LETTER THE SECOND. FROM MR. AUTHOR TO MR. READER.
MY DEAR SIR,--I thoroughly understand your complaint, and I think I can answer your question. My reply will probably a little astonish you--for I mean to speak the plain truth boldly. The public ought to know the real state of the case, as regards the present position of the English stage towards English Literature, for the public alone can work the needful reform.
You ask, if I attribute the present dearth of stage literature to the dearth of good actors? I reply to that in the negative. When the good literature comes, the good actors will come also, where they are wanted. In many branches of the theatrical art they are not wanted. We have as good living actors among us now as ever trod the stage. And we should have more if dramatic literature called for more. It is literature that makes the actor--not the actor who makes literature. I could name men to you, now on the stage, whose advance in their profession they owe entirely to the rare opportunities, which the occasional appearance of a genuinely good play has afforded to them, of stepping out--men whose sense of the picturesque and the natural in their art, lay dormant, until the pen of the writer woke it into action. Show me a school of dramatists, and I will show you a school of actors soon afterwards--as surely as the effect follows the cause.
You have spoken of France. I will now speak of France also; for the literary comparison with our neighbours is as applicable to the main point of my letter as it was to the main point of yours.
Suppose me to be a French novelist. If I am a successful man, my work has a certain market value at the publisher's. So far my case is the same if I am an English novelist--but there the analogy stops. In France, the manager of the theatre can compete with the publisher for the purchase of any new idea that I have to sell. In France, the market value of my new play is as high, or higher, than the market value of my new novel. Remember, I am not now writing of French theatres which have assistance from the Government, but of French theatres which depend, as our theatres do, entirely on the public. Any one of those theatres will give me as much, I repeat, for the toil of my brains, on their behalf, as the publisher will give for the toil of my brains on his. Now, so far is this from being the case in England, that it is a fact perfectly well known to every literary man in the country, that, while the remuneration for every other species of literature has enormously increased in the last hundred years, the remuneration for dramatic writing has steadily decreased, to such a minimum of pecuniary recognition as to make it impossible for a man who lives by the successful use of his pen, as a writer of books, to alter the nature of his literary practice, and live, or nearly live, in comfortable circumstances, by the use of his pen, as a writer of plays. It is time that this fact was generally known, to justify successful living authors for their apparent neglect of one of the highest branches of their Art. I tell you, in plain terms, that I could only write a play for the English stage--a successful play, mind--by consenting to what would be, in my case, and in the cases of all my successful brethren, a serious pecuniary sacrifice.
