t, my two or three plays were
models--in respect of brevity and conciseness. I was never troubled by
the necessity of cutting down--so cruel a necessity to many
playwrights.[6] My difficulty was rather to find enough for my
characters to say--for they never wanted to say anything that was not
strictly germane to the plot. It was this that made me despair of
play-writing, and realize that my mission was to teach other people how
to write plays. And, similarly, the aspirant who finds that his people
never want to say more than he can allow them to say--that they never
rush headlong into blind alleys, or do things that upset the balance of
the play and have to be resolutely undone--that aspirant will do well
not to be over-confident of his dramatic calling and election. There may
be authors who can write vital plays, as Shakespeare is said (on rather
poor evidence)[7] to have done, without blotting a line; but I believe
them to be rare. In our day, the great playwright is more likely to be
he who does not shrink, on occasion, from blotting an act or two.

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_. We are more willing
to accept a quiet, even an indecisive, ending.[11] Nevertheless it is
and must ever be true that, at a very early period in the scheming of
his play, the playwright ought to assure himself that his theme is
capable of a satisfactory ending. Of course this phrase does not imply a
"happy ending," but one which satisfies the author as being artisti