enarians, can
remember to have seen rooms on the stage with no furniture at all except
two or three chairs "painted on the flat." Under such conditions, it was
clearly useless for the playwright to trouble his head about furniture,
and even "positions" might well be left for arrangement at rehearsal.
This carelessness of the environment, however, is no longer possible.
Whether we like it or no (and some theorists do not like it at all),
scenery has ceased to be a merely suggestive background against which
the figures stand out in high relief. The stage now aims at presenting a
complete picture, with the figures, not "a little out of the picture,"
but completely in it. This being so, the playwright must evidently, at
some point in the working out of his theme, visualize the stage-picture
in considerable detail; and we find that almost all modern dramatists
do, as a matter of fact, pay great attention to what may be called the
topography of their scenes, and the shifting "positions" of their
characters. The question is: at what stage of the process of composition
ought this visualization to occur? Here, again, it would be absurd to
lay down a general rule; but I am inclined to think, both theoretically
and from what can be gathered of the practice of the best dramatists,
that it is wisest to reserve it for a comparatively late stage. A
playwright of my acquaintance, and a very remarkable playwright too,
used to scribble the first drafts of his play in little notebooks, which
he produced from his pocket whenever he had a moment to spare--often on
the top of an omnibus. Only when the first draft was complete did he
proceed to set the scenes, as it were, and map out the stage-management.
On the other hand, one has heard of playwrights whose first step in
setting to work upon a particular act was to construct a complete model
of the scene, and people it with manikins to represent the characters.
As a general practice, this is scarcely to be commended. It is wiser,
one fancies, to have the matter of the scene pretty fully roughed-out
before details of furniture, properties, and position are arranged.[14]
It may happen, indeed, that some natural phenomenon, some property or
piece of furniture, is the very pivot of the scene; in which case it
must, of course, be posited from the first. From the very moment of his
conceiving the fourth act of _Le Tartufe_, Moliere must have had clearly
in view the table under which Orgon hides; and