But Beau Austin we feel is but a frip.He endures a few minutes of sharp humiliation, it is true, but to the spectator this cannot but seem a very insufficient expiation, not only of the wrong he had done one woman, but of the indefinite number of wrongs he had done others.He is at once the villain and the hero of the piece, and in the narrow limits of a brief comedy this transformation cannot be convincingly effected.Wrongly or rightly, a theatrical audience, like the spectators of a trial, demand a definite verdict and sentence, and no play can satisfy which does not reasonably meet this demand.And this arises not from any merely Christian prudery or Puritanism, for it is as true for Greek tragedy and other high forms of dramatic art."
The transformation of villain into hero, if possible at all, could only be convincingly effected in a piece of wide scope, where there was room for working out the effect of some great shock, upheaval of the nature, change due to deep and unprecedented experiences -
religious conversion, witnessing of sudden death, providential rescue from great peril of death, or circumstance of that kind; but to be effective and convincing it needs to be marked and FULLY JUSTIFIED in some such way; and no cleverness in the writer will absolve him from deference to this great law in serious work for presentation on the stage; if mere farces or little comedies may seem sometimes to contravene it, yet this - even this - is only in appearance.
True, it is not the dramatists part OF HIMSELF to condemn, or to approve, or praise: he has to present, and to present various characters faithfully in their relation to each other, and their effect upon each other.But the moral element cannot be expunged or set lightly aside because it is closely involved in the very working out and presentation of these relations, and the effect upon each other.Character is vital.And character, if it tells in life, in influence and affection, must be made to tell directly also in the drama.There is no escape from this - none; the dramatist is lopsided if he tries to ignore it; he is a monster if he is wholly blind to it - like the poet in IN MEMORIAM, "Without a conscience or an aim." Mr Henley, in his notorious, all too confessional, and yet rather affected article on Stevenson in the PALL MALL MAGAZINE, has a remark which I confess astonished me - a remark I could never forget as coming from him.He said that he "had lived a very full and varied life, and had no interest in remarks about morals." "Remarks about morals" are, nevertheless, in essence, the pith of all the books to which he referred, as those to which he turned in preference to the EDINBURGH EDITION of R.L.Stevenson's works.The moral element is implicit in the drama, and it is implicit there because it is implicit in life itself, or so the great common-sense conceives it and demands it.
What we might call the asides proper of the drama, are "remarks about morals," nothing else - the chorus in the Greek tragedy gathered up "remarks about morals" as near as might be to the "remarks about morals" in the streets of that day, only shaped to a certain artistic consistency.Shakespeare is rich in "remarks about morals," often coming near, indeed, to personal utterance, and this not only when Polonius addresses his son before his going forth on his travels.Mr Henley here only too plainly confessed, indeed, to lack of that conviction and insight which, had he but possessed them, might have done a little to relieve BEAU AUSTIN and the other plays in which he collaborated with R.L.Stevenson, from their besetting and fatal weakness.The two youths, alas! thought they could be grandly original by despising, or worse, contemning "remarks about morals" in the loftier as in the lower sense.To "live a full and varied life," if the experience derived from it is to have expression in the drama, is only to have the richer resource in "remarks about morals." If this is perverted under any self-conscious notion of doing something spick-and-span new in the way of character and plot, alien to all the old conceptions, then we know our writers set themselves boldly at loggerheads with certain old-fashioned and yet older new-fashioned laws, which forbid the violation of certain common demands of the ordinary nature and common-sense; and for the lack of this, as said already, no cleverness, no resource, no style or graft, will any way make up.So long as this is tried, with whatever concentration of mind and purpose, failure is yet inevitable, and the more inevitable the more concentration and less of humorous by-play, because genius itself, if it despises the general moral sentiment and instinct for moral proportion - an ethnic reward and punishment, so to say - is all astray, working outside the line; and this, if Mr Pinero will kindly excuse me, is the secret of the failure of these plays, and not want of concentration, etc., in the sense he meant, or as he has put it.
Stevenson rather affected what he called "tail-foremost morality,"
