.mbered by the less useful remarks of the lecturer.