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THE STORY OF A PLAY

A Novel

W. D. HOWELLS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

W. D. HOWELLS'S WORKS.

THE STORY OF A PLAY.

The young actor who thought he saw his part in Maxwell's play had so far made his way upward on the Pacific Coast that he felt justified in taking the road with a combination of his own. He met the author at a dinner of the Papyrus Club in Boston, where they were introduced with a facile flourish of praise from the journalist who brought them together, as the very men who were looking for each other, and who ought to be able to give the American public a real American drama. The actor, who believed he had an ideal of this drama, professed an immediate interest in the kind of thing Maxwell told him he was trying to do, and asked him to come the next day, if he did not mind its being Sunday, and talk the play over with him.

He was at breakfast when Maxwell came, at about the hour people were getting home from church, and he asked the author to join him. But Maxwell had already breakfasted, and he hid his impatience of the actor's politeness as well as he could, and began at the first moment possible: "The idea of my play is biblical; we're still a very biblical people." He had thought of the fact in seeing so many worshippers swarming out of the churches.

"That is true," said the actor.

"It's the old idea of the wages of sin. I should like to call it that."

"The name has been used, hasn't it?"

"I shouldn't mind; for I want to get a new effect from the old notion, and it would be all the stronger from familiar association with the name. I want to show that the wages of sin is more sinning, which is the very body of death."

"Well?"

"Well, I take a successful man at the acme of his success, and study him in a succession of scenes that bring out the fact of his prosperity in a way to strike the imagination of the audience, even the groundlings; and, of course, I have to deal with success of the most appreciable sort--a material success that is gross and palpable. I have to use a large canvas, as big as Shakespeare's, in fact, and I put in a great many figures."

"That's right," said the actor. "You want to keep the stage full, with people coming and going."

"There's a lot of coming and going, and a lot of incidents, to keep the spectator interested, and on the lookout for what's to happen next. The whole of the first act is working up to something that I've wanted to see put on the stage for a good while, or ever since I've thought of writing for the stage, and that is a large dinner, one of the public kind."

"Capital!" said the actor.

"I've seen a good deal of that sort of thing as a reporter; you know they put us at a table off to one side, and we see the whole thing, a great deal better than the diners themselves do. It's a banquet, given by a certain number of my man's friends, in honor of his fiftieth birthday, and you see the men gathering in the hotel parlor--well, you can imagine it in almost any hotel--and Haxard is in the foreground. Haxard is the hero's name, you know."

"It's a good name," the actor mused aloud. "It has a strong sound."

"Do you like it? Well, Haxard," Maxwell continued, "is there in the foreground, from the first moment the curtain rises, receiving his friends, and shaking hands right and left, and joking and laughing with everybody--a very small joke makes a very large laugh on occasions like that, and I shall try to give some notion of the comparative size of the joke and the laugh--and receiving congratulations, that give a notion of what the dinner is for, and the kind of man he is, and how universally respected and all that, till everybody has come; and then the doors between the parlor and the dining-room are rolled back, and every man goes out with his own wife, or his sister, or his cousin, or his aunt, if he hasn't got a wife; I saw them do that once, at a big commercial dinner I reported."

"Ah, I was afraid it was to be exclusively a man's dinner!" the actor interrupted.

"Oh, no," Maxwell answered, with a shade of vexation. "That wouldn't do. You couldn't have a scene, or, at least, not a whole act, without women. Of course I understand that. Even if you could keep the attention of the audience without them, through the importance of the intrigue, still you would have to have them for the sake of the stage-picture. The drama is literature that makes a double appeal; it appeals to the sense as well as the intellect, and the stage is half the time merely a picture-frame. I had to think that out pretty early."

The actor nodded. "You couldn't too soon."

"It wouldn't do to have nothing but a crowd of black coats and white shirt-fronts on the stage through a whole act. You want color, and a lot of it, and you can only get it, in our day, with the women's costumes. Besides, they give movement and life. After the dinner begins they're supposed to sparkle all through. I've imagined the table set down the depth of the stage, with Haxard and the nominal host at the head, fronting the audience, and the people talking back and forth on each side, and I let the ladies do most of the talking, of course. I mean to have the dinner served through all the courses, and the waiters coming and going; the events will have to be hurried, and the eating merely sketched, at times; but I should keep the thing in pretty perfect form, till it came to the speaking. I shall have to cut that a good deal, but I think I can give a pretty fair notion of how they butter the object of their hospitality on such occasions; I've seen it and heard it done often enough. I think, perhaps, I shall have the dinner an act by itself. There are only four acts in the play now, and I'll have to make five. I want to give Haxard's speech as fully as possible, for that's what I study the man in, and make my confidences to the audience about him. I shall make him butter himself, but all with the utmost humility, and brag of everything that he disclaims the merit of."

The actor rose and reached across the table for the sugar. "That's a capital notion. That's new. That would make a hit--the speech would."

"Magnificent!" said the actor, pouring himself some more cocoa.

Maxwell continued: "In the third act--for I see that I shall have to make it the third now--the scene will be in Haxard's library, after he gets home from the complimentary dinner, at midnight, and he finds a man waiting for him there--a man that the butler tells him has called several times, and was so anxious to see him that Mrs. Haxard has given orders to let him wait. Oh, I ought to go back a little, and explain--"

"Yes, do!" The actor stirred his cocoa with mounting interest. "Yes, don't leave anything out."

"Never bring your principal character on at once," the actor interjected.

"That's a good name, too," said the actor.

"Yes, isn't it? It has a sort of probable sound, and yet it's a made-up name. Well, I was going to say--"

"And I'm glad you have it a homicide that Haxard is guilty of, instead of a business crime of some sort. That sort of crime never tells with an audience," the actor observed.

"No," said Maxwell. "Homicide is decidedly better. It's more melodramatic, and I don't like that, but it will be more appreciable, as a real sin, to most of the audience; we steal and cheat so much, and we kill comparatively so little in the North. Well, I was going to say that I shall have this whole act to consist entirely of the passage between the two men. I shall let it begin with a kind of shiver creeping over the spectator, when he recognizes the relation between them, and I hope I shall be able to make it end with a shudder, for Haxard must see from the first moment, and he must let the audience see at last, that the only way for him to save himself from his old crime is to commit a new one. He must kill the man who saw him kill a man."

"That's good," the actor thoughtfully murmured, as if tasting a pleasant morsel to try its flavor. "Excellent."

Maxwell laughed for pleasure, and went on: "He arranges to meet the man again at a certain time and place, and that is the last of Greenshaw. He leaves the house alone; and the body of an unknown man is found floating up and down with the tide under the Long Bridge. There are no marks of violence; he must have fallen off the bridge in the dark, and been drowned; it could very easily happen. Well, then comes the most difficult part of the whole thing; I have got to connect the casualty with Haxard in the most unmistakable way, unmistakable to the audience, that is; and I have got to have it brought home to him in a supreme moment of his life. I don't want to have him feel remorse for it; that isn't the modern theory of the criminal; but I do want him to be anxious to hide his connection with it, and to escape the consequences. I don't know but I shall try another dinner-scene, though I am afraid it would be a risk."

The actor said, "I don't know. It might be the very thing. The audience likes a recurrence to a distinctive feature. It's like going back to an effective strain in music."

"Yes," Maxwell resumed, "slightly varied. I might have a private dinner this time; perhaps a dinner that Haxard himself is giving. Towards the end the talk might turn on the case of the unknown man, and the guests might discuss it philosophically together; Haxard would combat the notion of a murder, and even of a suicide; he would contend for an accident, pure and simple. All the fellows would take a turn at the theory, but the summing-up opinion I shall leave to a legal mind, perhaps the man who had made the great complimentary speech at the public dinner to Haxard in the first act. I should have him warm to his work, and lay it down to Haxard in good round fashion, against his theory of accident.ne looks upon the performance?--here the wealthy donor, or the ambitious so-called artist, forgetting Whose this House was, demanded worship for himself. "Verily, they have their reward."

Therefore let those who have such things in charge study first of all what a church should be, and then what their particular church, such as they have received it in trust, is. It will often be found that a building very little esteemed has something to say for itself, and is worthy of respect as originally conceived, in its own structural character as designed by its architect. And if not, and if it must be borne with, then all the more reason, in planning to do anything further in it or upon it, to "abhor that which is evil, and cleave to that which is good."

And after such careful study, determine determine in advance what should be your total result when every window shall have been filled with stained glass: what story the whole shall tell, how best its parts may be distributed, what each part shall be, in what style, what design, what scale of drawing, scheme of color.

And when this has been determined, in the fear of God, in soberness of judgment, in conscientious fidelity to a sacred trust, with a willingness to be judged by a wiser posterity,--then let such a plan be adhered to as a law of the Medes and Persians which altereth not. To sacrifice one window to the seductions of some alien grandeur is to sacrifice the whole principle at stake. The plain glass patiently awaiting its time to give way to the right thing is more eloquent of a truly reverent and truly artistic intention than a medley of incongruous splendors.

And now, what is stained glass? This simple question it is of the utmost importance to answer, because a little familiarity with the materials and the methods of workmanship will itself serve as a guide to the choice of good windows and to the avoidance of bad.

Stained glass, then, is simply glass which has been colored in the pot, glass which has its color within itself: while painted glass--a term sometimes used as synonymous with stained glass--is properly glass which has had the color painted upon its surface, and has then been fired so that the colored or enameled surface has been vitrified. Some stained glass is of so deep a color,--red, for instance--that a thin coating of it blown over the surface of a white glass is sufficient to produce the desired color effect; if the entire thickness of the pane were of the colored glass, the effect would be much too dark: such glass is nevertheless true stained glass, and is called "flashed."

In the early period of the art, beginning in the eleventh century and running parallel with the development of Pointed Architecture, only true stained glass was used. The use of enamel paints applied to the surface to produce a different color marks also the beginning of the decadence of the art; for the glory of true glass is in its jewel-like quality, its color being within itself and all absolutely translucent, while a painted glass will always be necessarily dull in comparison. The temptation to paint color upon the surface of glass is readily understood: it was an easier method, it promised wider scope, greater variety, in a word, the opportunity to make pictures somewhat as the painter may upon canvas. But glass is not canvas, and church windows are not to be pictures. Retribution has overtaken this work, and the latest and most ambitious more speedily than all; the enamel-painted glass has not stood the test of time, becoming muddy and perishing while the true ancient stained glass is still the joy and wonder of all who gaze upon it.

For, as we have said, the glory of true stained glass is in its rich, jewel-like color. Its reds, which the makers called "ruby," its blues which they called "sapphire," with its "emerald" greens, its "gold" and its "pearl," never entered the field to compete with the achievements of the painter's brush; to compare the delight they afford the beholder with that derived from a painting would be in a sense as impossible as a comparison between the fragrance of a flower and the cadence of a song.

The early makers of stained glass windows contended with great, to moderns they would be intolerable, limitations. They were almost absolutely restricted to the primary colors. They had not at first the art of blowing glass, but cast their pieces in small panes of at most four or five inches in diameter. The use of the diamond in cutting was not known till the sixteenth century. Hence their work was simply mosaic. For variety they depended upon an arrangement of geometrical patterns, or patterns of familiar architectural form and of common ecclesiastical symbols. To construct these they leaded together their pieces and bits of glass, elaborating their treatment as time went on, but always in the main upon the same lines.

When they began to portray, in panels on their windows, the forms of Our Lord, of His apostles, of saints and angels, sometimes in crude settings of scenes or incidents from Holy Scripture or Church legend, their color principle was still the same; and it was still the same in the elaboration of the merely ornamental borders with forms of leaf or flower or fruit, or of sacred emblems and inscriptions. The brown pigment with which they produced faces and features, hands, feet, outlines and ornamentations, was not a color, nor intended for a color, but simply a means of definition or delineation when this was too minute to be carried out with leads. And the stained glass it was, still, which addressed the eye and compelled attention and admiration. No more than in heraldry did the forms and emblems pretend to be pictures of the actual, realistic representations of men, or of scenes or incidents. The makers of early stained glass were, in one word, simply makers of ornamental windows of rich color and religious symbolism.

We have said that their pieces of glass were small. This is but to say that their windows were a network of leads. For there is but one way to hold together such pieces of glass in a window, and that is by leads. These leads are not a misfortune. A square yard of simple red stained glass is artistically more beautiful if composed of a hundred pieces leaded together than if it were in a single sheet. The differences in texture themselves produce a better result, and the black leads, scarcely discernible individually, contribute an additional element of pleasure. And in arranging pieces of different color side by side, intelligent leading design was itself the artist's drawing, and effected results altogether admirable. So far was this art of leading carried in France, for instance, that windows mainly of white glass were produced, of rare beauty by simple virtue of their structural design.

All this was changed by the men who in a later age ground up their enamel pigments, glazed windows in large panes, and daubed upon them their muddy colors, with a sublime contempt for the crude laborious mosaic work of their predecessors. Would they have a representation of the earth for their figure to stand upon? it must be carpeted with grass, with green grass, and they can paint green grass upon a colorless surface; red flowers also, upon the same, with red paint, if such were desired. The Renaissance was coming; Gothic was barbarous anyway; antiquated crudities must give place to refined work worthy of the new enlightenment! Paint a picture on canvas, then paint that picture on your glass. It can be done, certainly, if you will not allow yourself to be bothered with the nuisance of leads, but just get an ample pane of glass, unobstructed, and go at it with your brush and paints!

This miserable travesty did not long hold sway, it was scarcely permitted to go its own theoretical length. There came great political changes, great religious changes, and for a long time few churches more were built, nor even those standing kept in repair. The course of Ecclesiastical Architecture suffered an interruption for several centuries, of which Mr. Ralph Adams Cram has told us feelingly in his recent writings on that subject.

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