No technical maxim is more frequently cited than the remark of the younger Dumas:  “The art of the theatre is the art of preparations.”  This is true in a larger sense than he intended; but at the same time there are limits to its truth, which we must not fail to observe.

Dumas, as we know, was an inveterate preacher, using the stage as a pulpit for the promulgation of moral and social ideas which were, in their day, considered very advanced and daring.  The primary meaning of his maxim, then, was that a startling idea, or a scene wherein such an idea was implied, ought not to be sprung upon an audience wholly unprepared to accept it.  For instance, in Monsieur Alphonse, a husband, on discovering that his wife has had an intrigue before their marriage, and that a little girl whom she wishes to adopt is really her daughter, instantly raises her from the ground where she lies grovelling at his feet, and says:  “Creature de Dieu, toi qui as failli et te repens, releve toi, je te pardonne.”  This evangelical attitude on the part of Admiral de Montaiglin was in itself very surprising, and perhaps not wholly admirable, to the Parisian public of 1873; but Dumas had so “prepared” the coup de theatre that it passed with very slight difficulty on the first night, and with none at all at subsequent performances and revivals.  How had he “prepared” it?  Why, by playing, in a score of subtle ways, upon the sympathies and antipathies of the audience.  For instance, as Sarcey points out, he had made M. de Montaiglin a sailor, “accustomed, during his distant voyages, to long reveries in view of the boundless ocean, whence he had acquired a mystical habit of mind....  Dumas certainly would never have placed this pardon in the mouth of a stockbroker.”  So far so good; but “preparation,” in the sense of the word, is a device of rhetoric or of propaganda rather than of dramatic craftsmanship.  It is a method of astutely undermining or outflanking prejudice.  Desiring to enforce a general principle, you invent a case which is specially favourable to your argument, and insinuate it into the acceptance of the audience by every possible subtlety of adjustment.  You trust, it would seem, that people who have applauded an act of pardon in an extreme case will be so much the readier to exercise that high prerogative in the less carefully “prepared” cases which present themselves in real life.  This may or may not be a sound principle of persuasion; as we are not here considering the drama as an art of persuasion, we have not to decide between this and the opposite, or Shawesque, principle of shocking and startling an audience by the utmost violence of paradox.  There is something to be said for both methods—­for conversion by pill-and-jelly and for conversion by nitroglycerine.

Reverting, now, to the domain of pure craftsmanship, can it be said that “the art of the theatre is the art of preparation”?  Yes, it is very largely the art of delicate and unobtrusive preparation, of helping an audience to divine whither it is going, while leaving it to wonder how it is to get there.  On the other hand, it is also the art of avoiding laborious, artificial and obvious preparations which lead to little or nothing.  A due proportion must always be observed between the preparation and the result.