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The crimes of Italy fascinated Englishmen of genius with a fascination even more potent than that which they exercised over the vulgar imagination of mere foppish and swashbuckler lovers of the scandalous and the sensational: they fascinated with the attraction of tragic grandeur, of psychological strangeness, of moral monstrosity, a generation in whom the passionate imagination of the playwright was curiously blent with the metaphysical analysis of the philosopher and the ethical judgment of the Puritan.
Others worked spasmodically, like the wild Irish playwright, who would shut himself up for a week at a time, then emerge, pale and drawn, to play like a madman against the time of his next retirement.
Surely, he would say, this must be the fiction of some fanciful brain, the whim of some romancer, the trick of some playwright. It would make a capital farce, this idea, carried out. A young man slighting the lovely heroine of the little comedy and making love to her grandmother!
And in many younger writers who may not even be aware of the Anderson influence, you can see touches of his approach, echoes of his voice. Writing about the Elizabethan playwright John Ford, the poet Algernon Swinburne once said: "If he touches you once he takes you, and what he takes he keeps hold of; his work becomes part of your thought and parcel of your spiritual furniture forever."
He seemed quite disposed to listen in a friendly manner to what I had to say to him; he did not, however, attempt to conceal his surprise at my direct appeals and the personal demands I made of him. He was the first playwright I had ever seen in an official uniform.
So much for the familiar catch-words and their validity. A little discouraged by the fatuity of all lay discussion, our playwright may be pictured as retreating to the clubrooms of the American Dramatists and there finding his fellow-craftsmen all busy as bees on scenarios overflowing with not particularly original sin.
From the same anonymous writer we learn something of Parisian life in the reign of Francis I. One day a certain Monsieur Cruche, a popular poet and playwright, was performing moralities and novelties on a platform in the Place Maubert, and among them a farce "funny enough to make half a score men die of laughter, in which the said Cruche, holding a lantern, feigned to perceive the doings of a hen and a salamander."
When he does not get it, he cannot explain what he wants; but he knows what he does not want, and he goes away and keeps his distance. The play has missed fire, and the playwright and his hero are ridiculous. Let us understand one thing: if we want to make men dutiful we must make them joyous.
"Go to!", they say to themselves, "I will write a play"; and the weary auditor is tempted to murmur the sentence of the cynic Frenchman, "Je n'en vois pas la nécessité." But now, lest we be led into misapprehension, let us understand clearly that what we desire in the theatre is not new material, but rather a fresh and vital treatment of such material as the playwright finds made to his hand.
On the mantelshelf there was a curious collection of photographs one of Ah Fu, the Chinese cook of South Sea memory, side by side with that of Sir Arthur Pinero, famous playwright silent witnesses to the wide extent of her acquaintance and the broad democracy of her ideas. At Stonehedge her life ran on almost undisturbed in the calm stillness that she loved so much.
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