The Life of Thomas Hardy
- Whether you regard the present divorce of fiction from the drama as beneficial or inimical to the best interests of literature and the stage;
- Whether you, yourself, have at any time had, or now have, any desire to exercise your gifts in the production of plays as well as of novels; and, if not,
- Why you consider the novel the better or more convenient means of bringing your ideas before the public you address.
Hardy's reply reads as follows:
- Inimical to the best interests of the stage: no injury to literature.
- Have occasionally had a desire to produce a play, and have, in fact, written the skeletons of several. Have no such desire in any special sense just now.
- Because, in general, the novel affords scope for getting nearer to the heart and meaning of things than does the play: in particular the play as nowadays conditioned, when parts have to be moulded to actors, not actors to parts; when managers will not risk a truly original play; when scenes have to be arranged in a constrained and arbitrary fashion to suit the exigencies of stage-building, although spectators are absolutely indifferent to order and succession, provided they can have set before them a developing thread of interest. The reason of this arbitrary arrangement would seem to be that the presentation of human passions is subordinated to the presentation of mountains, cities, clothes, furniture, plate, jewels, and other real and sham-real appurtenances, to the neglect of the principle that the material stage should be a conventional or figurative arena, in which accessories are kept down to the plane of mere suggestion of place and time, so as not to interfere with the high-relief of the action and emotions.
To the student of The Dynasts this is very interesting. Hardy betrayed here a real interest in the drama and
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