ther fact that
Stevenson, who was ever a sedulous ape of the masters he admired, had
here set himself a bad pattern to copy. This was not the loose and
rambling Elizabethan model which had led Tennyson and Browning astray;
it was the model of the cheap melodrama of the early years of the
nineteenth century. "Stevenson with all his genius failed to realize
that the art of drama is not stationary, but progressive," said Mr.
Pinero. "By this I do not mean that it is always improving; what I do
mean is that its conditions are always changing and that every dramatist
whose ambition it is to produce live plays is absolutely bound to study
carefully ... the conditions that hold good for its own age and
generation."

This is what every great dramatist has done; it is what Shakespeare did
and Moliere also; it is what Stevenson did not care to do, because he
did not understand the necessity of it. He did not borrow the formula of
the most successful of the plays which chanced to be pleasing the public
just then. If he had done this, he could have put into this formula all
the fine writing he so much enjoyed; he might have given to his plays
the utmost polish of style. Instead of trying to write dramas externally
like those popular in the theater of his own time, and making them
internally whatsoever he chose, he went back half a century and tried to
revive a poor formula already defunct. The game was lost before the
cards were dealt. He had refused to consider the conditions of the
problem he was handling--"the problem of how to tell a dramatic story
truly, convincingly, and effectively, on the modern stage"; as Mr.
Pinero described it, "the problem of disclosing the workings of the
human heart by methods which shall not destroy the illusion which a
modern audience expects to enjoy in the modern theater."

Stevenson was here making the mistake which so many men of letters make
when they turn to the theater. He was going upon the theory that the
drama is made literary, not from within, by observation and imagination
and sincerity, but from without, by the application of fine speeches.
His speeches were fine, no doubt, even tho they were not in keeping with
that special kind of play when it had been alive. But as it happened,
that kind of play was dead and gone, and no injection of oratory would
bring it to life again. And here the Scotch story-teller failed to
profit by the example of the French poet whose romances he had so
sym