Mr. Pinero has discust Robert Louis Stevenson as a dramatist, and his lecture contained passages which every man of letters should ponder.  He showed that Stevenson had in him the true dramatic stuff, but that he refused to serve the severe apprenticeship to play-making that he gladly gave to novel-writing.  Mr. Pinero made plain the further 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 sympathetically studied.  Hugo had also a gift for oratory and a talent for fine speeches; but when he yearned for theatrical success he went to the most popular playhouses where the plain people gathered, and he adopted as his own the formula of play-making which was proving its value in these boulevard theaters.  This was not in itself much better than the formula Stevenson borrowed and did not trouble to understand—­indeed, the two are not unlike.  But Hugo had made his choice half a century before Stevenson; and when he made it he was taking possession of the very latest fashion.