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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The English Stage, by Augustin Filon
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The English Stage
+       Being an Account of the Victorian Drama
+
+Author: Augustin Filon
+
+Translator: Frederic Whyte
+
+Release Date: July 3, 2011 [EBook #36590]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ENGLISH STAGE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
+generously made available by The Internet Archive.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE ENGLISH STAGE
+
+
+
+
+_WORKS BY THE AUTHOR._
+
+  PROFILS ANGLAIS.
+  MÉRIMÉE ET SES AMIS.
+  VIOLETTE MÉRIAN.
+  AMOURS ANGLAIS.
+  LES CONTES DU CENTENAIRE.
+  ETC. ETC.
+
+
+
+
+  THE ENGLISH STAGE
+
+  _Being an Account of the Victorian Drama by Augustin Filon_
+
+  Translated from the French by Frederic Whyte with
+  an Introduction by Henry Arthur Jones
+
+
+  JOHN MILNE
+  12 NORFOLK STREET, STRAND, LONDON
+
+  NEW YORK
+  DODD, MEAD, & COMPANY
+  MDCCCXCVII
+
+
+
+
+_All Rights Reserved_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+  Introduction by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones                               9
+
+  Author's Preface                                                    31
+
+
+  CHAPTER I
+
+  A Glance back--From 1820 to 1830--Kean and Macready--The
+  Strolling Player--The Critics--Sheridan Knowles and
+  _Virginius_--Douglas Jerrold--His Comedies--_The Rent
+  Day_--_The Prisoner of War_--_Black-Eyed Susan_--Collapse of
+  the Privileged Theatres--Men of Letters come to the Rescue of
+  the Drama--Bulwer Lytton--_The Lady of Lyons_--_Richelieu_--
+  _Money_                                                             39
+
+
+  CHAPTER II
+
+  Macready's Withdrawal from the Stage--The Enemies of the
+  Drama in 1850: Puritanism; the Opera; the Pantomime; the
+  "Hippodrama"--French Plays and French Players in England--
+  Actors of the Period--The Censorship--The Critics--The
+  Historical Plays of Tom Taylor and the Irish Plays of Dion
+  Boucicault                                                          73
+
+
+  CHAPTER III
+
+  The Vogue of Burlesque--Burnand's _Ixion_--H. J. Byron--The
+  Influence of Burlesque upon the Moral Tone of the Stage--Marie
+  Wilton's Début--A Letter from Dickens--Founding of the Prince
+  of Wales's--Tom Robertson, his Life as Actor and Author--His
+  Journalistic Career--London Bohemia in 1865--Sothern                93
+
+
+  CHAPTER IV
+
+  First Performance of _Society_--Success of _Ours_, _Caste_,
+  and _School_--How Robertson turned to account the Talent of
+  his Actors, John Hare, Bancroft, and Mrs. Bancroft--Progress
+  in the Matter of Scenery--Dialogue and Character-drawing--
+  Robertson as a Humorist: a Scene from _School_--As a Realist:
+  a Scene from _Caste_--The Comedian of the Upper Middle
+  Classes--Robertson's Marriage, Illness, and Death--The "Cup
+  and Saucer" Comedy--The Improvement in Actors' Salaries--The
+  Bancrofts at the Haymarket--Farewell Performance--My
+  Pilgrimage to Tottenham Street                                     114
+
+
+  CHAPTER V
+
+  Gilbert: compared with Robertson--His First Literary Efforts--
+  The _Bab Ballads_--_Sweethearts_--A Series of Experiments--
+  Gilbert's Psychology and Methods of Work--_Dan'l Druce_,
+  _Engaged_, _The Palace of Truth_, _The Wicked World_,
+  _Pygmalion and Galatea_--The Gilbert and Sullivan Operas           138
+
+
+  CHAPTER VI
+
+  Shakespeare again--From Macready to Irving; Phelps, Fechter,
+  Ryder, Adelaide Neilson--Irving's Début--His Career in the
+  Provinces, and Visit to Paris--The rôle of Digby Grand--The
+  rôle of Matthias--The Production of _Hamlet_--Successive
+  Triumphs--Irving as Stage Manager--as an Editor of
+  Shakespeare--His Defects as an Actor--Too great for some of
+  his Parts--As a Writer and Lecturer; his Theory of Art--Sir
+  Henry Irving, Head of his Profession                               156
+
+
+  CHAPTER VII
+
+  Is it well to imitate Shakespeare?--The Death of the Classical
+  Drama--Herman Merivale and the _White Pilgrim_--Wills and his
+  Plays: _Charles the First_, _Claudian_--Tennyson as a
+  Dramatist; he comes too soon and too late--Tennyson and the
+  Critics--_The Falcon_, _The Promise of May_, _The Cup_,
+  _Becket_, _Queen Mary_, _Harold_                                   174
+
+
+  CHAPTER VIII
+
+  The Three Publics--The Disappearance of Burlesque and Decadence
+  of Pantomime--Increasing Vogue of Farce and Melodrama--
+  Improvement in Acting--The Influence of our French Actors--The
+  "Old" Critics and the "New"--James Mortimer and his Two
+  "Almavivas"--Mr. William Archer's Ideas and Rôle--The
+  Vicissitudes of Adaptation                                         193
+
+
+  CHAPTER IX
+
+  The Three Principal Dramatists of To-day--Sydney Grundy; his
+  First Efforts--Adaptations: _The Snowball_, _In Honour Bound_,
+  _A Pair of Spectacles_, _The Bunch of Violets_--His Original
+  Plays--His Style--His Humour--His Ethical Ideal--_An Old
+  Jew_--_The New Woman_--A Talent which has not done growing         212
+
+
+  CHAPTER X
+
+  Henry Arthur Jones; his First Works--His Melodramas--_Saints
+  and Sinners_--The Puritans and the Theatre--The Two Deacons:
+  the Character of Fletcher--_Judah_--_The Crusaders_: Character
+  of Palsam; the Conclusion of the Piece--_The Case of Rebellious
+  Susan_--_The Masqueraders_--Return to Melodrama--Theories
+  expounded by Mr. Jones in his Book: _The Renascence of the
+  Drama_                                                             234
+
+
+  CHAPTER XI
+
+  Two Portraits--Mr. Pinero's Career as an Actor--His Early
+  Works--_The Squire, Lords and Commons_--The Pieces which
+  followed, Half-Comedy, Half-Farce--_The Profligate_; its
+  Success and Defects: _Lady Bountiful_--_The Second Mrs.
+  Tanqueray_: Character of Paula--Mrs. Patrick Campbell--_The
+  Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith_                                           254
+
+
+  CHAPTER XII
+
+  Ibsen made known to the English Public by Mr. Edmund Gosse--
+  The First Translations--Ibsen acted in London--The Performers
+  and the Public--Encounters between the Critics--Mr. Archer
+  once more--Affinity between the Norwegian Character and the
+  English--Ibsen's Realism suited to English Taste, his
+  Characters adaptable to English Life--The Women in his Plays--
+  Ibsen and Mr. Jones--Present and Future Influence of Ibsen--
+  Objections and Obstacles                                           277
+
+
+  CHAPTER XIII
+
+  G. R. Sims--R. C. Carton--Haddon Chambers--The Independent
+  Theatre and Matinée Performance--The Drama of To-morrow--A
+  "Report of Progress"--The Public and the Actors--
+  Actor-Managers--The Forces that have given Birth to the
+  Contemporary English Drama--Disappearance of the Obstacles to
+  its becoming Modern and National--Conclusion                       300
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+BY HENRY ARTHUR JONES
+
+
+I have rarely had a more welcome task than that of saying a few words of
+introduction to the following essays, and of heartily commending them to
+the English reading public. I am not called upon, nor would it become me,
+to recriticise the criticism of the English drama they contain, to reargue
+any of the issues raised, or to vent my own opinions of the persons and
+plays hereafter dealt with. My business is to thank M. Filon for bringing
+us before the notice of the French public, to speak of his work as a whole
+rather than to discuss it in detail, and to define his position in
+relation to the recent dramatic movement in our country.
+
+But before addressing myself to these main ends, I may perhaps be allowed
+to call attention to one or two striking passages and individual
+judgments. The picture in the first chapter of the old actor's life on
+circuit is capitally done. I do not know where to look for so animated and
+succinct a rendering of that phase of past theatrical life. And the
+pilgrimage to the deserted Prince of Wales's Theatre also left a vivid
+impression on me, perhaps quickened by my own early memories. In all that
+relates to the early Victorian drama M. Filon seems to me a sure and
+penetrating guide. All lovers of the English drama, as distinguished from
+that totally different and in many ways antagonistic institution, the
+English theatre, must be pleased to see M. Filon stripping the spangles
+from Bulwer Lytton. To this day Lytton remains an idol of English
+playgoers and actors, a lasting proof of their inability to distinguish
+what is dramatic truth. _The Lady of Lyons_ and _Richelieu_ still rank in
+many theatrical circles with _Hamlet_ as masterpieces of the "legitimate,"
+and _Money_ is still bracketed with _The School for Scandal_. It is
+benevolent of M. Filon to write dramatic criticism about a nation where
+such notions have prevailed for half a century.
+
+The criticism on Tennyson as a playwright seems to me equally admirable
+with the criticism on Bulwer Lytton, and all the more admirable when the
+two are read in conjunction. Doubtless Tennyson will never be so
+successful on the boards as Lytton has been. _Becket_ is a loose and
+ill-made play in many respects, and succeeded with the public only because
+Irving was able to pull it into some kind of unity by buckling it round
+his great impersonation of the archbishop. But _Becket_ contains great
+things, and is a real addition to our dramatic literature. It would have
+been a thousand pities if it had failed. On the other hand, the success of
+Lytton's plays has been a real misfortune to our drama. You cannot have
+two standards of taste in dramatic poetry. Just as surely as the
+circulation of bad money in a country drives out all the good, so surely
+does a base and counterfeit currency in art drive out all finer and higher
+things that contend with it. In his measurement of those two ancient
+enemies, Tennyson and Lytton, M. Filon has shown a rare power of
+understanding us and of entering into the spirit of our nineteenth-century
+poetic drama.
+
+If I may be allowed a word of partial dissent from M. Filon, I would say
+that he assigns too much space and influence to Robertson. Robertson did
+one great thing: he drew the great and vital tragi-comic figure of Eccles.
+He drew many other pleasing characters and scenes, most of them as
+essentially false as the falsities and theatricalities he supposed himself
+to be superseding. I shall be reminded that in the volume before us M.
+Filon says that all reforms of the drama pretend to be a return to nature
+and to truth. I have elsewhere shown that there is no such thing as being
+consistently and realistically "true to nature" on the stage. _Hamlet_ in
+many respects is farther away from real life than the shallowest and
+emptiest farce. It is in the seizure and presentation of the essential and
+distinguishing marks of a character, of a scene, of a passion, of a
+society, of a phase of life, of a movement of national thought--it is in
+the seizure and vivid treatment of some of these, to the exclusion or
+falsification of non-essentials, that the dramatist must lay his claim to
+sincerity and being "true to nature." And it seems to me that one has
+only to compare _Caste_, the typical comedy of an English _mésalliance_,
+with _Le Gendre de M. Poirier_, the typical comedy of a French
+_mésalliance_, to come to the conclusion that in the foundation and
+conduct of his story Robertson was false and theatrical--theatrical, that
+is, in the employment of a social contrast that was effective on the
+stage, but well-nigh, if not quite, impossible in life.
+
+It is of the smallest moment to be "true to nature" in such mint and
+cummin of the stage as the shutting of a door with a real lock, in the
+observation of niceties of expression and behaviour, in the careful
+copying of little fleeting modes and gestures, in the introduction of
+certain realistic bits of business--it is, I say, of the smallest moment
+to be "true to nature" in these, if the playwright is false to nature in
+all the great verities of the heart and spirit of man, if his work as a
+whole leaves the final impression that the vast, unimaginable drama of
+human life is as petty and meaningless and empty as our own English
+theatre. A fair way to measure any dramatist is to ask this question of
+his work: "Does he make human life as small as his own theatre, so that
+there is nothing more to be said about either; or does he hint that human
+life so far transcends any theatre that all attempts to deal with it on
+the boards, even the highest, even Hamlet, even OEdipus, even Faust, are
+but shadows and guesses and perishable toys of the stage?"
+
+Robertson has nothing to say to us in 1896. He drew one great character
+and many pleasing ones in puerile, impossible schemes, without relation to
+any larger world than the very narrow English theatrical world of 1865-70.
+
+In his analysis of the influence of Ibsen in England and France, M. Filon
+seems to touch the right note. I may perhaps be permitted a word of
+personal explanation in this connection. When I came up to London sixteen
+years ago, to try for a place among English playwrights, a rough
+translation from the German version of _The Dolls' House_ was put into my
+hands, and I was told that if it could be turned into a sympathetic play,
+a ready opening would be found for it on the London boards. I knew nothing
+of Ibsen, but I knew a great deal of Robertson and H. J. Byron. From these
+circumstances came the adaptation called _Breaking a Butterfly_. I pray it
+may be forgotten from this time, or remembered only with leniency amongst
+other transgressions of my dramatic youth and ignorance.
+
+I pass on to speak of M. Filon's work as a whole. For a generation or two
+past France has held the lead, and rightly held the lead, in the European
+theatre. She has done this by virtue of a peculiar innate dramatic
+instinct in her people; by virtue of great traditions and thorough methods
+of training; by virtue of national recognition of her dramatists and
+actors, and national pride in them; and by virtue of the freedom she has
+allowed to her playwrights. So far as they have abused that freedom, so
+far as they have become the mere purveyors of sexual eccentricity and
+perversity, so far the French drama has declined. So cunningly economic is
+Nature, she will slip in her moral by hook or by crook. There cannot be an
+intellectual effort in any province of art without a moral implication.
+
+But France, though her great band of playwrights is broken up, still lords
+it over the European drama, or rather, over the European theatre. There is
+still a feeling among our upper-class English audiences that a play, an
+author, an actor and actress, are good _because_ they are French. There
+is, or has been, a sound reason for that feeling. And there is still, as
+M. Filon says in his Preface, a corresponding feeling in France that
+"there is no such thing as an English drama." There has been an equally
+sound reason for that feeling. M. Filon has done us the great kindness of
+trying to remove it. We still feel very shy in coming before our French
+neighbours, like humble, honest, poor relations who are getting on a
+little in the world, and would like to have a nod from our aristocratic
+kinsfolk. We are uneasy about the reception we shall meet, and nervous and
+diffident in making our bow to the French public. A nod from our
+aristocratic relations, a recognition from France, might be of so much use
+in our parish here at home. For in all matters of the modern drama England
+is no better than a parish, with "porochial" judgments, "porochial"
+instincts, and "porochial" ways of looking at things. There is not a
+breath of national sentiment, a breath of national feeling, of width of
+view, in the way English playgoers regard their drama.
+
+M. Filon has sketched in the following pages the history of the recent
+dramatic movement in England. If I were asked what was the distinguishing
+mark of that movement, I should say that during the years when it was in
+progress there was a steadfast and growing attempt to treat the great
+realities of our modern life upon our stage, to bring our drama into
+relation with our literature, our religion, our art, and our science, and
+to make it reflect the main movements of our national thought and
+character. That anything great or permanent was accomplished I am the last
+to claim; all was crude, confused, tentative, aspiring. But there was
+_life_ in it. Again I shall be reminded that dramatic reformers always
+pretend that they return to nature and truth, and are generally found out
+by the next generation to be stale and theatrical impostors. But if anyone
+will take the trouble to examine the leading English plays of the last ten
+years, and will compare them with the _serious_ plays of our country
+during the last three centuries, I shall be mistaken if he will not find
+evidence of the beginnings, the first shoots of an English drama of
+greater import and vitality and of wider aim than any school of drama the
+English theatre has known since the Elizabethans. The brilliant
+Restoration comedy makes no pretence to be a national drama: neither do
+the comedies of Sheridan and Goldsmith. There was no possibility of a
+great national English drama between Milton and the French Revolution, any
+more than there was the possibility of a great school of English poetry.
+And the feelings that were let loose after the convulsions of 1793 did not
+in England run in the direction of the drama. It is only within the
+present generation that great masses of Englishmen have begun to frequent
+the theatre. And as our vast city population began to get into a habit of
+playgoing, and our theatres became more crowded, it seemed not too much to
+hope that a school of English drama might be developed amongst us, and
+that we might induce more and more of our theatre-goers to find their
+pleasure in seeing their lives portrayed at the theatre, rather than in
+running to the theatre to escape from their lives.
+
+After considerable advances had been made in this direction, the movement
+became obscured and burlesqued, and finally the British public fell into
+what Macaulay calls one of its periodical panics of morality. In that
+panic the English drama disappeared for the time, and at the moment of
+writing it does not exist. There are many excellent entertainments at our
+different theatres, and most of them are deservedly successful. But in the
+very height of this theatrical season there is not a single London theatre
+that is giving a play that so much as pretends to picture our modern
+English life,--I might almost say that pretends to picture human life at
+all. I have not a word to say against these various entertainments. I
+have been delighted with some of them, and heartily welcome their success.
+But what has become of the English drama that M. Filon has given so many
+of the following pages to discuss and dissect? I wish M. Filon would
+devote another article in the _Revue des deux Mondes_ to explain to his
+countrymen what has taken place in the English theatre since his articles
+were written. It needs a Frenchman to explain, and a French audience to
+understand, the full comedy of the situation.
+
+For ten years the English theatre-going public had been led to take an
+increasing interest in their national drama,--I mean the drama as a
+picture of life in opposition to a funny theatrical entertainment,--and
+during those ten years that drama had grown in strength of purpose, in
+largeness of aim, in vividness of character-painting, in every quality
+that promised England a living school of drama. It began to deal with the
+great realities of modern English life. It was pressing on to be a real
+force in the spiritual and intellectual life of the nation. It began to
+attract the attention of Europe. But it became entangled with another
+movement, got caught in the skirts of the sexual-pessimistic blizzard
+sweeping over North Europe, was confounded with it, and was execrated and
+condemned without examination. I say without examination. Let anyone turn
+to the _Times_ of November 1894, and read the correspondence which began
+the assault on the modern school of English drama. Let him discover, if
+he can, in the letters of those who attacked it, what notions they had as
+to the relations of morality to the drama. It will interest M. Filon's
+countrymen to know that British playwrights were condemned in the
+interests of British morality. And when one tried to find out what
+particular sort of morality the English public was trying to teach its
+dramatists, one discovered at last that it was precisely that system of
+morality which is practised amongst wax dolls. Not the broad, genial,
+worldly morality of Shakespeare; not the deep, devious, confused, but most
+human morality of the Bible; not a high, severe, ascetic morality; not
+even a sour, grim, puritanic morality. No! let any candid inquirer search
+into this matter and try to get at the truth of it, and ask what has been
+the recent demand of the English public in this matter, and he will find
+it is for a wax-doll morality.
+
+Now, there is much to be said for the establishment of a system of
+wax-doll morality, not only on the English stage, but also in the world at
+large. And all of us who have properly-regulated minds must regret that,
+through some unaccountable oversight, it did not occur to Providence to
+carry on the due progress and succession of the human species by means of
+some such system.
+
+I say it must have been an oversight. For can we doubt that, had this
+excellent method suggested itself, it would have been instantly adopted?
+Can we suppose that Providence would have deliberately rejected so sweetly
+pretty and simple an expedient for putting a stop to immorality, not only
+on the English stage to-day, but everywhere and always?
+
+I know there is a real dilemma. But surely those of us who are truly
+reverent will suspect Providence of a little nodding and negligence in
+this matter, rather than of virtual complicity with immorality--for that
+is what the alternate hypothesis amounts to.
+
+But seeing that, by reason of this lamentable oversight of Providence,
+English life is not sustained and renewed by means of wax-doll morality,
+what is a poor playwright to do? I am quite aware that what is going on in
+English life has nothing whatever to do with what is going on at the
+English theatres in the autumn of 1896. Still, like Caleb Plummer, in a
+matter of this kind one would like to get "as near natur' as possible,"
+or, at least, not to falsify and improve her beyond all chance of
+recognition. I hope I shall not be accused of any feeling of enmity
+against wax-doll morality in the abstract. I think it a most excellent,
+nay, a perfect theory of morals. The more I consider it, the more eloquent
+I could grow in its favour. I do not mean to practise it myself, but I do
+most cordially recommend it to all my neighbours.
+
+To return. The correspondence in the _Times_ showed scarcely a suspicion
+that morality on the stage meant anything else than shutting one's eyes
+alike to facts and to truth, and making one's characters behave like wax
+dolls. As to the bent and purpose of the dramatist, there was so little
+of the dramatic sense abroad, that an act of a play which was written to
+ridicule the detestable, cheap, paradoxical affectations of vice and
+immorality current among a certain section of society was censured as
+being an attempt to _copy_ the thing it was _satirising_! So impossible is
+it to get the average Englishman to distinguish for a moment between the
+dramatist and his characters. The one notion that the public got into its
+head was that we were a set of gloomy corrupters of youth, and it hooted
+accordingly. Now, I do not deny that many undesirable things, many things
+to regret, many extreme things, and some few unclean things, fastened upon
+the recent dramatic movement. And so far as it had morbid issues, so far
+as it tended merely to distress and confuse, so far as it painted vice and
+ugliness for their own sakes, so far it was rightly and inevitably
+condemned, nay, so far it condemned and destroyed itself. But these, I
+maintain, were side-tendencies. They were not the essence of the movement.
+They were the extravagances and confusions that always attend a revival,
+whether in art or religion. And by the general public, who can never get
+but one idea, and never more than one side of that idea, into its head at
+a time, these extravagances and side-shoots are taken for the very heart
+of the movement.
+
+Take the Oxford movement. Did the great British public get a glimmer of
+Newman's lofty idea of the continual indwelling miraculous spiritual
+force of the Church? No. It got a notion into its head that a set of
+rabid, dishonest bigots were trying to violate the purity of its
+Protestant religion, so it hooted and howled, stamped upon the movement,
+and went back to hug the sallow corpse of Evangelicalism for another
+quarter of a century. The movement was thought to be killed. But it was
+only scotched, and it is the one living force in the English Church
+to-day.
+
+Take, again, the æsthetic movement. Did the great British public get a
+glimmer of William Morris's lofty idea of making every home in England
+beautiful? No. It got a notion into its head that a set of idiotic fops
+had gone crazy in worship of sunflowers; so it giggled and derided, and
+went back to its geometric-patterned Brussels carpets, its flock
+wall-papers, and all the damnable trumpery of Tottenham Court Road. The
+movement was thought to be killed, but it was only scotched; and whatever
+beauty there is in English interiors, whatever advance has been made in
+decorating our homes, is due to that movement. Again, to compare small
+things with great, in the recent attempt to give England a living national
+drama, we have been judged not upon the essence of the matter, but upon
+certain extravagances and side-tendencies. The great public got a notion
+into its head that a set of gloomy, vicious persons had conspired to
+corrupt the youth of our nation by writing immoral plays. And the untimely
+accident of a notorious prosecution giving some colour to the opinion, no
+further examination was made of the matter. A clean sweep was made of the
+whole business, and a rigid system of wax-doll morality established
+forthwith, so far, that is, as the modern prose drama is concerned. But
+this wax-doll morality is only enforced against the serious drama of
+modern life. It is not enforced against farce, or musical comedy. It is
+only the serious dramatist who has been gagged and handcuffed. Adultery is
+still an excellent joke in a farce, provided it is conveyed by winks and
+nods. The whole body of a musical entertainment may reek with cockney
+indecency and witlessness, and yet no English mother will sniff offence,
+provided it is covered up with dances and songs. I repeat that if a
+thorough examination is made of the matter, it will be found that the
+recent movement has been judged upon a small side-issue.
+
+We may hope that the English translation of M. Filon's work will do
+something to reinstate us in the good opinion of our countrymen. I think,
+if his readers will take his cue that during the last few years there has
+been an earnest attempt on the part of a few writers to establish a living
+English drama, that is, a drama which within necessary limitations and
+conventions sets out with a determination to see English life as it really
+is and to paint English men and women as they really are--I think if
+playgoers will take that cue from M. Filon, they will get a better notion
+of the truth of the case than if they still regard us as gloomy and
+perverse corrupters of English youth.
+
+A passage from George Meredith may perhaps serve to indicate the position
+of the English drama at the present moment, and to point in what direction
+its energies should lie when the gags and handcuffs are removed, and the
+stiffness gets out of its joints. At the opening of _Diana of the
+Crossways_ these memorable words occur:--
+
+"Then, ah! then, moreover, will the novelist's art (and the dramatist's),
+now neither blushless infant nor executive man, have attained its
+majority. We can then be veraciously historical, honestly transcriptive.
+Rose-pink and dirty drab will alike have passed away. Philosophy is the
+foe of both, and their silly cancelling contest, perpetually renewed in a
+shuffle of extremes, as it always is where a phantasm falseness reigns,
+will no longer baffle the contemplation of natural flesh, smother no
+longer the soul issuing out of our incessant strife. Philosophy bids us to
+see that we are not so pretty as rose-pink, not so repulsive as dirty
+drab; and that, instead of everlastingly shifting those barren aspects,
+the sight of ourselves is wholesome, bearable, fructifying, finally a
+delight. Do but perceive that we are coming to philosophy, the stride
+toward it will be a giant's--a century a day. And imagine the celestial
+refreshment of having a pure decency in the place of sham; real flesh; a
+soul born active, wind-beaten, but ascending. Honourable will fiction (and
+the drama) then appear; honourable, a fount of life, an aid to life, quick
+with our blood. Why, when you behold it you love it,--and you will not
+encourage it?--or only when presented by dead hands? Worse than that
+alternative dirty drab, your recurring rose-pink is rebuked by hideous
+revelations of the filthy foul; for nature will force her way, and if you
+try to stifle her by drowning she comes up, not the fairest part of her
+uppermost! Peruse your Realists--really your castigators, for not having
+yet embraced philosophy. As she grows in the flesh when discreetly tended,
+nature is unimpeachable, flower-like, yet not too decoratively a flower;
+you must have her with the stem, the thorns, the roots, and the fat
+bedding of roses. In this fashion she grew, says historical fiction; thus
+does she flourish now, would say the modern transcript, reading the inner
+as well as exhibiting the outer.
+
+"And how may you know that you have reached to philosophy? You touch her
+skirts when you share her hatred of the sham decent, her derision of
+sentimentalism. You are one with her when--but I would not have you a
+thousand years older! Get to her, if in no other way, by the sentimental
+route:--that very winding path, which again and again brings you round to
+the point of original impetus, where you have to be unwound for another
+whirl; your point of original impetus being the grossly material, not at
+all the spiritual. It is most true that sentimentalism springs from the
+former, merely and badly aping the latter;--fine flower, or pinnacle
+flame-spire, of sensualism that it is, could it do other?--and
+accompanying the former it traverses tracks of desert, here and there
+couching in a garden, catching with one hand at fruits, with another at
+colours; imagining a secret ahead, and goaded by an appetite sustained by
+sheer gratifications. Fiddle in harmonics as it may, it will have these
+gratifications at all costs. Should none be discoverable, at once you are
+at the Cave of Despair, beneath the funeral orb of Glaucoma, in the thick
+midst of poinarded, slit-throat, rope-dependent figures, placarded across
+the bosom Disillusioned, Infidel, Agnostic, Miserrimus. That is the
+sentimental route to advancement. Spirituality does not light it;
+evanescent dreams are its oil-lamps, often with wick askant in the socket.
+
+"A thousand years! You may count full many a thousand by this route before
+you are one with divine philosophy. Whereas a single flight of brains will
+reach and embrace her; give you the savour of Truth, the right use of the
+senses, REALITY'S INFINITE SWEETNESS; for these things are in philosophy;
+and the fiction (and drama) which is the summary of actual Life, the
+within and without of us, is, prose or verse, plodding or soaring,
+philosophy's elect handmaiden."
+
+"Dirty drab and rose-pink, with their silly cancelling contest"--does not
+that sum up the English drama of the last few years? There was certainly a
+shade too much dirty drab outside a while back, but within there was
+_life_. What life is there in the drama that has followed? Where does it
+paint one living English character? Where does it touch one single
+interest of our present life, one single concern of man's body, soul, or
+spirit? What have these rose-pink revels of wax dolls to do with the
+immense, tragic, incoherent Babel around us, with all its multifold
+interests, passions, beliefs, and aspirations? When will philosophy come
+to our aid and depose this silly rose-pink wax-doll morality?
+
+"But," says the British mother, "I must have plays that I can take my
+daughters to see."
+
+"Quite so, my dear ma'am, and so you shall. But do you let your daughters
+read the Bible? The great realities of life are there handled in a far
+plainer and more outrageous way than they are ever handled on the English
+stage, and yet I cannot bring myself to think that the Bible has had a
+corrupt influence on the youth of our nation. Do you let them read
+Shakespeare? Again there is the freest handling of all these subjects, and
+again I cannot think that Shakespeare is a corrupter of English youth."
+
+The question of verbal indecency or grossness has really very little to do
+with the matter. A few centuries ago English gentlewomen habitually used
+words and spoke of matters in a way that would be considered disgusting in
+a smoking-room to-day. We may be very glad to have outgrown the verbal
+coarseness of former generations. But we are not on that account to plume
+ourselves on being the more moral. It is a matter of taste and custom, not
+of morality.
+
+The real knot of the question is in the method of treating the great
+passions of humanity. If the English public sticks to its present decision
+that these passions are not to be handled at all, then no drama is
+possible. We shall continue our revels of wax dolls, and our theatres will
+provide entertainments, not drama. I do not shut my eyes to the fact that
+many of the greatest concerns of human life lie, to a great extent,
+outside the sexual question; and many great plays have been, and can be,
+written without touching upon these matters at all. But the general public
+will have none of them. The general public demands a love-story, and
+insists that it shall be the main interest of the play. And every English
+playwright knows that to offer the public a pure love-story is the surest
+way of winning a popular success. He knows that if he treats of unlawful
+love he imperils his chances and tends to drive away whole classes--one
+may say, the great majority of playgoers.
+
+"Then why be so foolish as to do it?" is the obvious reply.
+
+The dramatist has no choice. He is as helpless as Balaam, and can as
+little tune his prophesying to a foregone pleasing issue. A certain story
+presents itself to him, forces itself upon him, takes shape and coherence
+in his mind, becomes organic. The story comes automatically, grows
+naturally and spontaneously from what he has observed and experienced in
+the world around him, and he cannot alter its drift or reverse its
+significance without murdering his artistic instincts and impulses, and
+making his play a dead, mechanical thing. There are many stories which
+treat of pure love thwarted and baffled and at last rewarded. I do not say
+that these stories may not be quite as worth telling as the others. But
+from the nature of the case, the course of a lawful love, though it may
+not run altogether smooth, does not offer the same tremendous
+opportunities to the dramatist. In affairs of love, as in those of war,
+happy are they who have no history! Almost all the great love-stories of
+the world have been stories of unlawful love, and almost all the great
+plays of the world are built round stories of unlawful love. David and
+Bathsheba, "the tale of Troy divine," Agamemnon, OEdipus, Phædra,
+Tristram and Iseult, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Abelard and Heloïse,
+Paolo and Francesca, Faust and Margaret, Burns and his Scotch lassies,
+Nelson and Lady Hamilton--what have they to do with wax-doll morality?
+What has wax-doll morality to do with them?
+
+I know the question is a difficult one. Much may be said for the French
+custom of keeping young girls altogether away from the theatre. I believe
+Dumas _fils_ did not allow his daughter to see any of his plays before she
+was married--a fact that reminds one of Mr. Brooke's delightful suggestion
+to Casaubon--"Get Dorothea to read you light things--Smollett--_Roderick
+Random_, _Humphrey Clinker_. They're a little broad, but _she may read
+anything now she's married_, you know."
+
+But whatever liberty may for the future be allowed to the dramatist or to
+his hearers, I am sure that no play which came from any English author of
+repute during the years included in M. Filon's survey could work in any
+girl's mind so much mischief as must be done by the constant trickle of
+little cheap cockney indecencies and suggestions which make the staple of
+entertainment at some of our theatres. But, as I have said, it is only the
+serious dramatist who in the present state of public feeling can be called
+to account for immoral teaching.
+
+I have strayed far from my immediate subject. But if I have written
+anything that cannot be considered appropriate as a preface to M. Filon's
+book, I hope it may be accepted as a supplement. At the time M. Filon
+wrote, the English drama was a force in the land, and had the promise of a
+long and vigorous future. Now those who were leading it stand, for the
+moment, defeated and discredited before their countrymen. But the movement
+is not killed. It is only scotched. The English drama will always have
+immortal longings and aspirations, though we may not be chosen to satisfy
+them.
+
+Meantime, one cannot help casting wishful eyes to France, and thinking in
+how different a manner we should have been received by the countrymen of
+M. Filon, with their alert dramatic instinct, their cultivated dramatic
+intelligence, their responsiveness to the best that the drama has to offer
+them. France would not have misunderstood us. France would not have
+treated us in the spirit of Bumble. France would not have mistaken the
+men who were sweating to put a little life into her national drama, for a
+set of gloomy corrupters of youth. France would not have bound and gagged
+us and handed us over to the Philistines.
+
+M. Filon has done us a kindness in bringing us for a moment before the
+eyes of Europe. He will have done us a far greater kindness if the English
+edition of his book helps our own countrymen to form a juster opinion of
+those who, in the face of recent discouragement and misrepresentation,
+who, with many faults and blunders and deficiencies, have yet struggled to
+make the English drama a real living art, an intellectual product worthy
+of a great nation.
+
+HENRY ARTHUR JONES.
+
+
+
+
+AUTHOR'S PREFACE
+
+
+The French public has heard a great deal about modern English poets,
+novelists, statesmen, and philosophers. What is the reason that it hears
+nothing, or next to nothing, about the English drama? Your first impulse
+is, perhaps, to make answer--"Because there is no such thing!" A
+conclusive reason, and one dispensing with the need of any other, were it
+true. But is it true? As it seems to me, it was true some thirty years
+ago, but is true no longer.
+
+And, indeed, were there no English drama at the moment at which I write,
+this in itself would be a phenomenon well worth studying, a problem that
+it would be interesting to solve. The understanding of the miscarriages of
+the mind, of the ineffectual but not wholly vain endeavours, the
+frustrated efforts of Life, contains for the critic, just as it does for
+the follower of any other science, the most fruitful of lessons, the most
+strangely suggestive of all spectacles. Were there no English drama, we
+should have to seek for the reasons--psychological, social, æsthetic--why
+the Anglo-Saxon race, which produced a Shakespeare at a time when it
+counted a bare three millions and covered a mere patch of ground, should
+now be able to produce but clowns and dancers, when it is forty times as
+numerous, and has spread itself throughout the world.
+
+But, as a matter of fact, these premises would be false. There _is_ an
+English drama. The demand for it has been felt, and the supply is
+forthcoming. Or, rather, it has come. It is a strenuous youngster,
+determined to keep alive, bearing up pluckily, if with trouble, against
+all the maladies of childhood, against the dangers of evil influences--the
+brutal roughness of some, and the undue tenderness of others. Its growth
+is slow and laborious; it recalls in no way that marvellous development of
+the early drama, which, towards the end of the sixteenth century, passed
+almost in a breath from the hesitating and halting speech of youth into
+the rich utterance of full maturity. Here we still see doubt, uncertainty,
+confusion. The struggle slackens at times. Improvement is followed by
+lamentable relapse. But there the drama is; it is alive, and it is
+growing.
+
+Ten or a dozen years ago, it was hard to say whether the drama was in
+process of decline or of renascence, whether there was to be an end of it,
+or a new beginning. There were many even among the critics who raised
+their eyes in sorrow to heaven, and spoke of the drama as one speaks of
+the dear departed. And they talked of the past as of a golden age--"the
+palmy days, the halcyon days."
+
+To-day, these pessimists are non-existent. Their place has been taken, it
+is true, by those intolerable carpers who, in every generation, would
+prevent youth from daring, regardless of the fact that youth's chief
+business is to dare. But these good people remain unheeded. Everyone is
+agreed that to-day is better than yesterday; and almost everyone, that
+to-morrow will be better than to-day. Twenty or thirty years ago, the
+dozen theatres of London were almost always empty; there are now three
+times as many, almost always full. The actors, then, were for the most
+part mere clowns; they are artists now. Then, some of the best of them had
+little more than a bare sustenance; now, there are some of the second rank
+who have their house in town and their house in the country. About 1835, a
+well-known author was glad to sell a drama to Frederick Yates, manager of
+the Adelphi, for the sum of £70, _plus_ £10 for provincial rights. In
+1884, a successful play (that had not yet exhausted its popularity)
+brought its author £10,000 within a few months, of which £3000 came from
+the provinces, and to which America and Australia had also contributed.
+This is a very sordid aspect of the case, but a very important one.
+£10,000 to an author must prove as effectual an incentive to the modern
+English author, as did a _coup d'oeil de Louis_ to the French dramatist
+in the reign of the Grand Monarque. Such profits should serve to encourage
+talent, if it be beyond them to generate genius.
+
+It is not difficult to find the real reason why the French public is kept
+so little and so ill informed as to the present prospects of the English
+drama. To read Lord Salisbury's latest speech, all one has to do is to buy
+a paper. One need but go to a bookseller to procure for oneself a volume
+of Swinburne's poems, or a novel by Stevenson, or a work by Lecky or
+Herbert Spencer. It is different with plays. From motives commercial
+rather than literary, it has been the custom not to print these until long
+after their production, and I could instance really popular dramas of
+twenty or forty years ago which have never yet been published. It is
+necessary, therefore, in order to study the drama, to become a regular
+frequenter of the theatre; or rather, it is necessary to have followed its
+course for a number of years in order to note, season by season, the
+changes it has been undergoing, the tendencies which have been developing,
+the growth or disappearance of foreign influences, and, finally, the
+course of each individual talent and of the taste of the public. This
+study, direct from nature--from the life--is not without difficulty, even
+to Englishmen; how much less easy must it be to a Frenchman? Ever since it
+has become the business of an actor, not merely to recite and declaim, but
+to reproduce faithfully life itself, how many small points must escape the
+ear of a foreigner?
+
+And if it be hard to say where the drama now stands, to foresee whither it
+is going, it is still harder to ascertain whence it has come. You expect
+from a critic, and quite properly, not merely a snapshot of a literary
+movement at a certain specified moment, but some record also of its
+process of formation. Affairs in England, even more than elsewhere,
+require to be thus approached by the historical method. There is no
+understanding what they are until you have learned what they have been. In
+the present instance, before examining the resuscitated drama, it is
+necessary to see of what it died, and how long it remained entombed. All
+this has to be found out for oneself. The critics of the preceding
+generations wasted their energies upon inessential details. Theatrical
+"Reminiscences" are crowded with fictitious anecdotes. This department of
+history is like a garden that has been neglected and grown wild; the
+pathways are lost to sight.
+
+I have believed--fondly, perhaps--that, by my special opportunities, I
+should escape some of these difficulties. I have resided long in England.
+I know something of its people and its customs. I know how much value to
+attach to individual testimonies, aided as I am by the thousand opinions
+and feelings which are in the air, so to speak, but which find their way
+never into print. I get the impressions of the public from the public
+itself. Lastly, I love the theatre, and have been an enthusiastic
+playgoer. During the last three or four years more especially I have seen
+all the new pieces; and I may perhaps take this opportunity of expressing
+my appreciation of the courtesy so kindly extended to me in this
+connection by the principal managers. I may mention, among those to whom I
+am most indebted, Mr. Tree, Mr. Hare, Mr. Wyndham, Mr. Alexander, and Mr.
+Comyns Carr, the talented dramatist who, in his _King Arthur_, provided
+Sir Henry Irving with the opportunity of rendering a last homage to the
+genius of Tennyson. Indeed, I have met with wide-open doors and
+outstretched hands wherever I have sought assistance in theatrical
+circles. Many authors have been good enough to place at my disposal copies
+of their works which had been printed only for their own use, or for that
+of their interpreters upon the stage.
+
+But my greatest debt, of course, is to contemporary critics. After having
+first assisted me in my studies, they have done me the further kindness of
+encouraging me with their sympathy upon the publication of the successive
+instalments of my work in the pages of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. Their
+mere attention had been a reward; their kindly approval was more than I
+had hoped for. I trust they will be able to accord the same indulgent
+reception to my book, now that it is complete, and that the spirit and
+feelings which have actuated me in my work will be more fully apparent.
+
+I owe a special acknowledgment to Mr. William Archer. You will see in the
+course of my book the part which he has played and is still playing, the
+excellent seeds which he has sown broadcast, not all of which have yet
+borne fruit. Here, I shall say only that, had I not had his books as a
+guiding thread, I should have hardly ventured to risk myself in the
+labyrinth of theatrical history.
+
+There are, in the England of to-day, two schools of dramatic criticism,
+whose divergence of opinion is clearly marked. They are called "New
+Critics" and "Old Critics," though accidents of date or age are hardly at
+all accountable for their antagonisms; it is possible that during the next
+few years the old criticism may become rejuvenated and that the new
+criticism may age. For my part, I have sided with neither the one nor the
+other, because the rôle of neutral is best suited to a foreigner. I have
+supplemented my own personal impressions by quotations, taken impartially
+from both camps, of what has struck me in their criticisms as noteworthy,
+or happy, or true. I think that the new school is right in wishing to free
+the English theatre from foreign influences, and in its efforts to give
+the drama a moral value and an ideal. But I think the old school is not
+far wrong when it defends, to a certain extent, the more popular forms of
+dramatic art, and when it would have the drama follow the indications of
+success, and not isolate itself from that public of whose feelings it
+should be the living expression.
+
+One word in conclusion. Among the French critics who have done me the
+honour of discussing my work during its serial publication, more than one
+has come to the conclusion that, after all, these new English dramas were
+not such great affairs, and that it was hardly worth while to make so
+much fuss about them. They forget, these good people, that I promised them
+no marvels; I did not invite them to a display of masterpieces. If there
+are to be masterpieces at all, they will be of to-morrow, not to-day. What
+I have set out to do is to ascertain at what temperature the drama comes
+to flower, to see how a great section of the human race sets about making
+to itself a new vehicle of enjoyment, of emotion, of thought, and, I may
+even add, of moral education. It is an essay in literary history, but also
+in social history. The two things go together,--are, indeed, henceforth
+inseparable.
+
+I do not merely follow, step by step, the gradual transformation of the
+theatrical world; I have endeavoured to make clear the attitude taken up
+by the drama in presence of the crisis through which society has been
+passing during the last score or so of years. In this strange conflict
+between laws and manners, upon which side will the drama definitively take
+up its stand? What part will it play, and what place will it assume, in
+the renovation of England by the democracy? Will it help democracy with
+earnest homilies? Or check it with satire and ridicule? Or will it turn
+aside from such things altogether, and aspire to those serene heights of
+art, to which the noises of the plain can never reach? The secret of its
+downfall or glory lies perhaps in the answering of these questions. It was
+time to submit them, pending the hour of their solution.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+A Glance back--From 1820 to 1830--Kean and Macready--The Strolling
+Player--The Critics--Sheridan Knowles and _Virginius_--Douglas
+Jerrold--His Comedies--_The Rent Day_--_The Prisoner of War_--_Black-eyed
+Susan_--Collapse of the Privileged Theatres--Men of Letters come to the
+Rescue of the Drama--Bulwer Lytton--_The Lady of Lyons_--_Richelieu_--
+_Money_.
+
+
+From 1820 to 1830 the Theatre, or, to be precise, the theatres, prospered
+to all appearances exceedingly. We shall see just now the real
+significance of this prosperity; it may be compared to the great ball
+given by Mercadet on the eve of his bankruptcy. But no one foresaw the
+collapse that was impending. It was the reign of the Adonis of sixty, who
+had spent his life inventing pomades and breaking oaths. It would have
+been droll, indeed, had the man who washed his dirty linen in the House of
+Lords pretended to be scandalised by the licence of the stage. And his
+heir, also a worn-out man of pleasure, had lived for a time with an
+actress, Mrs. Jordan, who, before his accession to the throne, died of
+grief, and forsaken, at St. Cloud. The small girl named Victoria, who
+roamed at this time amongst the lonely avenues of the old park at
+Broadstairs, and who was destined presently to bring marital love and the
+domestic virtues back into fashion, was still engrossed in the minding of
+her dolls.
+
+The "privileged" theatres were frequented, or patronised,--to use the
+recognised English expression, with its savour of old-time
+condescension,--by Society. By the term "privileged," subventioned must
+not be understood. To Drury Lane and Covent Garden alone belonged the
+right of producing the legitimate drama, the plays of Shakespeare, that is
+to say, and of his successors. This was their "privilege," a privilege
+which might soon have become but a doubtful benefit had not great actors
+arisen to keep alive the classical drama by their command on the suffrages
+of the masses. The generation of actors who had studied in the school of
+Garrick, and had maintained its traditions, was taking its farewell of the
+stage in the person of John Kemble and Mrs. Siddons--Siddons, "whose
+voice," one of her contemporaries tells us, "was more delicious than the
+most delicious music." Edmund Kean had already come forward, and after
+him, Macready.
+
+I try to picture to myself these two men as they appeared upon the stage,
+to produce for myself from all the accounts of them that I have read the
+illusion of their living presence. The first thing that comes home to one
+is Kean's Bohemianism, Macready's respectability and good-breeding.
+Macready was the friend of the leading men of letters of his time, and had
+the advantage of their advice and support. Kean's only intimate was the
+brandy-bottle that killed him. Writing to Frederick Yates, the manager of
+the Adelphi, to ask him for a box, he says, "I don't want to herd with the
+mob. I like the money of the public, but the public itself I scorn." He in
+his turn might be looked upon with scorn, were it not for the sufferings
+of his childhood and youth. If ever man had the right to hate life, it was
+he.
+
+At Madame Tussaud's the two rivals may now be seen standing side by side,
+Kean wearing the kilt of Macbeth and Macready the chlamys of Coriolanus.
+Save for his small size, the former seems the better endowed by nature;
+his countenance is sombre and bears the stamp of the tragedian. The
+angular and wrinkled face of Macready, on the other hand,--his slitlike
+mouth, his close-compressed lips and projecting jaws,--might have made the
+fortune of a clown. He had only to emphasise or modify its effects,
+indeed, for his tragic qualities to become comic. It was thus that he
+rendered so admirably the officiousness and fussiness of Oakley, the sly
+sensuality of Joseph Surface, the English Tartufe. Alas! he evoked a smile
+sometimes as Othello; when the Moorish _condottiere_, this personification
+of a passionate, noble, and high-strung race, was lost in an insensate
+negro or, if Théophile Gautier were to be believed, something lower still,
+"an anthropoid ape."
+
+Contemporaries seem agreed in attributing to Kean more genius, more
+talent to Macready. But there are many occasions when talent serves better
+than genius. To see Kean, said Coleridge, was to read Shakespeare by
+flashes of lightning. It is a method which has its merits, but by it one
+misses a good deal. Kean had some wonderful moments, then relapsed into
+dulness and insignificance. He would stumble, like a schoolboy reciting a
+lesson which had no meaning for him, through the whole of the speech of
+the Moor of Venice before the Senate, "letting himself go" only in the
+last verse, in which his emotion on seeing Desdemona brought down the
+house. He concentrated a whole passion into these final words. It was
+always thus with him.
+
+I may say of them, following Mr. Archer: of the two, Kean was the greater
+actor and Macready the greater artist. Everything that pertained to
+instinct was stronger in the one, and everything that pertained to
+intellect was stronger in the other. Macready bore himself best in moods
+of calm, rendered with most effect the more virtuous emotions,--_moral_
+passions one may call them. All that was greatest in Shakespeare, the very
+soul of his poetry, was revealed through Kean. On one point only had
+Macready the advantage: he had a way of gazing into space when his lined
+and haggard countenance seemed to tell of the seeing of things invisible.
+There was no one like Macready for the suggestion of the supernatural. In
+all the other provinces of terror Kean was the real master.
+
+Mr. Wilton, the father of an actress of whom I shall have much to say in
+these pages, used to tell how in his youth, when he was still a young and
+unknown actor, he had had the honour of playing with Edmund Kean. They
+were rehearsing the scene in which Shylock, baulked of his coveted gain,
+rushes frantically upon the stage crying out for his prey.
+
+"Have you ever seen me in this before?" inquired the great actor of his
+humble colleague.
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Well, we must rehearse it then, otherwise you would be too much startled
+this evening."
+
+They went through it, and yet Wilton tells us that when the evening came,
+Kean terrified him so by the indescribable violence of his performance
+that he was within an ace of losing his head and fleeing from the stage as
+one might flee from the cage of a wild beast.
+
+It may be supposed from all this that Kean was in the habit of abandoning
+himself entirely to the inspiration of the moment. Now, inspiration upon
+the stage is almost a meaningless expression. In the very moments when the
+terrifying actor was crossing the stage like a madman, he was counting his
+steps. As for Macready, immediately before the great scene of Shylock he
+would work himself up into excitement, emitting every imaginable oath, and
+brandishing a heavy ladder until he panted actually for breath. Then he
+would rush down the stage, pallid, breathless, the sweat coursing down his
+face, the very picture of a man bursting with rage. The audience would
+have laughed rather than have shuddered had they seen the ladder!
+
+Macready's voice was so rich and so beautiful that it delighted even those
+who could not follow the meaning of the words which it gave forth. But he
+was too intelligent an actor to make use of it as a mere instrument of
+music. Until his time verses were chanted on the stage. He himself was
+content to declaim them. English dramatic verse consists of a succession
+of five iambics, which, by the alternation of short feet and long, results
+in a regular and cadenced rhythm. From time to time an imperfection, the
+deliberate introduction for instance of a trochee, or perhaps a redundant
+syllable added at the end of the verse, has the effect of breaking this
+monotony, but it recommences at once, and the mind relapses under its
+sway, just as a child is sent to sleep again by a lullaby. My foreign ear
+was long in taking to it, but at last I began to derive from its melody
+the same delight that the music of Greek and Latin verse had given me long
+before. This verse, so interesting and curious in its structure, seems to
+bear a certain secret affinity with the genius of the English race; the
+rhythm would seem to have been suggested by the clattering of a horse's
+hoofs, or by the murmuring of waves.
+
+It is, then, no easy matter to deal with it. Macready approached it
+reverentially, as was but fitting in a scholar and a devotee of
+Shakespeare. He wished to leave to it all its melody, its poetic beauty,
+but he wished at the same time to emphasise the most important words and
+to bring out the full force of their meaning. He wished to blend the pure
+classicism of John Kemble with the passion of Kean, and to add that
+tendency to realism which marked his own temperament, and which sometimes
+carried him too far; when as Macbeth he came back from Duncan's room, he
+looked, according to Lewes, like an Old Bailey ruffian.
+
+It is enough for me to have shown that Macready, like many others in
+different parts of Europe in 1825, was prepared for a drama that should be
+in closer touch with life. In France, Romanticism came to turn aside and
+check the movement. In England, there came absolutely nothing.
+
+But the bankruptcy of the new school was still far off, and the literary
+atmosphere was charged with warlike sounds at the time when Macready made
+his appearance in France, with an English company, in the course of the
+year 1827. He was received as a missionary. He had come to preach
+Shakespeare to a tribe of poor "ignoramuses," whom their fathers had
+taught to worship the idols of Lemierre and Luce de Lancival, but who were
+now anxious to be converted. The young "leading lady" was a Miss Smithson,
+whose Irish accent clashed somewhat with the verse of Shakespeare. The
+Parisians thought she had talent, and lost their hearts to "la belle
+Smidson."[1] In London she was a joke. It is certain, however, that these
+performances revealed to him who was to be the only true dramatist of the
+romantic school--to Alexandre Dumas--the secret of a new art; that they
+made an epoch, therefore, in our literary history, and that they affixed
+the seal to the reputation of the English tragedian.
+
+Over and above the privileged theatres, there were a number of others,
+such as the Haymarket and the Adelphi, at which farces and melodramas were
+chiefly given. In the provinces there prevailed a curious system, without
+any analogue, so far as I know, in France, that of going on circuit,--a
+term borrowed, like the system itself, from the language and customs of
+the law. Just as the English judges make the round at certain dates of all
+the important towns within a certain district, holding assizes at each,
+and accompanied by an army of barristers, solicitors, and legal officials
+of all kinds, so the travelling companies of actors would cater for a
+whole county, or group of counties, giving a series of performances in the
+theatre of every town at certain fixed dates, in addition to fête-days and
+market-days. Communication was slow and costly in those days, and trips to
+London infinitely rarer than they are now. The country folk had to look to
+their travelling company to keep them in touch with the successes of the
+moment.
+
+On arriving in a new town, the manager's wife would go about soliciting
+respectfully the patronage of the ladies of the place. The manager busied
+himself over everything, played minor rôles, presided over the box-office,
+undertook the scene painting, and would even take off his coat and turn up
+his sleeves and lend a hand to the machinist. His life, and the life of
+all his company, was half _bourgeois_, half Bohemian; always _en route_,
+but always on the same beat, always coming upon familiar and friendly
+faces,--a beat on which his father and grandfather before him had followed
+the same career. He had friends living in every city, dead friends in
+every churchyard. Children were born to him on his travels, and when four
+or five years old made their appearance upon the stage. These comings and
+goings, the journeyings over green fields, the stoppages and ample
+breakfastings at little hillside inns, while the horses browsed at large
+along the hedges,--the freshness and peaceful rusticity of all these
+things, alternating with the tinsel of the theatre and the applause of the
+audiences, with the artificiality and feverishness of theatrical
+life,--must have been a constant entertainment to the little actors and
+actresses of eight or nine. For the adults, however, the life was a hard
+one, and only too often their _roman comique_ was a _roman tragique_ in
+reality.
+
+The public of these small towns wanted, on their part, to know something
+of what went on behind the scenes. Sides were taken on the subject of the
+actor's life, and hot discussions were called forth. Idle pens took to
+writing pamphlets for or against individual actors, and these had to
+defend themselves as best they might against their malignant inquisitors,
+using their booths as pulpits for the purpose. Here, for instance, is an
+incident that occurred one evening in a Northern town after the curtain
+had been raised for _Antony and Cleopatra_. The _jeune premier_ comes
+forward to the footlights, and takes the hand of one of the leading
+actresses with the stiff, staid courtliness of former days, and the
+following dialogue is exchanged between them:--
+
+"Have I ever been guilty of any injustice of any kind to you since you
+have been in the theatre?"
+
+"No, sir" (she replies).
+
+"Have I ever behaved to you in an ungentlemanlike manner?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Have I ever kicked you?"
+
+"Oh, no! sir!"
+
+The audience applauds. Antony and Cleopatra assume their correct attitudes
+and (this prologue to Shakespeare successfully performed) proceed with
+their rôles.[2]
+
+From time to time a great artist came forth, after three or four
+generations of mediocrities, from one of these theatrical nurseries. The
+others remained tied to their stake, revolving ceaselessly within the
+orbit of their chain. For them there was no question of glory or fortune.
+They lived simply and happily, if only they came to the end of the year
+without having gone to prison, and if only at the end of their life they
+saw their children growing up and getting educated. Their courage they
+derived in part from the bottle, in part from religion. A correspondence
+which has come to light through an unforeseen chance (a grandson who had
+become famous) revivifies for us the actor-manager on circuit. He is a
+good fellow, but a trifle sententious. He quotes from the works of his
+authors, tragic and comic (he has them at his finger-ends) axioms upon all
+the incidents and experiences of life. He quotes them just as Nehemiah
+Wallington or Colonel Hutchinson used to quote the Bible. He is as easily
+excited and as easily calmed as a child. A storm troubles him as a bad
+omen. A rainbow smiles on him as a promise. Providence may be trusted, he
+believes, to look after the takings of poor players. He is the Vicar of
+Wakefield become _père noble_.
+
+Neither in this monotonous and easy-going phase of life, nor in the
+theatrical world of London, had anyone any idea of modifying the forms or
+the tendencies of the stage. Those whose duty it should have been to give
+the necessary impulse did not seem even to suspect that there was any such
+work for them to perform. The critics of the time, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt,
+Charles Lamb, have achieved a permanent place in literature. And yet when
+one reads them one is disappointed. Except for a few pages of Lamb, one
+may look to them in vain for the expression of anything like a general
+idea. They are taken up almost altogether in discussing and comparing the
+different actors. It does not occur to them to attempt an appreciation or
+a classification of the plays, for these plays had already been
+definitively classified and pronounced upon. There was no drama, they
+seemed to think, except that of Shakespeare and his satellites; and as for
+comedy, it had said its last word when Goldsmith and Sheridan died. And
+they were quite content that this should be so. They saw no reason why
+they, their successors, and the general public, should not continue until
+the end of time to carp over an entry of Macbeth or an exit of
+Othello!--or why they should not sit out revivals without end of _The
+School for Scandal_ or _She Stoops to Conquer_. There are eras which will
+have novelties at all cost, and eras which cling to antiquity.
+
+Macready, with the instinct of a "realistic" and "modern" actor, kept on
+the lookout for authors. A former Irish schoolmaster, who also had been an
+actor, and whose name was Sheridan Knowles, brought him a tragedy entitled
+_Virginius_ which he had written in three months. He made a good deal of
+this point, never having read, probably, the scene of the sonnet of
+Oronte. The piece was put into rehearsal and played at Covent Garden in
+the spring of 1820. Reynolds introduced the unknown author to the public
+in a carefully-written prologue. In it he ridiculed the drama of the
+period, which he described as "stories"--
+
+  "... piled with dark and cumbrous fate,
+  And words that stagger under their own weight."
+
+He promised to return to Truth and Nature, the invariable programme of all
+attempts at reforming the drama. And as a matter of fact, _Virginius_
+might be accepted in a certain sense as a return to Truth and Nature. It
+belonged to what we were going to call in France, twenty-five years later,
+the School of Common Sense. Or if one prefers to look back instead of
+forward, one might say that in it the rules of Diderot and Sedaine's
+_Drame Bourgeois_ seem to have been transferred to Roman tragedy. The
+piece, like the plays of Shakespeare, was partly in verse and partly in
+prose, but the verse was little more, really, than metrical prose. The
+plot developed clearly and logically with a scrupulous observance of the
+probable and natural. The heroine (one smiles at having to describe her by
+so grand a name) is for all the world a little _pensionnaire_ who might
+have got her ideas on rectitude from Miss Edgeworth. She occupies herself
+with her needle in working together her initials and those of the young
+man of her choice, who is no other than the tribune Icilius. It is this
+piece of embroidery which reveals her secret. "My father is incensed with
+you," she says to Icilius, and, her lover becoming impassioned, she covers
+her face with her hands, saying (as is correct at such a juncture), "Leave
+me, leave me!" He does not obey, and the author, not knowing how else to
+prolong the scene, has recourse to high-sounding language.... "Thou dost
+but beggar me, Icilius," exclaims Virginia, "when thou makest thyself a
+bankrupt." And Icilius replies, ... "My sweet Virginia, we do but lose and
+lose, and win and win, playing for nothing but to lose and win. Then let
+us drop the game--and thus I stop it," and he stops it by seizing her in
+his arms.
+
+In the scene in which the client of Appius attempts to possess himself of
+her, Virginia remains absolutely mute. She is mute also in the great scene
+of the judgment, and she seems, moreover, to have understood nothing of
+what has been happening, for she asks her father if he is going to take
+her home. From the angels and furies of Shakespeare and Corneille we have
+come down to a virtuous idiot, and are told that this is a return to
+Nature.
+
+Virginius is an excellent father, a liberal-minded member of the middle
+class, interesting himself in politics. He knows his rights and does not
+stand in awe of the ministers. He reminds one of the city man who returns
+home to his comfortable residence in Chiswick or Hampstead after his day's
+work in his Leadenhall Street office. He is a widower, but his house is
+looked after by a very respectable elderly person, in whose excellent
+sentiments and weak intelligence we recognise a housekeeper of the
+superior type. The whole household is tranquil, well behaved,
+Christian,--I might even say, Puritan.
+
+Doubtless the Romans of the republic were men like ourselves, but a true
+picture of their humanity should reveal characteristics different from
+ours. The author should either have sought out these characteristics, or
+else have restricted himself to that sphere of great passions and heroic
+madnesses in which all the centuries meet on common ground. One is
+obliged, however unwillingly, to admit the impossibility of retrospective
+realism.
+
+When Virginius returns from the camp to defend his child, he gazes on her
+long, and tells her he had never seen her look so like her mother--
+
+  "... It was her soul, ... her soul that played just then
+  About the features of her child, and lit them
+  Into the likeness of her own. When first
+  She placed thee in my arms--I recollect it
+  As a thing of yesterday!--she wished, she said,
+  That it had been a man. I answered her,
+  It was the mother of a race of men;
+  And paid her for thee with a kiss."...
+
+There is something at once virile and moving in this passage, but how many
+such cases are to be found in this tragedy? The paternal emotion of
+Virginius prepares us but ill for the heroic crime which he is to commit.
+There is the same contrast between the antiquity of the events and the
+modernness of the characters.
+
+But the ruin of the piece was the fifth act. Virginia dead, it remains
+only to punish Appius according to the good old laws of tragic justice.
+For that, a single moment and a single gesture had been enough. Sheridan
+Knowles was in the position of being obliged to write his fifth act and
+having nothing to put into it. He had recourse to a mad scene. Merimée has
+written that "_il faut laisser aux débutants les foux et les chiens_."
+This doctrine has Homer and Shakespeare against it. On the other hand, the
+example of Sheridan Knowles proves that the recourse to madness will not
+always get the beginner out of his difficulty.
+
+Virginius has succeeded in making his way into Appius's prison--
+
+  "How if I thrust my hand into your breast,
+  And tore your heart out, and confronted it
+  With your tongue. I'd like it. Shall we try it?"
+
+When the old centurion plunged his hands into the robes of the _decemvir_,
+as though he expected to find Virginia in his pocket, and when Appius,
+horrified at finding himself "caged with a madman," appealed for help with
+all the strength of his lungs whilst calling out to his assailant, "Keep
+down your hands! Help! Help!"--I cannot imagine how the spectators of 1820
+can have refrained from laughter. The two men quitted the scene fighting,
+and turned up again in another room,--for the prison was a veritable suite
+of rooms. Having killed Appius, the old man grew calm, and Icilius had
+but to call him by his name to bring back to him his reason. He slipped a
+small urn into his hands. "What is this?" asks Virginius. "That is
+Virginia." And the curtain fell.
+
+Contemporary critics admitted that the last act was somewhat weak. It was
+curtailed, but delete it as one would, it was still too long. Had it been
+reduced to ten lines, these ten lines had been ten lines too much.
+
+In spite of everything, however, _Virginius_, by Macready's help, remained
+a masterpiece for twenty-five years! Knowles made haste to produce some
+more. He tells in one of his naïve prefaces, how he went to stop with his
+friend, Mr. Robert Dick, near an Irish lough known for its scenery and its
+fish, how he would spend the morning at his composition and the afternoon
+angling, and how his host would snatch his fishing line from his hands
+whenever he caught him using it before midday.... If only Mr. Dick had let
+him fish in peace! The trout he might have hooked had been at least as
+valuable as his verse and prose.
+
+If there was any sort of foreshadowing of a national drama in the years
+1830 to 1840, it must be sought for in the works of Douglas Jerrold.
+France knows little of Jerrold, who knew France so well. His was a valiant
+little soul; his life was one long battle--a battle against obscurity,
+against ill luck, against the enemies of his country, against the
+oppressors of the poor, last but not least, against all those whom he
+disliked. He belonged to that theatrical world at which I have glanced. He
+was the son of a provincial manager who had met with failure. In his early
+youth, while yet a child, one may say, he served as midshipman in the wars
+against Napoleon. He became a journalist later, and threw himself into the
+midst of politics. Whatever may be said of his caustic and aggressive
+temperament, he belonged, every inch of him, to that noble generation
+which aspired so fervently after better things, which strove so
+strenuously for what was right, which believed it could help humanity
+forward on the way to a progress without bounds. For forty years he
+vibrated with generous passions, and grew calm only in the presence of
+death, which he met like a stoic but with a simplicity not all the stoics
+knew. I have been brought into intimate relations with his son, who has
+repeated to me his last words--"This is as it should be." To fight for
+justice and to accept the inevitable without fear,--this was the life of a
+man.
+
+_The Rent Day_ was played on January 25, 1832, that is to say, at the
+commencement of the memorable year which was to see the passing of the
+Reform Bill. It is the day upon which the rents have become due. The
+tenants have brought their money. There is drinking and laughing and
+singing, the while the heaps of crowns are exchanged for receipts,--for
+nothing was accomplished in England in those days without drinking, and
+on rent day it had been almost a disgrace not to be at least "well on."
+The middleman is presiding over the function. This morning he has received
+a letter from the young squire, thus expressed--"Master Crumbs, use all
+despatch, and send me, on receipt of this, five hundred pounds. Cards have
+tricked me and the devil cogged the dice. Get the money at all costs, and
+quickly.--ROBERT GRANTLEY." The middleman therefore must have no pity.
+There is one farmer who cannot pay; his brother the schoolmaster comes to
+plead for him. He himself is too poor to lend--
+
+    _Toby_ (the schoolmaster): "My goods and chattels are a volume of
+    _Robinson Crusoe_, ditto _Pilgrim's Progress_, with Plutarch's
+    _Morals_, much like the morals of many other people--a good deal dog's
+    eared."...
+
+    _Crumbs_: "Has your brother no one to speak for him?"
+
+    _Toby_: "Now, I think on't, yes. There are two."
+
+    _Crumbs_: "Where shall I find them?"
+
+    _Toby_: "In the churchyard. Go to the graves of the old men, and there
+    are the words the dead will say to you:--'We lived sixty years in
+    Holly Farm; in all that time we never begged an hour of the squire; we
+    paid rent, tax, and tithe; we earned our bread with our own hands, and
+    owed no man a penny when laid down here. Well, then, will you be hard
+    on young Heywood; will ye press upon our child, our poor Martin, when
+    murrain has come upon his cattle and blight fallen upon his corn?'
+    This is what they will say."
+
+The middleman is not one to be moved by the supplications of the
+schoolmaster. He replies monotonously, inexorably--"My accounts; I must
+settle my accounts!" Grouped round him, farther back, are the instruments
+of his lowly tyrant, the beadle (for whom a young writer now hidden from
+the public eye in the gallery of the House of Commons, Charles Dickens,
+has in store so terrible a cudgelling) and the appraiser. In those days it
+was the beadle's function to execute evictions for the benefit of young
+squires who had lost at cards. The first act of _The Rent Day_ concludes
+with a spectacle of this kind. We witness the seizing of the peasant's bed
+and of all his furniture, down to a bird-cage and the children's toys. The
+scene follows its course; entreaties, curses, threats, then silence and
+desolation. It was thus that the social question was submitted. Had we
+been there, and in our twentieth year,--you and I who have to contest
+against the grandsons of the victims, become in their turn
+slave-drivers,--we should have joined with the rest of the pit in cheering
+Jerrold.
+
+The first act gives promise of a vigorous comedy of manners, but we sink
+gradually into a dense melodrama crowded with absurd incidents and
+extravagant surprises. Was this Jerrold's fault, or that of a public which
+insisted upon monster jokes and monster crimes? I am inclined to adopt
+the latter explanation, for supply is regulated by demand; a mercantile
+axiom which resolves itself in a great natural and highly scientific law.
+
+Jerrold could achieve a light and realistic touch at need, and he has
+given proof of it in _A Prisoner of War_. The scene is laid in France
+shortly after the rupture of the Treaty of Amiens. Quite impartially, and
+with consummate wit, Jerrold holds up to ridicule the _chauvinisme_ of the
+two nations. He does not confound bombast with valour. "Soldiers," says
+one character, "should die and civilians lie for their country." We are
+shown--and this has some historical value--the English prisoners living
+comfortably in a French town, frequenting the Café Imperial, regaling
+themselves on the bulletins of the "Grande Armée," with no other
+obligation than that of answering the roll-call morning and evening. They
+have money, for the lodging-house keepers compete for their favour; and
+they pay little French boys to sing "Rule Britannia." As it seems to me,
+if Garneray's Memoirs are to be believed, our compatriots were hardly so
+well off on the English hulks.
+
+But what strikes me most in _A Prisoner of War_ is one really ingenious
+and moving scene. It is the evening. An old officer, a prisoner, has
+remained late over a game of cards with a comrade. Meantime his daughter
+Clary has a man in her bedroom. Don't be alarmed--the man is her husband.
+A secret marriage is always introduced in English plays wherever a
+seduction is to be found in ours. Suddenly Clary is called out to, loudly,
+by her father. She imagines herself found out, and arrives quite pallid.
+What had she been doing? her father asks. How was it she had a light still
+in her window? So she had been reading, eh? Still reading--always reading.
+And what had she been reading? Novels! As though there weren't enough real
+tears in the world--real, scalding, bitter tears from breaking hearts--but
+we must have a parcel of lying books to make people cry double! And what
+was this silly novel of hers? Clary doesn't know what to answer, and
+begins telling her own story--the youth of no family and fortune, the
+moment of recklessness, the giving of her heart to him and then her hand.
+"Well, and how did it end?" asks the old officer. Clary had "not come to
+the end"! Ah, then (he resumes), she had turned down the page when he had
+interrupted her? But he could tell her how it ended. The young couple went
+upon their knees, and the father swore a little, then took out his pocket
+handkerchief, wiped his eyes, and forgave them.
+
+At this Clary's face lights up with hope. So that would be the ending,
+according to him! He could assure her of it? Yes, he replies, he could
+assure her of it. She is on the point of falling upon her knees. Behind
+the half-open door, behind which there glimmers the light of a candle, her
+lover waits, ready to rush forward upon a word from her. "Of course, in
+real life it would be quite another thing," goes on her father. "If it
+were I, what would you do?" "I'd kill him like a dog. And as for you--But
+there, it's too horrible to think of! Let's talk of something else." And
+he tells her he has found a husband for her. Naturally she protests. The
+old man goes off again into a fury. "These cursed novels are turning your
+head. I shall go and burn them this instant." And he steps towards the
+door, behind which Clary's lover stands trembling.
+
+All this is old-fashioned enough; it dates from the time when the drama
+was made out of the materials of a vaudeville. And yet I think that even
+nowadays this scene would tell.
+
+But once again Jerrold had to follow the public taste which led him so
+terribly astray. His greatest success was his worst production,
+_Black-eyed Susan_, the popularity of which does not appear to have been
+even yet exhausted. The hero is a sailor, who translates the simplest
+ideas into nautical phraseology; the heroine a woman of humble birth, who
+expresses the loftiest sentiments in the finest language. The prolonged
+success of such a piece shows the delight which the lower sections of the
+public derive from the extravagant and the absurd,--the gross idealism, as
+one may call it, of the masses.
+
+It is more difficult to understand how Jerrold, who had some regard for
+realism, and who had himself served on the sea, could have brought himself
+to write a drama which had in it not a semblance of truth, not a touch of
+nature. In spite of all, however, even in _Black-eyed Susan_, one may find
+that unrestrained violence, that _diable au corps_, which our fathers
+accepted willingly as passion.
+
+It was not the public taste alone that was at fault; from the year 1830
+the commercial decadence of the English theatre became more and more
+marked. As often happens, contemporaries failed to appreciate the real
+meaning of this, and attributed it to accidental causes; amongst others,
+to the rivalry between Drury Lane and Covent Garden, a rivalry which was
+carried to absurd extremes under some of the managers, who bid against
+each other, both for plays and players, to an extent that ruined them.
+Then came the notion of ending this dangerous competition by uniting the
+two houses under the same management, but the enterprise proved too big
+for one man and for a single company. The separate existence had to come
+into force again. A certain Captain Polhill, who aspired to the rôle of a
+Mæcenas, lost fifty thousand pounds in two years over the management of
+Drury Lane. Then Macready in his turn had a try, and managed the two
+theatres successively from 1838 to 1843.
+
+The privileged theatres were no longer living on their privilege; they
+were dying of it. Theatres were springing up all round them, which
+succeeded sometimes in drawing the public by strange means. Edmund Yates,
+whose father was then manager of the Adelphi, has given us in his memoirs
+some idea of the attractions then in vogue: a Chinese giant, Indian
+dancers, a legless acrobat who got himself up with spreading wings as a
+monstrous fly, and who sprang about, tied on to a thread, from floor to
+ceiling. The privileged theatres had no other course than to emulate the
+unprivileged ones. They produced Shakespeare in the form of
+curtain-raisers, or to wind up the evening before half-empty benches. They
+sliced him, carved him limb from limb, and served him up in bits, or
+floating in a dish of music, with a garnishment of loud and vulgar _mise
+en scène_, of which the contemporaries of Elizabeth would have been
+ashamed. And, in spite of all, in spite even of Macready's talent (Kean
+had died in 1833), they could not get the public to accept him. The new
+public which filled the theatres was gluttonous rather than _gourmet_, and
+wanted not quality but quantity--at least six acts every evening, and
+sometimes even seven or eight. Masterful, clamorous, ill-bred, uncouth in
+its expression both of enjoyment and of dissatisfaction, its attitude
+astounded Price Puckler-Muskau, a very careful observer who visited
+England about the time. Macready acknowledges that there were some corners
+in Drury Lane where a respectable woman might not venture. The barbarians
+had begun to arrive; it was the first wave of democracy before which the
+_habitué_, the playgoer of the old school, was forced to flee.
+
+In 1832 a Commission was instituted by Parliament for the purpose of
+going into the question of liberty for the theatre. The members could not
+agree upon the subject, and the question was not settled until after
+eleven years of discussion. Before this ultimate surrender of Privilege
+and Tradition to the new spirit, one last effort had been made by men of
+letters to save the theatre. This was when the great tragedian undertook
+the management of Covent Garden. There was only one feeling in the world
+of literature: "We must back up Macready!" Everyone helped. John Forster
+applied himself to the stage management. Leigh Hunt left aside his
+criticisms to undertake a tragedy (based on a legend in which Shelley had
+already found inspiration), and those who could not do so much penned
+prologues and epilogues and brought them to Covent Garden, just as in
+former days, at moments of national peril, the patriotic rich brought
+their valuables to the Mint.[3]
+
+From this abortive renaissance there remain one reputation and three
+plays. The three plays are _The Lady of Lyons_, _Richelieu_, and _Money_;
+the reputation is that of Bulwer, the first Lord Lytton. Bulwer passed
+himself off as a _grand seigneur_ and a genius; he was really but a clever
+man and a dandy, who exploited literature for his social advancement. He
+affected a lofty originality, but his talents were mostly imitative. His
+chief gift, almost entirely wanting in his books, but very notable in his
+life, was what we call _finesse_. He took from the Byronian Satanism as
+much as England would put up with in 1840. He copied Victor Hugo secretly
+and discreetly. A sort of Gothic democrat, he managed at the same time to
+charm romantic youths and flatter the proletariat by pretending to hurl
+down that society in whose front rank he aspired to take his place. His
+novels were terribly long-winded, but there are generations which find
+such a quality to their taste. When at last it was discovered that his
+sublimity was a spurious sublimity, that his history was false history,
+his "middle-ages" bric-a-brac, his poetry mere rhetoric, his democracy a
+farce, his human heart a heart that had never beat in a man's breast, his
+books mere windy bladders,--why, it was too late! The game had been played
+successfully and was over--the squireen of Knebworth, the self-styled
+descendant of the Vikings, had founded a family and hooked a peerage.
+
+He had an eye for all the popular causes which were to be served--and were
+likely to be of service. When there was talk of reforming the drama, he at
+once came to the front and took the lead. He was the heart and soul of the
+Commission of 1832. He was one of those who came to the support of
+Macready in 1838. It was to this end he wrote _The Lady of Lyons_ (without
+putting his name to it at first).
+
+This is a literary melodrama; a detestable combination, for melodrama,
+considered either as a variation from drama proper or as a separate type,
+is not to be raised to the dignity of literature by the veneering of it
+with a thin layer of poetry. This operation does but produce wild and
+violent incongruities. In the first act of _The Lady of Lyons_, Madame
+Deschappelles is a Palais Royal _Maman_. Only a Palais Royal _Maman_, and
+only one of the most pronounced of them at that, could imagine she would
+become a dowager princess by marrying her daughter to a prince. Pauline
+belongs to the same repertory. What are one's feelings, then, on hearing
+tragic verses from her lips in the third act and seeing her compete with
+Imogene and Griselda in the sublimity (and absurdity) of her
+self-sacrifice! In the fourth act she has resumed something of her natural
+temperament--the temperament of a prim and tedious governess.
+
+But I suppose I must put up with Pauline Deschappelles willy-nilly! It is
+one of the accepted doctrines of the old dramatic psychology that a
+character can pass from good to evil at critical moments, and pass out
+again even when all egress is barred. It is an absurd notion, but if
+Bulwer conforms to it, at least he is in the same boat with many others.
+Where he is himself at fault--that which indicates the obliquity of his
+moral outlook--is his having presented to us in Claude Melnotte a hero who
+is a double-dyed cheat. A mere peasant by birth, he passes himself off as
+a prince and marries under his false name the daughter of a rich
+bourgeois; a soldier by profession, he becomes a general within two years,
+and in these two years amasses a fortune. How? By what methods of
+brigandage we are not told, but we are left to accept it as a matter of
+course. As regards the first point, love may perhaps be held to excuse the
+crime; as regards the second, no one seems ever to have raised any
+objection, and it has been left for me to state my difficulty. In a
+sufficiently disingenuous preface, Bulwer accounts for the incoherences
+and extravagances of his hero by the state of extraordinary excitement
+into which men's minds had been thrown by the French Revolution. This
+explanation has sufficed for the author's fellow-countrymen, and the
+Revolution has a broad back. But I am afraid that Bulwer was not clear in
+his mind as to the kind of madness to which Frenchmen were impelled by
+it,--and still more, that he has confounded our generals with our
+contractors. Our Desaix and our Ouvrards are not made of the same clay nor
+moulded in the same form; a fact as to which, unfortunately, he remained
+unenlightened.
+
+After having made his anonymity serve the purpose of an advertisement, the
+author consented to reveal his identity whilst announcing at the same time
+that _The Lady of Lyons_ would be a sole experiment. The very next year he
+appeared before the public with the tragedy of _Richelieu_, in which
+Macready played the principal rôle. This piece may be compared with the
+Cromwell of Victor Hugo. It was marked by the same mixture of tragedy and
+melodrama; the same display of historical documents and the same ignorance
+of what is essential in history; the same use of the lowest and the most
+eccentric expedients to raise a laugh or cause a shudder; the same
+superficial and crude psychology which in each character, male or female,
+great or small, reveals the personality of the author. Even when this
+author is a Victor Hugo it is bad enough! But when it is a Bulwer--!
+
+When he blended into one plot the _journée des Dupes_ and the conspiracy
+of the Duc de Bouillon, together with some features borrowed from the
+adventure of Cinq-Mars and De Thou, the author mingled together two
+periods which could not and should not be thus confounded, the beginning
+and the end of Richelieu's career.[4] He managed, too, to falsify English
+history as well, incidentally, by making Richelieu refer in Council to
+Cromwell, at that time a still obscure member of the House of Commons.
+Richelieu speaks of the antagonism between Charles and Oliver at a period
+when the latter is not even a captain of cavalry. But what is an
+anachronism of this kind compared to that which involves the principal
+character in one continued topsy-turveydom? It is the drawback both of the
+historical play and the historical novel, that they put the great figures
+of history before us in a form and in an attitude that their
+contemporaries could have never witnessed; confessing, describing,
+revealing themselves just to illustrate their character by their
+conversation, always dilating on their deeds instead of doing them. But of
+all the braggarts in theatrical history, Bulwer's Richelieu is the most
+vainglorious and the most intolerable. It is all very well for the author
+to say in his preface that the cardinal was the father of French
+civilisation and the architect of the monarchy; he may say what he likes:
+but we cannot stand Richelieu when he talks of himself in the same strain
+and in the third person, just as Michelet and Carlyle might in a fit of
+raving; nor when he counterfeits death in order to play the ghost, nor
+when he weeps theatrically, and addresses declamatory love messages to "La
+France."--"France, I love thee,--Richelieu and France are one!" Nor can we
+believe in him when he sees modern France come to life again from out the
+cinders of feudalism. After such nonsensical dicta, indeed, one would be
+hardly surprised to hear him exclaim, "I am the precursor of 1789; what I
+cannot consummate, Bonaparte shall achieve in the Sessions of the Conseil
+d'Etat!"
+
+The secondary characters are one idea'd. Beringhen can say nothing but
+"Let's discuss the pâté!" and the Duc d'Orleans is limited to "Marion
+dotes on me." To the tragi-comedy there is tacked on a melodrama made
+after the approved methods of the Boulevard--a succession of events and
+surprises which cancel out. You feel you are expected to shout, Bravo
+Richelieu! bravo Baradas! Just as at the Porte Saint Martin or at the
+Ambigu you cry out, Bravo d'Artagnan! bravo Mordaunt! It is the system of
+Dumas without his art.
+
+Lord Lytton lacked both imagination and ingenuity. His effects are poor,
+and he overdoes them. The first resuscitation of Richelieu comes near to
+impressing one, the second is simply silly. The kernel of the play
+consists of a document which passes through every pocket but never reaches
+its address. At the moment, the owner of this treasure is a prisoner at
+the Bastille. Instead of searching him, the Government sends a courtier to
+seize him by the throat and rob him of it. The scene is witnessed through
+a key-hole and described to us by a little page of Richelieu's--the rôle
+being played by a woman. The page throws himself on the courtier the
+moment he comes out in order to snatch from him the fateful paper, and the
+conclusion of the drama results from these two encounters. One might sum
+up _Richelieu_ as a mixture of bad Hugo with worse Dumas!
+
+_Money_ is by way of depicting English Society as it was in 1840. It
+recognised itself, or rather its enemies recognised it, in this
+caricature! Are we to believe that the gambling scene in the third act
+takes place in an aristocratic club? It is more in keeping with the back
+parlour of a public-house. A very well-known critic, who represents the
+ideas of a whole class and of a whole school, in alluding to the success
+which the piece met with in the first instance, and which it meets with
+still on every revival, declares that the spectators wished to show their
+appreciation of the "humour of a scholar." I must confess that I can
+recognise neither the scholar nor the humour. On the contrary, what I see
+in it is a spurious sensibility and that moral obliquity to which I have
+referred. Alfred Evelyn, who has been enriched by the will of an eccentric
+cousin, and who now sees the world at his feet after having experienced
+its disdain, decides to share his fortune with an unknown girl who has
+sent £10 to his old nurse at a time when he himself was too poor to come
+to her aid. It is in this silly intention that he is throwing away his
+happiness, and that the plot finds its motive. He is engaged to a young
+girl whom he doesn't love, and in order to get rid of her, this mirror of
+refinement, this Alcestes with all his fine scorn of average humanity,
+pretends to ruin himself at play in the presence of his destined
+father-in-law. The girl whom he loves has refused (in Act I.) to marry
+him, not because he is poor, but because, poor herself, she was afraid of
+being a drag on him in his career. But someone had entered during her
+explanation and she had not been able to finish her sentence. She finishes
+it in the last act, and it transpiring also that it was she who had really
+sent the £10, the two lovers fall into each other's arms. That is really
+all there is in _Money_ over and above the social satire, which to my
+thinking is terribly far-fetched, and that wonderful "humour" which I have
+been unable personally to discover.
+
+Bulwer was not the man to save the erring Drama. Stronger men than he
+might have tried in vain to do so. It was not to the men of letters, the
+scholars, that it was to owe its salvation. The democracy had to come to
+the use of reason and to educate itself. Instead of the artificial drama
+which was offered to them, they held out for a drama sprung from its own
+loins, born of its own passions, made after its own image, palpitating
+with its own life; literary it might become later, if it could. And to
+this end, in the words of Olivier Saint-Jean, "It was necessary that
+things should go worse still before they could go better."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+Macready's Withdrawal from the Stage--The Enemies of the Drama in 1850:
+Puritanism; the Opera; the Pantomime; the "Hippodrama"--French Plays and
+French Players in England--Actors of the Period--The Censorship--The
+Critics--The Historical Plays of Tom Taylor and the Irish Plays of Dion
+Boucicault.
+
+
+Macready played once more in Paris in 1846, but the times were changed,
+and he achieved only a _succès d'estime_. He then visited America, where
+his presence evoked professional jealousies and bad blood, resulting in
+serious riots in which lives were lost. On February 26, 1851, the great
+actor gave his farewell performance. A brilliant page of Lewes has kept
+alive until our own day the emotion of this memorable occasion, which
+marks an era in the history of English art. Macready was in deep mourning;
+he had just lost a daughter of twenty years of age. He did not declaim his
+speech, but gave it forth with dignified sadness. In it he laid claim only
+to two merits--that of having brought back the text of Shakespeare in its
+purity, and that of having made of the theatre a place in which decent
+folks need not hesitate to be seen. He foresaw that if his glory as an
+artist should fade with the gradual disappearance of those who had
+witnessed it, his work as a literary restorer and a moral reformer would
+survive. And he was right.
+
+The farewell performance was followed by a banquet, at which the
+inevitable Bulwer took the chair. John Forster read aloud at it some
+verses by Tennyson. The Laureate had graven on the tomb of the tragedian's
+career the three words, "Moral, Grave, Sublime."
+
+Then all was over. The voice that had thrilled so many souls was to be
+heard only at charitable entertainments and provincial gatherings. And
+when he died in 1873 England had forgotten him.
+
+There is a story of his last days which I cannot refrain from repeating,
+though it has no bearing really upon the subject of this book. When the
+old man, confined by paralysis to his armchair, was cut off from the world
+by the loss of several of his senses, he would be seen acting to himself
+(barely so much as moving his lips the while) the masterpieces he had
+loved. There was nothing to reveal the progress of the play save the light
+that would illumine his ever-mobile countenance, to which new lines had
+been given by conscious use and solitary thought.
+
+How fine they must have been, these impersonations--Lear, Hamlet,
+Macbeth--in the mysterious half-shades of his life's evening and in the
+silent theatre of his mind, where there was nothing to shackle the artist
+in his struggle after perfection, where every aspiration was an
+achievement!
+
+If I have spoken at some length of Macready, it is because I cannot bring
+myself to regard him as the representative of a dead art, the last High
+Priest of a shattered idol. On the stage and off the stage, Macready was a
+pioneer. He was the first to see the coming of Realism, and he was the
+first actor of good breeding. But a long time was to ensue ere his example
+would be followed and understood. The stage, when he left it, was in a
+state of confusion and of squalor difficult to describe.
+
+Strive as Macready would to cleanse the theatre, the prejudice which kept
+certain classes apart from it seemed to grow and spread. The accession of
+the young Queen heralded one of those moods of puritanism which are
+chronic with English society. Young Men's and Young Women's Christian
+Associations multiplied, and, in providing innocent and free amusements
+for the artizan, they competed with the theatre at the same time as with
+the public-house. With the higher classes it was music that was injuring
+the drama by its rivalry. For a long time--as Lady Gay Spanker put it in a
+comedy of the time--the English had known no music but the barking of the
+hounds; now it was that Society began to scramble for boxes at extravagant
+prices to hear Grisi sing. A quarrel between the singer and her manager
+having led to a severance, the now "star"-less company, by a marvellous
+stroke of luck, was enabled to shine afresh with Jenny Lind. This rivalry
+continued, and together with the burning of Her Majesty's Theatre it led
+to the invasion of the two great London theatres by foreign musicians. The
+opera held sway from the end of March to the end of July. The Pantomime,
+at first humble and modest, but growing stronger every year, began now at
+Christmas and lasted throughout a considerable portion of the winter. A
+short autumn season was all that remained for the drama, or rather
+melodrama, and for what was worse than the others, the "Hippodrama." Thus
+was entitled a new kind of production in which horses had the principal
+rôles. More than one popular author was glad to invent plots for these
+singular protagonists. Shakespeare, who had had to go turns hitherto with
+the lions of the tamer Van Ambrugh,--he and they roaring on alternate
+evenings,--had to give in completely before the Hippodrama. He took refuge
+in a suburban theatre, Sadler's Wells, with the actor Phelps, and there he
+was able eventually to boast, like that survivor of the Reign of
+Terror--_J'ai vécu_. To arouse any interest in him amongst the English
+public, it was necessary that he should be stumbled through by foreigners
+or lisped by babes.
+
+According to an old brochure of the time which groans over the depth of
+the humiliation of the theatre, people stood still to look a second time
+at the madman who could attempt to run Covent Garden or Drury Lane. To the
+reckless amateur succeeded the shameless adventurer, the shy contractor
+with empty pockets that called for filling. About 1850 one of these great
+theatres was managed by an ex-policeman who had started a restaurant;
+later it passed into the hands of a theatre attendant. One manager was
+arrested for theft in the wings of his own theatre. It is easy to imagine
+how dramatic art would develop in the hands of such men. They dispensed
+with scenery and stage properties, and made shift with an empty stage;
+they squandered their substance and lavished their genius upon the art of
+advertising; their puffs and prospectuses were the only masterpieces of
+the times. There were some who sought to excite English chauvinism,
+pre-jingoism as one may call it, by such performances as that of the
+national acrobat who turned head over heels ninety-one times while his
+American rival was achieving but eighty-one, thus conquering the New World
+by ten somersaults.
+
+These things succeeded in attracting the public, but _what_ public?
+Theatre-goers were but a small section really of the public--a group apart
+on whom lay a certain suspicion of immorality connected with an evil
+reputation of being un-English. There was some ground for this last
+reproach. Foreigners were gaining ground. It would seem that there was no
+getting along without us French between 1850 and 1865. We were translated
+and adapted in every form. Our melodramas were transplanted bodily; our
+comedies were coarsened and exaggerated into farces; sometimes even, that
+nothing might be lost, our operas were ground down into plays. Second-rate
+pieces were honoured with two or three successive adaptations; and dramas
+which had lived a brief hour at the Boulevard du Crime, in England became
+classics. There is a tradition that the director of The Princess's had a
+tame translator under lock and key who turned French into English without
+respite, his chain never loosened nor his hunger satisfied until his task,
+for the time being, should be complete.
+
+Our actors had at this time a permanent home in London, kept for them by
+Mitchell, the Bond Street bookseller, at the St. James's Theatre. Thence
+they made incursions upon all the others. Some years previously Madame
+Arnould Plessy, having taken into her head to act in the tongue of
+Shakespeare, Théophile Gautier had complimented her on the grace with
+which she had succeeded in "extracting English from her mouth." Others now
+attempted to emulate her accomplishment and to turn it to account. Fechter
+resolved not merely to play Hamlet, but to play as it had never been
+played before, and he did so to rounds of applause for seventy nights. An
+_ingénue_, escaped from the Comédie Française, made a similar effort in
+the rôle of Juliet, and despite her bad accent, and intolerable
+pretension, she was able to keep it up, thanks to powerful supporters, in
+the teeth of the quite excusable hostility of the pit. Things did not
+always pass off so harmlessly, and in more than one instance the brutal
+anger of the public, as under Charles I., drove intruders from the stage,
+which it wished to see occupied by native actors alone.
+
+As a matter of fact, there were some notable English actors and actresses
+at this time. Helen Faucit (now Lady Martin) preserved the pure diction of
+John and Charles Kemble. Charles Kean, despite his inadequate physique,
+won for himself gradually an honourable place on the stage over which his
+father had held sway. Ryder had a presence, and a sonorous voice, deep and
+hollow and tragic, like that of Beauvallet or of Maubant. Keeley was a
+massive man, who could act with subtlety; his wife, incisive, keen,
+_amère_, had a leaning towards the serious drama--towards the realistic
+even. Robson, a queer and wonderful little figure, made a mark in _le
+drame noir_ and in outrageous caricature. Farren had made his _début_ in
+old men's parts at eighteen, and played them for fifty years without
+advancing in his art a step, without introducing a shade of emotion or a
+touch of humanity into his effects. Charles Mathews impersonated impudent
+youth, just as Farren impersonated unpleasant and ridiculous old age.
+Elegant, lissome, light, mobile, Mathews skipped and fluttered and
+chirruped like a bird. In his old age he reminded me of Ravel, his
+contemporary, whose method and rôles offered some analogy with his.[5]
+Buckstone made the Haymarket prosper for twenty years, where I saw him,
+secure in the favour of the public, with his colleague, Compton, whose
+speciality was a certain dryness of humour. Buckstone at this time had
+lost both his hearing and his memory. But what a sly look there was in his
+eye! How his mouth would twist and turn! What irony lurked in the
+expressive ugliness of that wrinkled old mask of his!
+
+These good actors injured rather than served their art. They revelled in,
+and limited themselves to, their own speciality, exaggerated their
+idiosyncrasies day by day, and left them as a legacy to their imitators.
+The authors were too insignificant, did they see the danger, to oppose
+their will to that of Charles Mathews and Farren. They took their measures
+to order and tried to satisfy their patrons. Thus became gradually
+narrowed at once the field for invention and for observation. As
+substitutes for the infinity of living human types and characters, seven
+or eight _emplois_, as one may say, came into existence--_emplois_ often
+further specified and characterised by the name of an actor. There was the
+low comedian and the light comedian, the villain and the heavy man. All
+diversities of womenkind were grouped into one of these four ticketed
+sections: the _ingénue_, the flirt, the chaperon, and the wicked woman.
+The valet of Comedy had become a rascally steward whose rogueries took on
+a certain aspect of Drama. There were two or three types of old men. There
+was the surly old curmudgeon in whom the author vents his spleen, and who
+draws up eccentric wills. There is the old beau, cowardly and cynical, who
+in the last act marries his fiancée to his own son and swears to reform.
+And there is the old peasant who is descended in a straight line from the
+father of Pamela, always talking of his white hairs and his contempt for
+gold, and always greeting the traveller, who has been overtaken by a storm
+and has lost his way, with "Be welcome to my humble roof." The peasant,
+one need hardly remark, never existed. On the stage he has lived more than
+a hundred years. Hardly less indispensable to the comedy or the drama was
+the captain, the "man about town," addicted to drink, with a diamond pin
+resplendent in his tie, wearing salmon-coloured trousers, and top boots
+that he is always dusting with the end of his riding-whip. He represents
+the selfishness, the folly, and the insolence of the higher classes, as
+imagined by a man who has never been inside a drawing-room. Did he know
+Society at his finger-ends, the man would never think of painting it. He
+never paints from nature. He copies for the thousandth time from the old
+models, Sheridan and Goldsmith, or his new masters, Scribe and d'Ennery.
+
+It was for the critics, one is inclined to say, to instruct the public,
+the actors, and the author. I am almost ashamed to tell of the pass to
+which dramatic criticism had come. A paragraph in an obscure corner, a
+quarter of a column on the more important works,--that was about all the
+space the great newspapers accorded to the theatre. Dramatic criticism was
+a nocturnal calling that enjoyed a not too good repute, and was frowned on
+by respectable people and fathers of families. It was entrusted to tyros,
+who hoped by their good conduct to earn their advancement presently to the
+reporting staff in the police courts. The one writer undertook both drama
+and opera. Dramatic criticism and musical criticism, owing to the natural
+gifts which they require, are two absolutely different callings. What
+mattered it, however, to the writer, who was expected only to praise the
+pieces and the performers, without being too much of a bore?
+
+John Oxenford, the critic of the _Times_, was sent for one morning to the
+office of the editor. In analysing a new piece he had criticised freely
+the performance of a certain actor, and the latter had addressed a letter
+of remonstrance to Mr. Delane. "These things," said the editor
+majestically to the writer,--"these things don't interest the general
+public, and I don't want the _Times_ to become an arena for the discussion
+of the merits of Mr. This and Mr. That. So look here, my dear fellow,
+understand this well, and write me accounts of plays henceforth that won't
+bring me any more such letters. Do you see?" "I see," said Oxenford. And
+thus it was, continues the teller of the story, that English literature
+lost pages which might have recalled the subtlety of Hazlitt in
+conjunction with the winning humour of Charles Lamb. Henceforth Oxenford,
+a scholar who had translated the "Hellas" of Jacobi and the
+"Conversations" of Goethe with Eckermann, passed for a blighted and
+discouraged genius; though of this he gave no stronger proofs than an
+English version of the operetta, _Bon soir, Monsieur Pantalon_, a farce
+which I saw fall quite flat, and some articles on Molière. But you should
+have heard him in a bar-parlour with his pipe between his teeth, a bottle
+of port on the table, and facing him some interlocutor who was not Mr.
+Delane!
+
+While the press critic neglected his duty, or was prevented from
+fulfilling it, the official censorship added one more to the troubles and
+obstacles which already hampered the progress of the stage. I may perhaps
+make some reference in this place to the origin of the Censorship, and to
+its scope and powers.
+
+Some writers will have it that this institution, as it now exists, is but
+a survival of the office of Master of the Revels, which flourished under
+the Tudors and the first Stuarts. As a matter of fact, the censorship owes
+its existence to a law passed in the reign of George II.[6] It was
+instituted nominally for the protection of good behaviour, decency, and
+public order; in reality, to protect Walpole from the stings of
+Aristophanic comedy and to silence Fielding. A century and a half have
+elapsed since the fall of Walpole, and the censorship still exists, like
+that sentinel who was stationed in an alley of Trarskoé Sélo to guard a
+rose, and who was still being relieved every two hours twenty-five years
+later. The law of 1843, which was by way of according liberty to the
+theatre, did not free it from the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain,
+whose powers were delimited, so to say, geographically, in the most
+curious manner, for it is impossible to understand why certain quarters of
+the Metropolis were placed outside the reach of his authority and
+submitted to the jurisdiction of the Justices of the Peace.
+
+To all intents and purposes the powers of the Chamberlain are exercised by
+a gentleman who is styled the Examiner of Plays. Plays have to be
+submitted to him seven days before their production, and when he returns
+them with his signature he receives from the submitters of them fees of
+from £1 to £2, according to the number of acts. The author may not enter
+his presence. The manager alone has the privilege of contemplating his
+features, and of giving, or getting from him, verbal explanations. And
+even those communications are under the seal of secrecy. Above the
+examiner stands a kind of head of department, and above him the
+Chamberlain himself. When you have exhausted these three jurisdictions you
+can go no higher. Above the Lord Chamberlain, as above the Czar of All the
+Russias, there remains only Divine Justice, and to Divine Justice authors
+of vaudevilles and musical comedies cannot very well appeal. The
+censorship indeed is an absurd anomaly, the sole irresponsible and secret
+authority which remains in English legislation.
+
+If you seek to discover how it has acted during this century, you will
+find that according as the censor was indolent or zealous his office has
+been a nullity or a nuisance. In theatrical circles that censor will not
+soon be forgotten who suppressed the word "thigh" as dangerous to public
+morals, and who exorcised from a play by Douglas Jerrold, as disrespectful
+to religion, the following phrase:--"He plays the violin like an angel!"
+The same censor found these words in a tragedy:--"_I_ do homage to pride,
+debauchery, avarice!... Never!" He hastened to delete this, admitting thus
+by implication that English society, which it was his mission to protect,
+was compact of these three heinous characteristics.
+
+It was forbidden to make fun of Holloway's ointment, for Mr. Holloway was
+"an estimable manufacturer who employs thousands of workmen." It was
+forbidden to put a comic bishop on the stage--unless it were a colonial
+bishop, in which case the censor would give his sanction. A play founded
+on Oliver Twist was forbidden because it was calculated to incite to
+crime, but it was allowed for a benefit performance; whence it would
+appear that it is allowable to incite the audience to crime on such
+special occasions. This poor censorship, which has to read everything,
+which has to supervise everything,--from the rages of Othello to the
+grimaces of the clown and the tights of the ballet girls,--which has to
+uphold at once the constitution and propriety, to defend at once the
+Divinity and Mr. Holloway, loses its head over it all at last, and reminds
+one of the _bourgeois_ broken loose who is being launched at carnival time
+into some dizzying Saraband.
+
+Its most absorbing task is that of barring the way against French
+immorality. Its vigilance is eluded, however, by a kind of conventional
+terminology. Where our authors have had the effrontery to write the word
+"cocotte" in black and white, they replace it by the word "actress." Where
+we have unblushingly written "adultery," they have inserted "flirtation."
+The censor gives his sanction and pockets his fees, and on the performance
+of the piece the by-play of the actor and actresses completes the
+translation, re-establishing if not reinforcing the original sense.
+
+In the midst of all these difficulties the growth of the theatre-going
+public had made necessary long series of performances, long runs as we
+call them now, unknown up till then and inaugurated by the new theatres.
+There were a dozen in 1847, twenty in 1860. The calling of dramatic author
+began to grow lucrative and to tempt many writers. It was an easy calling,
+too, as the public was young and ignorant, ready to accept anything, and
+as, in addition, the French drama offered an almost inexhaustible amount
+of raw material. They had recourse to it unceasingly, just as Robinson
+Crusoe after his shipwreck used to return to his ship in order to look for
+some tool! I shall not give a long list of names because, unless
+accompanied by a short personal sketch and a few words of criticism, these
+names, obscure or even unknown, would mean nothing to French readers, and
+would be almost as wearisome as the long lists of warriors in the epics of
+olden times. Amongst the more notable, I may mention Tom Taylor and Dion
+Boucicault. Tom Taylor belonged to both the world of law and the world of
+letters. Briefs gave him his dinner, the drama gave him his supper; his
+supper got to be the more substantial of the two. From 1850 to 1875 he
+seems to have achieved ubiquity. His name was on every poster. He was
+facile, had a certain method in his work, a certain skill in putting his
+plays together, a certain discretion which passed for taste--in fine, all
+the qualities that go to form a painstaking and prolific mediocrity. He
+would probably have wished to be judged on the merits of the historical
+dramas which absorbed his whole activity during the concluding years of
+his life, and in which he thought he was achieving "literature." But are
+they really historical dramas? They contain at once too much history and
+too little. The historical document is all-pervasive, enters into every
+scene, interrupts the action; but anything like historical psychology, any
+attempt to get at the real character of the personages presented, is
+wholly unattempted. It was characteristic of him that, when desiring to
+depict Queen Elizabeth, he relied upon some romantic stories by a German
+lady instead of going to the work of Froude (far more dramatic than his
+own drama), where he could have learned all he required to know.
+
+Dion Boucicault, the other writer whom I have singled out as
+representative of the lot, had more character and was more interesting. He
+was an actor, and an actor of some talent. He knew no other world than
+that of the theatre--the world which from eight o'clock till midnight
+laughs and cries, curses and makes love, dies and murders, under the
+gaslight, behind three sets of painted canvas. Without any real culture,
+and without having the least critical faculty, Boucicault had read
+everything about the theatre--read everything and remembered everything,
+good, bad, and indifferent, from _Phormio_ to the _Auberge des Adrets_. He
+knew by heart all the _croix de ma mère_ of modern melodrama, and from his
+mass of reminiscences he concocted his crazy-quilt-like plays, imitating
+involuntarily, unconsciously. He was plagiarism incarnate. In his first
+great success, _London Assurance_, you may find not only Goldsmith and
+Sheridan, but Terence and Plautus, who had reached him by way of Molière.
+You will meet in it a father who speaks to his son without recognising
+him, or who at least is persuaded not to recognise him; a young lady who
+boxes her husband's ears and calls him her doll; a master who makes a
+confidant of his valet, a valet as untruthful as Dave or Scapin; a lawyer
+who is anxious to get himself thrashed like _L'Intimé_; a young drunkard
+and debauchee who falls in love with a country lass; and a young girl
+brought up in the wilds, who replies to the first compliment she has paid
+her--"It strikes me, sir, that you are a stray bee from the hive of
+fashion. If so, reserve your honey for its proper cell. A truce to
+compliments." The piece goes from vulgarity to vulgarity, from absurdity
+to absurdity. Within a few minutes there is a ridiculous abduction, a
+comic duel and a hardly less comic marriage, all brought about by a will
+which is surely the most absurd of all the absurd wills known to the
+drama. The piece had its central figure in a clever humbug whom no one
+knows. "Will you allow me to ask you," says Charles Courtly in the last
+scene, "an impertinent question?"
+
+"With the greatest pleasure."
+
+"Who the devil are you?"
+
+"On my faith, I don't know. But I must be a gentleman." Upon which another
+character concludes the play with a pedantic definition of the word
+"gentleman," and morality is satisfied.
+
+One fine day--it was in 1860--this playwright, who lived by borrowing, and
+who was in debt to every literature, had the singular good fortune to
+create a _genre_ of his own. Perhaps it is too much to say create. A
+compatriot of his, Edmund Falconer, like himself an actor as well as an
+author, had opened the way for him. But Falconer never again met with the
+success which greeted _Peep o' Day_, and he wound up with the memorable
+failure of _The Oonagh_.[7] Boucicault, on the contrary, was able to
+exploit for twenty years the fruitful vein upon which he had happened in
+the _Colleen Bawn_.
+
+The _Colleen Bawn_ is a tissue of improbabilities and extravagances. What
+is the mysterious reason why we can put up with these absurdities and take
+an interest in them? It is, I think, that there is in this crack-brained
+drama a kind of ethnographic seed which enters into the mind and takes
+root there. The sad, patient, uncomplaining struggle of this poor peasant
+girl to become worthy of the man she loves,--her discouragement, which yet
+cannot exhaust her devotion,--all this is depicted by touches so
+suggestive and so strong that an elaborate analysis could not do more. But
+there is something beyond this. A sort of primitive poetry seemed to play
+round the whole character of the Colleen Bawn as she appeared thirty-five
+years ago in the person of Mrs. Dion Boucicault, with her little red
+cloak, her long black hair, and her expression half sad, half
+seductive--smiling through her tears like an angel in disgrace.
+
+Until Boucicault's time it had been the fashion to laugh over Ireland,
+never to weep over her. He brought about this change without depicting his
+country otherwise than as she really existed. He knew the strange feeling
+of England towards Ireland, the feeling of a man for a woman, devoid of
+the refinements of philosophy and civilisation. Passionate, violent, hard,
+England begins by crushing Ireland; then stops, conquered by the weakness
+of the victim, subjugated by a charm which no mere words can describe.
+Boucicault sought out this sentiment in the depths of the hearts of his
+English audiences, and ministered to it; and was instrumental thereby in
+preparing the way for an age of justice and generosity. Under the
+commonness of the means which he employed, and often also of the
+sentiments and ideas which he expressed, Boucicault hid a sort of subtlety
+which was born of instinct. His Irish psychology is true to life, and
+although he added many touches in the _Shaugraun_, in _Arrah-na-pogue_, in
+_The Octoroon_, in _Michael O'Dowd_, and in other works, it may be said to
+be already complete in _The Colleen Bawn_. When Myles-na-Coppaleen tells
+us, "I was full of sudden death that minute," and when Eily speaks of the
+little bird that sings in her heart, the passion does not strike us as
+exaggerated nor the poetry as out of place. Father Tom, too, who smokes
+his pipe and drinks his potheen with the smugglers, but who can assume at
+will his authority as an apostle and a leader, is the personification of
+the Irish priest of old, and indeed of our own day too--at once the man
+of the people and the man of God.
+
+Altogether, one cannot but exclaim, as one looks at this crude but
+striking piece--this is Ireland! The Ireland of zealots and traitors, of
+rebels and the meek, of madmen and martyrs, of heroes and assassins.
+Ireland the irrational and illogical, who disconcerts our sympathies after
+winning them, and who has doubtless still further surprises in store for
+History, already at a loss how to record her actions, how to explain her
+character, what verdict to pronounce upon her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+The Vogue of Burlesque--Burnand's _Ixion_--H. J. Byron--The Influence of
+Burlesque upon the Moral Tone of the Stage--Marie Wilton's _début_--A
+Letter from Dickens--Founding of the "Prince of Wales's"--Tom Robertson,
+his Life as Actor and Author--His Journalistic Career--London Bohemia in
+1865--Sothern.
+
+
+The taste, the rage for Burlesque, dates from almost the same moment as
+the introduction of the Boucicault drama. The two things have, however,
+nothing else in common, unless it be that neither one nor the other
+pertains to literature. Burlesque is the English form, under an un-English
+name, of that kind of musical parody in which we French used at that time
+to delight, and of which the operetta was born. In London this exotic
+_genre_ became quickly acclimatised by success.
+
+I shall take Burnand's _Ixion_ as a type, for by reason of its
+never-ending popularity it may be regarded as a masterpiece of its kind.
+It is in verse. What kind of verse may be imagined when I add that almost
+every line contains at least one pun. The subject is a matter of no
+consequence; the whole point of the piece consists in putting modern
+sentiments and expressions into the mouths of characters taken from
+antiquity. The people rebel and burn Ixion's palace. Jupiter appears in
+answer to his invocation. "Are you insured?" he inquires. "Yes," replies
+Ixion, "with all the best Insurance Agencies. But you see, when it comes
+to paying you the money, they let you whistle for it." Jupiter invites him
+to come to Olympus. "We lunch at half-past one. Don't forget." Mercury,
+charged to conduct Ixion thither, hails an aërial omnibus. "Come on for
+Olympus! Room for one outside!" We are shown Olympus. The meal is nearly
+over. Juno asks Venus the name of her dressmaker, and sends a servant to
+tell "the Master" that "coffee is served." Neptune talks nautical lingo
+like the hero of _Black-eyed Susan_, and goes nowhere unaccompanied by a
+French sailor and an English Jack-Tar, who are themselves bosom friends.
+The Frenchman executes a hornpipe out of good-fellowship towards his mate,
+whilst the Englishman expresses his regard for "La France" by performing
+the cancan. Apollo plays an English sun to the life--he never shows
+himself. He remains shut up in his office with his secretary, the Clerk of
+the Weather, who, like all his kind, scribbles verses and newspaper
+articles on paper bearing the Government stamp.
+
+Add to all this a bit of music here and there, a number of pretty girls
+scantily attired, notably nine Muses and three Graces, whose dress and
+dancing would have brought the author of the Histriomastrix in sorrow to
+the grave, and allusions to all the topics of the day--to the victory of
+the horse "Gladiator," to _Lady Audley's Secret_ (then all the rage), to
+vivisection, to the novels of Charles Kingsley, to the fountain in
+Trafalgar Square, to Mudie's Circulating Library,--and a thousand other
+things which to-day have ceased not merely to be amusing, but to be
+intelligible.
+
+To read _Ixion_, as I read it thirty-five years after its first
+production, to read it sitting by the fire on a foggy afternoon, making
+one's way as best one might through the thicket of allusions which had
+become enigmas, and through all the _débris_ of these used-up fireworks,
+was a singularly dismal undertaking. To form any just impression of the
+piece, you must try to picture to yourself the little theatre (The
+Royalty) on the occasion of the First Night, the thousand or so of
+spectators, who have dined well and who incline to an optimistic view of
+things in general, the pervading odour of the _poudre de riz_, the
+_flonflons_ of the orchestra, the quivering of the gasaliers and of the
+dazzling electric light, the diamonds, the gleaming white shoulders and
+the soft silk tights, the superabundance of animal life and high spirits
+which seem almost to glow like kindling firewood. A débutante destined to
+a higher kind of success, Ada Cavendish, regaled the opera-glasses with
+the sight of her beauty as Venus. Another attraction was to be found later
+in the appearance on the stage of a member of a great family, the Hon.
+Lewis W. Wingfield, who impersonated (with the contortions of a madman)
+the Goddess of Wisdom.
+
+But the real home of Burlesque was the Strand, then under the management
+of Mrs. Swanborough, famous for her incessant conflicts with English
+grammar. Her wants were provided for by Henry James Byron, a good-looking
+fellow who appeared in his own pieces, but not to great advantage. It used
+to be said that he was a descendant of Lord Byron. How is this
+genealogical mystery to be solved? I have been unable to find a clue to
+it. Theatrical folk are no great scholars, they take but little note of
+dates, and they are apt to treat history in a somewhat offhand fashion.
+For them Lord Byron was lost in the mists of antiquity, and it was easy
+for them to believe that their colleague, born about 1830, might have had
+him for an ancestor. Whatever his origin, H. J. Byron was an actor, and
+had begun on the lowest steps of the profession, with engagements at ten
+shillings a week, and even less. Suddenly he struck a vein of success in
+the writing of burlesques, and thenceforth he wrote as much as ever one
+could wish, and even more,--so much so that the list of his works, were I
+to print it here, would fill many pages. He did not worry himself about a
+subject. A subject was a nuisance, he held; you had to keep to it, and
+work it up,--you have to give it a beginning and an ending. Hang the
+subject! He thought only of the witticisms with which his burlesque should
+be stocked. He collected them together in notebooks which in time must
+have come to rival the volume of Larousse's Dictionary. In the street he
+would follow up some comic notion, jot it down on an envelope or on his
+sleeve, or on the margin of a newspaper, using his hat as a writing-desk,
+or else making shift with a wall. One day he was writing up against a hall
+door. The door opened, and in rolled Byron on top of an old lady who had
+been making her way out. He got up again smiling just as he would from his
+mishaps in the theatre. He was possessed with the demon of punning, which
+never left him an instant's peace. Having failed as a manager in the
+provinces, he made puns upon his bankruptcy. He punned in the last moments
+before his death. Is it not one of the rules of his profession to bring
+down the curtain on a witticism?
+
+Byron used to boast that he had never given offence to delicate ears. And,
+as a matter of fact, he said a million of nonsensical things but not a
+single indecent thing. Yet he helped to depreciate the moral tone of the
+theatre by lowering the standard of decency in regard to female costume
+upon the stage, and by bringing on to it those pseudo-actresses whom, in
+the slang of the green-room, we call _grues_.
+
+In this connection I ought to point out that the social ostracism under
+which the stage then suffered was due less to the bad morals of the
+actresses than to the bad manners and vulgarity of the actors. The former
+were much nearer to being ladies than the latter were to being gentlemen.
+Watched and warded, first by a father, then by a husband connected with
+the theatre, obliged to give their first thoughts to their professional
+and domestic duties, they had neither the power, nor the leisure, nor the
+inclination to think of evil. Tom Hood, in his _Model Men and Women_,
+paints a picture of the theatrical woman which reminds one of the
+biographies of the _Prix Montyon_. She goes late to bed, rises early,
+learns her rôles while washing her children's linen, rehearses in the
+afternoon, performs in the evening, and has no time to eat or to attend to
+her _toilette_, still less to think, or make merry, or make love. "School
+mistresses and governesses, shop-girls, dressmakers, cooks,
+housemaids,--what are your fatigues to those of an actress?" So spoke a
+writer[8] who was well acquainted with theatrical life.
+
+These habits were now to be changed. Burlesque, pantomime, comic opera,
+were throwing open the stage to actresses of a new type who posed but did
+not perform, and who were called upon to fill not rôles but tights. The
+respectable woman would not suffer herself to be vanquished on her own
+ground; she competed with the newcomers by the same means: sometimes she
+won--and lost. This was the transformation which Byron abetted. But it was
+the public, of course, as always, that was most to blame.
+
+Poor Byron was not without the ambition of an artist: he aspired to
+raising himself above the level of the _genre_ to which he owed his first
+success,--to writing a comedy. And it so happened that by his side on the
+stage of the Strand there was a quaint little body whose hopes ran
+parallel with his. This was Marie Wilton. I do not know how old she was
+then. In her pleasant Memoirs, written in collaboration with her husband,
+she has quite forgotten to give us the date of her birth. So much we know,
+however, that she was the child of somewhat obscure actors, and that she
+herself made her _début_ when she was five years old. At Manchester she
+had the honour of playing some small rôle with Macready, who was then
+making his last rounds before finally quitting the stage. The great
+tragedian sent for her to his dressing-room, lifted her on to his knee and
+questioned her.
+
+"I suppose," he said, "that you want to become a great actress?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"And what rôle are you most anxious to play?"
+
+"Juliet."
+
+Macready burst out laughing. "Then," said he, "you'll have to change those
+eyes of yours!"
+
+Marie Wilton did not change her eyes, but she changed her ideas, which was
+an easier matter. At fifteen she was acting fearlessly in every kind of
+rôle. One evening she (who was too young, they thought, to assume the rôle
+of any of Shakespeare's heroines) impersonated the old mother of Claude
+Melnotte in _The Lady of Lyons_.
+
+It was in Bristol that they began to realise that there was something in
+her. An actor on tour, then very well known, Charles Dillon, was playing
+_Belphegor_, a monstrous emotional drama,[9] the hero of which was an
+acrobat. Marie Wilton, in the rôle of a little boy, had to give him the
+cue in one of the great scenes. She hit on a little piece of business, and
+risked it at the rehearsal. The London actor lost his temper at first,
+then reflected, questioned the little actress, listened to her
+explanations, and finally gave in. The public was carried away. Dillon
+remembered this, and when he returned to London he engaged Marie Wilton at
+the Lyceum. Here she made her real _début_ towards the end of 1858.
+_Belphegor_ was followed by a farce in which Marie Wilton had also a rôle.
+On the same evening, at the same theatre, in the same piece, there
+appeared for the first time in London, John Toole, the king of English low
+comedians. With these two names we come to the living generation, and have
+to deal at last with the contemporary stage.
+
+But let us first follow Marie Wilton, for her little barque, though none
+had any inkling of it, not even she herself, carries with it the destinies
+of the English Comedy still to be born.
+
+From the Lyceum she passed to the Haymarket, where she was treated as a
+spoiled child by the three old men who there held sway. She played Cupid
+here with so much verve, point, impudence and sprightliness, that other
+Cupids were created for her. This is the public all over; naïvely selfish,
+it condemns the actor to maintain for a quarter of a century the posture
+which has taken its fancy, to repeat unceasingly the gesture or the tone
+which has amused or touched it. Marie Wilton had played the Haymarket
+Cupid for ever had she not betaken herself to the Strand. Here she was the
+inevitable principal boy of the burlesques.
+
+For some time past Mrs. Bancroft has played only when in the mood and at
+long intervals, and has not felt inclined for the exertion of carrying a
+whole piece on her shoulders a whole evening as of yore. I have seen her
+only in two subsidiary rôles, and for an estimate of her talents I must
+rely upon other judgments than my own. M. Coquelin thinks that she reminds
+one at once of Alphonsine and of Chaumont, and that she holds a middle
+place between the two. But M. Coquelin had in his mind, when he was
+writing, an actress of more than forty, appearing in the rôle of eccentric
+ladies of fashion. There is a gulf between this and the imp of 1860 who
+rattled across the boards of the Strand. All that I know of her at the
+time of her _début_ is that she had still those twinkling merry eyes which
+forbade her to attempt tragedy, and the figure of a child of twelve,--a
+figure so slight that when the man who was to marry her first saw her, he
+declared she was the thinnest actress in London. But here is a letter
+which will place Marie Wilton before our eyes as she was when the
+barristers of the Inns of Court made verses in her honour and half
+Aldershot came to town every second night to applaud her. It is from
+Charles Dickens to John Forster:--
+
+    "I escaped at half-past seven and went to the Strand Theatre; having
+    taken a stall beforehand, for it is always crammed. I really wish you
+    would go, between this and next Thursday, to see the _Maid and the
+    Magpie_ burlesque there. There is the strangest thing in it that ever
+    I have seen on the stage. The boy, Pippo, by Miss Wilton. While it is
+    astonishingly impudent (must be, or it couldn't be done at all), it is
+    so stupendously like a boy, and unlike a woman, that it is perfectly
+    free from offence. I never have seen such a thing. Priscilla Horton as
+    a boy, not to be thought of beside it. She does an imitation of the
+    dancing of the Christy Minstrels--wonderfully clever--which in the
+    audacity of its thorough-going is surprising. A thing that you _can
+    not_ imagine a woman's doing at all; and yet the manner, the
+    appearance, the levity, impulse and spirits of it, are so exactly like
+    a boy, that you cannot think of anything like her sex in association
+    with it. It begins at eight, and is over by a quarter-past nine. I
+    never have seen such a curious thing, and the girl's talent is
+    unchallengeable. I call her the cleverest girl I have ever seen on the
+    stage in my time, and the most singularly original."
+
+But Miss Wilton was sick and tired of Pippo no less than of the Cupids.
+She begged of all the managers to let her play the rôle of a heroine in
+long dresses. They turned a deaf ear to her. Buckstone said to her, "I
+shall never see you otherwise than in the part of this wicked little
+scamp."
+
+Every evening she set her audiences in roars and every afternoon she spent
+in tears over her lot. When one day her married sister said to her--
+
+"As the managers won't have you, take a theatre yourself."
+
+"But I have no money."
+
+"I'll lend you money," said her brother-in-law.
+
+A partnership between Byron and Miss Wilton was the immediate result. _He_
+brought his reputation and his puns. _She_ the £1000 which was not hers.
+
+A theatre had now to be found. Near Tottenham Court Road, one of the
+noisiest and commonest quarters of the town, there was a squalid,
+miserable-looking street where ill-fed and ill-famed Frenchmen were at
+this time beginning to congregate; and in it there was a place of
+entertainment where all sorts of things had been achieved, but bankruptcy
+oftenest of all. Frédéric Lemaitre had played Napoleon there in French,
+and had in this capacity passed in review some half-dozen supers who stood
+for the "Grande Armée" and who cried "Viv' l'Emprou!" The house bore the
+high-sounding name of the "Queen's Theatre," but the people of the
+neighbourhood called it the "Dust-Hole," and in doing so proved their
+acquaintance with it. The aristocratic seats were a shilling, and when the
+Stalls had dined well they were given to bombarding the Boxes with orange
+peel.
+
+It was now cleaned, restored, freshened up at an outlay more of pains than
+of money. The "Dust-Hole" was transformed into a blue and white
+_bonbonnière_. The little manageress did not spare herself, and on the
+evening of the first night, whilst the _queue_ was already forming outside
+the door of the theatre, she was busy hammering in a last nail. What would
+have been said by the devotees of fashion, wandering in the muddy
+Tottenham Street, and astonished at finding themselves in such a locality,
+had they seen their favourite squatting on a stool, hammer in hand?
+
+The company she had gathered round her consisted of Byron, John Clarke,
+transplanted from the Strand, Fanny Josephs--an actress of delicate and
+agreeable talent, the excellent _duègne_ Larkin, and two other sisters
+Wilton. It included also a tall young man of twenty-four who had not
+previously acted in London, and who was not therefore of any interest to
+the public, though to his manageress he was; his name was Bancroft.
+
+He was a gentleman by birth, breeding, and bearing. But, his family being
+ruined, he had followed the vocation which led him to the stage. In four
+and a half years he had played four hundred and forty-six rôles. In one
+engagement of thirty-six days in Dublin he had played forty. This hard
+life as a provincial comedian had broken him into his business. Tall and
+slender, he owed a sort of air of distinction combined with stiffness to
+his short sight and to his stature. The rendering of cool, well-bred
+nonchalance came naturally to him, but in the depth of his eye there
+lurked a gleam of irrepressible humour. He had spent much time in
+observing and reflecting, he knew much more of things than did his
+colleagues, and he felt vaguely conscious of possessing qualities which
+had only to be drawn out. And now fortune, in the guise of a young girl,
+had come to him and taken him by the hand.
+
+Thus there was both ambition and love in the air that April evening in
+1865 when the little "Prince of Wales's" opened its door as wide as it
+could. In order not to startle the public or disturb its habits, a
+burlesque and a comedy were offered it pending the preparation of the new
+repertory. Marie Wilton's friends supported her in their hundreds, but
+their sympathies were soon to be lost. The pieces themselves were almost
+worthless; Byron would seem to have lost his _verve_ during the removal.
+Something new had to be found for the autumn. It was then that Robertson
+was thought of.
+
+Thomas William, or more familiarly, Tom Robertson, was at this time next
+door to a failure. He was thirty-six, and was fighting an uphill fight
+against ill-fortune with a desperation that was growing into rancour. The
+son, grandson, and great-grandson of actors, he had passed the first years
+of his life in a touring company in the midst of those _bourgeois_
+vagabonds whose joys and sorrows I have endeavoured to depict. His father
+had been manager of the company which worked on the Lincoln circuit, and
+had ended by giving it up. Tom himself had appeared upon the boards whilst
+still a child, but, as it would seem, without giving evidence of any
+remarkable talents. Later, his speciality was the taking off of
+foreigners--a sorry means of inciting to laughter for a man of intellect.
+In fine, though there are some who would fain mislead us in the matter, it
+is clear that Robertson was but a second-rate actor.
+
+At the age of nineteen, on the strength of a newspaper advertisement,
+Robertson set out for Holland to secure a place as usher or junior master
+in a boarding school. After unspeakable misadventures, of which he talked
+afterwards quite merrily, and curious experiences which must have been
+useful to him in his capacity of dramatist, he was despatched home by a
+good-natured consul, and took up his actor's life again with its three
+rôles and one meal a day. In 1851 we find him in London trying to earn a
+livelihood. He has written one piece, _A Night's Adventure_, which by a
+lucky chance has been accepted and performed. But it fails. He has a
+quarrel with Farren, the manager, who has produced it, his only employer;
+and behold! he is again at sea. Now he comes to the assistance of his
+father, who is making desperate efforts to keep open a suburban theatre.
+Anon he is fulfilling insignificant engagements here and there. He goes to
+Paris with a company which gets paid on the first Saturday and never
+again. He becomes prompter at the Olympic. He translates French plays,
+writes farces, produces a heap of wretched stuff for which he cannot
+always find a market. When hunger drives him to it, he sells his "copy"
+for a few shillings to a bookseller, of whom it is difficult to say
+whether he was merely a shrewd man of business or a friend in need. For,
+after all, to the recipient these shillings meant his daily bread, and the
+bookseller was not always sure of reimbursing himself.
+
+He has introduced into one of his comedies a bitter memory of his
+beginnings as a dramatist of the objections which met him everywhere. The
+speaker is a composer of music. "In England, yesterday is always
+considered so much better than to-day--last week so superior to this--and
+this week so superior to the week after next--and thirty years ago so much
+more brilliant an era than the present.... I shall explain myself better
+if I give my own personal reasons for making a crusade against age. In
+this country I find age so respected, so run after, so courted, so
+worshipped, that it becomes intolerable. I compose music; I wish to sell
+it. I go to a publisher and tell him so; he looks at me and says, 'You
+look so young,' in the same tone that he would say, You look like an
+impostor or a pickpocket. I apologise as humbly as I can for not having
+been born fifty years earlier, and the publisher, struck by my contrition,
+thinks to himself, Poor young man, after all, he cannot help being so
+young, and addressing me as if I were a baby, says, 'My dear sir, very
+likely your compositions may have merit--I don't dispute it--but, you see,
+Mr. So-and-So, aged sixty, and Mr. Such-an-one, aged seventy, and Mr.
+T'other, aged eighty, and Mr. Somebody, aged ninety, write for us; and the
+public are accustomed to their productions, and we make it a rule never to
+give the world anything written by a man under fifty-five years old. Go
+away now, and keep to your work for the next thirty years; during that
+time exert yourself to get older--you will succeed if you try hard; turn
+grey, be bald--it's not a bad substitute--lose your teeth, your health,
+your vigour, your fire, your freshness, your genius,--in one short word,
+your terrible, abominable youth, and some day or other, if you don't die
+in the interim, you may have the chance of being a great man.'"
+
+As though in obedience to this ironical advice, Tom was already almost old
+after fifteen years of so dreadful an existence. His handsome face had
+assumed a melancholy cast which it was never to lose. Once in the depth
+of his misery he took it into his head to enlist. The army would have
+nothing to say to him. Then, recklessly, he married a beautiful girl who
+imagined she had a vocation for the stage. Children came, but neither
+success nor money. She died, and Robertson then tried his hand at
+journalism. He tried to "place" work of every kind wherever he could, from
+riddles and comic anecdotes of a dozen lines up to serial stories. He got
+connected with a score of London and provincial papers--the _Porcupine_,
+of Liverpool; the _Comic News_; the _Wag_, which his friend Byron had
+started; _Fun_, just started by Tom Hood, and the _Illustrated Times_, on
+which he succeeded Edmund Yates as dramatic critic, and in whose columns,
+under the title of "The Theatrical Lounger," he sketched the features of
+the whole stage-world from leading actor to fireman and call-boy. It is
+all written with easy, familiar humour, with a spice of impudence thrown
+in, not unlike the style of our old weekly _Figaro_; at the same time, it
+is observant, natural, alive, with here and there a gust of passion and a
+vent of spleen.
+
+Robertson lived in the very centre of Bohemia--that vaguely-defined
+district in which "men of the world" whom the "world" bored, among them
+officers who found the military clubs too solemn, came to drink and make
+merry with the night-birds of the law, the theatre, and the press. They
+would meet at the Garrick, the Arundel, the Savage, the Fielding, of which
+last Albert Smith has left us a description in mock-heroic verse. Tom
+Hood, a clerk in the War Office, and editor of _Fun_, used to give Friday
+supper-parties--frugal meals, just cold meat and boiled potatoes. But
+those who met there, Clement Scott tells us, were the best fellows in the
+world.
+
+Conversation flowed until daybreak in a kind of torrent. It still flowed
+as the guests made their way homewards at the hours when the carts of the
+market gardeners began to rumble through Knightsbridge and the rising sun
+to gild the treetops of Hyde Park.
+
+Were they all such very "good fellows"?--I have my doubts. This Bohemia
+was not a country where everyone was young and kindly and gay. It was just
+a backwater, or a little world apart where one talked instead of working,
+and where night took the place of day; it was the antechamber to the real
+world of literature, a place of impatient waitings, of feverish suspense.
+I am sure there were half a dozen malcontents and failures there for one
+man who could claim success.
+
+These lines[10] of Robert Brough (one of the most characterised members of
+the body, one of the first to disappear from it), written by him on his
+birthday, give an instructive glimpse at the life--
+
+  "I'm twenty-nine! I'm twenty-nine!
+  I've drank too much of beer and wine;
+  I've had too much of toil and strife,
+  I've given a kiss to Johnson's wife,
+  And sent a lying note to mine,--
+  I'm twenty-nine! I'm twenty-nine!"
+
+After having written a few newspaper articles and two or three plays,
+Brough grew embittered at not having attained wealth and fame. That he
+should have failed to do so seemed a sufficient indication of the infamy
+of society. He wrote and published the "Songs of the Governing Classes,"
+the satire of which is as corrosive as vitriol, as scalding as molten
+lead. The "Song of the Gentleman" in particular might well be given a
+place in the anarchist anthologies of the future.
+
+Something of this bitterness was to find its way into the impassioned
+outbursts of Robertson and the philosophic irony of Gilbert. But at these
+nocturnal repasts of Hood's, at which Robertson was one of the most
+brilliant, fearless, and enthralling of talkers, there was question not so
+much of reconstituting society as of renewing art and reforming the
+theatre. They ridiculed the wretched stage management of the day, the
+fatuity of the comedians of the old school, the tyranny of conventional
+routine,--everything connected with the stage. And what was it they had to
+offer in place of the old order? Truth more carefully observed, nature
+more closely followed. It is always the same ideals, or the same
+pretensions: the generation which holds them up against its senior never
+seems to suspect that its junior may invoke them against itself.
+
+Pending the consummation of these great projects, Robertson had acted at
+the Strand in 1861 a little play called _The Cantab_, which achieved a
+sort of success. He offered another burlesque to Mrs. Swanborough but she
+refused it. Then came a stroke of luck. Sothern, who was at this time
+attracting all London in a piece by Tom Taylor entitled, _Our American
+Cousin_, heard tell of a piece which Robertson had written. Sothern, who
+was getting sick of the inexhaustible popularity of Lord Dundreary, was
+anxious to appear before the public in the rôle of David Garrick. He was
+anxious to get completely away from the field of caricature, to play a
+really serious part which should bring out all his gifts. Unluckily the
+piece had not much success, nor did it merit much. It was an adaptation
+from the French with Garrick substituted for the original French hero.
+Strange beginning for one who aimed at a "Return to Truth," this sticking
+of a historic head upon the shoulders of "a gentleman unknown"!
+
+It was after this that he wrote his comedy _Society_. He took it to
+Buckstone, who refused it flatly. "My dear fellow," he said, "your piece
+wouldn't reach a fourth performance." The author went off, fingers
+twitching, beyond himself with rage, and wandered into the Strand, where
+one of his friends met him. "Look here," said Robertson to him, "here is a
+capital play and these asses won't have it." A provincial manager took it
+up. It succeeded in Liverpool. Marie Wilton secured it and produced it on
+November 14, 1861, at her little theatre. From that evening dates not only
+the success of the Prince of Wales's Theatre, but a new era for English
+Comedy--the era of Robertson.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+First Performance of _Society_--Success of _Ours_, _Caste_, and
+_School_--How Robertson turned to account the Talent of his Actors, John
+Hare, Bancroft, and Mrs. Bancroft--Progress in the Matter of
+Scenery--Dialogue and Character-drawing--Robertson as a Humorist: a scene
+from _School_--As a Realist: a scene from _Caste_--The Comedian of the
+Upper Middle Classes--Robertson's Marriage, Illness, and Death--The "Cup
+and Saucer" Comedy--The Improvement in Actors' Salaries--The Bancrofts at
+the Haymarket--Farewell Performance--My Pilgrimage to Tottenham Street.
+
+
+That evening of the 14th of November has been described to us by several
+eye-witnesses, so that we are able to realise the feelings that prevailed
+both on the stage and amongst the audience. The first act seemed gay and
+lively, with a sort of mordant raillery in it with which the audience was
+unfamiliar. Then came an idyll, evolving amidst the trees of a London
+square. What! love--youthful, tender, tremulous love--in the very heart of
+this city of mud, fog, and smoke! Love, so near that you might touch his
+wings! This was the kind of impression it evoked--an impression that
+pleased and moved the more, that the public, always over-curious
+concerning the private life of its favourites, was acquainted with the
+tender relations of actor and actress. It was a real "honeymoon"--the
+full moon which shone on this love duet from over the shrubbery of
+coloured canvas. The hearts of the audience went out to them, and all was
+well.
+
+But no one could say what sort of reception was in store for "The Owls'
+Roost." This "roost" was a picture from the life of the clubs which I have
+already described as the principal resorts of Bohemia. Now, the
+"Savages"--the members, that is, of the Savage Club--as well as the
+frequenters of the Garrick, the Fielding, and the Arundel, were all there
+in force. How would they take this caricature of themselves? The laughter
+which broke out in uninterrupted peals soon reassured the anxious ears
+behind the scenes.
+
+There is a point at which one of the chief characters is at a loss for
+half a crown wherewith to pay for the hansom in which he is going off to a
+ball. Having no money in his pocket he asks a friend for the sum. "I
+haven't got it," the friend replies, "but I'll see if I can't get it for
+you." He asks a third, who makes a similar reply; and so the appeal makes
+the whole round of the club, until at last a half-crown is found in the
+depths of a pocket, and is passed on from hand to hand, borrowed and lent
+a dozen times, to the man who had asked for it in the first instance. The
+incident was taken from actual life. Thus reproduced upon the stage, it
+seemed indescribably comic, and proved the turning-point in the fortune of
+the play--the happy crisis after which everything was greeted with
+applause. It was a trivial illustration, but it was thoroughly
+characteristic. It was Bohemia in a nutshell--to have nothing and give
+everything.
+
+As the "owls" were so much diverted by the faithful portrayal of their
+resorts and of their customs, thus presented for the first time upon the
+stage, there was no reason to expect that Society would take offence over
+the extraordinary and incongruous proceedings at the establishment of Lord
+and Lady Ptarmigant. This kind of comic libel was not unknown;--Bulwer,
+for instance, had set himself to depict the union of the old aristocracy
+with the new, the naïve veneration displayed by Riches for Rank, and on
+the other hand, the prostration of Rank before Riches. No one showed
+astonishment at seeing Lady Ptarmigant smilingly take the arm of old
+Chodd, though his language and his manners were those of a costermonger,
+and though his lordship's valet would probably have hesitated about
+letting himself be seen with him in a public-house. As for Lord Ptarmigant
+himself, he was just what we call a _panne_. The whole character resolved
+itself into a mere eccentricity, as monotonous as it was far-fetched and
+extravagant,--a habit of dragging about his chair with him wherever he
+went, and of falling asleep in it the moment he sat down, with the result
+that everyone who came in or went out could not fail to tumble over his
+stretched-out old legs. Who would have imagined that such a rôle as this
+would be one of the causes of the success of the piece, and would be the
+means of revealing to London an admirable actor? His name was John Hare.
+He was still quite young, and he had wished for this strange rôle in which
+to make his _début_. Profiting by the example of Garrick, Hare had
+realised that an actor does not make his name by giving out a witticism or
+telling phrase with effect, but by putting before us a live human figure,
+if only a silent figure, in all its eccentricity of brain. His facial
+expression was wonderful, and his mimicry excellent;--he had in him the
+genius of metamorphosis; he has it still, and gives evidence of it in a
+hundred different rôles. By a sort of intuition not easy to explain, there
+was hardly a spectator who did not divine the future great actor from this
+one performance.
+
+The success of _Society_--it lasted for one hundred and fifty nights--was
+followed almost at once by the success of _Ours_, which lasted still
+longer, and filled the theatrical season 1866-67. Then came _Caste_ in
+1867 and 1868. _School_ in 1869 surpassed its predecessors in popularity,
+being played nearly four hundred times. In the intervals between these
+four great triumphs there were two pieces which, without achieving so long
+a run, still maintained in the fortunate little theatre the same joyous
+atmosphere of success.
+
+When the "Prince of Wales's," however, had recourse to any other than its
+regular caterer, a check in its fortunes was sure to come, and there was
+no alternative to falling back on Robertson. And when Robertson tried his
+fortune elsewhere, even when supported by a popularity so well established
+as that of Sothern, the result was invariably but a _succès d'estime_,
+when not a disastrous failure. From these circumstances a certain
+superstition grew up. Superstitions are rife in the theatrical world.
+Marie Wilton, it was felt, had her lucky star, and Robertson had his, but
+the two had to be in conjunction for their benign influence to be exerted.
+Perhaps the coincidence may be explained without having recourse to the
+stars. Tom Taylor, on the day after a new triumph, wrote to the young
+manageress: "The author and the theatre, the actors and the rôles, all
+seem made for one another." This was quite true, and it may be added, that
+the public and the time were in harmony with the spirit of the pieces and
+the talent of the performers. Everything had come about as it should; so
+it was called chance!
+
+Robertson was not much of an actor, but he was a wonderful reader. When
+you heard Robertson read one of his comedies, Clement Scott tells us, you
+understood it in all its details. Under the sway of his moving elocution
+the actors laughed and cried. The author knew their weaknesses and their
+gifts better than they themselves; he knew, therefore, how to make the
+most of the peculiar constitution of this small company which formed a
+kind of family, closely united by common interests, ambitions, and
+affections. Until then a piece was often nothing more than a star actor
+planted well in the front of the stage, taking his time and prolonging his
+effects, and behind him a dozen or so nonentities mumbling mere odds and
+ends of dialogue and addressing themselves to the back of their more
+famous colleague. For the first time there was now at the "Prince of
+Wales's," an _ensemble_ moulded by assiduous rehearsals and perfected by
+the practice of every night.
+
+In _Ours_, John Hare, who played the rôle of Prince Perofsky, had only to
+utter a dozen sentences--hackneyed and affected compliments--yet he made
+out of it a really striking portrait of a Slavonic Grand Seigneur, with a
+smouldering passion in his heart veiled under the most perfect manners.
+Besides his impressiveness there was something enigmatic about him that
+set one speculating as to the part he was to play in the plot,--an enigma
+to which there was to be no solution.
+
+At length, in _Caste_, Robertson gave him a real rôle, that of Sam
+Gerridge. I imagine, indeed, that author and actor contributed equally to
+the creation of this character. The same might be said, perhaps, of that
+of Captain Hawtree, created by Bancroft in the same play. Seldom, surely,
+has the use of this big word "created" (so often applied in the papers to
+the most insignificant performances) been warranted so fully as in these
+cases.
+
+Before Sothern's time the man of the world used to be represented on the
+English stage as an absurd figure treading on tiptoe while in ladies'
+society and ogling them _à bout portant_.
+
+The type had been changed as regards costume, but not as regards language,
+from that of the Macaroni of 1770. The dandy of 1840 does not seem to have
+found his way on to the stage until 1865.
+
+It was a complete change from this type to the character presented by
+Bancroft as Captain Hawtree, humorous but not ridiculous; not in the least
+essential to the play, yet attracting a large share of interest and
+sympathy. An elegantly languid air, which yet spoke of weakness neither of
+muscles nor of character; a blind acceptance of the social code, which was
+not incompatible with generous feelings and a sense of humour; a mixture
+of soldier-like cordiality and worldly cynicism, which amounted to an
+_état d'âme_ if not to a philosophy: these were some of the features that
+went to make up the character.
+
+When circumstances--quite simple and natural--lead to Hawtree's taking tea
+in humble East End lodgings, between a little dancing-girl and an old
+plumber, nearly all the fun of the scene comes from his mute expression of
+continual astonishment. Hawtree presents a curious combination of
+awkwardness and goodwill in the scene in which he brings the plates to
+Polly Eccles in the pantry to be washed. At bottom it is the attitude of
+the English gentleman towards the social question,--somewhat scornful,
+somewhat amused, but ready to turn up his sleeves and put a shoulder to
+the wheel at need.
+
+As for Marie Wilton, with what wonderful insight Robertson had made out
+the real genius of this little woman, whose talents were so real, if all
+her ambitions were not attainable! She looked back with horror at her
+successes at the Strand; she wanted never again to play a _gamin's_ part
+(as we should call it) or to appear in burlesque. Robertson wrote her a
+succession of _gamin's_ parts and burlesque scenes. But the _gamin_ was
+petticoated and the burlesque scenes set in a comedy. I am not referring
+to _Society_, which was not written for the "Prince of Wales's." But what
+is it she has to do in the three other pieces? In _School_ she climbs a
+wall. In _Ours_ she takes part in a game of bowls, mimics the affectations
+of the swells of '65, plays at being a soldier, bastes a leg of mutton
+from a watering pot, and as a climax makes a roley-poley pudding, adapting
+military implements to culinary uses for the purpose. In _Caste_ her
+operations are still more varied--she sings, dances, boxes people's ears,
+plays the piano, pretends to blow a trumpet, puts on a forage cap, and
+imitates a squadron of cavalry. If this is not burlesque, what is it?
+
+Some months ago I saw her in a revival of _Money_, in which she plays the
+rôle of a woman of the world, and in one scene of which--a scene which
+owed much more to her than to Bulwer--she shows the steps of a dance. At
+this moment I seemed to see the legs of Pippo moving under the skirts of
+Lady Franklin,--those legs which five and thirty years before had made so
+lively an impression on the brain of Charles Dickens.
+
+Whether he was conscious of it or not, Robertson made her play Pippo all
+her life. These fantastic rôles, sketched on to the margin of domestic
+dramas, were to have a remarkable and twofold success; they were largely
+responsible for the good fortune of Robertson's comedies, and in the
+reading of these they constitute, as it were, appetising _hors
+d'oeuvres_. If I say to the admirers of _Caste_ that Polly Eccles is an
+excrescence spoiling the artistic merit of the piece, they reply at once
+that, on the contrary, she is its life and soul; and from the point of
+view of stage effect, they are quite right.
+
+The Bancrofts--they married shortly after the opening of the theatre--were
+the complements of each other. She was all fun and fancy, harum-scarum,
+irresponsible, indescribable. He was chiefly notable for thought, taste,
+careful observation, and truthful representation of real life. One of his
+first acts, as soon as there was some money in the exchequer of the
+"Prince of Wales's," was to introduce a certain amount of intelligent
+realism into the scenery. He felt the need of doors with locks instead of
+the wretched folding-sashes, which shook before the draughts from the
+wings. In _Caste_ he gave ceilings to the rooms. The last Act of _Ours_
+takes place in Crimean barracks during the winter of 1855; every time the
+door was opened a gust of snow came into the room with a whirl and
+whistle, which produced so strong an illusion that the audience shivered.
+In the gardens, real flowers were introduced, and living birds. Charles
+Mathews was thought very enterprising because he had ventured to have some
+chairs placed in a drawing-room upon the stage. Bancroft went so far as to
+assign a different character to different suites of furniture. Thus in a
+revival of the _School for Scandal_, Joseph Surface's furniture was
+different from that of Sir Peter Teazle; his furniture, hypocritical as
+himself, seemed to make a pretence of being plain and simple, lied for him
+and bore out his lies. As for the actresses, instead of being made guys of
+by the theatrical costumiers, they had real dresses made for them by real
+dressmakers.
+
+Robertson approved of these innovations, but he was never more than half a
+realist, and this from several causes. Like all Englishmen, he delighted
+in the warfare of words; he shared with them all, big and little, ancient
+and modern, that liking for brilliancy which is perhaps evolved from the
+liking of savages for brilliants. Once he began concocting repartees he
+forgot all else and gave his pen its head. He made his characters play a
+game of verbal battledore and shuttlecock. He dragged in by the nape of
+the neck, as it were, tirades whose proper place had been in a leading
+article. When he went too far, however, in these directions, he was often
+the first to make fun of the result. "What has that got to do with what we
+are talking about?" asks a character in _Ours_. "It has nothing to do
+with it, that's why I said it." And in the same piece another character
+remarks of something that has happened, "If an author put that into a
+play, everyone would say that it was impossible and untrue to life."
+
+Thus it was he would forestall gaily, with a sort of impudent frankness,
+the objections of the critics. The public enjoys this kind of thing. What
+it enjoys most of all, in England at anyrate, is the _grain de folie_, the
+lurking, unlooked-for quaintness, which characterises some of their
+humorists, Dickens, for instance, and Ben Jonson. It is this quality which
+is responsible for their creation of strange types whose ideas and
+conversations are all topsy-turvy.
+
+It was in _School_ that Robertson poured it out most plentifully. It was
+the most frivolous of his plays, and in this perhaps may be found the
+explanation of its success. The heroines are boarding-school girls; they
+are just at the age and in the situation in which no absurdity would seem
+too great or out of place. By a convention which the spectator agrees to
+willingly, they are girls in Act I. and women three weeks later in Act
+III. In these three weeks they have learned the meaning of life.
+
+"What is love?" asks one of the youngest in the first scene. "Why,
+everyone knows what love is," Naomi tells her. "Well, what is it then?"
+asks another, and the first speaker insists that no one seems to know.
+
+Then comes the time for them to pass from vague theory to real experience.
+It is the evening, in the orchard. There are two flirtation scenes, one
+following the other, full of childishness, but full of _naïveté_,
+freshness, and charm. There is question of the distance from the earth to
+the moon, of the play of light and shade, of a little milk-jug which it
+takes two to carry, of the Crimean War, and of Othello. Of love there is
+no word, but it underlies their every feeling, hides behind every word,
+peeps out through every glance, mingles with the very air they breathe.
+
+    _Naomi_: ... "I like to hear you talk."
+
+    _Jack_ (_bows_): "The fibs or the truth?"
+
+    _Naomi_: "Both. Have you ever been married?"
+
+    _Jack_: "Never."
+
+    _Naomi_: "What are you?"
+
+    _Jack_: "Nothing. It's the occupation I am most fitted for."
+
+    _Naomi_: "Oh, you must be something?"
+
+    _Jack_: "No."
+
+    _Naomi_: "What were you before you were what you are now?"
+
+    _Jack_: "A little boy."...
+
+    _Naomi_: "Mr. Farintosh was saying at table that you had been in the
+    army. Were you a horse-soldier or a foot-soldier?"
+
+    _Jack_: "A foot-soldier,--a very foot-soldier."
+
+    _Naomi_: "And that you were in the Crimea?"
+
+    _Jack_: "Ya-as, I was there."
+
+    _Naomi_: "At the battle of Inkermann?"
+
+    _Jack_: "Ya-as."
+
+    _Naomi_: "Then why didn't you mention it?"
+
+    _Jack_: "Not worth while, there were so many other fellows there."
+
+    _Naomi_: "Did you fight?"
+
+    _Jack_: "Ya-as, I fought."
+
+    _Naomi_: "Weren't you frightened?"
+
+    _Jack_: "Immensely."
+
+    _Naomi_: "Then why did you stay?"
+
+    _Jack_: "Because I hadn't the pluck to run away."
+
+    _Naomi_: "Did they pay you much for fighting?"
+
+    _Jack_: "No, but then I didn't do much fighting, so that I was even
+    with them in that respect!"
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    _Naomi_: ... "Are you fond of reading?"
+
+    _Jack_: "Ya-as. Middling."
+
+    _Naomi_: "Did you ever read Othello?"
+
+    _Jack_: "Ya-as. But I don't think it nice reading for young ladies."
+
+    _Naomi_: "Othello told Desdemona of the dangers he had passed and the
+    battles he had won."
+
+    _Jack_: "Ya-as. Othello was a nigger, and didn't mind bragging."...
+
+It would be but an ill service to Robertson to give an outline of his
+plays. A mere outline would give the impression that they were childish
+and absurd, and they were neither the one nor the other. He never invented
+a striking situation, so far as I am aware. He never settled (or even
+raised) a moral or social problem in any of his productions. He gave all
+his attention to the characters and the dialogue. A scribbled synopsis
+found amongst his papers reveals his method of character-drawing. He stuck
+down three words, one after another--a name, a profession, a ruling
+passion, such as love, ambition, cupidity, pride. With these words he
+thought he had summed up the ordinary conventional man, as nature had
+formed him, and society had reformed or deformed him: a very elementary
+but very sane psychology, which he enriched, embellished, elaborated, with
+the flowers of his fancy and the fruits of his observation. I have given
+some specimens of the former. I may now give some specimens of the second,
+to justify the title of half-realist which I have given him.
+
+He wanted nothing better than to be a realist and to reproduce what he had
+actually seen. He knew nothing of great ladies, as one may well
+understand. When he had to portray them he was obliged to copy from bad
+models. His Lady Ptarmigant is a regular _bourgeoise_; his Marquise de
+Saint Maur, who learns bits of Froissart by heart and gives lessons in
+history to her son, is either a myth or an anachronism. His Hawtree, on
+the other hand, is as real as can be; Robertson had met him probably in
+the clubs which he frequented. In _School_ he introduced a foolish yet
+ferocious usher, who was, it seems, a reminiscence of his youthful
+expedition to Holland. His rancour had not become extinguished in the
+twenty years that had intervened, and he could not resist the somewhat
+brutal satisfaction of inflicting a physical punishment in the last act
+upon his old enemy. He used to ask his small boy, whilst walking with him
+in Belsize Park, what he would answer to such and such a question? How
+would he set about enraging his master? And the boy would receive sixpence
+or a florin according to the nature of his reply.
+
+Soldiers, theatrical folk, artistic and literary Bohemians, are painted as
+they live, slightly idealised. In _Caste_ we have two specimens of the
+people--bad and good--in the persons of Eccles and Sam Gerridge. "Work, my
+boy," says Eccles to his future son-in-law; "there's nothing like
+work--when you're young." As for him,--well, it was some years since he
+worked (as a matter of fact he had lived on his daughters, and not touched
+a tool for twenty years), but he loved to see young folk at work. That did
+him good,--did them good too. He declaims against the upper classes; but
+when a marchioness passes his threshold, he bows down before her, and
+conducts her back to her carriage, only to return to his real self,
+insolent and venomous, the moment she has gone. When he makes his way to
+the public-house to drink, he gives a "business appointment" as his
+pretext--"a friend who is waiting for him round the corner." Always posing
+and aiming at effect, he uses big words for the smallest matters, and can
+produce a tear in his eye at will. He has a few garbled bits of literature
+at his command, and makes use of mangled quotations from _King Lear_.
+And, wretched actor though he be, he is able, with the aid of filial
+affection, to produce an illusion in the mind of one of his daughters.
+"Poor dad," says Polly, "he is so good at heart--and _so_ cute."
+
+No money in the house! He has been left at home by himself to mind the
+child of his eldest daughter, married to an officer who was well-born and
+rich, but who, it is supposed, has perished in the Indian Mutiny. The old
+drunkard rocks the cradle, angrily puffing his tobacco smoke in the baby's
+face.
+
+    _Eccles_: ... "Mind the baby, indeed! (_Smokes and puffs angrily short
+    cloud._) That fool of a ge'l to go and throw away her chances
+    (_rises_) for the sake of being an Honourable-ess. (_Goes up centre._)
+    To think of her father not having the price of an early pint, or a
+    quartern of cool refreshing gin! Rock the young Honourable! (_Kicks
+    the cradle._) Cuss him! Are we slaves, we working-men? (_Sings._)
+    'Britons never, never, never'--(_Snatches pipe from his mouth, throws
+    it over the fireplace, takes chair front of table._) However, I shan't
+    stand this much longer! I've writ the old cat!--the Marquizzy, I mean;
+    I told her her daughter-in-law and her grandson were starving! That
+    fool Esther is too proud to do it herself. I 'ate pride--it's beastly.
+    (_Rises._) There's no beastly pride about me! (_Goes up centre, clacks
+    his tongue against the roof of mouth._) I'm as dry as a limekiln! Of
+    course, there's nothing in the house fit for a Christian to drink!
+    (_Looks into the jug on dresser._) Empty! (_Lifts teapot on mantel._)
+    Tea! (_Turns up his nose. Turns to table, looks into jug on it._)
+    Milk! (_Contempt._) Milk for this aristocratic young pauper! Everybody
+    in the 'ouse is saggrefized for him! To think of me, Member of the
+    Committee of Banded Brothers, organised for the Regeneration of Human
+    Kind by an Equal Diffusion of Labour and an Equal Division of
+    Property!--to think of me, without the price of a pot of beer, while
+    this aristocratic pauper wears round his neck--a coral of gold--real
+    gold. Oh, Society! Oh, Governments! Oh, Class-degradation! Is _this_
+    right? Shall this mindless wretch enjoy in his sleep a jewelled gaud
+    while his poor old grandfather is _thirsty_? It shall not be! I will
+    resent the outrage on the Rights of Man! In this holy crusade of class
+    against class, of (_very meekly_) the weak and lowly against the
+    (_loudly, pointing to cradle_) powerful and strong! I will strike one
+    blow for freedom. (_Stoops over cradle._) He's asleep! This coral will
+    fetch ten "bob" around the corner! If the Marquizzy gives anythink, it
+    can be easy got out again! (_Takes coral._) Lie still, darling--lie
+    still, darling! It's grandfather a-watching you! (_Sings._) 'Who ran
+    to catch me when I fell? who _kicked_ the spot to make it well?--My
+    grandfather!' (_Goes R._) Lie still, my darling!--lie still, my
+    darling!"
+
+These comedies reveal the date of their composition in every line.
+Everybody cries out in them against money, but as against a master. Love
+cuts but a poor figure in comparison, though for form's sake it may
+triumph for five minutes before the curtain fails. Sam Gerridge, the
+virtuous plumber, who acts as counterpoise to the old wretch Eccles, has
+concocted a philosophy for himself out of the notices which he has seen on
+public conveyances--"First Class," "Second Class," "Third Class," "Holders
+of Third-Class Tickets must not enter Second-Class Carriages." As for him,
+he proposes to establish himself, and, from being a workman, to become an
+employer. John Burns will tell you that this kind of democracy is a
+negation of true democracy; in 1868 the formula seemed wide and generous
+enough.
+
+In such a manner was it that Robertson, who had wished that the world were
+a football which he could send into space with one kick, that the same
+Robertson, who, as he quitted those nocturnal symposia at Tom Hood's,
+would bring down his stick upon the pavement with a noise that made the
+silent streets resound, as he held forth indignantly against
+society,--grew in time and unconsciously, though in a manner easy to
+under-stand, to be the interpreter of the feelings and ideas of this very
+same society. The former assailant now defended the social rank which he
+had attained against both the enemies above and the enemies below. The new
+strata which came into being in 1832 were now half-way through their
+evolution. In 1850 they had been content with melodramas, vulgar farces,
+and Hippodramas. In 1865 they asked already for wit, sentiment, satire,
+poetic feeling, all flavoured, it might be, with Cockneyism, but this
+demand was an indication of progress, and Robertson satisfied it by
+writing the middle-class comedy.
+
+The change which took place just then in the life of the dramatist
+convinces me that I am right. He hastened to take leave of his irregular
+life, and to feel after _bourgeois_ comforts. He worked out for himself a
+happiness which made him, like the poor vagabond in the fable, weep for
+very joy. The Eve of this new-opened Paradise was a fair German whom he
+had met at the house of the editor of the _Daily Telegraph_, whose niece
+she was. Robertson did not long enjoy the sweets of this happy land. His
+mental and physical powers seemed to die away together. Mrs. Bancroft, who
+accompanied him to the first night of _The Nightingale_, saw him, livid
+with rage, shake his fist at the hissing members of the audience,
+muttering, "I shall never forgive them for this!"
+
+The doctors ordered him to Torquay, where, however, he grew worse. I have
+read a letter which he wrote thence to his young wife,--a pitiful letter,
+all in little jerky sentences, set in rhythm by the sick man's pants for
+breath. Pitiful, yet gay, for he could not give up being facetious. On his
+return to London he experienced a literary misfortune of which it was the
+lot of little Tommy, then thirteen or fourteen years old, to bring the
+news. Father and son looked upon each other with tearful eyes, and
+grasped each other's hands. "If they had seen me thus," said the writer
+sadly, "they would have had pity." Robertson was wrong. The public should
+know nothing of these things. There are no extenuating circumstances for
+literary mistakes.
+
+He died some days later. He was only forty-four. A friend who attended the
+funeral remarked, lying in the death chamber, its limbs dangling and
+disjointed, a doll whose injured stomach gave out sawdust through a wide
+opening. It was a doll with which he used to amuse his little girl to the
+very end. As for the puppets with which he had so long amused the world,
+they were to have a longer life. His comedies were destined to be
+continually revived, applauded, and imitated. Out of the six thousand
+performances given by the Bancrofts in a period of twenty years which
+formed one long success, three thousand belonged to Robertson. He alone
+furnished half their repertoire, and that the better half. From the depths
+of the out-of-the-way district which it had brought into fashion, the
+Prince of Wales's company sent colonies into the heart of the metropolis.
+It was by actors who had been brought out in it, as in a _conservatoire_,
+that the Vaudeville, the Globe, and the Court Theatres were founded. The
+inexhaustible success of _The Two Roses_--of which there will be question
+further on--placed the name of James Albery almost as high.
+
+Byron, in his turn, took a leaf out of the book of his old comrade, and
+succeeded, in _Our Boys_, in producing a comedy without (or almost
+without) puns. _Our Boys_ resembles Robertson's comedies just as a cook
+resembles her mistress when she is decked out in her mistress's hat and
+gown, or as Cathos and Madelon resemble the Marquise de Rambouillet and
+Julie d'Angennes. Even in this unintentionally caricature-like form the
+Robertsonian comedy continued to please, and it looked as though _Our
+Boys_ would never leave the bills.
+
+The exacting, the fastidious, those who had begun to dream of a purer and
+more penetrating art, dubbed Robertsonian comedy "Cup and Saucer" comedy.
+The school accepted the nickname, and gloried in it. For the tea-table,
+fifteen or twenty years ago, was still the centre of the home, the symbol
+of the family, the core of English life, such as it had been formed by the
+combination of the spirit of Puritanism with that of middle-class
+Utilitarianism.
+
+The name of the Bancrofts remained associated with the "Cup and Saucer"
+comedy as long as the movement lasted. As soon as they became sensible of
+their favourite author's decline in the eyes of the public they called
+Sardou to their assistance. By 1880 the Prince of Wales's had become too
+small for them and they emigrated to the Haymarket, which Mr. Bancroft had
+reconstructed as it is now, after a new plan, without the conventional
+proscenium, with the orchestra out of sight, the stage encased in a gilt
+frame like a picture, and no pit.
+
+This last innovation is characteristic. The pit from having composed the
+whole arena of the hall, had been moved back bit by bit, until at last it
+was confined to a few back benches behind the dress circle. To suppress it
+altogether was not so much an act of authority as of emancipation. It has
+been said that Mr. Bancroft thought too much of his gentility, and that he
+seemed anxious to reserve his theatre for the _élite: Satis est equitem
+mihi plaudere_. But even then? After all, it was only a case of an
+extremely able man keeping pace with the democratic generation to which he
+belonged, in his rise towards fortune and its accompanying enjoyments. He
+raised the price of stalls from six to seven shillings, and then to
+ten-and-sixpence. The public was evidently able to pay, for the stalls
+were always full.
+
+It should be added that, under the management of the Bancrofts, the rise
+in salaries was out of all proportion to the rise in the price of seats.
+The weekly salary of one actor, continuing to play in the same rôle, went
+from £18 to £60, and that of another from £9 to £50. Mrs. Stirling had
+created the rôle of the Marchioness in Caste at the "Prince of Wales's,"
+and received seven times as much for appearing in it at the Haymarket.
+Douglas Jerrold said to Charles Mathews: "I don't despair of seeing you
+yet with a good cotton umbrella under your arm, carrying your savings to
+the bank." Many years afterwards Mathews, presiding over the Theatrical
+Fund, recalled this remark, and added, "The first part of Jerrold's wish
+has been fulfilled. I have bought an umbrella." Thanks to the Bancrofts
+and the managers who came after them, the bank has been in receipt of the
+savings of many actors who previously would have been content if only they
+might earn their daily bread.
+
+Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft saw the time approaching when the monopoly they had
+secured of the works of Robertson would cease to exist; they felt at once
+that the vein was being exhausted, and that the new generation would have
+new needs. Able and far-sighted, they determined to retire at the zenith
+of their success, and if not in their youth, at least in their prime and
+in the full activity of their intellect. Neither of them was forty-five
+when in 1885 they gave their farewell performance at the Haymarket.
+
+Amongst the innumerable tokens of esteem which conduced to the triumph of
+this withdrawal, I shall cite only one. It is a letter from Arthur W.
+Pinero, who had belonged as an actor to the Bancroft Company, and who has
+taken since then a foremost place amongst English dramatists. He wrote to
+his former manager:--
+
+    "It is my opinion, expressed here as it is elsewhere, that the present
+    advanced condition of the English stage--throwing as it does a clear,
+    natural light upon the manner and life of the people, where a few
+    years ago there was nothing but moulding and tinsel--is due to the
+    crusade begun by Mrs. Bancroft and yourself in your little Prince of
+    Wales's Theatre. When the history of the stage and its progress is
+    adequately and faithfully written, Mrs. Bancroft's name and your own
+    must be recorded with honour and gratitude."
+
+I took it into my head not long ago to pay a visit to the little theatre
+in which Frédéric Lemaître appeared, in which Napoleon and Count d'Orsay
+rubbed shoulders with Dickens and Thackeray, in which there was difficulty
+once in finding a seat for Gladstone, and in which Beaconsfield received a
+memorable ovation. The Salvationists have succeeded to the comedians, and,
+whether or not it be that their trumpets have the virtue of those of
+Jericho, these historic walls are crumbling to ruin. The place is empty,
+cold, and desolate. It was on an evening of last winter that I stood
+pensively under the porch--the porch through which had flowed like a
+stream all the elegance and talent of a whole generation. The light of a
+gas jet shone mournfully on the notice, mouldy already, "To be let or
+sold"; and the rain trickled down on me from a gaping hole whence the
+electric light used once to glare upon pretty women issuing in all their
+finery from their carriages. My curiosity was not satisfied. In order to
+obtain admission inside, I gave myself out as a lecturer in search of a
+hall, but the ruse failed. I was told that I should have to pay £4500 or
+£6000, and was asked whether this trifling outlay would interfere with me.
+I did not pursue the negotiations, and the door remained closed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+Gilbert: compared with Robertson--His first Literary Efforts--The _Bab
+Ballads_--_Sweethearts_--A Series of Experiments--Gilbert's Psychology and
+Methods of Work--_Dan'l Druce_, _Engaged_, _The Palace of Truth_, _The
+Wicked World_--_Pygmalion and Galatea_--The Gilbert and Sullivan Operas.
+
+
+When Marie Wilton's company, during their first holiday, went on tour to
+Liverpool, they happened upon the autumn assizes. The young London
+barristers who followed the circuit made haste to fraternise with the
+theatrical folk, and a sort of little colony came into being in which
+everyone rejoiced and made merry. Grotesque trials were represented in
+which Marie Wilton, got up as the Lord Chief Justice in wig and gown, gave
+forth admirable verdicts; she tells of these frolics in her Memoirs,
+adding pleasantly: "We were all young then, and the fun perhaps appeared
+greater than it would now, but it was a very happy time."
+
+Among these young barristers there was one named Gilbert. He was soon to
+throw aside his gown in order to devote himself to the calling in which he
+was to achieve a reputation as great as Robertson's,--a reputation which
+still lives. The contrast between the two dramatists is striking.
+Robertson is a craftsman, brought up in the theatre, amenable to outside
+influences; he collaborates with his actors, with the public,--one may
+say, with his entire generation. The ideas of his time, good, bad and
+indifferent, exude from him at every pore. He becomes, therefore,
+unconsciously, a representative man and the leader of a school. Where
+Robertson is a natural product, a symptom, Gilbert is a freak, an
+accident. He might have "occurred" at any time in the century, or indeed
+in any century. One can neither trace his ancestry nor imagine his
+posterity. Born and bred a gentleman, he loved the theatrical world
+without being of it. Actors have accused him of being cold in his manner
+to them, high and mighty, even disdainful. So much for his personal
+character;--in discussing a living writer, more than this would be
+improper. As to his bent of mind, its originality was evident from the
+first, but that originality was at all times somewhat shallow and liable
+to run dry; and instead of widening it, he scooped it out.
+
+He exploited his talent by a kind of mathematical system, to its utmost
+limit, to the point of absurdity, in fact, and even further. His literary
+career may be described as containing three periods: in the first he felt
+his way; in the second he achieved brilliant and legitimate successes; in
+the third he met with even more fruitful triumphs, but of a kind which
+arouse little sympathy in a critic, and of which, I think, even he
+himself grew a bit tired. But he is so true an artist, and at the same
+time so typically English, that a French critic may well study him, even
+in his errors, without feeling that it is waste of time.
+
+It was some verses which he contributed from week to week to _Fun_ that
+first attracted attention to him. He reprinted them under the title, _Bab
+Ballads_, and as the public seemed to want them he followed these up with
+_More Bab Ballads_. Some of them were set to music and are still popular
+as songs, but these are not the ones which have the most flavour. It is
+difficult to describe this flavour; it consisted in a kind of naïve irony,
+expressed in a form that was sometimes extravagant, sometimes studiously
+careless,--a blend of the deliberately prosaic with amazing fantasy. Some
+of these ballads finished up with a surprise, the others did not finish up
+at all,--which was a surprise too.
+
+Gilbert offered to his friends at the Prince of Wales's a pleasant little
+comedy entitled _Sweethearts_. A young man is about to start for India,
+where he is to make a career for himself, but he is in love with a young
+girl who lives near his country home. She has but to say a word and he
+will not go, or will not go alone. She does not say this word. What
+prevents her? Is it timidity, bashfulness, pride, or that strange spirit
+of contradiction or of coquetry which sometimes keeps the tongue from
+obeying the dictates of the heart? However that may be, she lets him go.
+Thirty years ensue. The lover returns, grey haired now,--a lover, indeed,
+no longer.
+
+Distance in time, as in space, makes things look small. His "grande
+passion" seems to him now a boyish fancy. He merely wishes to see the spot
+again; that is all. She, too, is there, seated under the shade of the tree
+which they planted together, retaining still the flower which he had given
+her, faithful to the memory of the love she had seemed to scorn. The old
+boy's scepticism gives way to tenderness. They marry. But will they ever
+find the thirty years that they have lost?
+
+Here is one of those pleasingly fanciful ideas that a man like Octave
+Feuillet may work out delightfully. Sadness and gladness should alternate
+in it like mist and sunshine on an autumn day. Now, Gilbert is a cynic,
+though a refined cynic, and he could deal only with half of his subject.
+In his little comedy, one or other of its two characters is always carping
+at love. In the first act it is the woman, in the second the man. Gilbert
+speaks, and very cleverly, through the mouth of this railer, but, alas!
+there seems nothing to be said on the other side. From the moment of this
+first attempt of his, the young author had to face the fact that he had a
+great disqualification for the writing of dramas; he could neither depict
+love nor reproduce its language. Is it out of a kind of revenge that he
+has continued to rail at love ever since?
+
+Nevertheless, he made some further efforts during the years which
+followed. He wrote _Broken Hearts_, a fantastic drama in verse, and made
+it clear even to himself that he was unequal to such high flights. He
+aimed at freeing Goethe's Margaret from all that philosophy which
+surrounds and obscures her, and he discovered that the idyll thus
+disencumbered, and naturally told, became flat and commonplace. He was
+then inspired by history, and the idea entered his head--probably after
+some reading that had moved him and awakened in him some dormant atavistic
+instinct--that his misanthropy would have a new force in the mouth of a
+puritanical peasant of the seventeenth century. But how difficult it is
+for a university man, a Garrick Club man, to feel and speak like such a
+character! As far as mere language is concerned, the author was fairly
+successful; _Dan'l Druce_ is a pleasing mosaic of archaic phrases, an
+ingenious transcription of the speech of those days. (But was the public
+which applauded _School_ and _Society_ sufficiently advanced in its
+artistic education to enjoy these things?) Can one say the same, however,
+of the ideas? Had one submitted, for instance, to a contemporary of John
+Fox or of Bunyan the moral question on which Mr. Gilbert's drama turns,
+would he really have solved it after the fashion of _Dan'l Druce_? Surely
+not.
+
+It is an interesting problem, though, of course, not new. To which of the
+two does the child belong--to him who begat but abandoned it, or to him
+who took pity on it and brought it up? It is the modern conscience that
+decides in favour of the second; the Puritan conscience of former days
+would have feared to interfere with that natural order of things in which
+it saw the guiding hand of God. As all things in this world and the next
+were pre-ordained, the father must remain the father in spite of
+everything, just as the chosen remained chosen, and the evil evil; the
+heart might bleed, but Divine Providence must have its way. This, it seems
+to me, had been the Puritan solution. But while we are reflecting upon
+these things, this problem, by a characteristic Gilbertian stroke, is
+turned upside down through a series of utterly incredible complications,
+the real father becomes the adoptive, and the adoptive father the real.
+Thenceforth we tumble from psychology into melodrama, and there remains no
+problem to solve.
+
+A love-scene was required in the play, as there were a young man and a
+girl amongst its characters. Their conversation--apart from certain pretty
+archaic touches which continue to delight me--is a sort of subtle
+intellectual game. Each seizes upon some one word in the last phrase of
+the other, works it up into a new phrase and darts it back. Thus the
+dialogue is bandied about to and fro, the great thing being to keep it up.
+Sometimes, however, it falls to the ground. "I don't know what to say,"
+Dorothy's answer to her lover's proposal, seems to suggest that the author
+himself is in a difficulty. This Dorothy is a thoroughly ingenuous young
+person, naïvely outspoken to the point of silliness. She is not sure of
+being in love, and discusses the subject like a question of conscience
+with him whose interest in it is most at stake. "These are my feelings,"
+she tells him. "Is this love or is it not?" This self-analysing _ingénue_
+is the only woman's character in the whole of Gilbert's dramatic work.
+
+Before writing _Engaged_, some such thoughts as these must have passed
+through his mind. "I shall turn out the human soul like a bag and show its
+lining instead of its cover. It will be very ugly, but all the more
+amusing. What does a man want when he puts aside all hypocrisy and all
+regard for social conventions, and gives the rein to his appetites and
+instincts?--To eat, to drink, to sleep, to be at his ease; to see all
+those die off from whom legacies are to be expected; to win, honourably or
+otherwise, every pretty woman who comes across his path. And what does a
+woman want?--To shine in society, to have fine dresses, to be admired, to
+marry a man who may give her a good position in the world. What is the
+meeting-point of the feelings of both man and woman?--The greed for money
+wherewith to buy the rest.
+
+"My _dramatis personæ_ shall be neither good nor bad, they shall be
+naïvely and absolutely selfish,--their selfishness shown clearly, but in
+the thousand shades which civilisation has imparted to characters; it
+shall be expressed not bluntly but in the thousand shades which well-bred
+people bring into the utterance of fine sentiments and correct
+commonplaces. They shall lack only the moral sense; of this organ I shall
+deprive them as neatly and gently as possible. _Fiancé_ and _fiancée_,
+father and daughter, friend and friend, shall become enemies the moment
+their interests clash; the moment their interests agree they shall clasp
+hands and kiss again as before. Three couples will perform these
+evolutions and manoeuvres before the audience, and the young girls will
+change their lovers as complacently as they would their partners in a
+quadrille. In a few minutes Cheviot Hill will propose to three different
+women; within the same space of time Simperson will throw his daughter at
+the head of Cheviot Hill, and drive his intending son-in-law to suicide.
+Belvonny will expend all his energies in the first half of a scene in
+denying a certain fact, and during the second half of it will make no less
+desperate efforts to establish this fact. Thus will the changeableness of
+men be demonstrated at the same time as their egoism. These puppets are
+monsters and these monsters puppets: my audience will not need to be told
+that '_Il faut se hâter d'en rire de peur d'être obligé d'en pleurer_.'"
+
+So cruel a farce had never been seen. The public was accustomed in farces
+to two or three comic characters, to satire at the expense of two or three
+ridiculous types. Here was a caricature of all mankind. The spectators
+laughed, but the jest was too bitter for their palate. It was at once too
+unreal and too true. Such cynical outspokenness might mark the
+conversation of the inhabitants of some dreamland. But it was incongruous
+where people travelled by railway and read the daily paper. Gilbert had
+but to transfer his puppets to the enchanted region where he located his
+_Palace of Truth_ for the big children who composed the public to accept
+them with glee.
+
+The _Palace of Truth_ is a pleasant piece based on the same notions of
+psychology as _Engaged_, but the satire is less bitter and less obvious.
+Here there is no mistake possible. Before seeing the characters as they
+really are, we have seen them playing every rôle in the human comedy. In
+the second act the faithful husband flirts indiscriminately to every side
+of him; the devoted girl-friend is a machiavelian coquette; the ardent
+lover, so generous of madrigals and sighs, is a vain and selfish coxcomb;
+the _ingénue_, chaste and correct almost to the point of coldness, is
+beyond herself with love; the honey-lipped courtier becomes candid and
+insolent to all the world; finally, the most amusing metamorphosis of all,
+the professional boor, who has achieved notoriety by his merciless
+criticisms, is the only person sincerely content with his life. Alceste
+has changed skins with Philinthe.
+
+In this world of fantasy, Gilbert was at last thoroughly at home. He
+experimented without restraint, like those physiologists who practise upon
+animals, depriving this one of viscera, that one of a cerebral lobe, a
+third of some nerve essential to motion. His _Creatures of Impulse_ do
+everything that comes into their heads, obeying every dictate of their
+instincts. In the case of the inhabitants of the _Palace of Truth_, their
+language is sincere enough, it is their manner that is hypocritical. The
+denizens of fairyland in _The Wicked World_ are unacquainted with love;
+they form a kind of puritanical society up in the clouds. Once they are
+made to know the sentiment which they have lacked, every evil springs from
+the Pandora's box. Selenè passes through every stage of the malady. Joy,
+ecstasy, absolute security,--the celestial period; then vague disquietude,
+anxiety, with fierce jealousy on their heels; then anger, quarrels,
+threats of vengeance, finally, profound humiliation. The mocker had it all
+his own way, hitting to right and to left. On the one side, at the
+colourlessness, the shabbiness, the squalid monotony of virtue; on the
+other, at the enervating and degrading effects of vice.
+
+But Gilbert never soared so high either in his philosophy or in his art as
+in _Pygmalion and Galatea_. This was one of the great successes of the
+Haymarket in 1871 and 1872. Galatea was impersonated by Madge Robertson,
+the young sister of the dramatist, then in the flower of her twenty-second
+year; and Kendal, whose wife she was soon to be, was Pygmalion. Miss
+Robertson's grace of person, her pure and noble diction, were aids to
+success, though it was not to them that success was due. Even had the
+piece fallen quite flat, however, I should still give it a place above all
+the other productions of the author.
+
+I know, of course, what captious critics have had to say on the subject.
+Nothing is easier, indeed, than to pull to pieces the figure of Galatea;
+to show how far it is from plausibility; how inconsistent Gilbert was in
+his composition of it; to show how, almost in the same breath, she asks
+the most childish, almost imbecile, questions, and indulges in an analysis
+of her emotions as subtle as Joubert's or Amiel's; how this absolutely
+ignorant creature, who asks whether the room in which she comes to life is
+the world, has yet the faculty of explaining the stages of consciousness
+through which she has passed on her way to full existence; how she can
+distinguish between an original and a copy, and be jealous at another's
+having sat as a model for her features, although she does not know the
+difference between a man and a woman.
+
+Then, again, there is her characterisation of a soldier, when she has the
+meaning of the word explained to her, as a "hired assassin." Her
+comprehension of these two words "assassin" and "hired" presuppose some
+rudimentary knowledge of the principal social institutions which affect
+the preservation of life, as well as of penalties, and salaries, and of
+the circulation of money and of the economic laws which it obeys. The
+soldier, she is told, attacks only the strong. That may be so; still war,
+she insists, is cruel. As for hunting, it is cowardly. All these
+reflections and comparisons, all this reasoning in a brain of marble which
+could not think, which did not exist, a few hours before!
+
+These examples might be multiplied, but to no end. All such criticisms are
+vain, because they assume our acceptance of a general thesis more
+improbable than all the minor ones which it involves. No statue ever did
+come to life, but if one were to, it would find itself in the position of
+a newborn child. Before learning to moralise, it would first have to learn
+how to walk and how to talk; its first movement would be a tumble, its
+first utterance inarticulate: whoever submits such myths to this kind of
+critical examination is to be sincerely pitied, for whether he realise it
+or no he thus deprives himself of whatever of poetry or of suggestiveness,
+of charm, or of profundity, they may contain.
+
+For Gilbert the fable of Galatea, of the statue come to life, was
+something more than it had ever been either for artist or man of thought:
+it offered a form to that dream by which he was haunted, a frame for that
+favourite picture he had so often sketched out already--the woman whose
+heart is a _tabula rasa_, whose mind is an instrument that has never been
+used, but is perfected and ready for use, who for the expression of her
+unsophisticated feelings has all the resources of intelligence and
+language at her command. What _we_ learn during the toilsome schooling of
+twenty or thirty years _she_ apprehends at a glance, and it would seem
+that she is the better able to judge of life in that she sees it
+reflected, as it were, in a single picture suddenly unveiled.
+
+Mr. Gilbert's Pygmalion is married to a woman whom he loves, and who sits
+to him as a model. He is not in love with the statue at the outset. He is
+jealous, however,--and in this conception the author is more Greek than
+the Greeks themselves,--of the gods, in that they alone have the power of
+giving life. _He_ is capable only of producing this inanimate figure. As
+for death, any common murderer can achieve that better than he. It is not
+Venus who gives life to Galatea to satisfy mere lust; it is Diana, whose
+priestess Cynisca he had taken from her, and who avenges herself by this
+cruel gift, whilst humbling at the same time the pride of the sons of
+Prometheus. Thus it comes that Pygmalion's feeling upon first noting the
+aspect of the living statue is not rapture but wonder, a sort of religious
+awe, the exaltation of a lofty and intellectual paternity. It is the
+gradual passage from this feeling to that of love which constitutes the
+life and, I may add, the beauty of this scene. You can guess what is the
+first question of Galatea, "Who am I?"--"A woman." "And you, are you also
+a woman?"--"No, I am a man." "What, then, is a man?" Upon this the pit
+would burst out in a roar of laughter which must have hurt the ears of the
+author. How few of those who laughed were qualified to appreciate
+Pygmalion's reply--
+
+          "A being strongly framed,
+  To wait on woman, and protect her from
+  All ills that strength and courage can avert;
+  To work and toil for her, that she may rest;
+  To weep and mourn for her, that she may laugh;
+  To fight and die for her, that she may live!"
+
+Galatea learns the right which another woman possesses to Pygmalion, the
+thousand shackles by which men are content to limit their slender liberty
+and to diminish their fugitive enjoyments. The evening comes, and with it
+sleep. She thinks she is turning again to stone, then she dreams, and then
+she sees the light once more. But is life the dream or is the dream life?
+She asks Myrine, Pygmalion's sister, for an explanation of all these
+things. Myrine replies--
+
+  _Myrine_: "Once every day this death occurs to us,
+  Till thou and I and all who dwell on earth
+  Shall sleep to wake no more!"
+
+  _Galatea_: (_Horrified, takes Myrine's hand_) "To wake no more?"
+
+  _Pygmalion_: "That time must come, may be, not yet awhile,
+  Still it must come, and we shall all return
+  To the cold earth from which we quarried thee."
+
+  _Galatea_: "See how the promises of newborn life
+  Fade from the bright life-picture one by one!
+  Love for Pygmalion--a blighting sin,
+  _His_ love a shame that he must hide away.
+  Sleep, stone-like, senseless sleep, our natural state,
+  And life a passing vision born thereof,
+  From which we wake to native senselessness!
+  How the bright promises fade one by one!"
+
+At this point the idea reaches its full expression. The scenes written for
+old Buckstone, as an Athenian dilettante who judges statues by their
+weight; his dialogue with Galatea, in which the piece returns to the old
+groove of fun and folly and sinks almost to the level of burlesque, and
+finally, the domestic drama in which Pygmalion and Cynisca are concerned,
+and then the renunciation of self which moves Galatea to become once again
+the lifeless statue, that she may thus bring back peace and happiness to
+those upon whom she had entailed trouble and disunion: all this adds but
+little to the value of the piece, though it cannot be said to spoil it. It
+remains one of the most delicate, graceful, and ingenious of modern
+English plays.
+
+Gilbert had felt the need more than once of providing some sort of musical
+accompaniment for his paradoxical fantasies, for is not music the natural
+background to the land of dreams? This accompaniment seemed to soften the
+outlines of his thought and to temper the bitterness of his satire. The
+writer had experimented first with the music of his own verses, but this
+was not a success. Why then should he not secure the aid of real music by
+a musician? He did so in _Trial by Jury_, a very amusing one-act piece,
+suggested in part by his joyous reminiscences of Liverpool. It was a
+little piece, but it had a big success. Then came the long series of comic
+operas which have rendered the Gilbert and Sullivan combination as popular
+in England as that of Meilhac and Halévy with Offenbach was with us during
+the last ten years of the Empire. The English owe a debt of gratitude to
+their compatriots for having dethroned burlesque and operetta, two imports
+from France which competed with the national manufacture. So far so well,
+but I doubt whether the native comic opera will survive its originators.
+Already they are out of fashion.
+
+For my part, I never yawned so much as I did at _Princess Ida_, unless it
+was at _Patience_. The first is a parody of the unsuccessful work of
+Tennyson, which bears the similar title _The Princess_, and is a satire
+upon the higher education of women; the second is a parody of the
+aesthetic movement. In _Iolanthe_ I saw a Lord Chancellor who has been
+married to a fairy come at midnight to a spot in Westminster, with his
+colleagues of the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords, all dressed in
+their scarlet and ermine, and to sing (and dance) a judicial sentence
+(expressed in the correct legal phraseology), whilst the shining face of
+Big Ben lit up the background and a grenadier on guard paced up and down
+before Whitehall.
+
+In _The Pirates of Penzance_, and in _Pinafore_, mankind seems to be
+walking on its head. Everything happens contrariwise. The fun consists in
+making everyone say and do exactly the opposite of what might be expected
+from them, considering their character and profession. Here, briefly, is
+the plot of the _Pirates_. Frederic's nurse was charged by his parents to
+make him an apprentice to a pilot, but, being deaf, she had misunderstood
+and had handed him over to a pirate. The young man fulfilled his contract
+of apprenticeship, which provided for a certain number of years. This duty
+accomplished, it remains for him only to accomplish his duty as a citizen
+of proceeding to the extermination of his ex-companions. He has set
+himself ardently to this when the pirate chief points out to him that by
+the terms of his indenture he is not to be free until his birthday shall
+have come round a certain specified number of times. Now Frederic was born
+on the 29th of February in leap year! He has therefore many long years
+still to serve with the pirates. An outlaw's devotion to strict
+legality--this may be said to be the idea, which is worked out in the
+production with a methodical determination to overlook no single aspect of
+the question, the characters being dealt with like so many briefs. Would
+you have supposed that there would be material enough in this to furnish
+forth three hours' entertainment? But the author was justified by the
+result.
+
+Gilbert never quite succeeded in shaking off the dust of Chancery Lane and
+Lincoln's Inn. In many respects he may be said to have remained a lawyer
+all his life: by his professional scepticism, by the variety of his
+dialectical resources, by his proneness to subtle distinctions and
+interpretations, by his cleverness in setting up appearances against
+realities, and words against ideas, but above all, by his curious faculty
+for losing good cases and winning bad ones.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+Shakespeare again--From Macready to Irving; Phelps, Fechter, Ryder,
+Adelaide Neilson--Irving's _Début_--His Career in the Provinces, and Visit
+to Paris--The Rôle of Digby Grant--The Rôle of Matthias--The Production of
+_Hamlet_--Successive Triumphs--Irving as Stage Manager--As an Editor of
+Shakespeare--His Defects as an Actor--Too great for some of his Parts--As
+a Writer and Lecturer; his Theory of Art--Sir Henry Irving, Head of his
+Profession.
+
+
+What became of the "legitimate" drama the while Robertson busied himself
+with his attempts to bring comedy into the domain of reality, and Gilbert
+worked away at the exploiting of his fancy? In a preceding chapter I have
+shown to what a depth of degradation it had fallen towards 1850. The old
+privileged theatres which had possessed the monopoly of it had abandoned
+it, and when it became public property the new theatres scorned to take it
+up. The two little Batemans, aged six and eight, piqued in _Richard III._
+the curiosity of an unsophisticated, uneducated public, which was the
+readier to enjoy these childish exhibitions in that it was itself childish
+in its literary tastes. These little girls were symbols of a "Shakespeare
+Made Easy." An actor named Brooke made things still worse; with him it
+was a case of Shakespeare made ridiculous. He was laughed at up till the
+day which brought the news of his "Hero"-like end on a ship which was
+taking him to America, and which was wrecked; the poor tragedian had come
+upon real tragedy for the first time, in the hour of his death. From 1850
+to 1860 the permanent home of Shakespeare was the theatre of Sadler's
+Wells at Islington. Imagine Corneille exiled to the _Bouffes du Nord_, or,
+further still, to the _Théâtre de Belleville_!
+
+Phelps, whose undertaking it was, was not a great actor, but he was a good
+actor. He had, besides, the sacred fire, the key to certain rôles which up
+till then had been left to inferior performers, but which suited his
+personality, as he had the discrimination to perceive. They say his Bottom
+was a masterpiece of innocuous fatuity and conscientious blundering,--that
+crazy preoccupation of a workman, one sometimes encounters, with matters
+beyond the scope of his intelligence. In _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, the
+fantastic parts were represented behind a curtain of gauze, which threw
+between the spectator and the scene a faint mist producing the illusion of
+the vagueness and indistinctness of a dream.[11] Kean and Macready had
+"popularised" Shakespeare, as had Garrick and Kemble before them, to the
+best of their ability; they tried to extract from all his plays every bit
+of the melodrama therein contained. Phelps, as it seems to me, brought out
+another and nobler distinctive quality--that of _poèmes en action_. This
+does no small credit to the intelligence of a Shakespearian actor.
+
+The Frenchman, Fechter, came next. The same Fechter who, with Madame Roche
+in _La Dame aux Camélias_, set our mothers weeping, brought back
+Shakespeare in triumph to the Princess's and to the Lyceum. In _Macbeth_,
+he was only middling; but while they say his _Othello_ was the worst
+imaginable, his _Hamlet_, according to the same critics, could not be
+surpassed. He brought to light, indeed, an aspect of this great rôle which
+had been ignored. On the evening of his last performance of it, Macready,
+taking from him Hamlet's velvet coat, addressed to him, in tones of some
+emotion, Horatio's words--"Adieu, dear Prince!" and added, "It seems to me
+that I understand now for the first time all that there is of tenderness,
+humanity, and poetry in the character." Fechter found out traits which had
+escaped his predecessors. He imparted grace and elegance to the tranquil
+and pleasing parts of the action--a refined intellectual elegance proper
+to a prince who had passed through the University of Wittemberg. The
+advice of Hamlet to the players--the actor's Ten Commandments--he rendered
+with much art and spirit.
+
+After Fechter there came a new, but only a partial eclipse. Beginners
+became old stagers and appeared in principal rôles. Between 1870 and 1875
+I saw Ryder, whose voice varied in tone from that of an organ to that of a
+hunting-horn, on several occasions, notably in _Anthony and Cleopatra_,
+with Miss Wallis, who had not the beauty, and could not suggest the charm,
+one ascribes to a woman for whom an empire were well lost. I recall, too,
+the countenance, with its delicately tragic aspect, of Adelaide Neilson,
+who shook with passion from top to toe, and shrieked and writhed, and yet
+kept her good looks. She met with a sudden death at Pré-Catelan,--it was a
+glass of milk that killed her within two hours; and in London they say
+that the proprietor of the hotel in which she was stopping was inhuman
+enough to threaten to thrust her out in her agony upon the streets.
+
+He who was to bring back Shakespeare, and to make of him the most
+flourishing and most warmly applauded of dramatic writers, had already
+been long upon the stage,--he was already an actor of repute even; but the
+Shakespearian revival to which I allude dates from October 31, 1874. It
+was then that Henry Irving played Hamlet for the first time at the Lyceum.
+
+There was an institution in the City, at one time frequented by amateurs
+of the drama, which was known as the City Elocution Class. A certain Mr.
+Henry Thomas conducted it according to the principle of mutual instruction
+associated with the name of Pestalozzi. As soon as each student had
+recited his piece, his colleagues had their say upon his delivery of it,
+pointing out any faults they discovered in his manner of giving it out, in
+his pronunciation, accent, or emphasis; the master summed up these
+criticisms and pronounced his own judgment upon the subject. From time to
+time they gave public performances.
+
+It was at one of these that there appeared one evening--in 1853--a
+strange-looking and attractive youth. His eyes, intelligent and full of
+fire, lit up a face whose features were delicate as a woman's. He wore a
+jacket of the old-fashioned cut and a great white collar. His long raven
+locks covered his neck and reached even to his shoulders.
+
+He was then fourteen years old, and was employed in the office of an East
+India merchant. His early childhood had been spent in an out-of-the-way
+corner of Somerset, amongst sailors and miners. The library of the house
+in which he lived consisted of only three books, which he devoured--the
+Bible, _Don Quixote_, and a collection of old ballads. From these Western
+expanses, where the imaginative soul of the Celt has left something of its
+reveries, he had been transported when eleven to a mean little house in
+London, in one of those central districts which swarm and overflow like
+very ant-hills of humanity.
+
+Two years of school-life ensued; then his commercial apprenticeship, the
+stereotyped office-life. How was it that under these conditions Henry
+Irving's vocation for the theatre came out? He will tell us the story some
+day, perhaps, and tell it admirably. This, at least, is known, that his
+vocation, once it had declared itself, was distinct, absolute, not to be
+shaken. We have before us one of those rare careers which are so perfectly
+ordered towards the accomplishment of some end by a resolute and
+inflexible will, that there is to be found in them no single wasted minute
+or ill-directed endeavour.
+
+Young Irving frequented Phelps' theatre, Sadler's Wells; an old actor who
+belonged to it, David Hoskyns, gave him lessons, and on going off to
+Australia left him a letter of recommendation with the address blank.
+Phelps would have given him an engagement, but the young aspirant deemed
+himself too unworthy, and was anxious to commence his novitiate in the
+provinces. Doubtless he had an inkling already of the truth he expressed
+pithily at a later period: "The learning how to do a thing is the doing of
+it,"--one of the most thoroughly English aphorisms ever given out in
+England. Thus it was that the bills of the Lyceum at Manchester, on
+September 26, 1856, contained the name of Henry Irving, who was to play
+the rôle of the Duke of Orleans in Lord Lytton's _Richelieu_. Thence he
+proceeded to Edinburgh, and in the next three years he played a hundred
+and twenty-eight parts. On September 24, 1859, he made his _début_ in
+London at the Princess's, in an adaptation of the _Roman d'un Jeune Homme
+Pauvre_. His part was limited to six lines. What was he to do? Repeat
+those lines evening after evening till he got addled? He preferred to
+break off his engagement. But before returning to the provinces he gave
+two lectures at Crosby Hall, which drew from the _Daily Telegraph_ and the
+_Standard_ the prediction that he would have a fine career. Then came
+seven years of study and of growing success in Glasgow, Manchester, and
+Liverpool theatres. And then, the creation of a rôle in one of
+Boucicault's dramas having brought him into greater prominence, he at last
+set his foot firmly on the stage of the St. James's, whence he passed
+first to the Queen's, later to the Vaudeville, and finally to the Lyceum.
+
+More than one Parisian must remember the posters with which the actor
+Sothern covered all our walls during the Exhibition of 1867, that haunting
+vision of Lord Dundreary with his long frock-coat, his hat slightly tilted
+over his forehead, and his glass fixed in his eye. In the second, perhaps
+it would be more correct to say the third, rank of this company which
+visited us, hid Henry Irving.
+
+There are often two distinct phases of success. The first is that during
+which the conquest of one's professional brethren is achieved. Now, one's
+professional brethren maintain silence, sometimes with singular unanimity,
+upon the talents they have discovered, and thus retard that second period
+during which the greater and ultimate public success is at length
+attained. Irving was still in the first phase when he played Digby Grand
+in James Albery's _Two Roses_. Digby Grand is an impecunious gentleman
+who accepts alms with an air of conferring favours,--a singular blend of
+pride and baseness, brazen-faced, insolent, a liar and a blackguard. The
+opening scene of the piece, in which he induces a landlady who has been
+pressing him for rent to offer him a loan of twenty pounds, is so
+brilliantly carried through, that it compels one to compare it with the
+scene of Don Juan and M. Dimanche. But how far is all the rest of it from
+fulfilling the promise of this beginning! From this out we have nothing
+but a tumult of words, a confusion of _jeux de scenes_, interrupted here
+and there by silly _preciosités_ which are intended to serve as aphorisms.
+However, the vogue of the piece was inexhaustible, and such was the taste
+of the public, that two or three other actors attracted their attention
+more than Irving. On the occasion of the two hundred and ninety-first
+performance of _The Two Roses_, he recited "The Dream of Eugene Aram," and
+his delivery of it was a revelation. In it, indeed, the scope of the
+actor's art was immensely widened--what he actually expressed in his
+recital was nothing to what he was able to suggest. With the whole
+province of life for his subject, what was most impressive was the glimpse
+beyond, into the region of the unseen and the unknown.
+
+Irving was able not only to impart more meaning to his words than they
+expressed in themselves, but he was addicted even to making them
+subservient to his own ideas, and of making the public accept his
+conception in the face of a text which was in flat contradiction with it.
+
+At this critical moment of his career a happy chance brought to him the
+very piece of all others calculated to bring out his gifts--a piece which
+should enable him to depict the wonderful and awful dualism of thought and
+language, of a man's outward aspect and his soul within,--this was _The
+Bells_, an almost literal translation of Erckmann and Chatrian's _Polish
+Jew_. Irving bought the MS. and offered it to his manager, Bateman, who
+tried it as a last chance. Irving acted Matthias, and in one evening the
+actor of talent became the actor of genius. Clement Scott hurried to his
+newspaper, _The Daily Telegraph_, and wrote so enthusiastic an account of
+the performance that next morning the editor chaffed him on the subject,
+and wanted to know who this Irving might be. In an article in the _Times_,
+John Oxenford analysed with much penetration that suggestive power of the
+actor, and that striking dualism of which I have spoken. Matthias, for all
+that idyllic existence in which everything succeeded with him and smiled
+upon him, seemed, said Oxenford, to wear the aspect of one living in a
+world of terrors, where all was torture and impending destruction. The
+horrors of the second and third acts would not have been intelligible, and
+would have missed their effect, if they had not been foreshadowed in the
+first by the glances, the tremors, the lapses into silence, the
+indescribable atmosphere of fatefulness which seemed, under the bright
+morning sunshine, to envelop the murderer as with a shroud. The actor was
+to give proof of many other gifts, to traverse triumphantly every province
+of his art in the course of his splendid career, but it was by his
+psychological suggestiveness, by his engendering of fear, both physical
+and mental, that he won his first great theatrical victory.
+
+_The Bells_ was succeeded by _Charles I._, by Wills. From the Alsatian
+inn-keeper to Charles Stuart was a big jump. Irving managed it without
+apparent effort.
+
+It was as though the portrait by Van Dyck had stepped down from its
+frame--this stately figure with its cold and lofty aspect, the look of
+sadness in the eyes, the lips smiling bitterly under the thin moustache,
+the pale veined forehead that bore the seal of destiny. I seem still to
+see him, now playing with his children on the grass slopes of Hampton
+Court, now crushing Cromwell with his kingly scorn. That phrase of
+his--"Who's this rude gentleman?" still rings in my ears. The picture of
+Charles clasping little Henriette and her younger brother in his arms in
+the heartbreaking farewell scene at the close is still before my eyes....
+Then, in a village graveyard, that more terrible figure takes its place,
+the sombre phantom-form of Aram, long and lank, the assassin reasoning
+with his remorse.
+
+In these fruitful years one creation followed another in quick succession,
+each excellent, all different. Finally, on October 31, 1874, Irving
+appeared as Hamlet.
+
+This was his Marengo; up to the third act, the battle seemed lost. His
+anguish must have been terrible. The audience was mute, frigid, and their
+frigidity seemed to increase. The third act produced a complete change.
+From the scene with the players and the description of the imaginary
+portraits the evening was a continual triumph. The public had before them
+a Hamlet they had never seen or even dreamt of; all the Hamlets that had
+ever appeared upon the stage seemed to have been assimilated by an
+original and powerful temperament, and blended harmoniously into one. _The
+Bells_ had been played a hundred and fifty-one times, _Charles I._ eighty
+times. _Hamlet_ filled the Lyceum for two hundred nights without
+interruption.
+
+Irving took up _Richelieu_ next, and in it strove victoriously against
+memories of Macready. At the close of the performance the house rose at
+him--men waved their hats in their enthusiasm in the midst of the wildest
+cheering. Such a scene had not been witnessed in an English theatre for
+half a century! It proclaimed Irving Kean's successor. As though to
+complete the rites of this coronation, the sword which clanked at his side
+when he played Richard III. was that which Kean had carried in the same
+rôle, and the ring which shone on his finger was a ring of Garrick's. A
+colleague, old Chippendale of the Haymarket, had given him the one; the
+other was a present from the Baroness Burdett-Coutts. They formed, as it
+were, the insignia of royalty.
+
+He continued to make himself master of all the great Shakespearian rôles,
+like a conqueror annexing provinces. Of course, he was not equally good in
+all, though to all he brought his understanding and his inspiration, and
+to all gave the stamp of his individuality. He sighed and sang of love as
+Romeo, railed and mocked at it as Benedick; raged with Othello, trembled
+with Macbeth; laid bare, as Wolsey, the inner working of the soul of the
+statesman-priest; as Lear, went raving over the desolate heath in the
+storm and the darkness of the night. Throughout he has had the
+co-operation of Miss Ellen Terry, an actress of the finest and most
+delicate talent, whose charm has resisted the passing of the years. Around
+them there has grown up a generation of younger actors and actresses, who
+to-day adorn the stages of other theatres.
+
+Irving is to be looked on not merely as an interpreter of Shakespeare.
+Hardly less important has been his work in editing the plays for the
+modern theatre, and in staging them worthily: at the Lyceum he has given
+them a setting than which the great dramatist, had he lived in our days
+(and read Ruskin), could have wished for nothing better. He has told us in
+a few lines, which I regard as the expression of his mature judgment, the
+result of thirty years of theory and practice, what sort of staging is
+required for masterpieces. _The mise en scène_, he tells us, should not
+give the spectator any separate impression, it should be in keeping merely
+with the impression of the piece. It should envelop the performers in an
+atmosphere, provide them with suitable surroundings, afford the special
+kind of lighting that is required for the action. Its rôle is a negative
+one. It should introduce no incongruity, no discordant note; that is all
+that is required. To attempt more is a mistake, and is apt to do injury to
+the general effect. Whenever I have been to the Lyceum I have found this
+programme strictly adhered to.
+
+The restoration of Shakespeare's text, however, was a still more important
+achievement. Everyone congratulated him on his good sense in freeing us
+from Colley Cibber's version of _Richard III._ He continued the good work
+with all the other dramas he took up; and we have to thank him to-day for
+an "acting edition" of the Shakespearian masterpieces,--an actable
+Shakespeare that is yet a real Shakespeare. The principle which he has
+followed in this task may be summarised, I think, as follows:--Omissions,
+often; transpositions, sometimes; interpolations, never.
+
+I am far from pretending that Irving as an actor is without fault, that he
+is not liable to go wrong like everyone else, that the richness of his
+artistic nature attains to universality. There can be no doubt that he is
+better as Richard III. than as Macbeth, as Benedick than as Romeo. The
+first time you see him, his play of feature seems exaggerated, his motions
+jerky and irregular. A critic has compared his gait in _Hamlet_ to that
+of a man hurrying over a ploughed field; another critic has found in that
+curious gesture, which periodically throws up his shoulders and draws his
+head down into his collar-bone, a resemblance to the motion of a savage
+making ready to spring upon his foe. His elocution is far from being
+perfect,--a fact he has recognised himself, for he has worked hard to
+correct the defects of delivery which have been charged against him. But
+these are slight shortcomings of which a year of technical study at the
+outset of his career would have freed him completely.
+
+A more serious drawback, to my mind, is that he is too great for many of
+his rôles, that he is out at elbow in them, so to speak. He himself has
+told us that the first duty of an actor is to fit his part, to _be_ the
+character, to personate; and, it must be admitted, that in following this
+principle he has given proof of a versatility unsurpassed by Garrick
+himself: yet it would seem that the greater he has grown by study and
+thought, (with the growth of his years and of his fame,) it has become
+more and more difficult for him to squeeze himself into the smaller
+personalities he has had to represent upon the stage, to sink in them that
+magnetic individuality of his own which constitutes his power, and to
+which he owes his success. Just as that young actor called out "Burbadge"
+instead of "Richard," we also, in Irving's case, forget the rôle, and see
+only the actor; and the play assumes for us the character of an admirable
+lesson in the art of recitation.
+
+Although he reverences the great actors who have preceded him, Irving
+takes but little note of tradition. His method is essentially individual
+to himself, and he does not hesitate to recommend this method to all
+members of his profession, even beginners.
+
+It may be said to have three phases, involving three successive processes.
+First, a patient and conscientious study of the text: it is essential to
+understand the author's meaning. When this has been mastered, you may
+trust to your instinct, to inspiration. Then, amongst the ideas thus
+discovered, you make your selection, of the good ones by a species of
+mental process which will enable you to reproduce them artificially at
+will.
+
+Thus it is that Irving passes, smiling, by Diderot's paradox about the
+actor. Diderot is right, of course, when he says that the actor does not
+abandon himself on the stage to the promptings of inspiration; but he is
+wrong in concluding that the whole business of acting is mechanical. As
+Talma well expressed it in speaking of his own case, the emotions
+represented by an actor, and communicated through him to us, are often
+worked up from old experiences really met with and stored by study as
+material. But shall we exact from him that he should have a real craving
+to deceive when he impersonates a hypocrite? or that he should be in love
+with the actress who has to enact a love scene with him? or thirst for
+blood when he accomplishes a stage murder? These violent and often
+contrary emotions--supposing, that is, that any one man should be capable
+of them--would paralyse the actor instead of inspiring him. We expect of
+him not that he should himself experience personally all these passions,
+but that he should understand and be able to portray them. What culture,
+though--what a combination of gifts, does this portrayal require and call
+into play! An actor may be in turn, painter, sculptor, poet, musician,
+psychologist, moralist, historian, and yet be inadequately equipped for
+his calling.
+
+Does one go to the theatre to see life depicted upon the stage, or, on the
+contrary, to escape from life and forget it? Irving takes up a position
+half-way between the realist and that of the ultra-idealist. What one
+should see at the theatre is indeed life, but an intenser life, with
+emotions that are keener, a pulse that beats more quickly,--a life in
+which the potentialities of men and women are at their full, and in which
+there is a standard of good and evil to give a moral conclusion, a lesson
+in the art of living. "Get the working-man to go to the theatre," he
+declares; there is no better way of keeping him out of the public-house.
+The theatre should be really a school, should teach the young how to live,
+and reconcile the weary and the sad to their existence, by setting before
+them the ideal poetic justice which hovers over their heads.
+
+This is the substance of the great actor's teaching, as set forth by him
+on many occasions,--I shall not say in defence of his profession: the
+theatre, he has declared proudly, no longer needs to be defended--but
+rather in glorification of it. Quite recently, in an address to the Royal
+Society, in February 1895, he demonstrated that acting was truly one of
+the Fine Arts. Taking a definition of Taine's as his starting-point, he
+dealt with that great writer's opinions on the same plane of thought, in a
+style that was no less brilliant than clear and concise. Irving has too
+keen an appreciation of beauty of form not to be conscious of the value
+lent to his ideas by his method of expressing them. If he was not a writer
+born, he has made himself a writer; his sentences are marked by a purity,
+a nobility, a lofty and serene simplicity which communicates to the reader
+the same spell his acting has wrought upon the spectator. His first
+lectures were full of good things, happy phrases and observations that set
+one thinking. In his later ones he has taken up the philosophy of his art,
+and has revealed the tireless ambition of an intelligence ever striving
+after higher things. To-day it has reached the summit. The royal decree,
+therefore, which entitled him "Sir Henry" in May 1895, could not have come
+at a more fitting moment. When this favour is bestowed on an official who
+has grown old in service, or on a major-general who can no longer mount a
+horse, the world takes no notice; this everyday distinction dazzles only
+"my lady's" dressmaker and the tradesmen with whom she deals. In Irving's
+case, it is an historical occasion, an epoch-making event. He is the first
+actor to be invested with the emblem of rank. What is for him a reality is
+a possibility for every actor. Thus he has raised them in being raised
+above them.
+
+Irving seems to me--may I venture to say it without seeming unappreciative
+of the excellent and even great actors of whom our own country can
+boast?--to be pre-eminent in his art, the leader of his profession. He
+compels this admission by the beauty and unity of his life, by the
+splendid strength of his vocation, by the magnificent variety of his
+gifts, by his intelligent feeling for all the other arts and for the ideas
+which belong to the spirit of his time. And, on the other hand, by the
+slow growth, the gradual development of his talent, by his spirit of
+independence and initiative, tempered by regard for the past, he is one of
+the incarnations of his race, one of those men in whom to-day we may see
+most clearly the features of the English character. He has failed in
+nothing,--he has not even failed to make a fortune. And in respect to
+this, should anyone charge it against him as a fault, he has given his
+defence in a saying which I shall quote in conclusion as a finishing touch
+to his portrait:--"The drama must succeed as a business, if it is not to
+fail as an art." And in truth, does Shakespeare cease to be Shakespeare
+because in Irving's hand he is also a mine of gold?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+Is it well to imitate Shakespeare?--The Death of the Classical
+Drama--Herman Merivale and the _White Pilgrim_--Wills and his Plays:
+_Charles the First_, _Claudian_--Tennyson as a Dramatist; he comes too
+soon and too late--Tennyson and the Critics--_The Falcon_, _The Promise of
+May_, _The Cup_, _Becket_, _Queen Mary_, _Harold_.
+
+
+Irving's personality has filled the preceding pages so completely that I
+have been unable to find space in which to do justice to those men and
+women who, near at hand, or from afar, have helped to uphold the Colossus
+upon the stage. Ellen Terry, first of all, who has not only been an
+incarnation, delicate, moving, impassioned, of Shakespeare's heroines, but
+who, even more perhaps than her illustrious colleague, has in her pure and
+sweet elocution set the poet's dream to music. From America have come Mary
+Anderson, whose statuesque attitudes are well remembered; and, more
+recently, Ada Rehan, who gave us so modern and so alluring a Rosalind. It
+was possible for a critic to declare,--speaking of the vogue towards which
+everything seems to have worked,--that of all the dramatists of the day,
+Shakespeare was the most successful; adding with truth, that, having been
+brought into fashion in the theatre, Shakespeare in his turn had brought
+the theatre into fashion.
+
+But is the resuscitation of Shakespeare productive of nothing but good?
+Has it not been accompanied by certain drawbacks which are still evident,
+and by certain dangers all of which have not been successfully surmounted?
+One has taken to doubting whether Shakespeare be really the best of guides
+for a new generation of dramatic writers, especially when one has studied
+closely what the imitation of Shakespeare involves in practice. To imitate
+Shakespeare is to copy in the most superficial manner his locutions and
+turns of phrase, his complicated plots, his successions of changing
+scenes; to mingle prose and verse, and to indulge in puns and _coups de
+théâtre_; above all, to assume certain mannerisms that are held to bear
+the stamp of the master. To come near him, on the other hand, it is not
+merely prose and verse that must alternate, but the realism and the poetry
+of which these are but the outward signs; it is not puns and _coups de
+théâtre_ that are essential, but the power to divert and to move, which is
+quite another matter. Shakespeare's spirit is not to be assimilated; this
+is impossible to a man of our time: one can but dress oneself up in the
+cast-off garment which served as a covering to his genius. This garment
+does not suit us,--it is either too long or too short, or both together.
+One dresses up as Shakespeare for an hour, and resembles the great man
+about as much as a lawyer's clerk, masquerading _en mousquetaire_,
+resembles d'Artagnan, or as the Turk of carnival time resembles the
+genuine Turk smoking his pipe outside his café in Stamboul. This
+tremendous model, all whose aspects we cannot see because it goes beyond
+the orbit of our perspective glass, oppresses and paralyses our
+intelligence: did one understand it, one would not be much the better off.
+It would be sheer folly to wish the modern English dramatist not to read
+his Shakespeare, for it is in Shakespeare that he will find the English
+character in all its length and breadth; let him absorb and steep himself
+in Shakespeare by all means: but let him then forget Shakespeare and be of
+his own time, let him not walk our streets of to-day in the doublet and
+hose of 1600. The choice has to be made between Shakespeare and life, for
+in literature, as in morals, it is not possible to serve two masters. It
+is possible that Shakespeare has been, and is still, the great obstacle to
+a free development of a national drama. Nor is there anything to be
+astonished at in this. The Shakespeare whom we know could not have been
+born when he was had there been another Shakespeare two and a half
+centuries before.
+
+These are _a priori_ considerations, but they are confirmed by the
+experience of the last twenty years. These years have seen the apotheosis
+of Shakespeare and the death of the classical drama. Amongst the last who
+tried to galvanise it into life, I hardly know what others to mention
+besides Wills and Herman Merivale. In the drama entitled _The White
+Pilgrim_, Merivale achieved some really beautiful passages: in them may be
+felt the first thrill of those sombre and impalpable reveries, come
+towards us with the cool breath of the North, in which we find a balm for
+our fever. As for Wills, for a moment he gave rise to hopes. There was
+room for false expectations as to the future of his career. He was, says
+Mr. Archer, "so strong and so weak, so manly and so puerile, so poetic and
+so commonplace, so careful and so slovenly." His Bohemian life, his
+impassioned character, his hasty methods of production, added to the
+illusion, and gave him, in the distance, a look of genius. But it was a
+misleading look. I have seen two of his pieces, _Charles the First_ and
+_Claudian_. The first called up on the stage--for the last time
+doubtless--that legend of the martyr king which the historical labours of
+Gardiner have shivered into atoms. And here is the story of Claudian. A
+man who has killed a monk falls for this crime under a curse which,
+instead of attaching itself to him, attaches itself to all those who cross
+his path. He does evil unwittingly, when he would fain do good; he brings
+about the death of those he loves. In the end he is saved. So that this
+horrible waste of human lives, this torrent of tears and blood, these
+sufferings, agonies, despairs, all serve but to gain a seat for a
+white-robed criminal at the banquet of Life Eternal. "In order that the
+world may be Claudian's purgatory, it must first be the hell of an entire
+generation." Thus it is with all the pieces of Wills; they are founded
+upon conceptions which crumble away upon analysis, and the versification
+is too poor to veil or redeem the weakness of the dramatic idea.
+
+Despite the efforts of Henry Arthur Jones and some other living writers,
+tragic verse, blank verse, the impression of which I have tried to
+characterise, is dead. Were there still authors to work in it, there would
+yet lack actors to speak it, and I do not know who would venture to chant
+it after Ellen Terry.
+
+One name, however, comes to mind, a great name which it would be most
+unjust to overlook in this review of the contemporary drama,--the name of
+Tennyson. Mr. Archer has remarked that Tennyson, so fortunate in his life
+as a poet, was inopportune in his career as a dramatist. He wrote his
+plays too late and too early: too early for the public, and too late for
+his talent. As a matter of fact, he was sixty-six when he published _Queen
+Mary_, the first in date of the six pieces which constitute his dramatic
+output. That was twenty years ago, and the education of theatre-goers was
+far from being as advanced as it is now. It was not their fault if they
+brought to the poet a taste somewhat coarsened by the success of _Our
+Boys_ and the _Pink Dominoes_, and a soul closed to the higher enjoyments
+of the imagination.
+
+The actors did their duty, and even more than their duty, to the Laureate;
+it was the critics--and I am borne out in this by the most eminent of
+their number,--it was the critics who decided the fate of Tennyson's
+plays; if they did not exactly condemn him unheard, at least they listened
+to him under the sway of prejudice. I shall borrow the sardonic expression
+of Mr. Archer: the critics were prepared to be disappointed--it was for
+this they came. What business had this old man to start on a new career,
+and a career requiring all the powers of youth? What induced him to
+believe that he had developed faculties at an age at which it is more
+usual to repeat and re-read oneself? Had a man any right to be a success
+in two trades at once? Was there not a law against this kind of pluralism,
+tacitly agreed upon by critics, and applied by them with remorseless
+rigour? For the beauty of these methods of reasoning, it was necessary
+that Tennyson should fail upon the stage; therefore he failed.
+
+But as this check was an unfair one, he recovered from it, and his
+theatrical work, even when it is mediocre, even when it is bad, belongs to
+the living drama.
+
+I myself have fallen into the common error. I spoke of Tennyson in 1885 as
+if the tomb had closed over him already. I may have been right in saying
+that in the garden of the poet, upon which winter had fallen, certain
+flowers would bloom no more. But what I did not perceive then, and what
+to-day is manifest to me and to many others, is the fact that the latter
+days of the poet not only preserved some of his early graces, but brought
+out for us qualities which his youth had not known. He remained in touch
+with the mind of the humble until the very end. Moreover, he revealed
+himself a master in the art of giving expression in verse to the social
+and religious discussions which carry one away. He has displayed in his
+theatrical work an historical sense and a dramatic sense of the highest
+order, and if these two gifts have clashed sometimes to the point of
+cancelling each other, their combination at certain more fortunate moments
+had issue in some precious fragments of masterpieces. The slightest of all
+his pieces is _The Falcon_. The action takes place in some vague region in
+an Italy of romance; neither the scene nor the century is defined. It is
+like a tale by Boccaccio, but by a Boccaccio who is ingenuous and pure.
+Federigo, an impoverished gentleman, is in love, at a distance and without
+hope, with the rich and beautiful widow Monna Giovanna. His greatest
+possession, his pride and his joy, his only means, too, of securing a
+subsistence, is a wonderful falcon which he himself has trained for
+hunting. One morning Monna Giovanna pays him an unexpected visit, and,
+ignorant of the neediness of her neighbour, invites herself
+unceremoniously to lunch. Federigo, whose larder is empty, kills his
+favourite bird, that he may serve it up for the lady. It happens that it
+was this very falcon that the lady had come to beg for, to fall in with
+the fancy of a sick child. Federigo is obliged to acknowledge the
+sacrifice to which hospitality and her love impelled him, and Monna
+Giovanna is so keenly touched by it that she falls, and for ever, into his
+arms.
+
+When _The Falcon_ was put before the public in 1879 at the St. James's
+Theatre, John Hare, who is a manager of cultured taste as well as an
+excellent comedian, had mounted it with the utmost care, and had given it
+a _mise en scène_ that was at once realistic and poetic. Federigo and
+Monna Giovanna were impersonated by the Kendals, and those who saw Madge
+Robertson's performance think of it as one thinks of some painter's
+masterpiece seen in the picture galleries of Italy or Germany. In mere
+outward form, her Giovanna was a pendant to her Galatea. But neither the
+charm of the scenery, nor the perfection of the acting, nor the music of
+the verse, could obtain a long life for the piece. It was not to be
+expected that there would be more than a few hundreds of elect spectators
+to delight in this delicate trifle, the joy of an hour, the enthusiasm of
+an evening. From the morrow, Cockneydom was obliged to recapture the
+house, and call out for its wonted entertainment. The critics made common
+cause with Cockneydom, but from reasons less foreign to art.
+
+They pointed out that if there is any subject at all in _The Falcon_, it
+is apparently Federigo's sacrifices. Now this subject, such as it is, is
+not dealt with. Two words in an aside to his servant, a whispered order,
+that is all that leads up to and justifies the death-sentence on the bird.
+Even more deceptive than the _déjeuner_ offered to Monna Giovanna, the
+_menu_ presented by Lord Tennyson to his spectators was composed but of
+delicate _hors d'oeeuvres_, and there was not enough in them for healthy
+appetites.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_The Promise of May_ had a worse fate than _The Falcon_. It failed
+outright. A certain section of the public pretended to believe that the
+poet spoke through the mouth of his hero when he denounces, with so much
+bitterness and so indiscriminately, the principles and prejudices upon
+which society has its base. These spectators were sadly wanting both in
+patience and in intelligence. Harold's theories are answered in the play.
+When he has been declaiming upon the evil that religions have wrought upon
+man, Dora does her best to show him the good influences they have wielded.
+Whereas he prophesies the imminent and universal abolition of the bonds of
+marriage, Dora sets forth with simplicity, yet not without grace and
+feeling, her ideal of a perfect union of man and wife. "And yet I had once
+a vision of a pure and perfect marriage, where the man and the woman, only
+differing as the stronger and the weaker, should walk hand-in-hand
+together down this valley of tears, as they call it so truly, to the grave
+at the bottom, and lie down there together in the darkness which would
+seem but for a moment, to be wakened again together by the light of the
+resurrection, and no more partings for ever and ever."
+
+In the first part of the play, too, when Harold pulls down for Eve a
+branch of an apple-tree in blossom, this farmer's daughter looks upon it
+sadly. "Next year," she says, "it will bear no fruit,"--a moving piece of
+symbolism; one likes to see a poet condemning in this way the morality of
+the impulse which, in plucking the flower, forbids it to bring forth the
+fruit, and destroys the very seeds of the future.
+
+The comparative success of _The Cup_ at the Lyceum surprises me less than
+it does Mr. Archer. I see no need to seek the secret of this success in
+the grace of Ellen Terry, or in the splendid scenery of Diana's Temple.
+_The Cup_ has certain qualities which were calculated to please the
+general public. The subject is taken from Plutarch's _De Claris
+Mulieribus_, and from a passage which had already suggested a tragedy to a
+Frenchman, a German, and an Italian. It is possible that, without being
+quite conscious of it, Tennyson adopted to a certain point the tone of the
+original author and the manner of his predecessors. He was less English,
+less Shakespearian, less himself, in this piece than in his other dramatic
+works. The dialogue is rapid and effective; the characters do not give
+themselves up to poetical fancies; instead of formulating theories, they
+express sentiments that are in no way complex or strange. One of them,
+Synorix, is interesting. Except for the Don Juanism which seems to impart
+to him too modern a note, this double-faced type, half Roman, half
+barbarian, whose intelligence has been sharpened but whose passions have
+not been extinguished by civilisation, is an exceptional creature, a sort
+of monster, who is conscious of his intellectual superiority and his moral
+decay; he unites these two qualities in a sadness that has about it
+something that seems great.
+
+The attractiveness of this character was what made a failure of Tennyson's
+piece; the English poet avoids the subject which Plutarch puts before him,
+and which Thomas Corneille and Montanelli had seized upon; the latter,
+cleverly and with success, despite the inflation of his style. This
+subject lies in the action of Camma, widow of the Tetrarch of Galatia,
+whom Synorix, with the aid of the Romans, has killed and supplanted.
+Synorix loves her, and is anxious to make her his wife. Camma, seeing no
+escape from this odious marriage, pretends to assent to it. After the
+sacred rites she has to put her lips to the same cup as Synorix before the
+altar of Diana. She gives him death to drink from it, and drinks death
+from it herself. That this _dénouement_ should awaken no objections in our
+mind, it would be essential that we should have been brought to hate
+Synorix as Camma hates him. Now, Tennyson seems to have done everything in
+his power to minimise the repulsiveness of the character. He has woven
+round him the fascination of a noble sadness, the palliation of a great
+love; has in some sort constrained him to kill his rival, by importing
+into the action an element of justifiable self-defence. Not content with
+this, he depicts Camma's husband as an unintelligent brute, who ill
+deserves her regrets and her sacrifice.
+
+It may be added, that of the real drama--the conflict of emotion in
+Camma's soul--we know nothing until the last scene. A _coup de théâtre_
+does not make a play, and Mr. Archer is doubtless right in placing the
+work of Montanelli above that of Tennyson; but these defects
+notwithstanding, I think _The Cup_ would be accorded the same favourable
+reception from the public again now that it enjoyed in 1881. It bears a
+distinct resemblance to our French tragedies, in its dignity, its
+propriety, in the seriousness, the freedom from any comic element, by
+which it is marked, by the consistency in the characters, its continuity
+of tone and unity of action,--qualities which undoubtedly give more
+pleasure, whatever may be said to the contrary, than the most faithful
+imitation of the contrasts and inconsistencies of life.
+
+Had he written nothing but _The Falcon_, _The Cup_, and _The Promise of
+May_, Tennyson would hold but a very low place among play-writers. If he
+is to live as a dramatist, it must be by his three historical plays,
+_Queen Mary_, _Harold_, and _Becket_.
+
+These dramas, it has been declared, were bound to be inferior, even before
+they ever saw the light, to the historical dramas of the age of Elizabeth,
+whose aspect and character they recalled so completely; for whereas the
+histories of Shakespeare and his contemporaries were hewn out of the old
+Chronicles which, almost equally with reminiscences, preserve the vivacity
+of personal impressions, and something, as it were, of the warmth of life,
+Tennyson's dramas are taken from "History," properly so called, and
+"History" is a serious scientific person who studies life by dissecting
+it, who is addicted to discussion rather than to the telling of tales, and
+who substitutes modern judgments for ancient passions. The objection is
+more plausible than real. First of all, this definition of History, though
+true enough of a Guizot, a Hallam, or a Lecky, is quite inapplicable to a
+Carlyle, a Michelet, or a Taine.
+
+In reading Freeman and Froude, was Tennyson less in touch with the soul of
+the past than Shakespeare was in making his way through the cold and often
+tedious pages of Holinshed? Moreover, even had Froude been as sententious
+and frigid as he was in reality picturesque and impassioned, Tennyson's
+own faculties would have made good these defects.
+
+It may be well at this point to attempt to do justice to the delicacy and
+quite exceptional strength of Tennyson's sense of history. I must explain
+clearly what I mean by sense of history. I do not refer to the critical
+faculty of the historian, but to the gift bestowed upon few, of living
+over again in imagination the emotions of a century long gone to dust. It
+was thus that Michelet was present at the doing to death of Joan of Arc;
+Macaulay at the flight of James II. and at the trial of Warren Hastings;
+Carlyle at the taking of the Bastille, at the return from Varennes, and at
+the battle of Marston Moor. Had the men and the scenes been really painted
+upon their retina, the effect upon the brain could not have been stronger.
+This intellectual vision of theirs is worth a hundred times more than the
+actual physical vision of such men as Holinshed and Ayala.
+
+This rare gift belonged to Tennyson, and took in him that feminine
+acuteness which was in harmony with all his poetical faculties. As
+evidence of this, take the by-play in his historical dramas,--that is to
+say, all that is not essential in them, the mere accessories,
+illustrations of manners, minute traits of character, scraps of history;
+for instance, the account of the marriage of Philip and Mary, and that of
+the execution of Lady Jane Grey by Bagenhall, in _Queen Mary_, and in
+_Becket_ the sarcasm directed against the Church of Rome by Walter Map,
+the witty precursor of the bitter and sombre Langland.
+
+A Bulwer or a Tom Taylor may be able to cut out bits from the Chronicles,
+and introduce historic utterances into their flabby and declamatory prose,
+but beyond and underneath these words, will they be able, like Tennyson,
+to set before us _un état d'âme_, and plunge us into the depth of the life
+of olden days?
+
+I am fully aware, of course, that this is not everything, or rather that
+it is nothing, unless the poet possesses also the dramatic faculty. Is
+there a dramatic idea underlying _Becket_, _Queen Mary_, and _Harold_? I
+shall reply after the manner of the Gentlemen of the Jury: No, to the
+first question; Yes, to the second and third.
+
+It is true that _Becket_ achieved a startling success in the summer of
+1892. But three-fourths of the success were due to Irving. Those who have
+been long familiar with the great actor, know how episcopical he
+is--hieratical, pontifical. Mediæval asceticism is one of the forms of
+life which his artistic personality fills most perfectly, and fits into
+most easily; I know of only one other man who could have represented
+Becket nearly as well, and that was Cardinal Manning. It was well worth
+one's while to travel far, and put up with hours of boredom, to be present
+at that symbolical game of chess, in which the struggle between the bishop
+and the king foreshadowed the whole piece; to hear that absorbing dialogue
+in which Becket recounts to his confidential friend his tragic career and
+his prophetic dreams, and that stormy discussion, too, at Northampton,
+when the archbishop puts his signature to the famous constitutions and
+then cancels it; and to witness the scene of the murder. A scene which
+follows history, step by step, and which, by the way, might have been
+carried through by dumb show without words at all.
+
+Those who saw Irving, mitred and crozier in hand, totter under the blow,
+and fall upon the altar steps, whilst the chanting of the monks came in
+gusts from the church above--mingled with the cries of the people beating
+against the door, and the rumbling of the thunder shaking the great
+edifice to its foundation--experienced one of the strongest emotions any
+spectacle ever gave.
+
+And yet there is no drama in the piece, for a drama involves a situation
+which develops and changes, a plot which works out. The duel between the
+king and prelate in the play, no less than in our history books, is merely
+a succession of indecisive encounters. The metamorphosis of the
+courtier-soldier into the bishop-martyr is indicated hardly at all by the
+poet. And what is one to say of the love idyll appended to the historical
+drama, in spite of history, in spite of the drama itself? All Ellen
+Terry's tact did not suffice to save this insipid Rosamund. The
+complications surrounding the mysterious retreat of this young woman
+savour more of farce even than of melodrama, and as for the facetious
+details by which this episode is enlivened, they form so common and flat a
+piece of comic relief, that one listens to them ashamed and ill at ease. I
+may observe silence on this point, in order to avoid the ungrateful
+function of ridiculing a man of genius, but I cannot refrain from
+protesting against the irreparable error Tennyson committed in dragging
+Becket into this shady intrigue, and giving him the king's mistress to
+care for at the very time when he is holding the king in check with so
+much hardihood.
+
+I have not the same objections to make against _Queen Mary_ and _Harold_.
+In the first piece, the human psychological drama, which is half submerged
+in history, but not so as to be out of sight, is the development of the
+character and of the sad destiny of this unfortunate queen; the road,
+strewn first with flowers and then paved with sharp-edged stones and lined
+with thorns, along which she passed, in so brief a period, from a
+protracted youth to a premature old age, from irrepressible joyousness to
+agonising solitude, misfortune, and despair. Here was a life thrice
+bankrupt. As queen, she dreamt of the greatness of her country, and left
+it under the blow of a national humiliation, the loss of Calais. As a
+Catholic, she strove to restore her religion, and, far from succeeding,
+she dug a chasm between Rome and her people which the centuries have not
+sufficed to fill. As a woman, she loved a man of marble, an animated
+stone: her heart was crushed by him, and broke. She was to learn before
+her death the failure of all her projects; she read contempt and disgust
+in the eyes of the man she worshipped, the man to whom she had offered
+human sacrifices to win his favour. This is the drama Tennyson sketched
+out, if he did not quite complete it, in _Queen Mary_.
+
+The subject of Harold stands out more clearly, in stronger relief. It is
+the struggle of religious faith against patriotism and ambition. All the
+feelings that are at variance, are indicated with a power worthy of the
+great master of the drama in the successive scenes which take place at
+the Court of William when Harold is a prisoner. After the political aspect
+of things has been set forth by the old Norman lord, there comes the
+episode in which Wulfuoth, Harold's young brother, describes to him the
+slow tortures of the prison-life, the living death of the prisoner,
+deprived of all that he loves best,--of the sight of the green fields, of
+the blue of sky and sea, as of the society of men; his name gone out of
+memory, eaten away by oblivion, as he, in his dungeon, is being eaten away
+by the loathsome vermin of the earth.
+
+When Harold has yielded, it is moving to see him bow down with Edith in a
+spirit of Christian resignation, and sacrifice, as ransom of his violated
+oath, his personal happiness to his duty as a king. The dilemma changes,
+and its two new aspects are personified by two women, whose rivalry has in
+it nothing of the banality, or of the vulgar outbursts of jealousy, to
+which we are too often treated in the theatre.
+
+Edith gives up the hero to Aldwyth while he lives; dead, she reclaims him,
+with a nobility and pride of tone that thrill one.
+
+These two dramas--I dare not say two masterpieces--set in a framework of
+history, which in itself is infinitely precious, form the legacy left by
+the great lyrist to the theatre of his country.
+
+A pious hand, to extricate these two dramas from the rest, and so let in
+air and light upon their essential lines; a great actor, to understand
+and incarnate Harold; a great actress, to throw herself into the character
+of Mary,--and Tennyson would take his proper place amongst the dramatists.
+
+    NOTE.--I have decided to make no reference here to the dramas of
+    Browning or Mr. Swinburne. These belong rather to the history of
+    poetry than that of the theatre.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+The Three Publics--The Disappearance of Burlesque and Decadence of
+Pantomime--Increasing Vogue of Farce and Melodrama--Improvement in
+Acting--The Influence of our French Actors--The "Old" Critics and the
+"New"--James Mortimer and his Two "Almavivas"--Mr. William Archer's Ideas
+and Rôle--The Vicissitudes of Adaptation.
+
+
+Is it not a sign of the times that the Lyceum should have been filled
+through two consecutive months, in the midst of the heat of summer, by a
+reverent crowd, come to listen to and to applaud _Becket_?
+
+Attribute it, if you will, partly to Irving, partly to fashion, the fact
+remains, that fifty or sixty thousand persons showed a keen, a passionate
+interest in this struggle between Mind and Power--between the National
+Throne and the Roman Priesthood--resuscitated by a poet. Many other
+symptoms go with this one, and confirm it.
+
+I do not wish to assert that low tastes and vulgarity have gone out of
+London: nothing could be more untrue. Never has the _bête humaine_ been so
+completely at large there; never has sensualism, since the distant days of
+George IV., and those more distant still of Charles II., held its way so
+unblushingly. But these tastes are catered for in certain special
+resorts. Every evening in the year more than thirty music halls spread out
+before the multitude a banquet of indelicacies that are but slightly
+veiled, and of flesh scarcely veiled at all. So much the worse for
+morality. So much the better for art. For, this being so, nothing is
+looked for in the theatres except emotion and ideas. All the ideas may not
+be right, nor all the emotions healthy. No matter. The _bête humaine_ is
+outside the door.
+
+I have told of the initial vogue of burlesque at the Royalty and the
+Strand. This vogue was later to bring fortune to a larger and more
+luxurious theatre, the Gaiety, under Nellie Farren, as the successor to
+Mrs. Bancroft, whose former rôles she vulgarised to a remarkable degree.
+If you mention her name before an elderly "man about town," who was young
+and went the pace from 1865 to 1875, you will set his eye aflame. To-day
+you hear no more of Nellie Farren, no more of burlesque.
+
+The operetta, too, is vegetating; the pantomime serves hardly to amuse the
+children. Of inferior dramatic forms, two still survive, and have even
+extended their clientèle. Farce has called for elbow-room; it takes three
+acts now, instead of one, to spread itself in. Melodrama, which used to
+inhabit only outlandish regions, chiefly to the East and South,--districts
+of London whose geography was hardly known,--at the Surrey, the Victoria,
+the Grecian, the Standard, returned once again to the charge. It holds
+sway at Drury Lane, the Adelphi, and the Princess's. In that immense
+conglomeration of human beings, of which London boasts, there is a third
+public for these two popular forms of the drama, an uncultured but
+respectable public, which is to be confounded neither with the public of
+the music halls nor with that of the great theatres in which the literary
+drama and the light comedy are produced. The persisting, and even growing,
+popularity of farce and melodrama, is not a disquieting symptom. These
+forms meet mental requirements that are primitive, but quite legitimate.
+It is hardly necessary to prove that it is a good thing to make people
+laugh, and that this laugh is a beginning of their education. Those who
+despise the absurdities of melodrama do not reflect that the very
+acceptance of these absurdities reveals an idealising instinct in the
+masses which people of culture often lack.
+
+When dealing with Irving, I asked the question, so often discussed,
+whether we go to the theatre to see a representation of life, or to forget
+life and seek relief from it. Melodrama solves this question, and shows
+that both theories are right, by giving satisfaction to both desires, in
+that it offers the extreme of realism in scenery and language together
+with the most uncommon sentiments and events. These multitudes who delight
+in the plays of R. Buchanan and G. R. Sims, or even--to descend a degree
+lower--of Merritt and Pettitt, often pass quite naturally to Shakespeare,
+for there is a melodrama in every drama of Shakespeare's; and were it not
+for the archaism of the language, this melodrama would thrill the people
+to-day, in 1895, as it did in 1595.
+
+Melodrama does not lack its moral, but the moral is always incomplete, in
+that it is the issue of an accident. A foot-bridge over a torrent breaks
+under the steps of the villain; a piece of wall comes down and shatters
+him; a boiler bursts, and blows him to atoms. These people should be
+taught that a criminal's punishment ought to be the natural outcome of his
+own misdeeds. Will they ever be brought to understand? If not, at least
+their children will, and will take their seats beside us in the same
+places of entertainment. But in their place, new strata of uncultured
+spectators will appear, who will continue to call out for melodrama.
+
+As for the literary drama and for comedy, whose destinies I am here
+following, they have been cultivated only by the Lyceum, the Haymarket,
+the Garrick, the St. James's, the Court, and the Comedy; I should add,
+perhaps, the Criterion, where, under the management of that excellent
+actor, Charles Wyndham, they have often found a home. The _personnel_ of
+these theatres presents a remarkably distinguished body of actors and
+actresses, ceaselessly recruited and strengthened. We have seen the
+advances that have been made by the profession as regards its material
+well-being, its personal dignity, and social status. It has made a yet
+more notable advance in the matter of intelligence. To what is this due?
+To observation, to study, to that striving after improvement by which
+individuals, and classes, and communities are set in movement and kept
+going. Twenty or twenty-five years ago a manager's first question of a
+girl coming to him for an engagement would be--"Can you sing? Can you
+dance? Have you got good legs?" To-day his first requirement would be that
+she should have intelligence.
+
+English actors and actresses owe much to ours. Sarah Bernhardt especially,
+and now Réjane, have exerted an influence so decided that it might be made
+the subject of a separate study; and the visits of the Comédie Française
+are regarded in England as events. Clement Scott, in his _Thirty Years at
+the Play_, tells, as only a genuine playgoer could, of the improvised
+performance given by our comedians at the Crystal Palace, after the
+banquet given to them by the theatrical world of London. That evening
+Favart and Delaunay played _On ne badine pas avec l'Amour_ before the
+keenest and most impressionable of "pits," composed exclusively of actors
+and authors. When, at the _dénouement_, there was heard the sound of a
+fall behind the scenes and of a muffled cry, and Favart appeared, pallid
+to the lips, and rushed across the stage, like a whirlwind of despair,
+crying out, "_Elle est morte! Adieu Perdican!_"--so exquisite was the
+sense of anguish, that the audience forgot to applaud, and there was a
+second of strange stupor, of respectful silence, as if in the presence of
+some real catastrophe: the finest tribute ever paid to histrionic talent.
+I should not be surprised if that evening marked a date in the career of
+more than one English actor.
+
+Dramatic criticism had at last emerged from that lowly and precarious
+stage of existence in which I have shown it in the first part of this
+study. It had now the independence and intelligence which were required to
+enable it to aid in the movement which was shaping, and even to take a
+large part in it. When the history of the English stage of the nineteenth
+century comes to be written, place must be reserved in it for men like
+Dutton Cook, Moy Thomas, Clement Scott, and all those who, having made
+their first appearance during the years of drought and famine, have led
+the community of critics, and with it the whole of the people of Israel,
+out of the land of bondage. It is not so long since the critic sold his
+soul for an advertisement; since Chatterton, who, from being a theatrical
+attendant, had become the master of three theatres, and who suffered his
+toadies to call him the "Napoleon of the Theatrical World," would fain
+have had Clement Scott, of the _Weekly Despatch_, dismissed from his post,
+and presumed to deny him the _entrée_ to his theatres, and even to refuse
+his money at the ticket-office; since the actor who had been criticised
+appealed to the jury, and the jury, being composed of business men, and
+looking at the case always from a business standpoint, decided invariably
+in the actor's favour;--for the truer the adverse criticism, the more
+injury it did to its object.
+
+Truly, there were some hard years to weather. Perhaps one of the men to
+whom criticism owes its emancipation most is James Mortimer, the founder
+of the _London Figaro_. An American by birth, Mortimer lived for many
+years in Paris; he was known to Napoleon III., and it was in the palace of
+St. Cloud that I made his acquaintance. He possessed a thorough knowledge
+of our drama, no less than of our politics, and when his newspaper, by
+reason of the withdrawal of certain financial support, from being a daily,
+became a weekly or bi-weekly, Mortimer gave plenty of room and plenty of
+freedom to criticism. He not only opened his columns to Clement Scott and
+William Archer, but, far from disclaiming connection with them in cases of
+complaint, he backed them up sturdily, and I have seen him, with his hat
+on the side of his head, staring boldly at a gang who hooted at him as he
+entered the theatre. The gallant and witty little journal has lived its
+life; Mortimer himself, since that time, has fallen upon hard times in his
+career as publisher. It is not the less one's duty to accord him, under
+the eye of French theatre-goers, the tribute due to him, and paid to him
+by his old colleagues; so that, having undertaken the toil, he should now
+carry some of the honour, the victory being won and the barbarian driven
+from the theatre.
+
+The critics have often made mistakes since that time, have erred in their
+judgments, have condemned good pieces and glorified bad ones, have
+pandered to vanity and spite, have backed up speculators and cliques, have
+abused their new power, and fallen back to their old feebleness; but, on
+the whole, dramatic criticism in England is worth more to-day than it was
+yesterday, and this must content us--this is as much as we have any right
+to expect.
+
+_The London Figaro_ was published in a mean little shop near Old Temple
+Bar, facing the site where the Law Courts were to be erected. Two writers
+in succession undertook the theatrical chronicle, and signed it with the
+pseudonym of "Almaviva." The reader is already acquainted with the real
+names of "Almaviva I." and "Almaviva II."; he has encountered them several
+times in these pages. Clement Scott and William Archer had only a
+difference of a few years between them, but they represented in their
+profession two periods, schools, temperaments, that were absolutely
+opposed. Scott was the critic of the Robertsonian era; Archer is the
+critic of the drama of to-day, and to a certain point of the drama of
+to-morrow.
+
+Mr. Archer's passion for the theatre--he has told us in a charming preface
+addressed to his friend, Robert Lowe, how this passion began in him--dates
+from his earliest youth, and it was entirely free from any alloying
+element. He has never written plays; or, at least, has never put them on
+the stage. On principle, he has abstained from frequenting the green-room,
+and from personal intercourse with actors. He has devoted himself entirely
+to his critical mission; and, to carry it through the better, he has
+studied the past of the national drama and every kind of dramatic
+literature, living and dead. Mr. Archer is an encyclopædia, a library of
+references, but, unlike so many men of learning, his every item of exact
+information goes side by side with some pregnant thought, some suggestive
+idea; not content to instruct, he thinks and sets one thinking. He is at
+once a penetrating critic and a first-rate _petit journaliste_. Humour, of
+which he is full, flows freely through all his writings; an easy, limpid,
+lively, delicate humour, in which I have never detected a lapse of taste
+or a touch of pedantry. I don't believe that in all his life he has
+perpetrated an obscure or insipid line; in fact, he could not become a
+bore, if he would.
+
+The best way of giving French readers an idea of him would be to compare
+him with one of our dramatic critics of this generation, or of that which
+preceded it, and to show in what respects he resembles, for instance, M.
+Francisque Sarcey or M. Jules Lemaître, and in what respects he differs
+from them. But the comparison is impossible, because their positions and
+circumstances are even further removed than their talents. The excellent
+writers whom I have mentioned are with us the guardians and interpreters
+of a tradition consecrated by masterpieces; they strengthen or refine it,
+now by the vivacity and gaiety, now by the delicacy and grace, of their
+personal impressions. The public to whom they address themselves is more
+_blasé_ than ignorant, and has more need to be stirred up than to be
+taught. William Archer, on the contrary, is an initiator; he has had to
+hew a passage for himself through a forest of prejudices; he has had
+always to go back to the elements of his subject, to demonstrate
+principles which, with us, are taken for granted,--to accomplish, in fact,
+a task which bears some resemblance to that of Lessing in the
+_Dramaturgie_ of Hamburg. Were one to extract from the thousands of
+articles which he has published during the last twenty years the questions
+which he has set himself to discuss, one would amass a sufficiently
+complete code upon all the problems, great and small, which touch upon the
+arts and professions of actor, playwright, and critic.
+
+His conception of the theatre is a very wide one. He regards it as a
+meeting-place, a _rendez-vous_, of all the arts. Its province, he holds,
+is co-extensive with life itself. He welcomes all forms and all kinds,
+provided they are not exotic growths, and answer to some need of the soul
+of the people. Thus melodrama is but an illogical tragedy for him. As for
+farce, he cares nothing for its progress; for although a really lively
+farce is worth more than a pretentious and unsuccessful drama, it would be
+folly to judge it by æsthetic laws. One does not take the height of a
+sugar-loaf, he remarks, from barometric observations. The drama can exist
+outside the domain of literature. It was thus with the English drama ten
+or fifteen years ago. The business of criticism, Mr. Archer holds, was to
+raise it to the dignity of a department of literature, to reconcile it
+with literature. What sort of criticism was required to this end?
+Analytical or dogmatic, comparative, anecdotical or facetious? They may
+all be resorted to, each in its own place and time, provided only that
+they are sincere and independent.
+
+Every piece should contain these three elements: a picture, a judgment,
+and an ideal. On the first rests the great question of realism on the
+stage. Mr. Archer has put the objections to realism in the form of a
+dilemma. "Either you show me on the stage," he says, "what I see and go
+through myself every day; in which case, where is the point of it--what do
+I learn from it? Or else you put before me things, ideas, and modes of
+life of which I know nothing; and how am I to determine their degree of
+truth and reality?" To this he replies himself, that the theatre obliges
+us to observe--that is to say, to see and feel more intensely--what we see
+and feel in our daily life, without taking much notice of it and without
+reflecting upon it. As for the sensations we have never experienced, and
+of the depicting of which we are unable, therefore, to judge the truth,
+the English critic pins his faith to an intuitive sense, which accepts or
+refuses the portrayal of an unknown world. When Zola describes the
+financial methods of the Second Empire, when Pierre Loti transports us to
+the side of Rarahu or of Chrysanthème, an infallible instinct tells the
+reader if it be truth or fancy. Why should not the spectator also be
+endowed with the same critical instinct?
+
+Mr. Archer will not allow that the Robertsonian comedy had this realistic
+character; or he maintains, at least, that if it ever had it, it very soon
+lost it. The author kept pouring hot water into the famous tea-pot until
+there was nothing to offer the public but an insipid decoction, whose
+staleness he tried in vain to hide by alternating it with the bitterness
+of French coffee, accompanied by the inevitable cognac. The English drama,
+Matthew Arnold had written, lay between the heavens and the earth--it was
+neither realistic nor idealistic, but just "fantastic." Mr. Archer took up
+Matthew Arnold's idea, and carried it a step further. Over and beyond the
+portrayal of manners and of character, the theatre puts before us a
+succession of events, a phase of life, upon which we are to pronounce
+judgment. It was in this field that the critic had entirely new truths to
+put before his countrymen. The English drama thought itself very moral;
+the critic deprived it of, and set it free from, this illusion. He was
+inclined even to admit the truth of M. Got's declaration, that our drama
+was the more moral of the two; or rather, he held, that whereas the French
+drama was deficient in morality, the English drama had no morality at all.
+Does a play become moral by having for its climax the destruction of the
+villain and the rewarding of virtue, that triumph of good which is lost in
+the general rummaging for overcoats and shuffling of feet? No; a play is
+moral if it works out a psychological situation, a problem of conduct to
+which it suggests or allots a right solution. Now, Mr. Archer could see no
+drama in 1880 written upon this model; nothing but colourless
+sentimentalities, a minute corner of life, and for sole problem the
+antagonism of poverty and riches, ever smoothed over by love.
+
+He wished to see soaring above every dramatic work, an aspiration towards
+better things, towards a life superior to our common life,--the life,
+perhaps, of to-morrow.
+
+He wished the theatre to have an ideal; not a retrospective, and, so to
+speak, reactionary ideal, as so often happens in a country where tradition
+retains its force, and where it is held that there is no reform like that
+of restoration; but an ideal of advance and progress.
+
+His articles were like a series of vigorous shakes to a sleeper. Any kind
+of effort, he maintained, was better than apathy. He cast about in every
+direction, ransacked every hole and corner, raised every imaginable
+question, whether of trade or theory. Up to what point may Shakespeare be
+imitated with profit? Is the censorship more favourable to manners than it
+is oppressive to talent? Is the establishment of a national theatre, which
+should serve at once as a school and a standard, a practicable idea? And
+would such an institution really help to the perfecting of the art? What
+is one to think of Diderot's paradox about the actors' art, and what do
+actors think of it themselves? What was the social position of actors in
+former times, and what will it be in the future? Will they be respected
+because of their profession, like the judge, the clergyman, the officer,
+or only in spite of it? What are the rights and the duties of the critic?
+What are the dangers, and what the advantages, inherent in the system
+which leaves all the great theatres in the hands of actor-managers? Ought
+the English dramatist to accept the collaboration of the actor-manager,
+and to what extent? These are some of the questions he has discussed and
+answered with a variety of information, a freedom of judgment, an
+unfailing argumentative power that command our respect even when our own
+opinions are at variance with his.
+
+This is not all. Perhaps the most important part of Mr. Archer's rôle has
+consisted in his labours in connection with the dramatic literature of
+foreign countries. He was one of the first to make known the Norwegians
+and the Germans; and better than anyone else he has understood the works
+of our French dramatists, and realised to what account they were to be
+turned in the development of the English stage. Of the influence exerted
+by Ibsen and Björnson on the generations of to-day and to-morrow, I shall
+speak later. Here I shall indicate only the new way in which French works
+have come to be adapted since 1875 and 1880; a curious movement of which
+Mr. Archer is by no means the sole author, but of which he has been a very
+attentive and perspicacious observer, and to which his counsels have lent,
+as it were, a character of scientific precision.
+
+The way in which the English used to imitate our pieces half a century ago
+resembled the hasty procedure of a band of thieves plundering a house,
+doing their utmost, but against time and without method, and in
+consequence burdening themselves with worthless nick-nacks and overlooking
+jewels of price. When the London managers came to Paris post haste, vieing
+with each other for our manuscripts, and resorting to every kind of dodge
+to secure the prize, it was sometimes but the potentiality of becoming
+bankrupt that was thus held up, as it were, to auction.
+
+From 1850 to 1880 they took everything indiscriminately, translating
+sometimes a second and a third time the same inept _vaudeville_. A
+melodrama from the Boulevard du Temple, but long forgotten there, became
+the _Ticket of Leave Man_, a play whose success is not yet exhausted; on
+the other hand, a great comedy by Augier or Feuillet, still to be found in
+our repertory, would languish and die after a few weeks before the
+indifference of the English pit, without anybody's attempting to draw a
+moral from the event. But the legal aspect of things began to alter; the
+idea of international literary property had been started, and was making
+way. The successive steps were as follows. The principle was settled by an
+Act of Parliament in 1852; the foreign author retained his copyright for
+five years, but this affected translation only, adaptation not being
+covered by the laws; then it was sufficient to add a character, or to
+invert two scenes, to evade all dues. In 1875 a new law brought adaptation
+into the same category as translation. Finally, in 1887 as the result of
+the Treaty of Berne, and the interesting discussions which led up to it,
+an Order in Council laid it down in black and white, that the literary
+property of foreigners is, in every respect, identical with that of the
+natives of this country, and is protected in the same way.
+
+These are very liberal provisions, and do honour to the statesmen to whom
+we owe them, but I am obliged to say they have greatly reduced the
+importation of French goods into the English theatrical market, and that
+they threaten it with complete extinction in the future. One has to think
+twice before taking up a piece which is burdened with the necessity of
+paying two authors; it seems preferable to study our methods, and learn
+from us, if possible, how to dispense with us. Nothing has contributed so
+efficaciously, for some years past, to the progress of the native English
+drama.
+
+It is here that the teaching of the critic comes in, with the _flair_ of
+the actor-manager.
+
+From the English point of view, there are two kinds of pieces included in
+the domain of our _Haute Comédie_.
+
+The one, including such plays as those of Dumas and Augier, requires
+almost literal translation, and ought to be put before the public as
+finished specimens of Parisian civilisation and art; to alter them would
+be to spoil them--_sint ut sunt aut non sint_. It is different with the
+pieces of M. Sardou. Once you have torn off the outer covering, and
+detached the thousand adventitious details with which the French author
+has ingeniously set out his subject, there remains an idea to be worked
+out, an idea with a strong foundation, capable of supporting an entirely
+new structure. It is possible to make an entirely English thing out of the
+excellent foreign materials from which one has chosen. It is a matter of
+taste, adroitness, and inspiration, and I quite understand this kind of
+work having a certain fascination for the playwright.
+
+To understand thoroughly the process of adaptation, we ought to have been
+in a certain first-class carriage on the way from Paris to Calais one
+spring morning in 1878. It was occupied by three Englishmen, Mr. Bancroft,
+Mr. Clement Scott, and Mr. Stephenson. They had been present at the
+performance of _Dora_ on the previous evening. Bancroft had bought the
+English right from M. Michaelis, who had himself bought them from M.
+Sardou. How were they to make an English play out of it? Someone suggested
+the introduction of the Eastern Question, which at the moment, under the
+sedulous treatment of Disraeli, was stirring British _amour propre_. All
+the music halls were re-echoing the refrain, "But by jingo if we do." The
+idea hit upon was to turn this jingoism to account in the adaptation, by
+making Disraeli collaborate with Sardou. "By the time we got out at Amiens
+to drink our _bouillon_," one of them tells us, "the play was fully
+planned out." And, under the title of _Diplomacy, Dora_ enjoyed an even
+more brilliant success in England than it had had in France.
+
+This, of course, was only a combination of smartness and good luck. The
+new kind of adaptation was in sight, however, which was to have the double
+advantage of evading the law and elevating the art. All that was taken
+from the French author was a social thesis, a dramatic situation, a moral
+problem. Thesis, situation, and problem were carried bodily into the midst
+of English life, provided only that English life allowed of them. Then, in
+complete disregard of the original, a solution was sought for afresh. If a
+new _dénouement_ resulted, a solution quite opposed to that in the French
+play, it was felt to be so much the better, for in this case the
+adaptation was seen to be independent, and it had but opened the field to
+a fruitful and suggestive comparison between the two races, the two arts,
+and the two codes of morality.
+
+This is where we stand at present: this form of adaptation is the more
+interesting of the two, and constitutes the last stage previous to the era
+of complete emancipation, of absolute originality.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+The Three Principal Dramatists of To-day--Sydney Grundy; his First
+Efforts--Adaptations: _The Snowball_, _In Honour Bound_, _A Pair of
+Spectacles_, _The Bunch of Violets_--His Original Plays--His Style--His
+Humour--His Ethical Ideal--_An Old Jew_--_The New Woman_--A Talent which
+has not done growing.
+
+
+If you were to ask a London theatre-goer to name the most popular
+dramatists of the present day, to designate the ripened talents which tell
+most clearly of the present and of the future of the English drama, I
+think I may affirm that the names that would come immediately to his lips,
+with scarcely a moment's pause for reflection, are those of Arthur Wing
+Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones, and Sydney Grundy. There would doubtless be
+some demurrings on the part of those contrary or eccentric spirits who
+will never admire except out of opposition and in disagreement, not merely
+with the uncultured many, but with the critical few. The theatre has its
+sects and its chapels, or rather, its crypts and its unknown idols, to
+whom a dozen votaries offer incense with weird rites. But we have no time
+to study the vagaries of individual minds. A _plébiscite_ of West-End
+playgoers would certainly point to the three men whose names I have
+mentioned as the leaders of the dramatic movement of the day.
+
+They all began work about the same time--a score of years ago, as nearly
+as possible. They have encountered the same difficulties. Their progress
+has been slow. The commencement of their career was marked by vain efforts
+and misdirected labour: whether it was that opportunity was lacking, or
+that they could not find their way, certainly no one of them gave evidence
+of his full capacity, or even gave any real promise, in his earliest
+works. They were long mere imitators, without seeming to suspect that they
+were worth more than their models; and they hardly were aware of their
+originality before the public discovered it for them. There is something
+almost depressing in the story of these three theatrical _autodidactes_,
+but it is very human and very instructive. It shows the will dragging
+along the intelligence; the investigation by means of experiment preceding
+science; the effort giving birth to the ability. And even now, they are
+only half-way along their arduous paths.
+
+So much they have in common. But their temperament and their ideas are
+dissimilar, and every day adds to this dissimilarity. With whom should one
+commence? Clearly with him who retains most in him of the past, who
+adheres still--largely through his antecedents, and partly through his
+natural disposition--to the school of Robertson, and to the imitation of
+the French: with Sydney Grundy.
+
+If I am not mistaken, his first appearance dates from 1872. At long
+intervals during the subsequent years he succeeded in getting quite small
+pieces upon the stage, contenting himself very often with provincial
+theatres. Two things served to draw him forth from obscurity--an affray
+with the censorship, and the very thorough success of a farce in three
+acts, entitled _The Snowball_. There was question, in the first case, of
+an adaptation of _La Petite Marquise_, which he wrote in collaboration
+with Joseph Mackayers. To my mind, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius contain
+nothing more frankly moral than _La Petite Marquise_. The story of the
+piece, for all the licence of its treatment, is one calculated to deter a
+virtuously inclined woman from succumbing to temptation. Unfortunately its
+moral is a moral of--shall I say?--fastidious abstention; a moral it is
+difficult to appreciate or put into practice, except at an age when
+passion has lost its fire and its poison.
+
+It serves, therefore, despite its subtle humour and clever observation, no
+more useful purpose than the entertainment of philosophers. The English
+censor did not, or would not, see the lesson it taught; he saw only the
+posturings and the language, and was alarmed. He had "passed" the _Petite
+Marquise_ in French in all her original licence; he refused her his
+sanction when she turned up respectably attired by two of his
+fellow-countrymen. Mr. Sydney Grundy made a great outcry, greater,
+perhaps, than was necessary. He was in the right; but one might have
+wished that he had kept in the right without so much passion and
+indignation. However that may be, he made his name known to many people
+who were destined to keep it in mind.
+
+_The Snowball_ is an English version of _Oscar, ou le mari qui trompe sa
+femme_. Mr. Sydney Grundy's originality consists in his having introduced
+into the English farce qualities which were foreign to this
+species--cleverness and ingenuity, wit, some bits of comedy, and not a
+single pun. The author holds his puppets adroitly suspended from his
+finger-tips, without ever entangling their threads. But if, in listening
+to or reading _The Snowball_, you look out for a single trait of English
+manners or character, you will do so in vain, for there is not one.
+
+The well-merited success of _The Snowball_ retarded Mr. Grundy's dramatic
+career, because it condemned him to the work of adaptation--so ungrateful
+in those days--for long years. But this period of ill-fortune had its good
+side, for he knew how to turn it to account. Just as a good painter,
+obliged to earn his livelihood by painting portraits, looks on the wealthy
+Philistines whose features he has to depict as mere models who pay instead
+of being paid; so Mr. Grundy learned the technique and methods of his
+business from Sardou, Labiche, and Scribe. I shall not follow in detail
+these literary jobs of his, some of which were very humble, though none
+of them useless. I shall draw attention merely to three of these
+adaptations, in which Mr. Grundy seems to me to have put some of his
+personal quality, and to have grafted his own talent on the talent of
+another.
+
+The first in date, _In Honour Bound_, is at once a condensation and a
+critical commentary on Scribe's piece, _Une Chaîne_. The heroine is a
+young wife whose husband has neglected her, and who has sought
+distractions. How far has she gone in her search? We are not told; and it
+is better that we should not know, for this doubt adds to the interest of
+a piece which, whilst wearing the outward aspect of comedy, borders
+throughout upon serious drama, and keeps it always within sight. The young
+man who has consoled her, or who has come near to consoling her, and has
+had strength enough to flee to the ends of the earth from his guilty
+happiness, comes back presently with a new love in his heart, a love that
+is to be consummated in a happy and brilliant marriage, if the girl's
+guardian gives his consent. Now--and it is here that Scribe's hand is
+discovered--this guardian and the husband, whose honour has been
+threatened or destroyed, are one and the same, the famous barrister, Sir
+George Carlyon. He it is who bears the burden of the play; and the plot is
+unrolled in a kind of cross-examination of the guilty youth at his hands,
+under the guise of a friendly conversation. How much does Sir George
+know? And whither is he making? Therein lies the interest. You follow
+every move in the clever and perilous game played by the husband whose
+happiness is at stake; and you follow it with the intenser interest that
+he never for a moment loses his _sang-froid_, his grace, or his wit. At
+bottom, his policy consists in counting upon the innate generosity of the
+woman. After devoting a world of skill and patience to the trapping of
+Lady Carlyon, at last, when he has in his hands the written proof of her
+guilt, he throws it into the fire, and, instead of listening to the
+confession which has been offered him, accuses himself.
+
+There results a mutual pardon, discreetly covering over and absolving all
+the past. Thus finishes this little piece, which runs smilingly,
+breathlessly, along the edge of a precipice. It is the Drama in essence,
+cunningly distilled.
+
+_A Pair of Spectacles_ is an imitation (Mr. Grundy modestly calls it a
+translation) of _Les Petits Oiseaux_, by Labiche and Delacour. The subject
+is well known. It is the crisis of distrust which every man goes through,
+sooner or later, who has believed too much in the goodness of mankind. He
+passes from a blind optimism to a ferocious pessimism, then returns to a
+more moderate estimate of average human nature--prepared now and again to
+come across a wretched creature who abuses his charity, and many shallow
+natures who accept it and forget it. This indulgent theory, this
+easy-going attitude, finds expression in a pretty apologue, explanatory
+of the title chosen by Labiche. The old fellow's future daughter-in-law
+congratulates him on the good he effects all round him. "You are so good!"
+she cries; "but people are so ungrateful!" "What does that matter?" she
+makes answer; "I feed the sparrows every morning that come to my
+window-sill. They never say 'Thanks.' Often, indeed, one of them, hungrier
+than the others, pecks at my finger. But that does not stop me from
+feeding them again next day." At the _dénouement_, he recalls this lesson
+read to him by the innocent girl, and applies it to his own experience.
+The pecking is the deception of which he has been the victim; and as for
+the ingratitude of people, well, there is nothing to be surprised at in
+that--the sparrows don't say "Thanks!"
+
+It is a symbol, nothing more nor less,--a symbol in a play by Labiche!
+Labiche poaching upon the fields of him who has written _Solness, the
+Master-Builder!--n'est ce pas un comble!_ A second symbol is added to the
+first in order to justify the title which Mr. Grundy has given to the
+English piece. In his ill-temper over the discovery that human nature is
+not perfect, Benjamin Goldfinch has broken his spectacles. From this
+moment he uses those which have been lent to him by his brother Gregory,
+the misanthrope. At the _dénouement_, his own come back to him from the
+optician's. He seizes upon them with delight, and there is nothing to
+prevent the spectator, should the superstition be to his taste, from
+believing that all that has happened has resulted from the changing of
+these pairs of spectacles. The author's idea is obvious to all. Our mind
+is the prism by which everything is distorted or refracted. So long as we
+look at things through the glasses of our intellectual vision, it is
+probable that they will always appear to us as they appeared at first. The
+pair of spectacles is in us. Experience breaks them, and illusions mend
+them again.
+
+In France the _Petits Oiseaux_ had a provincial success. In Paris the
+piece produced but little effect when first performed; and when revived at
+the Comédie Française some years ago, the critics thought it childish.
+
+In London, on the contrary, in the form given to it by Mr. Grundy, it was
+given a brilliant reception, which was renewed later on its revival, as I
+myself can bear witness. Whence is this difference? From the superiority
+of Parisian taste? Such an explanation would be pleasing to our _amour
+propre_. I shall venture upon another, which will, perhaps, dispense with
+this one. Namely, that _Les Petits Oiseaux_ is a fairy tale, and that
+Labiche has no gift for fairy tales. His big honest hands--I speak
+figuratively, never having seen the author of _Perrichan_ and _La
+Grammaire_--were made to seize and keep hold of the comic aspect of
+realities. But for this gracefully fanciful subject, the touch of a real
+writer, such as Mr. Grundy, was required, and this is why I think the
+copy is better than the original.
+
+The third adaptation which has struck me is that of _Montjoye_. So far
+back as 1877 Mr. Grundy offered a first version of it, under the title of
+_Mammon_, to the English public. He must, while profiting by opinions
+already passed upon it, have made a full and detailed critical study of
+the piece before he touched it at all. The result of his reflections was
+the suppression of a valueless character, that of Montjoye's son, and the
+introduction of an excellent one, that of Parker, the old clerk, whose
+fidelity and modesty everyone admires, and who, having found out all his
+employer's secrets, and treasured up in his dogged and unforgiving heart
+all the grievances he has experienced, follows him step by step, acquires
+his property bit by bit, and becomes eventually his master's master.
+
+_Mammon_ is certainly a better made piece than _Montjoye_, but this was
+not enough for Mr. Grundy. More than sixteen years later he took up the
+same subject again, and subjected it to a new examination, from two points
+of view. How had the type of the company-promoter been modified in the
+course of thirty years? In what particulars does the English speculator
+differ from his French compeer? The scene will be recalled in which
+Montjoye, the positivist, laughs at the enthusiastic Saladin, his old
+schoolfellow, who remained poor through having retained his illusions, his
+belief in mankind. "That is all rubbish," Montjoye declares,--"_Tout
+cela, c'est du bleu!_" Whatever is not practical, whatever cannot be
+expressed clearly in black and white, he calls "Bleu." Poetical illusions,
+childish preconceptions, romantic superstitions, sickly sensibilities,
+sonorous and empty sayings--"_Voila le royaume de bleu!_"
+
+Thus Montjoye, "_ou l'homme fort_," declaimed, in language which now seems
+somewhat out of date. For to-day he has changed rôles with Saladin. He is
+the enthusiast who gains the confidence of the simple and the credulous,
+he is the _virtuoso_ of sickly sensibility--the Paganini of the sonorous
+and empty sayings; he has found a mine of gold in the _Royaume du Bleu_.
+His _Tartufferie_ is social rather than religious. He is not content to
+issue shares in the port of Bohemia, and bonds on a railway from Paris to
+the moon; he is anxious that these magnificent enterprises should serve
+the interests of humanity. The modern Montjoye rides upon politics and
+finance, the Bible and Socialism; he succeeds through chauvinism and
+through philanthropy. Transport him to London, and clothe him in that
+hypocrisy of which our neighbours have made an art, and you will have Sir
+Philip Marchant, the hero of _A Bunch of Violets_.
+
+Thus Montjoye, who comes home at seven in the morning after a spree,--like
+a college boy who has been out of bounds,--and who sacrifices his
+financial eminence, his reputation, and his peace of mind to an
+adventuress, escorted and aggravated by a Palais Royal husband, would
+never go down in England, and I think the French public of to-day would
+refuse to stand him.
+
+I had the honour of personal acquaintance with Octave Feuillet. He was a
+man of delicate, nervous, solitary disposition. He depicted these aspects
+of the _vie mondaine_ and _demi-mondaine_ of 1865 from afar and _de chic_.
+Mr. Grundy eliminated this naïve and old-fashioned Don Juanism of his. In
+order to bring about the necessary crisis, he has recourse to bigamy. The
+expedient is not new, and is even somewhat repellent, but I admit that it
+gives a solidity to the English piece which the French piece lacks.
+
+Philip Marchant has married twice, Montjoye has not married at all. "What
+would the world say if it knew you had allowed your mistress to invite it
+to dinners and dances under the guise of being your wife?" The objection
+is submitted to Montjoye by his unfortunate accomplice, and by the public
+to the author who is no better able to reply to it than his hero. At all
+events, Sir Philip Marchant has not been guilty of this blunder. His
+second marriage is a crime certainly, but it is not a mistake. And then we
+escape that ultimate conversion, a lamentable concession made by Feuillet
+to the optimistic playgoers of the fair sex of thirty years ago. Sir
+Philip swallows his laudanum (or is it strychnine?) without turning a
+hair--a method of settling one's differences with social morality and the
+criminal code resorted to, as we know, in every country, when no other
+method is available.
+
+On one point Mr. Grundy has shown himself even more fanciful and
+sentimental than Octave Feuillet. I refer to the little bunch of violets
+which gives its name to the piece. Sir Philip, the bigamist, the swindler,
+who has defrauded public societies, defrauded the poor, defrauded even his
+own wife, refuses to give the little penny buttonhole of violets, his
+daughter's present to him that morning, in exchange for a sum of five
+thousand pounds--a sum which would enable him to keep up the fight for
+another twenty-four hours and--who knows?--perhaps escape bankruptcy and
+suicide. "These violets are not for sale," he thunders, and the audience
+is carried away. The men applaud and the women weep. By this single trait
+the criminal is redeemed and absolved.
+
+Even in his original plays, Mr. Grundy has been haunted by the memory of
+his French studies, and no one will think of reproaching him for having,
+now and again, made use of semi-unconscious reminiscences, floating, as it
+were, between the regions of his imagination and his memory. A more
+serious cause for complaint is, that having concerned himself for a great
+portion of his life with the French theatre, he has ended by confounding
+our dramatic types with characters from real life. At the same time, as he
+is gifted with a very lively sense of humorous observation, which he has
+employed in every direction upon things and people, he has managed to
+produce some curious mixtures. Sometimes we have Scribe's marionettes
+moving in an English atmosphere, sometimes we have English characters
+unfolding themselves through the course of sentimental plots very much
+like ours. Thus, in _The Glass of Fashion_, we have depicted for us the
+havoc wrought by society journalism of the worst type. A silly fool who
+has come in for a fortune has allowed himself to be persuaded into buying
+a journal of this class. It traduces his best friends, and even his very
+wife. A little more and he must institute proceedings against it for
+libelling himself. The whole of this amusing picture of manners,
+thoroughly racy of the soil, is framed in a melodramatic affair in which
+women are juggled out of sight, like a thimble-rigger's peas, in
+accordance with our traditional method. Mr. Grundy pins his faith to
+Scribe, whom he looks upon with reason as a marvellous stage-carpenter,
+and he cannot see the need for a divorce between ingenious scenic
+contrivance and sincerity of dramatic emotion. And indeed, it is not
+essential that a theatrical piece should be badly constructed that it may
+contain human feeling and truth to life. But how to get nature and art to
+combine together in the same work? That is the enigma, and there are many
+still who have to search for the secret of this mysterious collaboration.
+
+In every play of Mr. Grundy's there is to be found an element which is
+very old in the initial situation, and also an element which is very new
+and very personal in the treatment, the working out,--the individual
+note, in short, which relieves even the smallest points, and stamps them
+with a special character that cannot be counterfeited. It is to Mr. Grundy
+the writer that Mr. Grundy the dramatist owes his greatest success, and it
+is the writer, too, who has covered the retreat when the dramatist has
+entered the fray too rashly, and been threatened with disaster.
+
+This gift of writing is not displayed in rhetorical tirades, or in
+brilliant discourses and philosophisings upon social problems, as with our
+writers of the Second Empire; it is concentrated chiefly upon quick
+rejoinders that are rapped out short and sharp. Humour flows in such
+abundance through Mr. Grundy's theatrical work that it floods even his
+serious dramas. _A Fool's Paradise_, that sombre story of poisoning, is so
+saturated with gaiety that one laughs throughout, from start to finish;
+and the murderess is so conscious of it that she betakes herself
+considerately behind the scenes to die, in order not to dissipate our good
+humour by the sight of her agonies. In _The Late Mr. Castello_ there is
+nothing at all of tragedy--nothing but the whims of a pretty woman, whose
+amusement it is to woo the lovers of all the rest of her sex; thus causing
+general indignation.
+
+The author's wit follows her with rare agility through these dangerous
+gymnastics, which the less nimble would attempt at the risk of a broken
+neck. Coynesses, childishnesses, contrarinesses, moods of jealousy,
+endearing terms used in earnest and in jest, outbursts of passion
+artificial as well as real, shades and half shades and quarter shades of
+expression, fibs, feint upon feint, nothing disconcerts the writer,
+nothing finds this light, subtle, railing, emotional tongue at a loss--the
+tongue which recalls Marivaux sometimes, and sometimes Musset. You can
+understand, then, why Mr. Grundy's plays are popular with the public,
+without satisfying the critics. The public is carried away by the charm of
+his dialogue; the critics stop to discuss the age of his subject and the
+truth of his thesis.
+
+One of Mr. Grundy's peculiarities--and, together with his fancy and his
+originality as a writer, it is my chief reason for delighting in
+him--consists in the strange contrast presented in his theatrical work
+between the passions called into play and the impression produced. Severe
+judges accuse him of being over-indulgent to the weaknesses of unlawful
+love, and perhaps they are right. But of this I am sure, that you go from
+one of his plays in an excellent frame of mind, with a genuine wish to
+lead a good life, and to attain happiness through the giving of happiness
+to others. How does he set about the management of this? He does not set
+about managing it at all. There is something in the depth of his nature
+that gushes out in good-will, a source of generous emotions which
+strengthen and refresh and reanimate us. In place of the thousand little
+rules and regulations by which conventional and machine-made morality hems
+us in, a broader, if less clearly defined, morality is to be found, one
+which contrives the avoidance of evil, not by the observance of laws, but
+by the sparing of pain and suffering to our fellows.
+
+In _Sowing the Wind_, Mr. Grundy has pleaded the cause of illegitimate
+children with a warmth and eloquence Dumas would not have been ashamed to
+acknowledge. I am told that the third act, when a good actress has taken
+part in it, has never failed to produce its effect, and I am not
+surprised. The piece is well conceived and is touching; and there is a
+suggestion of history in it, tactful and pleasing. You would say it had
+really been written over sixty years ago, in this England of 1830, in
+which the scene is laid.
+
+But I shall cite _An Old Jew_ as the best example of those plays of his
+which do not satisfy ordinary morality, and which yet leave a man better
+and more strong. It is a curious play. It would be easy to point out its
+faults; it is very difficult to explain its charm. A man who has been
+deceived by his wife, instead of showing her up, punishing her, driving
+her from his house, condemns himself to exile, and allows himself to be
+suspected at once of hardness and infidelity. Why? Because a father can do
+without his children, a woman cannot. Left all alone, she would lapse into
+despair or into shame; her children will be her safeguard, her redemption,
+her virtue. This conduct of Julius Stern is magnanimous; but if he is
+ready to ignore himself, should he not think rather of his innocent
+children than of his guilty wife? Has he not run too great a risk in
+confiding the education of a pure-minded girl to an adulteress? The
+dangerous experiment succeeds, and if you ask me why, I can only say,
+because Mr. Grundy so decided it. Julius has been mistaken only on one
+point,--on the powers of endurance of a father deprived of his daughter's
+caresses, and the companionship of his son.
+
+He returns therefore, and draws near to his deserted family; he remains in
+concealment, but close beside them, ready to guard and help them.
+
+His daughter plays _ingénue_ parts in a London theatre, and although the
+morality of the wings is a little better on the other side of the channel
+than on ours, the girl is exposed to such proposals as that of a certain
+Burnside, who asks her calmly and coolly, without any pretence of love or
+any beating about the bush, to come and live with him. It is time for the
+father to show himself. But Julius has a method all his own for watching
+over his daughter. Every evening he goes to see her act, and, the piece
+over, returns to bed. As for the young man, his dream is of literary
+glory, and it is now that the second subject is introduced, a satire upon
+the ways of contemporary English journalism, which is made to go side by
+side with the domestic drama of the Sterns. How do we find Julius
+intervening in the interests of his son? First he buys him a rare edition
+of "The Dramatists of the Sixteenth Century," which he seems to recommend
+to him as a model (a mistaken and ill-timed recommendation, as I think,
+for the reasons I have indicated already in a previous chapter). The young
+man has written a comedy. Without having read it, and, in consequence,
+without knowing whether he is encouraging a real or only an imagined
+vocation, Julius buys a theatre in which the piece may be performed, and
+he buys also two or three newspapers wherewith to secure its success. Here
+he assumes proportions that are almost fantastic. His sadness, his
+wandering and mysterious life, his authority of voice and bearing, that
+fatal gift of his for turning everything he touches into gold, point to
+some symbolical intention in the author's mind, and to a _third_ subject.
+
+It is no longer _A Jew_; it is _The Jew_--the Jew rehabilitated, and
+becoming now, in his turn, a dispenser of social justice. But how does he
+set about it, this reformer? By loading rascals with gold. Not a good way,
+truly, of closing the _marché aux consciences_. And then the whole
+structure falls to pieces before a very simple reflection. The newspapers
+that give success are not to be bought. Those that are to be bought don't
+give success.
+
+I could proceed with these criticisms, but I am almost ashamed really, as
+it is, of having gone so far, for they make me look ungrateful. If the
+play be theoretically bad, how is it that we listen to it, moved or
+amused, without a moment of fatigue? It is a play without love, for one
+cannot regard the incident of Burnside's base proposal as a love scene. A
+whole act passes in the smoking room of a club, in which we do not catch
+sight of even the shadow of a petticoat. But one would not miss a line of
+this frank, direct, live dialogue; one is thrilled by certain sentences,
+strangely deep or bitterly eloquent, as by lightning flashes; one feels
+that there are real souls behind these unreal incidents. And then,--shall
+I acknowledge it?--one is keenly interested in the absurd but affecting
+spectacle of this father, who thirsts for his daughter's forehead, as a
+lover thirsts for the lips of his mistress. Why should not such love as
+this have its drama and its romance, as it has its anguishes, its
+sacrifices, and its joys?
+
+_The New Woman_, played in the autumn of 1894, gives us the same emotions,
+without suggesting to the mind the same doubts and objections. It had a
+well-merited success. It is, of course, open to criticism. It is a wholly
+modern picture of manners, the _dernier cri_ of social satire, serving as
+a background to the working out of a very old dramatic subject. Does the
+play bear out the promises of its title? I see in it three episodical
+types, of which two, at least, are caricatures; an impudent lady-doctor,
+who takes herself very seriously; a sort of _garçon manqué_, who smokes
+and wears her hair short; and a sort of half-faded flirt, who is much more
+taken up with angling for a husband in troubled waters than with the
+reformation of society.
+
+I see also a married woman, who bores herself at home, and who tries to
+appropriate another woman's husband, by collaborating, or pretending to
+collaborate, with him on a book. But I have no difficulty in recognising
+in her the everlasting would-be adulteress, of whom our drama has made
+such abuse. Her case is complicated with literature; she is the old
+Blue-Stocking darned anew. Thus escapes us once more the New Woman, this
+obsessing phantom of which everyone speaks and which so few have seen.
+
+The real theme of the play is the folly of a man of the world in marrying
+a little farmer's daughter, who has been brought up at home in the
+country. I have said that it is an old subject, but it is well to remark
+that it is generally approached from another side. The authors of a
+certain epoch were fond of describing the origin of one of these passions
+which level the differences of rank and education. They led the hero and
+heroine up to the point of marriage, but it is the morrow of their
+marriage, and the day after that still more, that one would like to hear
+of. This is precisely what Mr. Grundy sets out to show us, but is his
+representation of it accurate, lifelike, credible?
+
+In reality, were this marriage to come off, it is very likely that the
+newly-wedded wife, made giddy by the sudden plunge, would surpass in
+frivolity those who belong to the gay world into which she has been
+introduced, and who have lived in it. But this idea would be too true and
+too simple for the theatre. Or else this little country girl would show
+herself inferior to the people amongst whom she has to mix, as much by the
+vulgarity of her ideas as that of her manners. It is not the world who
+would repulse her, it is she who would be unable to suit herself to the
+world; whence it would come, that her husband must either cast her off or
+become a pariah with her. This version, also, would fail to please the
+pit. Mr. Grundy, therefore, has preferred to devote all his _savoir
+faire_, his wit and his emotional power, to the task of making us accept,
+as a compromise between realism and idealism, a solution as pleasing as it
+is illogical and essentially theatrical. In the second act, Marjery
+commits blunder upon blunder. Everybody makes fun of her, and her husband
+declares she is "hopeless." In the third act she is the admired of all,
+for her eloquence and dignity, her virtue and tact; those who made fun of
+her have prostrated themselves at her feet. Is it possible that she has
+learnt all this during the entr'acte, whilst the orchestra got through a
+waltz? She takes refuge with her father, whose country dialect is just
+strong enough to raise a smile. She milks the cows and plucks the apples,
+the only occupations permissible on the stage to a pretty farmer's lass.
+The youthful husband comes in search of her to this retreat, and obtains
+her pardon. She will never be a lady, but she will be a "woman" _par
+excellence_. The public seemed to me to be delighted with this conclusion.
+An assembly of two thousand snobs will never stint its applause to an
+author who chastises snobbery.
+
+To sum up, Mr. Sydney Grundy has never yet had the good fortune to utilise
+all his gifts at once--to put his whole strength into one important work.
+But he has not said his last word: he may give us to-morrow a vigorous
+comedy, taken whole and entire from actual life, a drama palpitating with
+living passion. Has he not everything required for the purpose?
+Sensibility, humour, individuality, the knowledge of the theatre, and the
+favour of the public.[12]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+Henry Arthur Jones; his First Works--His Melodramas--_Saints and
+Sinners_--The Puritans and the Theatre--The Two Deacons; The Character of
+Fletcher--_Judah_--_The Crusaders_; Character of Palsam; the Conclusion of
+the Piece--_The Case of Rebellious Susan_--_The Masqueraders_--Return to
+Melodrama. Theories expounded by Mr. Jones in his book: _The Renascence of
+the Drama_.
+
+
+The start of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones was not less difficult than that of
+Mr. Sydney Grundy. He could get only short and light pieces accepted at
+first. The earliest play of his within the memory of London play-goers was
+performed at the Court Theatre, and was entitled, _A Clerical Error_. The
+second was an idyll in two short acts, called _An Old Master_.
+
+The young author found it necessary to seek refuge in provincial theatres.
+The world remained unwilling to learn his name--a somewhat undistinguished
+name, and easily forgotten. When, in 1882, Mr. Archer included him in his
+_Dramatists of To-day_, there were many who asked, "_Who_ is this Mr.
+Jones?"
+
+It was then he worked at melodrama. He served seven years with Laban, and
+married Leah, upheld by the hope of one day obtaining Rachel. This was
+his apprenticeship. As Mr. Grundy had learnt his craft by adapting our
+French authors, Mr. Jones learnt his by writing great popular dramas. It
+was in this _genre_, one which gives full scope to the imagination, that
+he came to know his own individual temperament, and developed those
+poetical faculties which were to be put to better uses; it was by this
+unlikely pathway that he found the road to Shakespearian emotions. His
+qualities and his defects date from this time.
+
+The great success of _The Silver King_ set Mr. Jones at liberty. I have
+neither seen nor read the piece, which has not been printed. It is a good
+melodrama, I understand. People found in it, together with some new types
+and _coups de théâtre_, observation, gaiety, a rare freedom of handling,
+some really moving touches, and, here and there, flashes of imagination
+and poetry.
+
+Mr. Jones thought he could now take a step further, and please himself,
+having succeeded in pleasing the public. He wrote _Saints and Sinners_.
+The little Margate Theatre was the scene of the first performance of the
+new play in September 1884, this first performance having for object only
+the perfecting of the actors in their parts, and the testing of the
+public. The piece passed thence to the Vaudeville, where it held the bills
+until the middle of the following year, much talked about and applauded.
+
+It marks an important date, not merely in the career of Mr. Jones, but in
+the history of the English drama. It denotes the revival of active
+hostility, in that ancient conflict between the Puritans and the stage,
+which began in 1580, and will last as long as English literature and
+English civilisation. This conflict had assumed a sluggish and inactive
+character in the nineteenth century. Shattered by the scorn of the
+Puritans, the stage had not dared to raise its arm for a blow. Suddenly it
+took the offensive, and carried the war into the enemy's camp. _Saints and
+Sinners_ is only the first of a series of dramas and comedies, in which
+Mr. Jones has fearlessly attacked the hypocrisies of religion, in their
+most characteristic form. He has let fly some darts, indeed, which have
+sped even further, and which he has not shot at random. Has he not
+declared, in his high-spirited and witty preface to _The Case of
+Rebellious Susan_, that the theatre was perhaps destined to succeed to the
+tottering pulpit, and to teach morality to the professional moralists?
+
+Already, in 1885, he had claimed energetically for the drama the right to
+deal with any subject, even with religious subjects. Elsewhere, he
+declared that the theatre was one of the organs of the national life, and
+one of its essential organs; that one could no more imagine England
+without the theatre, than England without the press and the platform.
+
+He seems to say--and this boldness does not displease in a man of
+talent--"We want liberty. Free our hands; give us permission to produce
+masterpieces, and the masterpieces will not be delayed."
+
+What Mr. Jones satirised in _Saints and Sinners_, was the money-making
+spirit that went hand in hand with bigotry. This combination is incarnated
+by Hoggard and Prabble, the two deacons of the dissenting congregation of
+Steepleford. Hoggard is a business man on a small scale, and in a small
+town; Prabble is an easy-going grocer. The one is repulsive, the other
+merely comic; but, at bottom, they represent the same spirit, in different
+degrees, and after different fashions. Hoggard is fully aware of his
+rascality, and there is nothing sincere about him except his pride. He is
+convinced that there is a special moral code for clever men of his own
+stamp.
+
+Prabble, on the other hand, is of opinion that the minister would be doing
+no more than his duty were he to denounce from the pulpit the co-operative
+stores by which his shop is being ruined. "I keep up his chapel. He ought
+to keep up my custom." Even in the last scene, in the midst of the tragic
+emotions of the _dénouement_, when he wishes to express to the minister
+they have driven away the remorse of his ungrateful congregation, his one
+fixed idea comes out again. If only Mr. Fletcher could manage, without
+inconvenience, to slip in a word on Sunday--just one word about the
+co-operative stores!
+
+Does this grocer, who would prop up his shop against his chapel, reason
+and act otherwise at bottom, than did the great king when he allied his
+throne with the pulpit of Bossuet? In both cases the policy proved
+successful--at least, for a time.
+
+"You know, my dear Prabble," Hoggard says to his friend, "it is we who are
+the greatness of England; it is we who have made her what she is." And
+what is so terrible about it is, that he is not wholly wrong. Hoggard and
+Prabble represent one of the various types of that Puritan democracy,
+which accomplished great things in former days, but which has learnt
+nothing for two centuries, except to make money. They belong to what is
+called the middle class, and the middle class, so different from our
+_Classe Moyenne_, is regarded with real contempt by superior
+intelligences. Matthew Arnold congratulated Mr. Jones ten years ago on
+having given it, in his admirable picture of these two deacons, one of the
+hardest blows it had yet received. What neither Mr. Arnold nor Mr. Jones
+took the trouble to point out is, that in ordinary life the minister
+cannot belong to a different race of men from those who of their own
+accord have placed him at their head. Like flock, like pastor, and--I
+shall venture to add--like creed.
+
+In default of prudence, an artistic consideration (which I can understand)
+would have strongly impelled Mr. Jones to offer us a pastor differing from
+his flock, as the suave tenderness of the New Testament differs from the
+harshness of the Old. This minister, who allows himself to be robbed by a
+poulterer, and who says such sublime things, has not been taken from real
+life, but from _The Vicar of Wakefield_,--Goldsmith's irrational,
+delightful work. At times he rises to the height of Myriel, the bishop in
+_Les Miserables_, and it is not at these times I like him best. I
+acknowledge that he has tried my temper by his blindness, that I have been
+aggravated by his meekness, have lost all patience with his patience. He
+is very human, very virile, when before his assembled congregation he
+makes the confession which is so cruel to him, of his daughter's sin, and
+relinquishes the spiritual functions which have been his livelihood. There
+is real grandeur in this self-abasement--a dignity full of impressiveness
+in this confession of shame. The words are at once plain and delicate,
+they come from the depths of his nature, and go straight to the soul of
+his hearers. But when he hides his mortal enemy, in order to shield him
+from the vengeance he has earned, and shares with him his last piece of
+bread, I feel that he is going too far, and that pity, as sometimes
+happens, is clashing with justice. Then, when he cries out, "Christians,
+will you never learn to forgive?"--the words thrill me, and I change my
+mind again--I tell myself that one must sometimes exaggerate beyond the
+bounds of reason to bring even a little goodness into the souls of the
+pitiless.
+
+Mr. Jones's talent achieved a fresh advance in _Judah_, produced on May
+21, 1890. There is no longer any trace of melodrama, either in the
+situations or in the characters. The nobility of mind, and the need of
+spontaneous confession, which mark the finest scene in _Saints and
+Sinners_, are used as motives again in _Judah_, with great power, and
+form, so to speak, the mainspring of the play. A young girl named Vashti
+Dethic, has been brought up by her father to the rôle of _clairvoyante_
+and miracle-worker. Extreme poverty, extreme youth, moral force carried
+perhaps to the point of terrorising,--she has abundant excuses for
+adopting this horrible career. Now, her interests, her pride, the
+enthusiam of her stupid devotees, constrain her to persevere in an
+imposture which she loathes.
+
+We pity her, and are grateful to the author for diverting our scorn to the
+wretched Dethic. We are even willing to believe that a high-strung,
+nervous girl may imagine herself to be the subject of miraculous
+influences. When Vashti is subjected to a fast of three weeks, and when,
+by the merciless vigilance of her watchers, this fast threatens to become
+too real, the young girl's heroism touches us, in spite of ourselves, as
+much as though it were devoted to a better cause. We form the absurd wish
+that her father may succeed in smuggling some food to her--we are all for
+the miracle against science, for charlatanism against the truth; which is
+going as far as can be gone! Or rather, we have developed an interest in a
+poor human creature in serious peril, and, without reflecting upon her
+character, we hope she may escape. How would it be if we were
+passionately in love with her? Thus it is with Judah Llewellyn.
+
+These two names are noteworthy; the author calls our attention by them to
+the dual origin of his hero, Celtic and Jewish. This mixed ancestry
+explains, doubtless, both the fanatic and the impulsive side of his
+nature, and the mastery of the religious instinct in its conflict with the
+ardours and passions of the imagination. Judah is endowed with a burning
+eloquence, the secret of which he gives in the simple statement, "I
+believe what I say." This faith, which carries away the uncultured,
+inspires the respect of men of the world. One listens to him without a
+smile, when he talks of the voices which have called upon him in the
+night; some may not believe that the voices did so call upon him, but all
+believe that he heard them calling. Thus his church becomes too small for
+the multitudes who come to seek nourishment, or rather intoxication, in
+his words.
+
+This man has to pass through various phases of mind before our eyes. At
+first, he loves Vashti with a humble, ecstatic love, in which religious
+enthusiasm seems to enter more than human passion. In his eyes she is a
+superior being--privileged, the elect of God. He dares not defile her with
+a carnal thought; it is enough for him to kiss the hem of her robe. But it
+chances one evening that he is an involuntary witness of the desperate
+efforts of Vashti's father to get some food to her during her fast. At
+once, almost without transition, by the force of circumstances that permit
+no time for deliberation, he becomes her accomplice, he saves her by a
+lie, and a lie which carries the more weight in that his veracity has
+never been called in question. A vulgar writer would not have failed to
+show us Judah raising himself to his full height, and invoking curses upon
+the woman he had protected, and fleeing afterwards to a solitude where he
+would be tortured by the visions of lost happiness. Mr. Jones has done
+just the opposite. Judah's first sensation is a burst of wholly human joy.
+Vashti is not an angel or a saint, but a woman, a frail creature, like to
+himself, whom he may love without thought of sacrilege! It is not until
+later that remorse makes itself felt in his soul, and that his conscience,
+terrible and tempestuous like passion, asserts its rights.
+
+To all appearances Judah and Vashti are triumphant: they are to be united;
+Lord Asgarby's daughter, the subject of the imposture, is cured because
+she believes herself cured; the world pays its homage at once to Vashti's
+miraculous powers, and to the virtue and eloquence of the man she is to
+marry. What is lacking? Peace of mind, self-respect. In what poignant
+terms Judah recounts to Vashti his mental agony! With what imagination of
+poet, or of the lost, does he give voice and form to all the terrors of
+the Puritan mind,--those terrors which, for some mere trifle, some shadow
+of a sin, so tortured Bunyan, and prostrated Cromwell, pallid, gasping,
+on the bare boards of his chamber! Yet love has not gone from Judah's
+heart. Better Hell with her than Heaven without!
+
+The champion of science, Dr. Jopp, for his part, has instituted an inquiry
+into the whole thing; he is inclined to bracket Dethic and his daughter
+together. Judah becomes aware of what is in preparation, is free to
+separate his lot from that of Vashti; but he does not do so. Then when
+Jopp, on the entreaty of his old friend Lord Asgarby, has consented to
+spare Vashti, it would be easy for Judah to maintain silence, and to
+accept, together with his wife, the favours with which they are being
+overwhelmed. But no, he must speak; he must confess himself! The
+confession issues with the explosive violence born of long compression, in
+a strange frenzy of humiliation and of repentance, impetuous, vibrating,
+almost triumphant, like a blare of trumpets. Beyond the awful but not
+impassable ordeal, the guilty man and woman see the divine horizon of
+paradise regained.
+
+"You won't? Then hear me, hear me, all of you! I lied! I lied! Take back
+my false oath; let the truth return to my lips! Let my heart find peace
+and my eyelids sleep again! You all know me now for what I am; let all who
+honoured me and followed me know me too. Hide nothing! Let it be blazed
+about the city. (_Pause. To_ LORD A.) Take back your gift. (_Gives deed
+to_ LORD A.) We will take nothing from you! Nothing! Nothing! (_Goes to_
+VASHTI.) It's done. (_Takes her hand._) Our path is straight; now we can
+walk safely all our lives."
+
+It is the pride of penitence, and this expression of feeling has never
+been given a prouder tone. In the previous play, _Saints and Sinners_, old
+Fletcher, on learning of his daughter's shame, had cried out, "How shall I
+ever hold up my head again?" To hold up his head, that is an Englishman's
+first need. And when Letty Fletcher had effaced her transgression by dint
+of heroism and devotion, she said, not, "I have expiated my sin," but, "I
+have conquered." By such expressions it is that I can see that the
+artificial psychology of the drama is yielding place to a truer and more
+real psychology. Hitherto, almost everything that has been written in
+England, would seem to have had for object, to conceal and not to make
+clear the English mind. A new generation of writers has come forth, whose
+work it will be to depict this mind as it really is, and to make its
+confession with the fierce sincerity of Judah.
+
+_The Crusaders_, produced on November 2, 1891, is a piece of quite another
+stamp. It is not the unfolding of a character contending with
+circumstances: it is a satirical representation of a _côterie_, a group, a
+social movement. This kind of piece has but a first act, in which the
+theme is expounded and a brilliant array of characters presented to the
+audience. The plot of _The Crusaders_ is a mere imbroglio, fastened on
+somewhat artificially to a satirical and ethical homily; it turns upon an
+open window and shut door, which endanger the reputation of a young widow.
+Unfortunately, we do not take much interest in this young widow, or in the
+two men who love her; one of them is a faded copy of Judah, the other is
+nothing at all.
+
+But what is a mere accessory in the view of the ordinary playgoer,
+constitutes the essential part of the play for the critic, for the
+historian of the drama and of life.
+
+When the time comes for depicting the state of English society during the
+last years of the nineteenth century, this curious first act of _The
+Crusaders_ will certainly be drawn upon for material. There will be found
+in it the confusion of elements that stir and mingle, without uniting, in
+the vague social movement of this period: enthusiasm lacking a clear end
+in view, devotion lacking a definite object, a pilgrimage which leads no
+one knows whither, and on which no single pilgrim will reach his
+destination. It deals with the reformation of London; a programme so vast
+and complex as to be none at all. This association counts amongst its
+members a number of pretty women who play at charity; young idlers for
+whom the reformation of London is merely an opportunity for flirting, just
+like private theatricals, _tableaux vivants_, and garden parties; pushing
+women who turn the occasion to their own profit by bringing about
+relations with this "dear Duchess of Launceston," and who raise
+themselves thus in the world, step by step. One of these good ladies, Mrs.
+Campion Blake, invites an old statesman to dinner, to meet a kind of
+apostle whom she defines as a "new variety of inspired idiot--something
+between an angel, a fool, and a poet! And atrociously in earnest! a sort
+of Shelley from Peckham Rye. He's rather good fun, if you take him in
+small doses." After dinner, an American lady gymnast will give a
+performance in the dining-room. "She's adorable. She gives drawing-room
+gymnastics after dinner. It isn't the least indelicate--after the first
+shock." Be sure the Minister will accept the invitation. He is quite ready
+to reform London, provided only that no one calls upon him to alter his
+own mode of life. He acknowledges that he has no ideals. No ideals! his
+hearers exclaim horrified. Alas! no; had he not become a member of the
+House of Commons in his twenty-second year! Which of the two is Mr. Jones
+turning into ridicule? Idealism, or the House of Commons? Both, I fancy.
+Why should there not be a double irony for the clever, just as there is a
+_galimatias double_ for the dull?
+
+In this movement there are many who are in earnest. First of all we have
+the credulous, ingenuous Ingarfield, dragging in his train Una, the
+petticoated apostle of the prison and the house of ill-fame, the young
+virgin whose joy it is to attempt the conversion of rogues and
+prostitutes. But the most real type is that of Palsam. This individual is
+wholly repulsive. A voluntary spy, a detective by his own choice, he is
+the incarnation of that spirit of sneaking, which rages so cruelly in
+certain sections of English society. Basile, in comparison with him, is a
+"good sort," an amiable companion. He stoops to expedients to which an
+_agent de moeurs_ would blush to have recourse against an _habituée_ of
+Saint Lazare; and it is against women of the world, too, that he resorts
+to them! He is so insensible to indignity that a box on the ear has no
+effect upon him. How do people put up with him? How is it they let him
+into their houses? In France we would throw him out without troubling
+about his calumnies, which would be welcomed only by the lowest kind of
+newspaper; or rather, a complete Palsam, a perfect Palsam could not be
+found in France. In England he is a reality and a power. But is he so vile
+as he seems, as at first we are inclined to regard him? No; his conduct
+seems mean to the utmost degree; but consider, please, two things: first,
+that he acts thus, quite disinterestedly; secondly, that he deprives
+himself of those incorrect enjoyments of which he is so bent upon
+depriving others. Give him the benefit of these two admissions, and,
+little by little, the man will begin to wear for you a different aspect.
+The ascetic will rehabilitate the spy, you will be forced to find a kind
+of heroism in his meanness, and to admire, while you hate, his hideous
+virtue, which is perhaps one of the hundred ways of doing good to men in
+their own despite.
+
+Perhaps it was not Mr. Jones's intention to suggest so many reflections by
+his Palsam, but whether he wishes it or no, his work is thus suggestive,
+and it is the special note of this very straightforward, very masculine,
+very generous satire, that it never ridicules the enemy without letting us
+see the redeeming traits in his character, and the good motives which he
+might plead in self-defence, thus putting the real man before us whole and
+entire.
+
+Mr. Jones ridicules the would-be reformers of London, and represents their
+efforts as resulting in a pitiable fiasco. But he has not contended, of
+course, that London is all right as it is, and that the bringing of the
+great city into a state of moral health has ceased to be one of the dark
+problems which demand, and baffle, the good intentions of honest folk. He
+himself has indicated a solution, and the true solution; "To reform
+London, it is necessary, first of all, that each of us should reform
+himself." Such is the moral of the piece; and this sermon is worth more
+than many others.
+
+Through alternate successes and failures, Mr. Jones's popularity has gone
+on increasing during the last four years. _The Tempter_, it is true, gave
+the public something of a shock. Despite the intelligently devised
+splendours of the _mise en scène_, and the admirable resources of his own
+talent, Mr. Tree, who had a special liking for the piece, and was not
+wholly unconnected, they say, with its conception, did not succeed in
+bringing his audience round to his way of thinking. In the _Triumph of
+the Philistines_, Mr. Jones resumed his campaign against Puritanism, but
+after a pettier, less vigorous fashion than in his preceding works. The
+hero and heroine of this comedy were empty, formless shadows, and the
+public would not have known _à quoi se prendre_, had not the piece been
+given a fillip quite unexpectedly by the appearance of an inessential
+character, that of a whimsical little Frenchwoman, acted to perfection by
+Miss Juliette Nesville. The study is a brilliant one, and at moments
+really profound. It is the first time, if I mistake not, that an English
+dramatist, in introducing a Frenchwoman into his work, has turned out
+anything more than a collection of mere external peculiarities, tricks of
+facial expression, mistakes in pronunciation and in language, and that he
+has penetrated into the very soul, or at least into the _état d'âme_, of
+another nation, differentiating it from his own.
+
+_The Case of Rebellious Susan_ is a very amusing comedy. I know of none
+with so lively a beginning. In his ironical dedication to Mrs. Grundy, Mr.
+Jones begs of that good lady to find out a moral in his play. There should
+be one in it, he tells her--indeed, there should be several; they have but
+to be looked for.
+
+I don't know what will be the outcome of Mrs. Grundy's researches. I, for
+my part, have searched also, but from a different standpoint, and have
+found nothing, unless it be that Susan is Francillon with certain
+differences, which transform both the character and the dramatic
+situation. The idea of revenging herself against an unfaithful husband, by
+paying him back in his own coin, must have taken shape, one thinks, first
+of all in the mind of an Englishwoman, for the Englishwoman has in her
+nature much more of pride than of love. Susan's grief is not a tearful
+grief. She is violent, bitter, vindictive; she carries through her little
+exploit with much self-possession and without a sob. How far has her
+vengeance carried her? Has she been guilty or merely imprudent? No one
+knows, and, lacking information upon the subject, neither Mrs. Grundy nor
+I can solve the problem put before us. Her husband has been unfaithful to
+her, her lover forgets her, and the last crime is worse than the first.
+She returns, but dispassionately, to the domestic hearth. Oh! cries the
+repentant husband, how I am going to love you! Yes, love me, she replies;
+I need to be loved. But to judge by his hungry glances at her whilst he
+helps her off with her opera-cloak, I am afraid we are witnesses of a
+fresh misunderstanding. The love that she is offered and the love she
+wants are not the same love. An omen full of menace for the future. It is
+to the President of the Divorce Court, I fear, that it will fall in the
+end to lay down the moral of the whole business.
+
+Very different is the heroine of _The Masqueraders_, who, as impersonated
+by Mrs. Patrick Campbell, fascinated London during the season of 1894.
+Dulcie Larondie is a coquette, at first ambitious, giddy, keen on
+enjoyment, anxious to shine; become a mother, she adores her child; then
+love takes possession of her; and then duty reasserts its claims. She is
+the plaything of her own feelings, and of the passions she raises up all
+round her. She obeys every voice that calls to her, abandons herself with
+a kind of gracious pitiful passiveness to these unknown forces and these
+mysterious fatalities, within her and without, which break her strength
+and oppress her will.
+
+Mr. Jones had taken leave of melodrama in order to write _Judah_; he
+returned to it in _The Masqueraders_, not from listlessness or
+unwittingly, but deliberately and systematically. A husband staking his
+wife at a game of écarté--is not this melodrama? But what cares the author
+of _The Masqueraders_, whether the incidents be improbable and his
+situations artificial? Mr. Jones will not hear of the "well-made" piece;
+he seems to have recognised that the architecture of a play does not count
+for much, and that the science of Scribe and Sardou is a snare. Nor will
+he hear of realism or of logic. He defends himself against the charge of
+being a realist as though it were a disgrace, and ridicules those who pay
+for admission to a theatre to see paper lamp-posts and canvas houses, when
+they can see real lamp-posts and real houses in the streets for nothing.
+Realism, he contends, is only a vast field of preliminary studies and a
+store-room of materials. As for logic, it may be left to the professors
+who teach it, and thus make a comfortable living. Why should the drama be
+logical when life is not? A drama should contain four principal elements,
+amongst which neither logic nor realism finds a place; and these elements
+are--Beauty, Mystery, Passion, and Imagination. The drama, he is
+convinced, is returning now to the mysterious and imaginative side of
+human life.
+
+And if the critic press too hard upon the author of _The Masqueraders_, he
+has recourse for his defence--and quite rightly--to the great name which
+is worth ten thousand arguments. For it must be again asserted,
+Shakespeare's plays, with the exception of four or five, are melodramas,
+traversed and fertilised by streams of poetry, lit up by flashes of
+thought, and here and there softened, brightened, animated, by some
+passing glimpses of real life.
+
+To the lessons of Shakespeare, Mr. Jones has added those of Ibsen. They
+are great masters, but there comes a time of life when no one can have any
+master, save himself. I do not know whether the theories developed of late
+by Mr. Jones will lead him on to works which shall throw _Judah_ and _The
+Crusaders_ in the shade. But he is certainly passing through a crisis in
+his career, and I cannot refrain from remarking that the structure of his
+later plays has been less solid, and that their meaning has been apt to be
+obscure and vexing to the mind. Whether or no he issue from behind this
+cloud, he has already played a great part in the resuscitation of the
+drama, and he is the most English of all the living English dramatists;
+the one who expresses most sincerely and most brilliantly the mind of his
+generation and of his race.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+Two Portraits--Mr. Pinero's Career as an Actor--His Early Works--_The
+Squire_, _Lords and Commons_--The Pieces which followed, half Comedy, half
+Farce--_The Profligate_; its Success and Defects--_Lady Bountiful_--_The
+Second Mrs. Tanqueray_--Character of Paula--Mrs. Patrick Campbell--_The
+Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith_.
+
+
+Meanwhile, it was to Mr. Pinero that fell the lot of writing the most
+human work yet known to modern English dramatic literature,--the work,
+too, approaching most nearly to perfection.
+
+I have never gazed on Mr. Pinero in the flesh, but I have seen two
+portraits of him which have struck me. In one I seem to discover the
+pensive _bonhomie_ of a philosopher, who looks on at the world from afar;
+the other suggests rather the frequenter of drawing-rooms--the look in the
+eyes is more alive, the smile more knowing, less calculated to leave one
+at one's ease. Which of these portraits tells the truth? Both of them
+perhaps. There are aspects of Mr. Pinero's work which respond to these
+different moods of a single mind. Then, the two physiognomies, which I try
+to reconcile with each other, have this trait in common: they both show us
+a man who observes and who reflects.
+
+And, in truth, a man must look about him and within him a good deal in
+order to be able to pass, like Mr. Pinero, from the formless efforts of
+his youth, or even from such pieces as _The Squire_ and _Lord and
+Commons_, to a work like _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_. His career as an
+author has been a long-continued ascent, delayed by many incidents and
+accidents, but from which the horizon of art has seemed larger at every
+stage. To-day he is in the heights, almost at the summit.
+
+In his early youth he had felt his vocation and had written a play, but he
+knew nothing of the theatre. He learnt his art, as Dion Boucicault and H.
+J. Byron and Tom Robertson before him, by acting in the plays of
+others.[13] He maintained a good position upon the Edinburgh stage, and
+then came to London, where he became connected first with Irving's company
+and then with the Bancrofts'.
+
+After getting some small pieces produced, he tried his hand at the kind of
+plays then in vogue,--farces, melodramas, and sentimental comedies. He
+adapted some French pieces also; and it was then he realised what was
+lacking in his first models, in Robertson and his emulators. A play is a
+living organism. Under the flesh one should find organs, muscles, an
+articulated skeleton. It was this frame-work that Mr. Pinero wished to
+give to his dramatic works; and his ambition did not, perhaps, aspire
+beyond sustaining Robertson by means of Scribe. What he himself possessed,
+and what was already recognised in his work, was a gift for the writing of
+bright and natural dialogues, free from those tricks and artificialities
+which until then had served as wit upon the stage. This dialogue was the
+language really called for by the plot; but it was the plot, precisely,
+that was weak in Mr. Pinero's earliest efforts.
+
+_The Squire_ was an unlifelike story of a case of bigamy, annulled by an
+unexpected death. The piece pleased, by reason of its idealised
+representation of rural life. There was a breath of the woods in it, and a
+smell of hay. But even this attraction the author had borrowed from a
+pretty novel, by Thomas Hardy, _Far from the Madding Crowd_.
+
+_Lords and Commons_ carries a degree further the romantic strangeness of
+the Swedish drama, by which it is inspired. A great nobleman has married a
+young girl of illegitimate birth, in ignorance of her history. He
+discovers the fact, and drives her ignominiously from the house. After
+some years, she comes across his path again, without his recognising her.
+She has a double end in view--to win back her husband's love in her new
+guise, and to awaken his remorse in regard to _that other_, thus torturing
+him with conflicting emotions. Finally, she sends him, his heart torn in
+twain, to a _rendez-vous_ with his former victim to obtain her pardon.
+When Mr. Pinero was content to write a _dénouement_ of this kind, who
+could have divined in him the future creator of _Mrs. Tanqueray_?
+
+But at this very moment he had discovered another vein, which he worked
+for a number of years with increasing success. This was a kind of hybrid
+production, which partook of farce in regard to plot, and of the comedy of
+manners in regard to ideas and to dialogue. In short, it belonged to the
+same province of the drama as _Divorçons_, sometimes on a higher plane,
+sometimes on a lower. You would say that characters from Dumas and
+D'Augier had fallen by accident into a scenario of Labiche. _The
+Magistrate_ is thoroughly French in character. A London Magistrate, who
+finds it necessary to hide himself under a table in a restaurant of
+doubtful reputation, and who, under this table, knocks up against his own
+wife, and who, in the following act, having escaped by a miracle from this
+fearsome situation, finds himself called upon to pronounce judgment upon
+this guilty spouse of his (who, needless to say, is guilty only in
+appearance),--this kind of thing does not belong to English life or even
+to English humour. In _Dandy Dick_ and in _The Hobby-Horse_, I find, in
+the midst of fanciful incidents, a number of delicate and noteworthy
+sketches of provincial life, of clerical society, of the racing world, and
+those who belong to it, including a queer kind of female centaur,--a
+woman jockey,--whom Mr. Pinero has certainly not borrowed from our
+_répertoire_. There are many brilliant features really, much ingenuity of
+invention, as well as a real sense of fun and fertility of resource in
+_The Times_ and _The Cabinet Minister_. I have read these two pieces a
+number of times, and found them amusing in their deliberate exaggeration.
+But when I look into them closely, I ask myself whether the phase of
+social evolution through which we are passing is really like that which
+the author holds up to ridicule, and whether his caricatures are not a
+generation or two behind the time. And it is always thus. In the matter of
+satire, it is the newspaper always that opens the way; the novel comes
+after it, and then, after a long interval, the theatre. The manners it
+describes have often ceased to exist; the types it portrays have
+disappeared, or have become changed. We laugh over Egerton Bompas, the
+rich shopkeeper, who wants to marry his daughter to a peer of the realm;
+and over Joseph Lebanon, the vulgar little stockbroker, who dreams of
+getting invited, through the influence of his sister, the fashionable
+modiste, to a shooting-party at a castle in the Highlands. But we know
+quite well that nowadays it is the other way about. It is the peers of the
+realm who seek to ally themselves with Bompas; and, instead of trembling
+before them in Parliament, he imposes his social and political programme
+upon them, turning against land, which is in extremity already, the storm
+which has been threatening capital. Mr. Joseph Lebanon's part is not to
+accept invitations, but to give them. It is he who gives shooting-parties,
+and invites the peers; he allows his house to be used for aristocratic
+dances, and if he does not appear at them himself, it is from disdain, not
+from discretion. If he be distinguishable from his new companions, it is
+through his carefulness in aspirating his h's, his punctiliousness in the
+matter of etiquette, of his dress, of his servants' livery, of his stud,
+and of his table. And then if he does make solecisms, they are thought
+delightful. The only failing for which he could not be forgiven would
+be--failure. And he is on his guard.
+
+I am afraid, therefore, that Mr. Pinero's comedies, although very
+pleasant, are already somewhat aged at their birth. It is in vain to get
+them up in the latest fashions; their age is evident, especially when they
+are looked at side by side with that first act of _The Crusaders_, in
+which the satire is so modern and so full of life.
+
+Mr. Pinero had not renounced the serious drama, and all his theatrical
+friends, watching his progress in light comedy, yet expected to see him in
+this field in which, so far, he had achieved but half-successes. On April
+24, 1889, the Garrick opened its doors with a drama of his, entitled _The
+Profligate_. Marvels were expected from the new theatre which John Hare
+had erected for himself and his company. As had been the case with the
+opening of the Prince of Wales's, it was felt that the first night at the
+Garrick ought to mark a date in the history of the drama. The critics,
+"old" and "new," were enthusiastic. "At last," exclaimed Mr. Archer, "we
+have a real play; a play which has faults, with a third act which has
+none!" Those triumphant assertions, made in the heat of the moment, must
+unfortunately be taken with a considerable discount. _The Profligate_ is a
+melodrama, treated with delicacy and distinction, but incontestably a
+melodrama in every aspect and in every part, that wonderful third act
+included; it is even one of the most fanciful, most romantic melodramas
+that have been written in England for fifteen years.
+
+Whom shall I recognise as an English character, or even as a human type?
+Hugh Murray, the sentimental lawyer, who loses his heart at first sight to
+a schoolgirl, and who buries this beautiful passion in the depths of his
+heart, to disinter it just at the wrong moment? Janet?--who has given
+herself, without the temptation of love, to a seducer in the forties, and
+who, during the remainder of the piece perseveres in the accomplishment of
+acts of delicacy, of renunciation and of self-abnegation without number,
+veritable _tours de force_--_morale_. Leslie?--the heroine of the play, a
+schoolgirl who giddily exclaims, a quarter of an hour before her wedding,
+that she wonders whether the world will seem of the same colour when she
+is the wife of Duncan Renshaw; and who, after a month spent _tête-à-tête_
+with her husband in a villa near Florence, where a fresco of Michael
+Angelo is to be seen, seems to know life better than we do ourselves. I
+know, of course, the explanation that is forthcoming: only a single moment
+was required to alter this character, to bring light to that one. It is
+precisely in this explanation that I find the mark of melodrama. In
+serious psychology, it is not so easy to believe in these "moments"--in
+these sudden revelations, these flash-like crises, which transform an
+individuality completely, annulling nature and education.
+
+And what is one to say of the "Profligate" himself? He is just the
+traditional libertine of all the innumerable English novels published
+during the last fifty years, nor is he unknown to our own old Boulevard du
+Crime. We see him coldly and deliberately cynical up to the moment when
+love touches him with its magic ring. That is a kind of conception that
+has passed its prime. Nowadays we are inclined to regard Don Juan as a
+kind of dupe, the plaything of woman from puberty to decrepitude. We
+picture him to ourselves more engaging when he first begins to sin, and
+less easy to convert when he has become hardened to it. We find it
+difficult to believe that thirty days of wedded bliss suffice to awake a
+conscience which has lain dormant for forty years. If the sense of
+morality were innate, it must have shown itself earlier; to have been
+acquired and to have reached such a degree of perfection and
+sensitiveness, it would have needed more time than the average duration
+of a honeymoon.
+
+The situation which delighted so the English critics may be thus
+described. The seducer's wife has, without knowing it, given shelter to
+his victim. She wishes to help her to confront the man who has wronged
+her, and her heart breaks when she sees upon whom the penalty has to fall.
+I admit that the scenes leading up to this discovery, contrived with great
+ability, produce a veritable anguish in the spectator's mind, and that the
+scene between the husband and the wife, which follows after it, is on the
+same plane of emotion. But by what a number of improbable coincidences had
+this precious moment to be bought! Chance had to take Janet to Paddington
+station at the same moment as Leslie and her brother; Chance had to give
+this same Janet as "companion" to Miss Stonehay, Leslie's school friend;
+to send the Stonehays travelling towards the environs of Florence and the
+villa of the Renshaws; to synchronise Janet's illness and Dunstan's
+departure so that the two women may interest themselves in each other. And
+it is Chance again that makes Janet see Dunstan in Lord Dangars' company
+in order that the confusion may arise regarding the two men, and that this
+Lord Dangars, who is Dunstan's friend, may become engaged to Irene
+Stonehay, the friend of Leslie. And even after Chance has made all these
+thoughtful arrangements, Renshaw's happiness might yet be saved, and this
+terrible danger by which it is threatened be avoided (and this great scene
+of Mr. Pinero's never come to pass), if only Janet were allowed to go as
+she desires, and as good sense and modesty make it right that she should.
+What is it that makes her stay? Who is it that advises her to bring about
+this scandal? No one but Leslie, and I cannot but think her ideas on the
+subject singularly gross for so refined a person. This advice she gives is
+grounded on the slenderest and most irrational of arguments; a score of
+conclusive replies could be given to the pitiful considerations she puts
+forward. But Janet has to be convinced. Otherwise, what would become of
+the crisis of this "Faultless Third Act"?
+
+What surprises me most of all is the number of useless excrescences with
+which the author has encumbered his piece. What is the point of this
+solicitor who bores us, and who gives himself such important airs
+throughout the play without having the slightest influence upon the
+development of the plot? When, by a final stroke of chance, Leslie has
+come to know of the absurd love of which he is the victim, why should she
+let him see that she has heard? All she can find to say to him is,
+"Good-night." And "Good-night" is all he has to say in reply. This scene
+in four words could only be sublime or grotesque: I am inclined towards
+the latter view of it.
+
+Had I been present at one of the first performances of _The Profligate_, I
+should have imagined myself in the presence of a talent that had lost its
+way, turning its back on the goal to which it should direct its steps,
+seeking beyond the confines of reality for some imaginative source of
+tears. I should have been wrong. Mr. Pinero is of a reflective turn of
+mind; he learns from his mistakes, and is not blinded by his successes.
+Before the echoes of the applause which greeted _The Profligate_ in London
+had yet died out in the provinces and abroad, Mr. Pinero was at work upon
+another drama, conceived after a fashion quite different--quite contrary,
+in fact--a drama in half tints, with realistic touches; a sort of novel in
+dialogue. This was _Lady Bountiful_, produced on March 7, 1891.
+
+In _Lady Bountiful_ there is no question of any great fundamental truth,
+no great human interest. It is a very unequal piece of work, in turn very
+moving and very irritating, for of the two women in whom its interest
+centres, it happens unfortunately that one has the sympathy of the author
+and the other that of the public. But it showed, at least, that its author
+had found its way into the domain of psychological observation.
+
+It was on May 27, 1893, that _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_ was performed for
+the first time at the St. James's Theatre. It must be said, to the credit
+of the public, that its success was immediate, universal, and continued.
+The critic whom I have quoted so often exclaimed in a burst of joy, that
+here was a piece "which Dumas might sign without a blush." No one is
+entitled to speak in the name of our greatest dramatist; but quite
+recently, when I re-read _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, I said to myself
+that if the greatest gift of M. Alexandre Dumas was that of embodying deep
+psychological and social observation in splendid eloquence or dazzling
+wit, this rare faculty is to be found almost in an equal degree in
+Pinero's masterpiece.
+
+"The limitations of _Mrs. Tanqueray_," Mr. Archer goes on to say, "are
+really the limitations of the dramatic form." I would go further still,
+and say that such a piece enlarges the province of the theatre. Minute
+details are to be found in it, brought out by intelligent and carefully
+thought-out acting, which one would have regarded as too small to attract
+attention on the stage, shades that the theatre had left to the novel up
+till then. _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_ is, like _Lady Bountiful_, an acted
+novel, but a novel excellently constructed. Its four acts are its four
+chief chapters, and it should be noticed that the first two of these
+chapters are purely analytical; but emotion is introduced imperceptibly
+into the play, and we step from psychology into drama without being
+conscious of the passage.
+
+It is not the old, old subject of the courtesan in love, but that of the
+mistress raised to the dignity of wife. One of Mr. Pinero's clever notions
+is that of having in a sense left passion out of the question. It is
+clear, of course, that Tanqueray is very sensible of Paula's personal
+attractions. Who would not be, in the presence of so charming a woman?
+But there is another feeling mingled with this. He is neither a satyr nor
+a stoic, he assures his friend Cayley; he has a quite rational affection
+for "Mrs. Jarman"; hitherto she has never met a man who has been good to
+her; he, Tanqueray, will be good to her, that is all. Is he absolutely
+sincere? Is his affection quite so rational as he asserts? Cayley has his
+own ideas upon the subject, and so have we. Mr. Pinero has been charged
+with not having told us to what extent philanthropy--the craze for
+redeeming--entered into Tanqueray's marriage, to what extent the desire to
+have a pretty woman all to himself. But after all, was it incumbent on the
+author to give us Tanqueray's psychology? Was it not rather an indication
+of his æsthetic sense to keep the husband in the background, to leave him
+in half-tints so as not to mar the effect of the principal figure? That
+excellent actor, Mr. Alexander, seems to have felt this, for he effaced
+himself in the presence of Mrs. Campbell, though quite capable of filling
+the stage unassisted, as he showed in _The Masqueraders_ and many other
+pieces. In regard to Tanqueray's character, this, however, should be
+noted, that, being rich and young enough to keep a mistress without
+looking ridiculous, he might, if he chose, have become Paula's lover. If
+he decided to make her his wife, it was first of all to give her pleasure,
+but also to satisfy a sense of devotion and of virtue in himself. This I
+believe to be quite true to life. He was born to believe in women--not to
+be deceived by them, but to deceive himself in their regard: which is a
+different thing, and perhaps more serious. His first wife was like a nun.
+He ends with a courtesan. The law of moral oscillation requires that he
+should go from the iceberg (it is thus the first Mrs. Tanqueray is
+described to us) to a volcano. Like all weak men, he would play the part
+of _un homme fort_. With Paula's arm passed through his, he is ready to
+look the world in the face; but when on the eve of their wedding she comes
+to see him at eleven o'clock at night, his first remark is, "What will
+your coachman say?" This remark lights up his whole character, and for my
+part I require nothing more.
+
+But Paula! What a complex character is hers, and how true in all its
+aspects! How important to the delineation of this character, and how
+suggestive, is everything she says--even her most trifling remarks; with
+what tact and cleverness are her very silences contrived! And with what an
+infinity of deft and delicate touches has the masterpiece been brought to
+perfection! She is a courtesan, but with an elegance of manners which
+imparts to her an air of poetry, and which makes her more akin to a Gladys
+Harvey than to a Marguerite Gautier. There are women who traverse muddy
+ways with so light a step that they do not sink in them, and that one but
+guesses where they have passed from little stains upon the tips of their
+shoes. One or two traits reveal to us the irregularity of Paula's life;
+the mobility of her impressions, the manner at once fanciful and passive
+in which she allows chance to regulate her actions. She has forgotten to
+order her dinner; her cook, a "beast" who "detests" her, has pretended to
+believe that she was not dining at home, and has given himself an evening
+out. So she has got herself up in _grande toilette_ and has taken up her
+position in her dining-room, her feet on the fender. Here she has fallen
+asleep and dreamt. She tells us her dream later, the while she sups off
+the dessert of the farewell dinner Tanqueray had given to three old
+bachelor friends. To sup instead of dining, does not this in itself
+suggest a whole conception of life? Whoever gets into the way of it will
+never be able to reconcile himself to the respectable regularity of the
+family joint.
+
+Thus it is with her in everything. She has acquired a certain _ton_, now
+brusque, now bewitching, an air of Bohemianism, and a whole host of
+opinions which could never tally with the rôle of married woman; and these
+characteristics have become embedded in her nature. Her irregularity of
+word and deed goes with a like incoherence of thought and feeling. Sombre
+moods succeed suddenly to extreme gaiety and vanish as suddenly again. The
+idea of suicide comes to her; next moment she bursts into laughter at the
+sight of the mournful expression she has evoked on Aubrey's countenance.
+She has so serious a way of saying the wildest things, and says the most
+serious things so frivolously, that you don't know what to believe; her
+every word leaves you under her spell, and this effect is intensified more
+and more. She is a really "good" woman, Tanqueray will declare just now to
+his friend. It is neither an illusion on his part nor even an
+exaggeration. Paula is "good" and loyal; she has kept back from Aubrey
+nothing of her past. Better still, she has spent this last day writing out
+a general confession, with a precision and scrupulousness in which there
+is a touch of childishness, a touch of cynicism, and a touch, I think, of
+heroism. She weighs the letter with a smile. It is heavy! She wonders if
+the post would take all that for a penny! She says to Aubrey, quite
+simply, without affectation of any kind, without any airs of tragedy about
+her, that she wants him to read this letter and to think over it; and
+then, on the morrow, at the last moment, if he changes his mind, let him
+send her a line before eleven o'clock, and--"I--I'll take the blow!"
+Aubrey puts the letter into the fire and she throws her arms round his
+neck; she tells him quite frankly she had counted upon his doing so, an
+admission which would quite spoil her "effect," had she sought one.
+
+Has the question ever been better set? Think of the _Mariage d'Olympe_.
+The insolent and hypocritical _gueuse_ stood revealed before she had
+uttered half a dozen words. We knew she could never become acclimatised to
+that family of honest folk, amongst whom fortune had thrown her. Where,
+then, was the problem? All Augier's wonderful cleverness hardly sufficed
+to make us await during two hours the punishment of the wretched woman.
+Paula is sincere; she is a woman of heart and brain; she is as good as the
+women of that world in which she hopes to take her place. In the absence
+of a _grande passion_, she feels a grateful tenderness for the gallant
+fellow who would lift her up; she is fully resolved to be faithful to him
+and to make him happy. We desire ardently her success. Why should she not
+succeed?
+
+We learn in the second act. First of all, because, once she is married,
+Paula gets bored. The world will not visit her, and custom does not permit
+of her taking the initiative. She is a kind of prisoner in the beautiful
+country-house in Surrey. The monotonous tranquillity of "home" oppresses
+her after the feverish, exciting existence she has led; the quiet wearies
+her to death. Here is her account of her day's occupations from hour to
+hour.
+
+"In the morning, a drive down to the village, with the groom, to give my
+orders to the tradespeople. At lunch, you and Ellean. In the afternoon, a
+novel, the newspapers; if fine, another drive--_if_ fine! Tea--you and
+Ellean. Then two hours of dusk; then dinner--you and Ellean. Then a game
+of Bésique, you and I, while Ellean reads a religious book in a dull
+corner. Then a yawn from me, another from you, a sigh from Ellean, three
+figures suddenly rise--'Good-night! good-night! good-night!' (_Imitating
+a kiss._) 'God bless you!' Ah!"
+
+With Cayley she speaks out more strongly. He asks her how she is.
+
+_Paula_ (_walking away to the window_): "Oh, a dog's life, my dear Cayley,
+mine."
+
+_Drummle_: "Eh?"
+
+_Paula_: "Doesn't that define a happy marriage? I'm sleek, well-kept,
+well-fed, never without a bone to gnaw and fresh straw to lie upon.
+(_Gazing out of the window._) Oh, dear me!"
+
+_Drummle_: "H'm, well, I heartily congratulate you on your kennel. The
+view from the terrace is superb."
+
+_Paula_: "Yes, I can see London."
+
+_Drummle_: "London! Not quite so far, surely?"
+
+_Paula_: "I can. Also the Mediterranean on a fine day. I wonder what
+Algiers looks like this morning from the sea? (_Impulsively_) Oh, Cayley!
+do you remember those jolly times on board Peter Jarman's yacht, when we
+lay off"--(_Stopping suddenly, seeing Drummle staring at her_).
+
+Has she ceased to love her husband and to appreciate the sacrifice he has
+made for her? By no means. When he asks her tenderly what he can do for
+her, she tells him he can do nothing more. He has done all he could do. He
+has married her. She accuses herself. Fool that she was, why did she ever
+want to be married? Because the other women of her world were _not_. The
+title of married woman looked so fine, seen from afar. Instead of trying
+to make her way into a circle of people who would have nothing to say to
+her, why not have lived happily with Aubrey in her own sphere, in which
+she would have experienced neither the cold insolences of well-bred people
+nor the inexorable uniformity of well-to-do, respectable life?
+
+But these are Paula's least serious trials. There is another woman in the
+house--the daughter by the first marriage. She has shut herself up in a
+convent, but just when her father is marrying again she decides to resume
+her place in his household. This young girl inspires in Paula a double
+jealousy. Paula envies her the tenderness shown her by Tanqueray; she
+feels that this tenderness is very different from the love she herself
+inspires. Then she would fain win the love of this child, who, warned by
+some instinct, draws away from her and shrinks from her caresses. It is a
+shame, she cries, for after all the girl knows nothing--she ought to love
+her. Then, forgetting that love does not come to order, that advice cannot
+produce it, that it is begged for in vain, she exclaims to Tanqueray, that
+he should command Ellean to love her. This love would do her so much good.
+It would expel from her nature that mischievous feeling which carries her
+into deeds of rashness and folly.
+
+A neighbour, a lady who has for long been a family friend of the
+Tanquerays, comes to call on her at last, but it is only to take her
+step-daughter to some extent from under her care. What is it intended to
+do? To find some distractions for Ellean and get her married if possible
+(it being obvious that Paula cannot take her into society), and thus to
+bring about a freer and quieter time for Paula and her husband. But Paula
+can see in all this nothing but a conspiracy formed behind her back, and
+in which her husband is mixed up. Then ensues a passionate scene in which
+bursts out all the terrible violence of this spoilt-child-like character,
+embittered by a false position. Now there remains nothing more for us to
+learn about her.
+
+When we see Ellean again in the third act, a great change has come over
+her. On her travels she has come across a man whom she loves and who wants
+her to marry him. Paula is overwhelmed with delight. She sees an
+opportunity of playing the part of a mother. She will help on this
+love-affair, and Ellean will love her out of gratitude. Already the ice in
+which the young girl's heart has been locked is beginning to melt. She is
+to be found acknowledging to Paula the feeling of repulsion she at first
+had entertained for her, and trying to explain away, and express her
+sorrow for, her conduct. But the man who has gained the love of the girl
+is one of the former lovers of the woman!
+
+This is the situation which forms the subject of the last two acts, and
+which leads Paula in the end to suicide. The circumstance which brings her
+face to face with a man whom she had known before her marriage is likely
+enough; that which makes of him a suitor for the hand of Ellean is less
+natural, but not impossible, and it would be ungracious--after the author
+has so richly catered for our psychological curiosity by his rare gifts of
+analysis--to carp at the means he has employed of stirring our
+sensibility. He has made it clear to us from out the close of the second
+act that the domestication of the courtesan is an impossible dream; and
+the appearance of Captain Ardale, bringing things to a crisis, does but
+render the antagonism between Past and Present, visible, palpable,
+crushing. And the Future, what of it? We are to be shown it; for nothing
+has been overlooked by the stern logic which informs this play, underlying
+and disguising itself, but not altogether hidden, under the aspect of
+humour and emotion. Paula, her mind already full of those thoughts of
+death she had, as it were, flirted with in the first act, replies to her
+husband, who has suggested as a remedy their migration to some distant
+land:--She sees her beauty, she tells him, fading little by little, her
+beauty that was her one strength, her one unfailing excuse; she sees
+herself _tête-à-tête_ with this cruel and insoluble problem, with the
+bitter memory of her misdeeds, with the consciousness of the harm she had
+suffered and had wrought.... I shall never forget this scene. How her
+hoarse voice vibrated, and its accents of despair! How her every word went
+to the heart and sank in it! The actress had her share in this great
+triumph, and it was one of the strokes of luck attending this fortunate
+play that it was the means of revealing a great artist.
+
+Mrs. Patrick Campbell is a woman of Society who was led by circumstances
+and an unusually strong vocation to embrace the stage. She is said to have
+Italian blood in her veins; hence, no doubt, that nervous delicacy of
+hers, that _morbidezza_ which shades, veils, tempers, refines her talent
+no less than her beauty. She has neither the originality, nor the
+knowledge, nor the voice of Sarah Bernhardt, but she possesses that
+magnetic personality of which I have spoken with reference to Irving, and
+with which there is no such thing as a bad part. If this personality must
+be described, I would say that Mrs. Campbell's province as an actress is
+more particularly that of dangerous love. That voice of hers, though it
+has but little sonorousness, power, or richness, produces in one a sense
+of disquiet and distress, straitens the heart with a kind of fascinating
+delicious fear that I would describe as the _curiosité de souffrir_. You
+feel that if you love her you are lost, but once you have seen her it is
+too late to attempt resistance. The generations which believed in the
+human will, which asked for simple tenderness, pert coquetry or imperious
+passion in a heroine, would never have understood her. She has come just
+in time to lull our dolorous philosophy, to show incarnate in woman the
+victim and the instrument of destiny.
+
+It was with the same ally that Mr. Pinero risked his next battle, in
+January 1895, at the Garrick. I shall not analyse _The Notorious Mrs.
+Ebbsmith_. I acknowledge that the piece is full of charming traits, and
+that the melodramatic element has been carefully eliminated from it. But I
+am obliged also to say that the author has seized one of the serious
+questions of the time, the emancipation of woman, and her revolt,
+justified in some respects, against marriage, and that this great subject
+has been allowed to slip through his fingers. Agnes Ebbsmith is on the
+point of seeking consolation in free love for the troubles and
+humiliations of her married life. She has rejected a copy of the Bible
+which a friend has offered as a last resource. She has thrown it into the
+fire, then in a sudden reaction she rushes to the fireplace, plunges her
+arm into the flame, rescues the sacred book, and falls upon her knees. The
+scene is a very fine one, and Mrs. Patrick Campbell never failed in it to
+bring down the house. But the conversion of Agnes is a _dénouement_,--not
+a solution, unless Mr. Pinero would have us believe that the modern woman
+will find in the Bible a response to all her anxieties, a remedy to all
+her ills. It is a delicate thesis, and not wishing to discuss it I shall
+remain silent. I prefer to bring my account of his talent to a stop,
+provisionally, with this admirable _Mrs. Tanqueray_, which submits and
+solves a moral problem at the same time that it sets forth and brings to
+its natural close a drama of domestic life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+Ibsen made known to the English Public by Mr. Edmund Gosse--The First
+Translations--Ibsen acted in London--The Performers and the
+Public--Encounters between the Critics--Mr. Archer once more--Affinity
+between the Norwegian Character and the English--Ibsen's Realism suited to
+English Taste; his Characters adaptable to English Life--The Women in his
+Plays--Ibsen and Mr. Jones--Present and Future Influence of
+Ibsen--Objections and Obstacles.
+
+
+"There is now living at Munich a middle-aged Norwegian gentleman, who
+walks in and out among the inhabitants of that gay city, observing all
+things, observed of few, retired, contemplative, unaggressive.
+Occasionally he sends a roll of MS. off to Copenhagen, and the Danish
+papers announce that a new poem of Ibsen's is about to appear."
+
+It was by these characteristic lines that England learnt of the existence
+of the singular man who exerts to-day so great an influence over the art
+and the thought and the moral life of the whole of Europe. He was shut up
+at that time in his meagre Dano-Norwegian glory, like that genie whom the
+Eastern tale shows us imprisoned in a bottle. As for the author of the
+article which brought him before the English public, he was a quite young
+man, a subtle poet and delicate critic, Mr. Edmund Gosse. Nowadays he
+occupies in the literary world one of the foremost places amongst those
+who create and who criticise, but the best pieces of good fortune fall to
+one's youth. In his distinguished career as a critic, he has had no more
+precious stroke of luck than that of the finding of Ibsen, at an age at
+which as a rule one has been hardly able to find oneself.
+
+Mr. Gosse made known Ibsen's published works, his historical and
+historico-legendary dramas, his first efforts towards taking up his
+position in the domain of modern realism. He showed an indulgent
+partiality towards _The Comedy of Love_, and justified it by ingenious
+translations into verse of his own. He condemned _Emperor and Galilean_ as
+only a half-success, although his faithful and penetrating analysis of it
+did no wrong to any of the beauties of the piece. He rendered full justice
+to the sombre grandeur of _Brand_ and the dazzling fancy of _Peer Gynt_.
+In short, he heralded a poet and a satirist. Ibsen has long ago renounced
+the first of these titles, and as for the second, Mr. Gosse must find him
+somewhat _grêle_ for the part. He could not, in 1873, foresee the
+realistic dramatist, the reformer, the psychologist, and the symbolist,
+who in turn have appeared before us. But he touched the right note, I
+think, when he paid his homage to Ibsen as "a vast and sinister
+genius"--"a soul full of doubt and sorrow and unfulfilled desire."
+
+Ibsen entered into correspondence with his young critic, as Goethe before
+him had done under analogous circumstances with Carlyle. Mr. Gosse was one
+of the first to be informed of the internal crisis which was transforming
+the poet's talent, and which was to be a starting-point for the series of
+social and psychological dramas. "The play upon which I am now at work, he
+wrote,"--it was _The Pillars of Society_,--"will give the spectator
+exactly the same impression as he would have watching events of real life
+running their course before his eyes." The stage was to be merely a room,
+one of whose walls had been taken down that two thousand people might look
+on at what was happening inside it. Mr. Gosse entreated the author of
+_Brand_ and _Peer Gynt_ not to abandon poetry, but Ibsen followed his
+destiny.
+
+In England they began now to translate him. In 1876 Miss K. Ray gave an
+English version of _Emperor and Galilean_; three years later the British
+Scandinavian Society printed at Gloucester a selection of extracts from
+his works. In 1882 Miss H. F. Lord translated _The Dolls' House_ under the
+title of _Norah_, and prefixed to it an introduction in which she
+represented Ibsen as a champion of Woman's Rights. Women like to form some
+concrete picture of their friends, and Miss Henrietta Lord was careful to
+inform her sisters that their defender has a powerful forehead, "a
+delicate mouth which has no lips, but shuts energetically in a fine line,"
+small blue eyes that almost disappear behind his spectacles, and a nose
+quite northern in its irregularity; that he speaks softly, moves slowly,
+and rarely gesticulates, and that his "self-command amounts to coldness,
+but it is the snow which covers a volcano of wild and passionate power."
+In 1886 Mr. Havelock Ellis published in the Camelot Classics three of
+Ibsen's plays, _The Pillars of Society_, _Ghosts_, and _An Enemy of the
+People_, accompanied by a general study in which he passed in review the
+dramas of the social and psychological series, indicative of a strong
+sympathy with the new ideas and marked in an extreme degree by a fine
+literary sense. To this library _Ondine_ was added in 1888, and Mr. Gosse
+returned to the scene to take matters up where he had left them in 1877.
+Arrived now at the full maturity of his talent, he offered in 1889 an
+analysis and appreciation of these prose dramas which may be regarded as
+final in some respects.
+
+It was in the year 1889 that a new period began for Ibsen's fame and
+influence in England. People were no longer content to read him, they
+attempted now to put him on the stage. He was tried at afternoon
+performances, or, as a last resource, as a _fin de saison_, when there was
+nothing any longer to be lost or gained, in some second-rate theatre which
+was about to be closed, or which might be said to be only half open; a
+little later he was played under the auspices of the Independent Theatre,
+which is the _Theâtre Libre_ of London, but which might be called even
+more aptly the Nomadic Theatre, for it has no home of its own, and has to
+take refuge, like a tramp, in houses that have no habitant. It may be said
+that from 1889 to 1893 the Ibsenite drama lived in London a thoroughly
+Bohemian life, never knowing whether it would dine nor where it would
+sleep on the morrow. Yet there was a good side to this precarious
+existence, namely, that there was involved in it no thought or care for
+the question of shillings and pence. Business men have summed up an
+undertaking or a man when they have said that it or he "does not pay." Now
+Ibsen has never paid. If I might venture to invert that saying of Irving's
+which I quoted in a previous chapter, I would affirm that artistic success
+is most real when business is worst.
+
+Little by little a group of actors and actresses was got together who gave
+themselves up to the work, and interpreted their author with faith,
+passion, and courage, ready to "confess" him, and to endure for him, and
+with him, not death but hisses: I may mention Mr. Waring and Miss Robins,
+and above all Miss Achurch. An Ibsenite public was coming into existence
+at the same time, having for its nucleus a small group of those who had
+been devotees from the first. In addition, there was a great number of
+hostile critics come to condemn, but behaving themselves on the whole very
+respectably. Again, there were some who were merely curious, genuinely
+curious, who brought to these moving representations minds entirely open
+and unprejudiced. These returned in thoughtful mood and exchanged
+opinions upon the remarkable productions they had witnessed.
+
+It was in the press that the great battles were waged. Many of the critics
+lost their temper and their manners, and passed, without realising it,
+from ridicule to mere rudeness. I do not confound these excesses either
+with the serious discussion to which men of talent submitted Ibsen's
+philosophy in lectures and in the Reviews, or with merry skits such as
+those of Mr. Anstey, who gave us a "Pocket Ibsen" in the pages of _Punch_;
+these parodies suggest, to my mind, a lack neither of comprehension nor of
+respect. I refer to the furious and savage attacks which seemed to have
+for object the driving back of Ibsen to Norway, much as the East-End
+tailors would like to drive back to Hamburg those German immigrants who
+lower the rate of their wages.
+
+Mr. Archer was the target for the fiercest volleys of these battles, in
+which he commanded the courageous little phalanx of Ibsenites; but he
+returned shot for shot, and with usury, for his fire was infinitely more
+destructive than that of his foes. Just as Mr. Gosse had revealed Ibsen to
+the literary world fifteen years before, Mr. Archer introduced him now
+into the world of the theatre.
+
+If he entered into the Ibsen controversy so much later than his colleague,
+it must not be concluded on this account that he was less well equipped
+as regards preliminary study, or that he was upholding convictions that
+were newly born. To him, also, Ibsen was an early love. So far back as
+1873 he knew by heart, in the original, those admirable scenes in _Brand_,
+which touch the soul to its depths. Before the performance of each new
+play he would try to explain the Monster, and to get the public into the
+way of looking it straight in the face; he would translate the symbolism
+into the most intelligible terms, speaking as one speaks to children, with
+an authoritative gentleness, a clearness of expression, and wealth of
+exposition, to which his quick intelligence does not often have resort.
+But the greatest service he has rendered to the cause, is his series of
+translations, which are now in everybody's hands; not only do they convey
+into English the intense realism of Ibsen's dialogues, but young authors
+may learn from them, also, new flexions of familiar speech, and thus get a
+step or two nearer to life.
+
+Mr. Archer has been followed, and perhaps outrun, in his apostolate by
+other writers full of ardour and talent. Amongst these vanguard critics it
+is impossible not to mention Mr. Arthur B. Walkley, known to the readers
+of the _Star_ as "Spectator," and to those of the _Speaker_ by his
+initials, "A. B. W." To his name must be added that of Mr. George Bernard
+Shaw, whose articles in the _Saturday Review_ have attracted much notice
+during the year 1895, and have constituted a veritable campaign in Ibsen's
+honour.
+
+The theatrical managers, as you may suppose, gave Ibsen a wide berth. Mr.
+Tree was the first of them who ventured to tackle him; this actor
+possesses an inquiring mind, and a spirit ever ready to accept--even, at
+need, to initiate--reforms. As long ago as 1891, in a lecture read before
+the Playgoers' Club, he had given a very clever analysis of one of the
+most striking of M. Maeterlinck's plays. In 1893 he produced a play of
+Ibsen's at the Haymarket. The drama which he chose was _The Enemy of the
+People_. He had supposed, not unreasonably, that the geniality, courage,
+and invincible optimism of Stockmann would win the public. I imagine he
+did not regret the experiment, for since then he has made a similar one
+with a piece of Björnson's. Therein he has set a good example to a greater
+actor, and in this connection I would venture to ask a question. Is Irving
+to quit the stage without attempting an Ibsen part? However that may be,
+the time is approaching when the Norwegian drama will pay. Not, of course,
+like _Charley's Aunt_! One must not expect too much when one has only
+genius. Ibsen can and should keep alive without robbing or coveting a
+single one of lucky Mr. Penley's spectators.
+
+Now that Ibsen is known in England, what influence does he exert, or will
+he continue to exert in the future, upon English dramatic literature? By
+what racial affinities was the way for this influence prepared? By what
+prejudices--religious, philosophical, æsthetic--has it been impeded? To
+what does it owe its strength? To the dramatist's art, or to the ideas
+which inform his work? This is the last big question I have to face before
+bringing my study to an end.
+
+I do not wish to carry this question on to the moving bog of ethnography;
+I should lose my life. I shall say only that the English turn towards the
+Scandinavian world, much as we turn towards the Greco-Latin, with a vague
+feeling of tenderness and of filial curiosity. If the Teuton is their
+cousin, the Scandinavian is their brother; if not the eldest of the
+family, at least the one who has best kept up his tradition. Thus it is to
+him they have recourse when they would renew or seek inspiration in these
+traditions. Is it not a significant fact that Mr. Gosse and Mr. Archer,
+two of the most brilliant minds of their generation, should be familiar at
+the age of twenty-five with the literary idiom of Denmark and Norway? Is
+it not curious that the Sagas should have been the common source of
+Carlyle's last work, and of the most important poem of William Morris? The
+Sagas are the Commonplace Book, the _livre de raison_, in which this soul
+of the North, free from all taint of the South, and from all antique
+serfdom, has left its mark. For the Englishman, who reflects and ponders,
+it is the real Bible of his race.
+
+Just because the Norseman was the incarnation in the mediæval world of the
+Teutonic genius in all its purity, a certain number of enthusiasts will
+not allow his descendants to exist in the present, and play their part in
+modern life. To make of this little country a museum of Runic relics, to
+make a mere caretaker of this vigorous little race, is worse than
+pedantry; it is cruelty. Will it be believed that it was from such a
+standpoint that objection was first raised against the acceptance of
+Ibsen? The idea was so curiously retrograde and artificial, that it could
+not long hold up against the force of the current. These archæologists,
+strayed into the field of criticism, made two mistakes: they misunderstood
+the law which imposes movement and progress upon all living organisms; and
+they were unable to recognise in Ibsen, beneath his modern aspect and
+present-day doubts, that valiant temperament, at once fearless and blunt,
+of the ancient Vikings,--as brave before the enigmas of thought as _they_
+had been of yore before the perils of battle and the tempest.
+
+Thus it was that Ibsen, like Oehlenschläger before him and Björnson in his
+own day, made the Sagas his starting-point. It is in the Sagas that the
+Norse genius had its root, as in deep and tranquil waters, its stem rising
+towards the light and flowering above the surface. Even to-day, Norway and
+Denmark take more pleasure in Ibsen's historical and semi-legendary dramas
+than in his more recent works; but whatever they themselves and the
+devotees of Runic tradition may think, their national character has
+undergone change since the twelfth century. Many races have contributed to
+the formation of their character, just as they have to that of the
+English, and it is worthy of remark that in both cases the elements are
+almost identical. The vigorous and energetic Finn, the weak and mystical
+Laplander, the blue-eyed, fair-haired Norseman, silent and profound, could
+all find their equivalents, if not their like, amongst the ancestors of
+the British people. Their history has been different, and yet has had
+points in common. Like England, Norway has had religious and political
+individualism for school or rather for model. Absolute independence under
+a nominal monarchy; freedom of the press and religious intolerance; no
+nobility and no class distinctions--Norway has been since 1814 very much
+what England would have been, had the semi-republican establishment of
+Cromwell and Puritan Democracy endured.
+
+In his strange poem, _Peer Gynt_, Ibsen intended to depict the Norwegian
+type; and he has done so after a fashion which is the more intelligible to
+a foreigner in that he has in some cases exaggerated the principal
+features of this model to the point of caricature. The Norwegian mind is
+full of wild dreams, which seem to him as real as actual facts. Leading a
+hard and lonely existence amidst natural surroundings that seem to dwarf
+and threaten them, the people learn to live in themselves and for
+themselves. They have much pride and much ambition, and plenty of
+political wisdom. It is their imagination that sends them into maritime
+commerce, this being one of the ways left open to the spirit of adventure.
+Peer Gynt sells idols to the Chinese and Bibles to the missionaries; this
+second transaction redeeming the first. Twice he makes his fortune and
+twice he loses it; but he is a spirited gambler, and a few oaths suffice
+to comfort him for his most serious mischances. When, at the moment of his
+death, he is enabled to rest his head upon the bosom of the woman he has
+vilely betrayed, he accepts this final stroke of luck like all the
+rest--grateful but unastonished. The most ludicrous scene of all is that
+of a death agony! Peer Gynt's old mother is about to meet her end, and she
+is seized with violent tremors. Her son, however, reminds her how, when he
+was a boy, the two of them used to play together at horse and cart.
+Supposing they had a game now? Where shall we drive to, mother? And off
+they go to where God lives! They come to the gates and call upon St. Peter
+for admission,--he's _got_ to let Peer Gynt's old mammy into Heaven! The
+old woman breaks out into a guffaw, and in the midst of all this frolic,
+cheered now and brightened up, she achieves the dread crossing. To French
+readers this scene may seem a ghoulish farce: English humour accepts it
+from Norwegian humour without demur. In copying from Peer Gynt the
+portrait of one race, I had it in my mind to paint the portrait of a
+second. The picture has two models. That is why Ibsen comes so easy to the
+English mind--less difficult to understand than was Carlyle in his earlier
+works. The Norwegian cosmopolitan is more intelligible than the Scottish
+peasant, Germanized by a too long intimacy with Goethe and Jean Paul.
+
+Everyone knows that Ibsen has his own way of constructing a drama, a way
+which differs sensibly from ours. Is it better or worse? That is a
+question with which I am not concerned. What should be noted, however, is
+that the English, who have proved such wretched pupils in our school, and
+who, after fifty years have been unable to master their Scribe, have
+grasped everything they could turn to their own account in Ibsen's
+methods. To understand this, we must remember that the English have a
+horror of our realism, even when toned down and filtered through America.
+Their compatriot, George Moore, despite his incontestable talent, has been
+unable to get them to accept him. They read his works with curiosity but
+without pleasure. We have seen in the preceding chapters that of their
+three most prominent dramatists, two turn their backs resolutely against
+realism, one by instinct, the other of set purpose; whilst the third
+cannot acclimatise himself to it, his temperament carrying him off towards
+the realm of fancy and humour. On this point they are at one with the
+public. _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_ is an exception. It is a compromise
+between the dramatic system of _Francillon_ and that of _Hedda
+Gabler_--the second, I think, prevailing. Ibsen has brought to the English
+the form, the kind, and the degree of realism they can put up with. Not
+that they accept everything without demur, even in Ibsen's realism. They
+draw the line at the brutality of certain details, and the almost childish
+minuteness of others. Thus it was that Madame Solness's nine dolls
+produced some tittering in the stalls.[14] In _Little Eyolf_, if Alfred
+Allmers be allowed to make the avowal in the midst of his despair at the
+tragic death of his little boy, that he had caught himself wondering what
+he was going to have for dinner, I should not be surprised if there were,
+at this point, a shudder of protest. But these moments in which the
+dramatist and his English spectators are out of sympathy are rare.
+Shakespeare taught them to be surprised in no way at seeing human nature
+sink to the lowest depths after rising to giddy heights. What they want is
+to pass quickly from facts to ideas, and from ideas to fancies, and then
+to return suddenly to facts. The exact reproduction of life will never
+seem to them, as at certain literary epochs it has seemed to us, the
+supreme and final end of Art. It satisfies them only when it leads towards
+the solution of some problem of conduct, towards the explanation of some
+enigma of destiny, or of the fascinating secrets of this psychical world
+in which we live without ever seeing it,--of what is in it, and beside it,
+and beyond it. It must not be forgotten that symbolism is not a mere
+pastime and amusement to the Northern races which are addicted to it, but
+a real need born of their peculiar nature, a need which is not to be
+replaced by that idolatry of forms and colours which prevails in the
+joyous and sensuous South. When it is not satisfied, this need is
+accentuated to the point of a longing, a craving. The fact translates and
+suggests, follows or precedes, the thought; without the thought, it were
+but an empty envelope, a dress without a wearer, a box containing nothing.
+It serves, so to speak, as handmaid to the idea, and I would venture to
+suggest this formula (which I believe truthful, though it seem strange):
+In England, realism will be symbolical or non-existent.
+
+If Ibsen's art, then, is to prove to be to English taste, it is because
+this art is subordinated to the expression of certain moral feelings, and
+secret tendencies of the inner life; and also because all the questions
+with which the dramatist is taken up, are precisely those by which the
+English race is absorbed and divided into opposing camps; because in fine,
+Ibsen's message, to make use of the expression of Carlyle, is addressed to
+this race more than to any other.
+
+With regard to its bearing upon philosophy, let us take for instance that
+theory of Atavism which is developed, first of all, in a lugubrious
+episode in _The Dolls' House_, and which pervades _Ghosts_, and
+_Rosmersholm_, and _The Lady from the Sea_; does it not find a fit and
+well-equipped audience in the readers of Darwin, Huxley, and Herbert
+Spencer? From a social standpoint, the ulcers which Ibsen cauterises are
+the ulcers which eat also into the life of England. That tyranny of the
+majority, that conventional and machine-like morality which stifles all
+initiative, that cavilling, degrading charity which is not Christian, but
+sectarian, are all well known to England. In Pastor Rörland and Pastor
+Manders these things find expression,--in the former violent, impetuous,
+fanatical, in the latter sheeplike and pusillanimous; the one is the
+incarnation of intolerance, the other of human respect; and England is
+well aware that she has both her Rörlands and her Manders. When, too, she
+is shown a Consul Bernick upon the stage, who is full of fine sentiments,
+but whose fortune is founded upon lies, and who sends out gallant fellows
+on a ship destined to be wrecked, she must be reminded of her own
+philanthropic ship-owners, enriched by the insuring of coffin-ships. And
+just as she is capable of a Bernick, so she is not unequal to producing a
+Stockmann, nor, in consequence, to understanding and loving this genial
+_bavard_, this impassioned devotee of truth and virtue, this Don Quixote,
+this Pangloss who would go to the martyr's stake, but prefers to stop on
+the road. His enemies have broken his windows: what does he do? Sends for
+a glazier! He picks up the stones that have been thrown at him, examines
+them and criticises them. "Why, these are mere pebbles. There is hardly a
+decent stone in the lot!" He has returned from a public meeting with his
+trousers torn, and he comments thus philosophically upon the misadventure:
+"When you propose to stand up for justice before men, you should be
+careful not to wear your best pair of breeches." If these traits are not
+English, I don't know what the English character is.
+
+Were I to pass Ibsen's types in review one by one, I should find it easy
+to show with what ease they adapt themselves to English life. Engstrand,
+the man of the people, always a sinner and always lamenting his sin, who
+makes a career and a livelihood out of his repentance; and Lövborg, that
+noble but feeble character whom drunkenness drags into debauchery, and in
+whom the temptations of one night nullify years of virtue and honest
+endeavour;--these would require no modification or commentary upon the
+London stage. But it is English women that Ibsen seems to have divined
+best of all. Nearly all those demands of the Anglo-Saxon woman which evoke
+so much talk to-day are contained in germ in the last scene of _The Dolls'
+House_, which dates from 1879. The woman is tired of being a servant and a
+plaything to the man; she sees herself confronted with responsibilities
+and duties for which she has had no preparation; she wants to live her own
+life as a reasoning and thinking being. This note is being re-echoed
+daily in the Reviews and on the platforms open to women, and thus Norah's
+cry is indefinitely prolonged.
+
+It is more than fifteen years since Ibsen wrote: "In democracy will be
+found the only solution of the social question. But the new state of
+society should contain an aristocratic element, not the aristocracy of
+birth or of the money-chest, not even the aristocracy of intellect, but
+the aristocracy of character, of the will and of the soul. I expect much
+in this direction from woman and from the working-man, and it will be to
+the bringing nearer of their hour that my whole life-work shall be
+devoted." I do not know whether this double promise has been kept. It
+seems to me that the people have found in him but a wayward and
+intermittent champion, and women a friend too pitilessly clear-sighted.
+
+Women, both the good and the bad, are given traits of character, in
+Ibsen's dramas, which are common to the Northern races. That _joie de
+vivre_, which in Norah gushes forth into affectionate sympathy, but which
+in Regina (in _Ghosts_) takes the form of a cold and marble-like
+indifference, which can be touched by nothing save self-interest and
+self-love; the jealousy and pride of Hedda Gabler, who prefers to send a
+man to his death, rather than see him repentant, and brought to happiness
+through the agency of another woman, and who decides to die herself rather
+than submit to the yoke or endure the scorn of the world; the naïvely
+animal sensualism of Rita Allmers (in _Little Eyolf_), who puts her
+husband before her child, and plays the wanton to rekindle the fire which
+had gone from his heart--to secure the marital attentions which are her
+due: these are all characteristics which are to be met with beyond the
+fiftieth parallel and north of the Pas de Calais, no less than north of
+the Sound.
+
+I shall not go so far as to say that Ibsen has taught the English
+dramatists to understand the women of their race, but, at least, he has
+brought out certain aspects of them which had remained unportrayed,
+whether because the requisite psychological knowledge, or that rare
+quality, pluck, had been lacking in those who had attempted to depict
+them. Not all these dramatists accept Ibsen as their master; Sydney
+Grundy, whilst disapproving most strongly of the insults with which a
+certain section of the critics attack Ibsen and his partisans, has
+declared outright that he himself is no disciple of the author of _The
+Master Builder_. We can easily believe it; even without the declaration,
+his work in itself would have told us as much. Mr. Pinero, also, does not
+seem to me to have accepted any of Ibsen's ideas; but he must have
+reflected upon his methods, and to some purpose, for if the brain which
+conceived _Hedda Gabler_ is a powerful brain, the hand which constructed
+its various parts, and wove them together, is a cunning hand.
+
+As for Mr. Jones, he indeed has followed both the artist and thinker in
+Ibsen. In speaking of his plays, I omitted designedly the adaptation which
+he made of _A Dolls' House_, in collaboration with Mr. Herman, an
+Alsatian, resident in London since 1870, who died three years ago. In
+certain respects the English piece is better constructed than the
+original, in as much as it rids us of Dr. Rank, who is an excrescence, and
+of the love-affair of Krogstad and Madame Linden, which is really wanting
+in common sense. But Mr. Jones, ill advised, I fancy, by a collaborator of
+rather a timid and commonplace order of mind, shrank from that last scene
+which may be repellent to some people, but which is really the whole play.
+For that terrible door which shuts with so inexorable a clang, in the
+midst of the silence of the night, separating husband and wife perhaps for
+ever, and leaving Norah to seek her way in the dark and the cold,--symbols
+of a life of which nothing is known, save that hardships will be met in
+it,--the authors of _Breaking a Butterfly_ substituted a general
+reconciliation. They justified the optimistic _dénouement_ by making the
+husband rise to that act of heroic devotion, which, in the original, Norah
+declares she hoped for from him. Ibsen did not intend this, and he was
+right. It is necessary that Norah should look for this sacrifice, and that
+she should look in vain. Thus the man and the woman maintain their
+individual characters: the one remains faithful to his practical logic,
+the other to her romantic conception of life; and if everything does not
+turn out well, at least everything is true in this most disunited of
+_ménages_.
+
+Mr. Jones has been much happier when inspired by Ibsen than when he has
+translated him. It is, above all, when he is depicting women that he seems
+to me to be haunted by the memory of the Norwegian's heroines. It may be
+said, speaking generally, that a breath of Ibsen has passed through all
+his works during the last seven or eight years. But his dialogue is too
+lively, he yields too much to the temptation of turning his wit to
+account, he is of too gay a temperament, to be a veritable Ibsenite. It is
+in these respects, indeed, that the divergence begins between the author
+of _Hedda Gabler_ and his admirers on the other side of the Channel. The
+English are ready to rail at life, but not to condemn it root and branch;
+despite an apparent sombreness they know how to enjoy themselves, and they
+consent to travel only as tourists in that world of Ibsen's, in which for
+the few smiling and sunlit spaces, there frown such vast and mournful
+solitudes, where nothing sings and nothing flowers.
+
+It has been said that Ibsen is the Winter of the North and Björnson its
+Spring. This Björnson is a strange personality. Intellect and temperament
+have made a battlefield of his life. Born to write idylls, he has thrown
+himself heart and soul into the warfare of journalism. He has come under,
+and even sought, a thousand influences, instead of trying to find himself.
+The friendly antagonism with Ibsen has done him more harm than good. This
+connection has made him known to readers in Western Europe, but it has
+drawn him into channels for which his faculties did not fit him, and have
+failed to support him. By his faith in the future, and by his confident
+and combative spirit, he seemed destined to please the English. Long
+before Ibsen's name had been even mentioned in London, his _Arne_ and
+_Synnové Solbakken_ had been read there, two sketches of peasant life
+which will bear comparison with _La Mare au Diable_ and _La Petite
+Fadette_; and the idealist novels he has published during the last ten
+years became popular with his countrymen only after they had first
+achieved success in England. But his plays up to the present have made but
+little show upon the English stage, and he shares only to an infinitesimal
+degree in the sympathies and antipathies of his illustrious rival.
+
+When Ibsen attacks that class of puritans and hypocrites who turn away
+their faces when they pass the entrance to a theatre, there is no
+hesitation about applauding him and imitating him. But when he would shake
+the whole edifice of society, and when he calls in question all the ideas
+and customs upon which the edifice is based, the theatre hesitates to
+follow him, for it feels that a portion of its clientèle, and that the
+best,--that which has always been constant in its support,--will be
+startled and alarmed. The theatre is reactionary, and has good reason to
+be: it is to its commercial interest to range itself alongside privilege
+and tradition, against change and progress. It is on the side of those
+who have money in their pockets, and who wish to amuse themselves, for
+these are the people to whom it opens its doors. These people are
+indignant when, having come to weep or to laugh, they are made to think;
+when a man to whom they cannot but listen speaks to them of their rights
+and their duties, of life and of death, of their most secret thoughts, of
+what they would fain ignore or forget, and all this with a freedom, an air
+of authority, a depth the theatre had never known before, the pulpit knows
+no longer. Here is the key to the exclamations of surprise, the gusts of
+anger, the broadsides of satire and ridicule, which Ibsen and his devotees
+have had to face. But one gets used to everything, even to being insulted,
+and gets even to like it. It is one of the amusements of the decadent.
+Perhaps some day we shall see Ibsen's adversaries, fascinated by his
+genius, follow his barque like the rats that followed the ratwife's in
+_Little Eyolf_, and plunge into the deep waters to the music of his
+flute.[15]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+G. R. Sims--R. C. Carton--Haddon Chambers--The Independent Theatre and
+Matinée Performances--The Drama of To-morrow--A "Report of Progress"--The
+Public and the Actors--Actor-Managers--The Forces that have given Birth to
+the Contemporary English Drama--Disappearance of the Obstacles to its
+becoming Modern and National--Conclusion.
+
+
+I have given an account of the beginnings of the contemporary dramatic
+movement, have indicated the various influences from within and from
+without which have affected it, by which it has been stimulated or held
+back; have analysed what seem to me the most characteristic of those
+dramas which have already seen the light. There remains nothing then for
+me to do, except to ascend a tower, as it were, and to scan the horizon,
+and to foretell, if I can do so, what we may expect from the drama of
+to-morrow.
+
+There is a group of writers who keep near the confines of drama and
+melodrama, torn between literary ambition and the very natural wish to
+earn money. What will they do? Will they be artists or artizans? Will they
+stoop to the conditions of the trade, or rise to the requirements of the
+art? There are many of their kind whom Sir Augustus Harris has made away
+with, and whom we shall never get back.
+
+I can remember the hopes given rise to by Mr. Buchanan. But, as Oronte
+says in Molière's _Misanthrope_--"_Belle Philis, on désespère alors qu'on
+espère toujours_." The case of Mr. G. R. Sims is different. There has been
+no apostasy with him; he has remained what he always was, and has given
+what he was bound to give. Story-teller, journalist, or playwright, he is
+an improviser, who does not aim too high, but who combines with a gift of
+observation, a certain imaginative faculty and a kind of popular humour,
+together with a touch of Zolaism. Above all, he is a Cockney, and nothing
+that belongs to Cockneydom is unknown to him. The only play of the period
+in which you can really smell the East End, as the _maître_ of Medan would
+say, is _The Lights o' London_, and that perhaps is why all the London
+managers, one after the other, returned it to Mr. Sims, "with thanks."
+_The Lights o' London_ got produced in the end, however, and had an
+immense success, but a success that was not to endure. It is not towards
+realism, as we have seen, that the English stage is making.
+
+Who will take the lead amongst the younger school of dramatists? Who will
+write the _Judahs_, _The Second Mrs. Tanquerays_ of to-morrow? Will it be
+Mr. Louis N. Parker, Mr. Malcolm Watson, or Mr. J. M. Barrie? Or will it
+be Mr. Carton, author of _Liberty Hall_ (one of the successes of 1893)
+and of _The Squire of Dames_, an adaptation, or rather an abridged
+translation, of _L'Ami des femmes_, which has been attracting the public
+to the Criterion? Up to the present, Mr. Carton has shown that he
+possesses wit and talent, but neither observation nor the inventive
+faculty. But in the near future he may give proof of both.
+
+Or will it be Mr. Haddon Chambers, who is already known in Paris, one of
+his works, _The Fatal Card_, having crossed the channel? Since then he has
+written a piece entitled _John-a-Dreams_, played at the Haymarket in 1894,
+in which Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Mr. Tree joined their talents. It is
+not a good play, but it is one in which the tendencies of the new drama
+are clearly shown. I recall one scene of the utmost simplicity, the
+restrained and sober emotion of which contrasts curiously with the fine
+phrases a situation such as it contains would inspire in an author of a
+quarter of a century ago. Kate Cloud loves, and is loved by, Harold Wynn.
+Before consenting to marry him she gets herself introduced to Harold's
+father, a country clergyman.
+
+"You do not know me, sir," she says to him (I quote from memory), "but I
+know you. You came to preach ten years ago at the village of ----. I was
+with Mrs. Withers then."
+
+"Oh, indeed,--an excellent person," he replies; "but it is strange that I
+did not make your acquaintance."
+
+"No, it is not strange, really,--do you remember the kind of work she was
+engaged upon?"
+
+"The redemption of unfortunates, was it not."
+
+"Yes, exactly. And you, doubtless--you helped her?"
+
+"No," Kate replies gravely, sadly, her voice trembling. "No, it was she
+who helped me." She tells him her story, the sad, perennial story, or
+rather, having begun it, she leaves him to divine the rest. "They came to
+my help," she goes on, "but no one came to the help of my mother. She fed
+and clothed me when I was little; I in my turn fed and clothed her later
+on."
+
+Then had come years of endeavour, and the hard apprenticeship by which she
+had made herself an honest woman.
+
+"Now, sir, if a man who had a heart wanted to marry me in full
+consciousness of my past, should I have the right to accept him?"
+
+"Certainly, my child," the old man answers.
+
+"You would still be of the same opinion even though the man were of your
+own rank, ... were a friend of yours, ... were your son?"
+
+Harold's father gives a gesture of anguish and horror, of physical recoil
+and inexpressible confusion. Then he stammers, tries to recover himself,
+seeks to call to his aid the merciful doctrine of the sacred Book which he
+has all his life upon his lips, and which he thought he had within his
+heart. But Kate does not give him time. A gesture has decided her future;
+she holds herself bound by this instinctive display of a social prejudice
+which has become his second nature, his second conscience, even to the
+point of effacing the idea of pardon in him who should be its interpreter
+and messenger. The title of the play is not misleading, the action being
+pervaded and, as it were, impregnated by, steeped in, dreaminess. Mr.
+Haddon Chambers dares to dream in the theatre, and the public seem to me
+to be ready to keep him company. That anyone should go to the theatre to
+dream will seem incredible to many Parisians. But we must remember always
+that the English mind has literary needs, and to a certain point emotional
+propensities, that are different from ours. We should have in our minds,
+too, in the place of these theatres of ours so brightly lit, in which the
+spectacle lies often as much in the boxes and balcony as on the stage,
+those London theatres, plunged in a semi-obscurity which induces to
+forgetfulness of oneself and of the ordinary conditions of life. The stage
+appears like the fabric of a vision. The dull-looking, uninterested faces
+of the musicians are no longer interposed between us and the scenery. The
+jingling of a bracelet, a slight rustling of satin, the faint and delicate
+odour of a rose, the quick breathing of some neighbour who is moved, bring
+home to us only at moments the presence of other human beings. Perhaps it
+is the place of all others where one gets furthest away from the thought
+of reality, where one is readiest to wish for the unlifelike and to love
+the impossible.
+
+After the writers whom I have named, there are others, and yet others
+still, whose names the public hardly knows, and at whose manuscripts the
+managers look askance. The Independent Theatre gave them an opening, but
+this theatre itself has ceased its existence, beset with difficulties, and
+there is nothing to suggest that it will come to life again. There remain
+for them only those matinées in the regular theatres which lend their
+stage, more or less disinterestedly, for these ephemeral performances in
+which young actors are to be found interpreting unknown authors to the
+strangest of publics. The house is full of friends--if it be not empty
+altogether. A certain number of long-suffering play-lovers attend these
+tentative representations, sustained by the hope of being the first to
+discover a talent in process of formation, or a new formula of art: they
+have come across little up to the present except the _gaucherie_ which
+feels its way, and the deliberate exaggeration which aims at exciting
+wonder.
+
+Those who have followed me in this long study of mine, and who have
+watched the evolution of the English drama through its successive stages,
+are in a position to see for themselves what advance it has made already
+during the last thirty years. There is the advance first of all in the
+taste of the public. The democracy has gone through its course of
+education; it has "settled," so to speak, and the dregs have sunk to the
+bottom. Three classes of spectators have gradually been formed by a
+process of natural selection. The music halls provide for the feasting of
+the eye; melodrama and farce have attracted and retain an enormous mass of
+clients; the literary drama and Comedy have secured their own homes, to
+which one looks only for artistic emotions and refined amusements.
+
+In these are to be found that highest rank of actors and actresses whose
+rise in fortune, talent, and esteem I have described. To the names already
+mentioned I would add those of some to whom I have not had occasion to
+refer in these pages, but whom I have often had the pleasure of
+applauding: Mr. Willard, Mr. Wilson Barrett, and Mr. Forbes Robertson; Mr.
+Charles Wyndham, whose confident and brilliant style would do honour to
+the best of our _sociétaires_ of the Rue Richelieu; Mr. Robson, whose gift
+of humorous naturalness almost made a realistic play out of _Liberty
+Hall_; Lionel Brough, who for thirty years has set the stamp of his
+whimsical originality upon all his rôles; Miss Evelyn Millard, who recalls
+Mrs. Patrick Campbell without imitating her; and Miss Kate Rorke, who is,
+on the contrary, her exact opposite, and who incarnates the sweet
+freshness of pure affection, the innocence which weeps and smiles, just as
+Mrs. Campbell personifies the love that is disquieting and dangerous; Miss
+Winifred Emery, an actress of varied and supple talent, capable of
+depicting caprice no less than virtue and devotion. The list is far from
+being complete.
+
+There have always been a number of good actors, but what was constantly
+lacking before the Bancrofts' time was unison. To-day the _ensembles_ are
+far better than they were, and they would be better still were it not for
+that perpetual _va-et-vient_ in the theatrical world which is so injurious
+to the homogeneity of the various companies.
+
+The art of _mise-en-scène_ did not exist. To-day it not merely exists: it
+has reached a certain degree of perfection. I am not referring now to the
+scenic splendours and illusions of Drury Lane, though I have no wish to
+make light of these, but to that appropriate framing, that scrupulous
+accuracy in the matter of historical details, no less than in the matter
+of modern accessories, that living atmosphere, to use Irving's formula,
+with which the intelligent stage-manager should clothe the action of the
+piece. I have already alluded to the Shakspearian revivals at the Lyceum.
+No one knows better than Mr. Tree, of the Haymarket, how to give us a
+glimpse of the real world of fashion, and how to bring home to us the
+poetry underlying the play which he is producing. Mr. Haddon Chambers must
+have been grateful to him for that yacht which sped so swiftly past the
+Needles, bathed in the pale radiance of the moon; and for the scenery in
+the last act which imparted a sense of austere and solemn grandeur to the
+conclusion of the play. In the same piece, when Harold, after a sleepless
+night, threw open his window, and we saw the fields lying under their
+covering of morning mist, and the fresh and joyous sunlight flooded the
+room, and there came to our ears the song of the awakening birds, the
+sensation was full of a rare charm, serving as _andante_ to the loftiest
+feelings.
+
+It would seem that the dramatists have not so much influence in the matter
+of _mise-en-scène_ as they might wish. But may this not be that for one
+reason or another their competency, except in the case of some of them, is
+inferior to their pretensions? It is the custom to abuse the
+actor-managers, and to point to them as one of the obstacles to the
+complete development of the drama. It is a domestic quarrel, and there is
+no good in interfering between husband and wife. It is possible that some
+actor-managers succumb to the temptation of ordering their parts to
+measure, and call for even more docility than talent from the young
+authors whom they employ. It is possible also that the ill-feeling of a
+dramatist who has had his work refused, or of an actor who has been left
+in the background, may have done something to exaggerate the evil. Make a
+study of the author-manager who has to minister to his own personal
+vanity, to his own literary prepossessions, and to the needs of his own
+special circle of admirers and sympathisers; the commercially-minded
+manager for whom questions of art find their answer in the yearly
+balance-sheet; the worldly, pleasure-seeking manager, _amateur de théâtre_
+and to an even greater degree _amateur de femmes_: you will find that
+each has his faults, and that these faults are just as bad on the whole as
+the actor-manager's.
+
+Another obstacle is the Censorship. I have shown how absurd it is in
+principle; it is my duty to add that in practice it is not wholly
+unreasonable, though it relapses into prudishness every now and then. I
+have read lately a moving drama, from the pen of Mr. William Heinemann,
+the celebrated publisher whose enterprising spirit is well known in the
+world of literature, and who has it in him to make no less a mark in the
+world of the theatre. The Censorship would not sanction _The First Step_:
+this piece might have made it known to Londoners that there are couples in
+their great city whom the registrar has not united and whom the clergyman
+has not blessed, men of good position who get drunk and beat their
+mistresses, young girls who leave home in the morning and don't return at
+night. The Censorship thought it better to spare them this revelation.
+
+But such instances are rare. The Censorship is changing bit by bit, like
+the beefeaters of the Tower, who replaced their hose by breeches some
+years ago without warning. These breeches do not go, I am aware, with the
+hood, doublet, and halbert, but this is our poor way of imitating nature
+in her transformations. For the Censorship there is only one way of
+adapting itself to modern life, and that is to disappear. Disappear it
+will, but slowly and gradually, confining its action to essential cases;
+and thus it will drag out its existence yet a little while. When,
+finally, the time will come to give it its _coup-de-grâce_, it will be
+found to have already ceased to breathe.
+
+Who then will succeed to the censor? who will be censor when the
+Censorship has been abolished? The public itself; the public represented
+not only by those of its members who are the most refined, but those who
+are strictest and most uncompromising. In other words, the Puritans will
+be on the watch. And after all, why not? Are they not one of the forces of
+the national mind, one of the reasons of England's existence? They are the
+natural enemies of the theatre, and will last as long as it. When they
+leave it free, their end or its end will be near at hand, and England's
+end will be in sight.
+
+We live, not because we choose but because we must. It is thus with the
+English drama as with everything else. The law that put the dramatic work
+of foreigners upon the same footing in regard to copyright as their own
+has made translation and adaptation almost impossible, by reason of the
+double expense involved. Thenceforward it was necessary for the English
+dramatist to invent plots for himself, to be original, to be himself. It
+was thus the English drama came to life.
+
+The vote of Congress, which in 1890 secured copyright in America for
+English authors, put an end to the old system of keeping plays in
+manuscript. Once publication was no longer attended by risk, how could
+they hold aloof from this new form of success? Accordingly they began to
+print. But in order to be read, a play should be really written. The
+drama, then, had to become literary. As yet it is literary only in a
+moderate degree. I began with the question: Is there a living English
+drama at the present moment? To be living it is necessary that it should
+express the ideas and the passions of the time, and to be English it
+should be a faithful likeness, a complete synthesis of all the elements of
+the national character. The drama, from various causes, was behind the
+times. These causes, which I have pointed out and discussed, were:--
+
+1. The timidity resulting from excessive severity of manners.
+
+2. The dramatist's lack of opportunity for the study of social life.
+
+3. The Shakespeare cult, which paralysed the imagination by offering it a
+model that was too big for it, and forms that had become antiquated.
+
+These causes have disappeared one after the other. The moral ideal has
+become enlarged and has given over a wider field to the dramatist. The
+dramatist himself has learned to know life outside the green-room and the
+tavern back-parlour. He has studied from nature instead of copying
+Goldsmith and Sheridan. Shakespeare has never been less imitated, perhaps
+because he has never been better acted or better understood.
+
+But what prevented the drama from being "English"? It is we French who
+have prevented it--it is from our drama that the English playwrights have
+drawn for so long, at first with an indiscriminate eagerness for which
+there is no parallel, later more modestly and with discernment. At the
+risk of offending my compatriots, I must here express my absolute
+conviction that, except in regard to acting, this French influence has
+been harmful to the English stage. Our dramatists have enriched some
+London managers; but they have lain for thirty years on top of the English
+dramatists, and have stifled their originality--and without deriving much
+profit from this involuntary tyranny. If only they could have taught their
+pupils the secrets of their trade! But the English were maladroit
+disciples of Scribe and Sardou, whilst the philosophy of Dumas and Augier
+remained to them a closed book.
+
+The French influence has come at last to be what it should be. The two
+theatres, placed upon the same footing, will lend each other from time to
+time,--now, the idea of a play which, treated differently on either side
+of the channel, will serve to measure the divergence or resemblance of the
+two forms of society; now, a complete play which, translated literally,
+will give to us a perfect representation of London life, or to the
+Londoners a perfect representation of ours. Meanwhile the English drama,
+freed from its leading strings, will find its own way for itself. It is
+capable of doing so unaided, but I think Ibsen's plays will help it. In
+this reference to Ibsen my readers may think they see a contradiction in
+my reasoning. "What!" they will cry. "In order to bring back the English
+drama to itself again, you say it must be freed from foreign influence,
+and yet you send it to school to Norway!"
+
+But I have answered this objection by anticipation. I have shown that
+Ibsen is not a foreigner to England. He seems to have written for
+Englishmen; he has given them the kind of drama, more or less, that
+Shakespeare, were he living now, would have given them. I write this
+sentence, confident that if I am in the world, or, not being in the world,
+am still read, a score of years hence, no one will be inclined to call me
+to account for it. To the Northern races, at all events, Ibsen means not a
+fashion but an era.
+
+What the English drama is in search of, what it is about to create,--with
+or without Ibsen's assistance,--is a new form in which to reproduce that
+dualism which has struck and disconcerted every observer, native or
+foreign, Matthew Arnold, Emerson, Taine. For my part, I have sometimes
+endeavoured to trace this dualism to the marriage, tempestuous but
+fruitful, of Saxon and Celt, to the effort, ever vain but never ceasing,
+of these two refractory elements to fuse and unite. The drama of the
+sixteenth century came, in a moving and memorable hour, from one of those
+unions between the young and strong in which there enters something of
+violence and even of madness. The existing drama is the issue of parents
+well on in years in a time of gloom and trouble. It is delicate and calls
+for care. At the same time, it bears resemblances to those who gave it
+life. A race of heroes who are also buccaneers, a race of poets and
+shopkeepers, a race fearless of death and devoted to money, calculating
+but passionate, dreamers yet men of action, capable of the charges of
+Balaclava and the deal in the Suez shares, cannot possibly find its
+literary expression either in pure idealism or in realism undiluted. The
+"bleeding slice of life" awakes in it no appetite; "Art for Art's sake"
+leaves it wonderfully indifferent; of moralising, it is tired for the time
+being: it is passing through a stage of sensuous torpor which is not
+without charm, and it waits open-eyed and, as it were, hesitatingly before
+the labour of creating society afresh, of building up a new civilisation.
+It does not wish, and is not able, to forget those problems--that terrible
+To-morrow--by which we are everywhere threatened. Hence its sensuousness
+is tempered, refined, saddened by philosophy. And in this mood, what it
+asks of the drama is not to be amused, or to be excited, but to be made to
+think.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+  Achurch, Miss, and Ibsen, 281.
+
+  Actor-manager on circuit, 49.
+
+  Adaptations from the French, 77, 207;
+    law as to, 208;
+    process, 209;
+    S. Grundy's, 216.
+
+  Adelphi, The, 41, 46, 63, 195.
+
+  Albany, James, 133;
+    his _Two Roses_, 162.
+
+  Alexander, Mr., in _Mrs. Tanqueray_, 266.
+
+  Almaviva I. and II., 200.
+
+  America, Macready in, 73.
+
+  Anderson, Mary, 174.
+
+  Anstey, Mr., and Ibsen, 282.
+
+  Archer, W., on Kean and Macready, 42.
+
+  ---- on Wills, 177;
+    on Tennyson, 178.
+
+  ---- on Tennyson and Montanelli, 185, 299-207.
+
+  ---- and H. A. Jones, 234;
+    and _The Profligate_, 260;
+    and _Mrs. Tanqueray_, 265.
+
+  ---- and Ibsen, 282, 285, 290.
+
+  Arnold, Matthew, in the English Drama, 204;
+    and H. A. Jones, 239.
+
+  _Arrah-na-pogue_, 91.
+
+  Art of _mise-en-scène_, 307.
+
+  Arundel Club, The, 109, 115.
+
+  Augier, 209, 257, 269, 312.
+
+  Authors of 1850-65, 80.
+
+
+  _Bab Ballads_, 140.
+
+  Bancroft, Mr., as Captain Hawtree, 119, 120;
+    his realism, 122;
+    revival of _School for Scandal_, 50, 123.
+
+  Bancrofts, the, compared, 122;
+    and Robertson's plays, 133;
+    and the "cup and saucer" comedy, 134;
+    retirement, 136.
+
+  Bancroft, Mrs., 101 (see Wilton, Marie).
+
+  Barrett, Wilson, 306.
+
+  Barrie, J. M., 301.
+
+  Batemans, the, 156.
+
+  Beauty in the Drama, 252.
+
+  _Becket_, Tennyson's, 185, 188, 193.
+
+  _Bells, The_, 164, 166.
+
+  _Belphegor_, 100.
+
+  Beringhiem in _Richelieu_, 69.
+
+  Berlioz, 45.
+
+  Berne, Treaty of, 208.
+
+  Bernhardt, Sarah, 197, 275.
+
+  Björnson, 406.
+
+  ---- and Ibsen, 297.
+
+  _Black-eyed Susan_, 61, 94.
+
+  Bohemia, centre of, 109, 115;
+    in a nutshell, 116.
+
+  Boucicault, Dion, 87, 88-92, 93.
+
+  ---- Mrs. Dion, 90.
+
+  _Brand_, Ibsen's, 278, 279, 283.
+
+  _Breaking a Butterfly_, 296.
+
+  _Broken Hearts_, Gilbert's, 142.
+
+  Brooke, 156.
+
+  Brough, Lionel, 306.
+
+  ---- Robert, 110.
+
+  Browning and Macready, 64;
+    his dramas, 192.
+
+  Buchanan, Robert, 195, 301.
+
+  Buckstone, 79, 80, 103, 112, 152.
+
+  Bulwer, Lord Lytton, 64-72;
+    at Macready's banquet, 74;
+    portrayal of Riches and Rank, 116 (see Lytton).
+
+  _Bunch of Violets, A_, 221.
+
+  Burdett-Coutts', Baroness, present to Irving, 167.
+
+  Burlesque, 93.
+
+  Burnand's _Ixion_, 93-95.
+
+  Byron, H. J., 96-99, 103, 104;
+    and Robertson, 134.
+
+  ---- Lord, 96.
+
+  Byronian Satanism and Bulwer Lytton, 65.
+
+
+  _Cabinet Minister, The_, 258.
+
+  Campbell, Mrs. Patrick, 250, 266, 275, 276.
+
+  ---- in _John o' Dreams_, 302, 306.
+
+  _Cantab, The_, Robertson in, 112.
+
+  Carlyle and the Sagas, 285;
+    and Ibsen, 288.
+
+  Carton, 301.
+
+  _Caste_, 117;
+    Howe in, 119;
+    Marie Wilton in, 121;
+    scene from, 129.
+
+  Cavendish, Ada, 95.
+
+  Censor's Successor, the, 310.
+
+  Censorship, official, 83.
+
+  ---- and Sydney Grundy, 214.
+
+  ---- and _The First Step_, 309.
+
+  Chamberlain, Lord, 84.
+
+  Chambers, Haddon, 302, 307.
+
+  Characters, limited types of, 80.
+
+  _Charles I._, Wills's, 165, 166, 177.
+
+  _Charley's Aunt_, 284.
+
+  Chatterton, 198.
+
+  Chedd, 116.
+
+  Chippendale's present to Irving, 166.
+
+  Cibber, Colley, 168.
+
+  Circuit, on, 46-49.
+
+  City elocution class, 159.
+
+  Clarke, John, 104.
+
+  Clary in _The Prisoner of War_, 59.
+
+  Classical drama, death of the, 176.
+
+  _Clerical Error, A_, 234.
+
+  Coleridge on Kean, 42.
+
+  _Colleen Bawn_, 90-92.
+
+  Comédie Française, 197.
+
+  Comedies, Robertson's, cause of their success, 122.
+
+  Comedy, "Cup and Saucer," 134.
+
+  Comedy, the, 196.
+
+  Comic opera, 98.
+
+  Commission, parliamentary, 64;
+    and Bulwer Lytton, 65.
+
+  Compton, 80.
+
+  Cook, 198.
+
+  _Cool as a Cucumber_, 79.
+
+  Copyright in dramatic work, 310.
+
+  Coquelin, M., on Mrs. Bancroft, 101.
+
+  Coriolanus, Macready as, 41.
+
+  Court Theatre, The, 133, 196.
+
+  Courtly, Charles, in _London Assurance_, 89.
+
+  Covent Garden, 46, 62, 64, 76.
+
+  Criticism, dramatic, 81.
+
+  Critics, 81.
+
+  ---- old and new, 198;
+    and Sydney Grundy, 226;
+    and Ibsen, 282.
+
+  Cromwell and Richelieu, 68.
+
+  Crumbs and Toby in _The Rent Day_, 57.
+
+  _Crusaders, The_, 244-248, 259.
+
+  "Cup and Saucer" comedy, 134.
+
+  _Cup_, Tennyson's, 183.
+
+  Cynisca, 150, 152.
+
+
+  _Dandy Dick_, 257.
+
+  _Dan'l Druce_, 142.
+
+  Darwin and Ibsen, 292.
+
+  Delacour, 217.
+
+  Delane, Mr., and John Oxenford, 82.
+
+  Delaunay, 197.
+
+  Democracy and the drama, 72.
+
+  Deschapelles, Madame, in _The Lady of Lyons_, 66.
+
+  Dick, Robert, 55.
+
+  Dickens, Charles, 58;
+    letter on Marie Wilton, 102.
+
+  Diderot's rules, 51.
+
+  ---- paradox, 170, 206.
+
+  Dillon, Charles, 100.
+
+  _Diplomacy_, origin of, 210.
+
+  _Dolls' House, The_, 279, 292, 293, 296.
+
+  Drama, legitimate, 40;
+    a national, and Douglas Jerrold, 55, 156.
+
+  ---- and democracy, 72.
+
+  ---- the Boucicault, 93.
+
+  ---- the classical, 176.
+
+  ---- English and French, 204;
+    elements of the, 252.
+
+  ---- German, in England, 299.
+
+  ---- English, cause of its return to life, 310;
+    causes of its decay, 311;
+    Ibsen's influence, 313;
+    what it is seeking, 314.
+
+  Dramatic verse, English, 44.
+
+  ---- criticism, 81, 198.
+
+  Dramatists of to-day, 212.
+
+  Drury Lane, 40, 62, 76, 195.
+
+  Dumas, Alexander, effect of Macready on, 46, 70, 209, 227, 257, 264, 312.
+
+  Dundreary, Lord, 112.
+
+  "Dust-Hole," The, 104.
+
+  Dutton, 198.
+
+
+  _Ebbsmith, The Notorious Mrs._, 275.
+
+  Eccles, 128, 129.
+
+  Eccles, Polly, 120, 122, 129.
+
+  Edgeworth, Miss, 51.
+
+  Eily in _Colleen Bawn_, 91.
+
+  Ellis, Havelock, and Ibsen, 280.
+
+  Emery, Winifred, 306.
+
+  _Emperor and Galilean_, Ibsen's, 278, 279.
+
+  _Enemy of the People, An_, 280, 284.
+
+  _Engaged_, Gilbert's, 144.
+
+  English dramatic verse, 44.
+
+  Ennery, d', 81.
+
+  Evelyn, Alfred, 71.
+
+  Examiner of Plays, 84.
+
+
+  _Falcon, The_, 180.
+
+  Falconer, Edmund, 89.
+
+  Farce, 194.
+
+  Farren, 79, 80, 107.
+
+  Farren, Nellie, 194.
+
+  Father Tom in _Colleen Bawn_, 91.
+
+  _Fatal Card, The_, 302.
+
+  Faucit, Helen, 79.
+
+  Favart, 197.
+
+  Fechter in Hamlet, 78, 158.
+
+  Feuillet, Octave, 222.
+
+  Fielding and the Censorship, 83.
+
+  Fielding Club, The, 109, 115.
+
+  _Figaro, London_, 199, 200.
+
+  _First Step, The_, 309.
+
+  Forster, John, and Macready, 64;
+    at Macready's banquet, 74;
+    letter from Dickens, 102.
+
+  France, Macready in, 45, 73.
+
+  _Francillon_, _Hedda Gabler_, 289, 295.
+
+  French actors in London, 78.
+
+  ---- adaptations, 77, 207;
+    law as to, 208;
+    S. Grundy's, 216.
+
+  ---- drama prevented English, 311.
+
+  Froude, 88.
+
+  _Fun_, Gilbert a contributor to, 140.
+
+
+  Gaiety, The, 194.
+
+  Garneray's Memoirs, 59.
+
+  Garrick, David, the rôle of, 112.
+
+  Garrick and Hare, 117, 157.
+
+  Garrick school, 40.
+
+  Garrick Club, The, 109, 115, 196.
+
+  Garrick, the first night at the, 259.
+
+  Gautier, Théophile, 41, 78.
+
+  Gerridge, Sam, Hare as, 119, 128, 131.
+
+  German drama in England, 299.
+
+  _Ghosts_, 280, 292.
+
+  Gilbert, irony of, 111.
+
+  ---- and Robertson, 138;
+    literary career, 139;
+    _Bab Ballads_, 140;
+    _Sweethearts_, 140;
+    _Broken Hearts_, 142;
+    his only woman's character, 144;
+    _Engaged_, 144;
+    _Palace of Truth_, 146;
+    his philosophy, 144-146;
+    _Wicked World_, 147;
+    _Pygmalion and Galatea_, 147-152;
+    _Trial by Jury_, combines with Sullivan, _Princess Ida_, _Patience_,
+          _Iolanthe_, 153;
+    _Pirates of Penzance_, _Pinafore_, 154;
+    a lawyer, 155.
+
+  Globe, The, 133.
+
+  Goldsmith, 50, 81, 88.
+
+  Gosse, Edmund, and Ibsen, 277-280, 285.
+
+  _Greatest of These, The_, 233.
+
+  Grecian, The, 194.
+
+  Grisi, 75.
+
+  Grundy, Sydney, 212;
+    first appearance, 214.
+
+  ---- _The Snowball_, 214;
+    _In Honour Bound_, 216;
+    _A Pair of Spectacles_, 217;
+    _Mammon_, 220;
+    _A Bunch of Violets_, 221;
+    influence of the French, 223;
+    _The Glass of Fashion_, 224;
+    _A Fool's Paradise_, _The Late Mr. Costello_, 225;
+    his peculiarities, 226;
+    _Sowing the Wind_, _An Old Jew_, 227;
+    _The New Woman_, 230;
+    _The Greatest of These_, 233.
+
+  ---- and Ibsen, 295.
+
+  _Grues_, 97.
+
+
+  Hamlet, Irving's, 166.
+
+  Hardy, Thomas, and Pinero, 256.
+
+  Hare, John, 117;
+    in _Ours_, 119;
+    in _Caste_, 119, 181, 259.
+
+  _Harold_, Tennyson's, 185, 188, 190.
+
+  Harris, Sir Augustus, 301.
+
+  Hawtree, Captain, Bancroft as, 119, 122.
+
+  Haymarket, The, 46, 101.
+
+  ---- and the Bancrofts, 134, 196.
+
+  Hazlitt, 49, 82.
+
+  Heinemann's, Wm., _First Step_, 309.
+
+  Her Majesty's Theatre, 76.
+
+  Herman, Mr., and H. A. Jones, 296.
+
+  Hippodrama, The, 76.
+
+  _Hobby Horse, The_, 257.
+
+  Homer, 54.
+
+  Hood's _Model Men and Women_, 98.
+
+  ---- supper-parties, 110, 111, 131.
+
+  Horton, Priscilla, 102.
+
+  Hoskyns, David, and Irving, 161.
+
+  Hugo, Victor, and Bulwer Lytton, 65, 68, 70.
+
+  _Humour of a Scholar_ and _Money's_ success, 71.
+
+  Hunt, Leigh, 49;
+    and Macready, 64.
+
+  Hutchinson, Colonel, 49.
+
+  Huxley and Ibsen, 292.
+
+
+  Ibsen, 206, 253, 233.
+
+  ---- England hears of him, 277;
+    translations by Edmund Gosse and others, 278-280;
+    played by The Independent Theatre, 280;
+    and the Critics, 281-283;
+    and theatrical managers, 284;
+    performed at The Haymarket, 284;
+    and the Sagas, 286;
+    _Peer Gynt_, 287;
+    more intelligible than Carlyle, 288;
+    his methods, 289;
+    realism, 290;
+    his message, 291-292;
+    his types, 293;
+    and democracy, 294;
+    and English dramatists, 295;
+    H. A. Jones's adaptation of _A Dolls' House_, 296;
+    divergence from English admirers, 297;
+    and the Puritans, 298;
+    influence on the English drama, 313.
+
+  Icilius and Virginia, 51.
+
+  Imagination in the drama, 252.
+
+  Independent Theatre, The, 280, 305.
+
+  _Iolanthe_, 153.
+
+  Irving, Henry, first plays Hamlet, 159;
+    early days, 160;
+    in the provinces and début in London, 161;
+    as Digby Grant in Albery's _Two Roses_, 163;
+    secures _The Bells_, 164;
+    in _Charles I._, 165;
+    as Hamlet, 166;
+    in _Richelieu_, 166;
+    on staging masterpieces, 167;
+    and Shakespeare's text, 168;
+    his rôles, 168;
+    his method, 170;
+    his position as to realism, 171;
+    as a writer and lecturer, 172;
+    "Sir Henry," 172;
+     his success, 173;
+    and Tennyson's _Becket_, 188;
+    and Ibsen, 284.
+
+  _Ixion_, Burnand's, 93-95.
+
+
+  Jean, Oliver Saint, 72.
+
+  Jerrold, Blanchard, 79.
+
+  Jerrold, Douglas, 55-62;
+    _Rent Day_, 56;
+    _Prisoner of War_, 59;
+    _Black-eyed Susan_, 61, 94;
+    and the Censorship, 85.
+
+  _John-a-Dreams_, 302-304.
+
+  Jones, H. A., 178, 212.
+
+  ---- _A Clerical Error_, _An Old Master_, 234;
+    _The Silver King_, _Saints and Sinners_, 235-240;
+    _The Case of Rebellious Susan_, 236-250;
+    _Judah_, 239-244;
+    _The Crusaders_, 244-248, 259;
+    _The Tempter_, 248;
+    _Triumph of the Philistines_, 249;
+    _The Masqueraders_, 250, 252;
+    on realism, 251;
+    future work, 252.
+
+  ---- and Ibsen, 295-297.
+
+  Jordan, Mrs., 39.
+
+  Josephs, Fanny, 104.
+
+  _Judah_, 239-244, 251.
+
+
+  Kean, Charles, 79, 157;
+    his successor, 166.
+
+  Kean, Edmund, 40-45;
+    death of, 63.
+
+  Keeley, 79.
+
+  Keeley, Mrs., 79.
+
+  Kemble, Charles, 79.
+
+  Kemble, John, 40, 45, 79, 157.
+
+  Kendal as Pygmalion, 147;
+    in _The Falcon_, 181.
+
+  Kendals in _The Greatest of These_, 233.
+
+  Knebworth, Squireen of, 65.
+
+  Knowles, Sheridan, 50, 54, 55.
+
+
+  "La Belle Smidson," 45.
+
+  Labiche, 215, 217, 218, 219, 257.
+
+  Lacy, the bookseller, 107.
+
+  _Lady from the Sea, The_, 292.
+
+  _Lady of Lyons_, 64, 65-67.
+
+  Lamb, Charles, 49, 83.
+
+  Lancival, Luce de, 45.
+
+  Larkin, 104.
+
+  _Late Mr. Costello, The_, 225.
+
+  Law as to adaptations and translations, 208.
+
+  ---- as to foreign dramas, 310.
+
+  Legitimate drama, 156.
+
+  Lemaitre, Jules, 201.
+
+  Lemierra, 45.
+
+  Lewes on Macready's Macbeth, 45;
+    on Macready's last performance, 73.
+
+  _Liberty Hall_, 301, 306.
+
+  Lind, Jenny, 76.
+
+  _Little Eyolph_, 290, 299.
+
+  _London Assurance_, Boucicault's, 88.
+
+  _London Figaro_, 199, 200.
+
+  _London, Lights o'_, 302.
+
+  Lord, Miss H. F., and Ibsen, 279.
+
+  _Lords and Commons_, 256.
+
+  _Love, The Comedy of_, Ibsen's, 278.
+
+  Lyceum, The, 100.
+
+  ---- _The Cup_ at, 184.
+
+  Lyceum, 196.
+
+  Lytton, Lord, 64-72;
+    at Macready's banquet, 74;
+    on Riches and Rank, 116.
+
+
+  Macbeth, Kean as, 41;
+    Macready as, 45.
+
+  Mackayers, Joseph, 214.
+
+  Macready, 40-45;
+    and Dumas, 46;
+    and authors, 50;
+    and _Virginius_, 55.
+
+  ---- manager of Drury Lane and Covent Garden, 62, 63, 64, 65;
+    in _Richelieu_, 67;
+    in Paris, 1846, 73.
+
+  ---- work and farewell performance, 73;
+    last days, 74.
+
+  ---- and Marie Wilton, 99, 157;
+    and Fechter's Hamlet, 158.
+
+  Maeterlink, M., 284.
+
+  _Magistrate, The_, 257.
+
+  Man of the world type, 120.
+
+  Managers, theatre, 77, 308.
+
+  Manning, Cardinal, and Becket, 188.
+
+  Martin, Lady, 79.
+
+  _Master Builder, The_, 290, 295.
+
+  Mathews, Charles, 79, 80, 123, 135.
+
+  Melnotte, Claude, in _The Lady of Lyons_, 66.
+
+  Melodrama, 154, 196.
+
+  Memoirs, Marie Wilton's, 99.
+
+  Merimée, 54.
+
+  Merivale, Herman, 177.
+
+  Merritt, 195.
+
+  _Michael O'Dowd_, 91.
+
+  Millard, Evelyn, 306.
+
+  Mitchell, the Bond Street bookseller, 78.
+
+  _Model Men and Women_, Hood's, 98.
+
+  Molière, 88, 236.
+
+  _Money_, 64, 70-72;
+    Marie Wilton in, 121.
+
+  _Moor of Venice_, Kean in, 42.
+
+  Moore, George, 289.
+
+  Morals of the stage, Byron's effect on, 97.
+
+  Morris and the Sagas, 285.
+
+  Mortimer, James, 199.
+
+  Munich, Ibsen at, 277.
+
+  Music, a rival to the drama, 75.
+
+  Music halls, 194.
+
+  Myles-na-Coppaleen in _Colleen Bawn_, 91.
+
+  Myrine, 151.
+
+  Mystery in the drama, 252.
+
+
+  Neilson, Adelaide, 159.
+
+  Nesville, Juliette, 249.
+
+  _New Woman, The_, 230-233.
+
+  _Night's Adventure, A_, Robertson's, 107.
+
+  _Norah_, Ibsen's, 279.
+
+  Norway and England, affinities between, 287.
+
+  _Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, The_, 276.
+
+
+  Oakley, Macready as, 41.
+
+  _Octoroon_, 91.
+
+  Official Censorship, 83.
+
+  _Old Jew, An_, 227-230.
+
+  _Old Master, An_, 234.
+
+  Olympic, The, 107.
+
+  _Oonagh, The_, 90.
+
+  Operetta, The, 93, 194.
+
+  Origin of Official Censorship, 83.
+
+  Orleans, Duc d', in _Richelieu_, 69.
+
+  _Our American Cousin_, Sothern in, 112.
+
+  _Our Boys_, 134, 178.
+
+  _Ours_, 117;
+    Marie Wilton in, 121.
+
+  "Owls' Roost," 115.
+
+  Oxenford, John, 82;
+    on Irving, 164.
+
+
+  _Pair of Spectacles, A_, 217-220.
+
+  _Palace of Truth, The_, 146.
+
+  Pantomime, the, 76, 98, 194.
+
+  Parker, Louis N., 301.
+
+  Parliamentary Commission, 64;
+    and Bulwer Lytton, 65.
+
+  Passion in the drama, 252.
+
+  _Patience_, 153.
+
+  Pauline in _The Lady of Lyons_, 66.
+
+  _Peep o' Day_, 90.
+
+  _Peer Gynt_, Ibsen's, 278, 279, 287.
+
+  Penley, Mr., 284.
+
+  Pettitt, 195.
+
+  Phelps, 76, 157.
+
+  _Pilgrim, The White_, 177.
+
+  _Pillars of Society, The_, Ibsen's, 279, 280.
+
+  _Pinafore_, 154.
+
+  Pinero, Arthur W., letter to Mr. Bancroft, 136, 212.
+
+  ---- personal, 254;
+    an actor, 255;
+    _The Squire_, _Lords and Commons_, 256;
+    _The Magistrate_, _Dandy Dick_, _The Hobby Horse_, 257;
+    _The Times_, _The Cabinet Minister_, 258;
+    _The Profligate_, 259-264;
+    _Lady Bountiful_, 264;
+    _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, 264-274, 276;
+    _The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith_, 276;
+    and Ibsen, 295.
+
+  _Pink Dominoes_, 178.
+
+  Pippo, Marie Wilton as, 102, 103, 121.
+
+  _Pirates of Penzance_, 154.
+
+  Plautus, 88.
+
+  Playgoers' Club, Mr. Tree at, 284.
+
+  Plays, Examiner of, 84.
+
+  Plessy, Madame Arnould, 78.
+
+  "Pocket Ibsen," A, 282.
+
+  Polhill, Captain, 62.
+
+  Prices under the Bancrofts, 135.
+
+  Prince of Wales's Theatre, 105 (see Queen's), 113.
+
+  ---- Robertson's plays at, 114.
+
+  ---- last visit to, 137.
+
+  _Princess Ida_, 153.
+
+  Princess's, The, 195.
+
+  Princess's translator, The, 78.
+
+  _Prisoner of War_, Jerrold's, 59.
+
+  "Privileged" theatres, 40, 62-64, 156.
+
+  _Profligate, The_, 259-264.
+
+  _Promise of May, The_, 182.
+
+  Provincial touring, 46-49.
+
+  Ptarmigant, Lord and Lady, 116, 127.
+
+  Puckler-Muskau, Price, 63.
+
+  Puritans and the Stage, 236.
+
+  ---- and the Censorship, 310.
+
+  _Pygmalion and Galatea_, 147;
+    the critics on, 148-152.
+
+
+  _Queen Mary_, Tennyson's, 178, 185, 187, 190.
+
+  Queen's Theatre, 104 (see Prince of Wales's).
+
+  _The Promise of May_, 182.
+
+
+  Raval, 79.
+
+  Ray, Katharine, and Ibsen, 279.
+
+  Realism, H. A. Jones on, 252.
+
+  ---- English horror of, 289;
+    Ibsen's, 289.
+
+  _Rebellious Susan, The Case of_, 236, 250.
+
+  Rehan, Ada, 174.
+
+  Réjane, 197.
+
+  _Rent Day, The_, Jerrold's, 56.
+
+  Reynolds, 50.
+
+  Rhythm of English dramatic verse, 44.
+
+  _Richelieu_, 64, 65-70.
+
+  Richelieu and Cromwell, 68.
+
+  _Richelieu_, Lytton's, 69.
+
+  Robertson, Forbes, 306.
+
+  Robertson, Madge, as Galatea, 147;
+    in _The Falcon_, 181.
+
+  Robertson, T. W., early life, 106;
+    quarrel with Farren, 107;
+    at journalism, 109;
+    in Bohemia, 109-111;
+    writes a play for Sothern, 112;
+    _Society_ and Marie Wilton, 112, 113;
+    success, 117;
+    a wonderful reader, 118;
+    his insight into Marie Wilton's genius, 121;
+    cause of the success of his comedies, 122;
+    only half a realist, 123;
+    characteristics exemplified from _School_, 124;
+    method of character-drawing, 127;
+    his characters, 127-132;
+    marriage, 132;
+    death, 133;
+    and Byron, 134;
+    and Gilbert, 138.
+
+  Robins, Miss, and Ibsen, 281.
+
+  Robson, Mr., 79, 306.
+
+  Roche, Madame, 158.
+
+  Romanticism in France, 45.
+
+  _Roses, The Two_, 133.
+
+  _Rosmersholm_, 292.
+
+  Rorke, Kate, 306.
+
+  Royalty, The, 95.
+
+  Ryder, 79, 158.
+
+
+  Sadler's Wells, 76, 157.
+
+  Sagas, The, 285.
+
+  Saintine, X. B., and _Richelieu_, 68.
+
+  _Saints and Sinners_, 235-240, 244.
+
+  Salaries of actors, 135.
+
+  Sarcey, Francisque, 201.
+
+  Sardou and the Bancrofts, 134, 209, 210, 215, 252, 312.
+
+  Savage Club, The, 109, 115.
+
+  Scandinavian Society, British, and Ibsen, 279.
+
+  School of Common Sense in France, 51.
+
+  _School_, 117;
+    Marie Wilton in, 121;
+    scene from, 125.
+
+  Scott, Clement, and _The Oonagh_, 90;
+    and Tom Hood's parties, 110;
+    on Robertson's reading, 118;
+    on Irving, 164, 197, 198, 199, 200.
+
+  Scribe, 81, 215, 216, 224, 252, 312.
+
+  Sedaine's _drame bourgeois_, 51.
+
+  Shakespeare, 40, 42, 44, 45, 48, 50, 63, 73, 76;
+    and French actors, 78;
+    in Irving's hand, 173;
+    resuscitation, 175;
+    and melodrama, 196.
+
+  "Shakespeare made Easy," 156.
+
+  _Shaugraun_, 91.
+
+  Shaw, G. B., and Ibsen, 283.
+
+  Shelley, 64.
+
+  Sheridan, 50, 81, 88.
+
+  Shylock, Kean as, 43.
+
+  Siddons, Mrs., 40.
+
+  _Silver King, The_, 235.
+
+  Sims, G. R., 195, 301.
+
+  Smith, Albert, 109.
+
+  Smithson, Miss, 45.
+
+  _Snowball, The_, 214.
+
+  _Society_, Robertson's, 112;
+    first performance, 114;
+    success, 117.
+
+  "Song of the Gentleman," by Brough, 111.
+
+  "Songs of the Governing Classes," by Brough, 111.
+
+  Sothern and Robertson, 112, 118.
+
+  ---- and Irving, 162.
+
+  _Sowing the Wind_, 227.
+
+  Spanker, Lady Gay, 75.
+
+  Spectators, three classes, 305.
+
+  Spencer, Herbert, and Ibsen, 292.
+
+  _Squire of Dames_, 302.
+
+  _Squire, The_, 256.
+
+  St. James's Theatre, 78, 181, 196.
+
+  Standard, The, 194.
+
+  Strand, The, 96, 99, 101;
+    Dickens at, 102, 104, 112, 121.
+
+  Stirling, Mrs., in _Caste_, 135.
+
+  Sullivan and Gilbert, 153.
+
+  Surface, Joseph, Macready as, 41.
+
+  Surrey, The, 194.
+
+  Swanborough, Mrs., 96, 112.
+
+  _Sweethearts_, Gilbert's, 140.
+
+  Swinburne's dramas, 192.
+
+
+  Talma on the actor's emotions, 170.
+
+  _Tanqueray, The Second Mrs._, 264-274, 276, 289.
+
+  Taylor, Tom, 87.
+
+  ---- _Our American Cousin_, 112.
+
+  Taylor, Tom, on Marie Wilton and Robertson, 118.
+
+  _Tempter, The_, 248.
+
+  Tennyson and Macready, 74;
+    and Gilbert's _Princess Ida_, 153.
+
+  ---- as a dramatist, 178;
+    and the critics, 178;
+    _The Falcon_, 180;
+    _The Promise of May_, 182;
+    _The Cup_, 183.
+
+  ---- _Queen Mary_, _Harold_, _Becket_, 185;
+    his sense of history, 186.
+
+  Terence, 88.
+
+  Terry, Miss Ellen, 167, 174, 178, 189.
+
+  Theatre-goers of 1850, 77.
+
+  Theatres, number of, 86.
+
+  Theatre, commercial decadence of the, 62.
+
+  Theatres, "Privileged," 40, 62-64, 156.
+
+  Theatre managers, 77.
+
+  Thomas, Henry, 159.
+
+  Thomas, Moy, 198.
+
+  _Ticket of Leave Man_, origin of, 207.
+
+  _Times, The_, Pinero's, 258.
+
+  Toby and Crumbs in _The Rent Day_, 57.
+
+  Toole, John, first appearance, 100.
+
+  Tour, on, 46-49.
+
+  Translations of foreign plays, law as to, 208.
+
+  Travelling companies, 46-49.
+
+  Treaty of Berne, 208.
+
+  Tree, Mr., and _The Tempter_, 248.
+
+  ---- and Ibsen, 284.
+
+  ---- in _John-a-Dreams_, 302;
+    his staying, 307.
+
+  _Trial by Jury_, 153.
+
+  _Triumph of the Philistines_, 249.
+
+  Tussaud's, Madame, Kean and Macready at, 41.
+
+
+  Van Ambrugh, 76.
+
+  Vaudeville, The, 133.
+
+  Victoria, 39.
+
+  Victoria, The, 194.
+
+  Virginia and Icilius, 51.
+
+  _Virginius_, Knowles's, 50-55.
+
+  Virginius's character, 52.
+
+
+  Walkley, A. B., and Ibsen, 283.
+
+  Wallington, Nehemiah, 49.
+
+  Wallis, Miss, as Cleopatra, 159.
+
+  Walpole and the Censorship, 83.
+
+  Waring, Mr., and Ibsen, 281.
+
+  Watson, Malcolm, 301.
+
+  Wells and the classical drama, 177.
+
+  _Wicked World, The_, 147.
+
+  Willard, Mr., 306.
+
+  Wills's _Charles I._, 165, 177;
+    _Claudian_, 177;
+    his conceptions, 178.
+
+  Wilton and Kean, 43.
+
+  Wilton, Marie, and Macready, 99;
+    at the Lyceum, 100;
+    at the Haymarket, 101;
+    Coquelin on, 101;
+    Dickens on, 102;
+    partnership with Byron, 103;
+    her first company, 104;
+    secures _Society_, 113;
+    and Robertson, 118;
+    her parts in Robertson's plays, 121;
+    early days in Liverpool, 138.
+
+  Wilton, the Sisters, 104.
+
+  Wingfield, Hon. Lewis W., 95.
+
+  Woman, the English, and Ibsen, 293.
+
+  Wyndham, Charles, 196, 306.
+
+
+  Yates, Edmund, 62.
+
+  Yates, Frederick, 41.
+
+
+
+
+  PRINTED BY
+  MORRISON AND GIBB LIMITED
+  EDINBURGH
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Berlioz did so literally, and married her.
+
+[2] William Archer, _Life of Macready_.
+
+[3] "Write me a drama," said Macready to young Browning, "and save me
+having to go off to America." The drama was written, but attained only a
+fourth performance, and did not save the actor from his impending
+expedition.
+
+[4] As a matter of fact, Bulwer had not even the merit of inventing this
+arrangement for himself. His play was founded on the novel by X.-B.
+Saintine.
+
+[5] Charles Mathews played at the _Variétés_, in French, in _L'anglais
+timide_, an adaptation of _Cool as a Cucumber_, by Blanchard Jerrold.
+
+[6] 10 George II. cap. 19.
+
+[7] In _Thirty Years at the Play_, Clement Scott gives an account of the
+first night of _The Oonagh_, which has come down to us as a tradition. At
+two o'clock in the morning the play was still in progress. The house was
+empty save for a few critics slumbering in their stalls. The actors were
+on the stage all in a line facing the public, as was then the custom, and
+there was no sign of the ending, when suddenly the machinists pulled back
+the carpet on which the chief characters were standing. They collapsed
+simply!--with the piece, which was never brought to its real conclusion.
+
+[8] T. W. Robertson in _The Illustrated Times_.
+
+[9] Founded on the famous French play _Paillasse_.
+
+[10] To the fourth line he added a footnote to the effect that the name
+was _not_ Johnson really.
+
+[11] Henry Morley, _Journal of a Playgoer_.
+
+[12] These lines appeared in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, on September 15,
+1895. Less than three months later the Kendals produced, for the first
+time in the provinces, a new drama by Mr. Grundy, _The Greatest of These_.
+This play, which was performed later in London, is a work of real value.
+In it Mr. Grundy has forgotten his French models, and has painted English
+life and English characters with a freedom, a fidelity, a power, worthy of
+that Ibsen to whom he will not have it that he owes anything. He has put
+aside his wit in order to be more moving. There is not a weak spot or a
+trace of bad taste in the whole piece. The scene which takes up most of
+the third act is equally beautiful, whether regarded from a psychological,
+a literary, or a purely dramatic standpoint.
+
+[13] His début was in 1874, when he was nineteen. He has given an account
+of some of his Edinburgh experiences about this time in a pleasant Preface
+to Mr. William Archer's _Theatrical World in 1895_.
+
+[14] When this episode was reached on the night of the first performance
+of _The Master Builder_, a critic turned to Mr. Archer and said, "Will you
+explain _that_ symbol to us?" "I am not sure," Mr. Archer replied quietly,
+"that it _is_ a symbol." Upon which, a lady sitting near them interposed:
+"Excuse my breaking in upon your conversation," she said, "but you may be
+interested to know that many women are like Mrs. Solness in this. I myself
+have all the dolls of my childhood safely preserved at home, and I look
+after them tenderly." It is well known, too, that the Queen's collection
+of her dolls is preserved at Windsor Castle.
+
+[15] I should have wished to determine the influence exerted by the
+contemporary German drama upon the dramatic movement in England, but I can
+find no trace of any such influence at all. Only a single work of
+Sudermann's has so far been translated, and this came from America. An
+attempt was made in 1895 to found a permanent _Deutsches Theater_ in
+London, and works by Freytag, Sudermann, Hauptmann, Otto Hartleber, Max
+Halbe, and Blumenthal were produced there. I do not know whether the
+attempt, made under modest, and indeed almost mean, conditions, will be
+renewed. The critics attended the performance, but the general public paid
+but little attention to them.
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_.
+
+Punctuation has been corrected without note.
+
+The following misprints have been corrected:
+  "had had" corrected to "had" (page 112)
+  "uninterruped" corrected to "uninterrupted" (page 115)
+  "made" corrected to "make" (page 117)
+  "Pgymalion" corrected to "Pygmalion" (page 151)
+  "protraits" corrected to "portraits" (page 166)
+  "aquainted" corrected to "acquainted" (page 200)
+  "is is" corrected to "is" (page 277)
+  "105" corrected to "50" (index)
+  "succces" corrected to "success" (index)
+
+Other than the corrections listed above, inconsistencies in spelling and
+hyphenation have been retained from the original.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The English Stage, by Augustin Filon
+
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+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of The English Stage: Being an Account of the Victorian Drama, by Augustin Filon, translated by Frederic Whyte.
+    </title>
+
+    <style type="text/css">
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+    p {margin-top: .75em; text-align: justify; margin-bottom: .75em;}
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+    body {margin-left: 12%; margin-right: 12%;}
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The English Stage, by Augustin Filon
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The English Stage
+       Being an Account of the Victorian Drama
+
+Author: Augustin Filon
+
+Translator: Frederic Whyte
+
+Release Date: July 3, 2011 [EBook #36590]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ENGLISH STAGE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
+generously made available by The Internet Archive.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<p class="center"><span class="giant">THE ENGLISH STAGE</span></p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="note">
+<p class="center"><strong><i>WORKS BY THE AUTHOR.</i></strong></p>
+<p class="center">PROFILS ANGLAIS.</p>
+<p class="center">M&Eacute;RIM&Eacute;E ET SES AMIS.</p>
+<p class="center">VIOLETTE M&Eacute;RIAN.</p>
+<p class="center">AMOURS ANGLAIS.</p>
+<p class="center">LES CONTES DU CENTENAIRE.</p>
+<p class="center">ETC. ETC.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="giant">THE ENGLISH STAGE</span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="large"><i>Being an Account of<br />
+the Victorian Drama<br />
+by Augustin Filon</i></span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><span class="large">Translated from the French<br />
+by Frederic Whyte with<br />
+an Introduction by<br />
+Henry Arthur Jones</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center">JOHN MILNE<br />
+12 NORFOLK STREET, STRAND, LONDON</p>
+<p class="center">NEW YORK<br />
+DODD, MEAD, &amp; COMPANY<br />
+MDCCCXCVII</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/deco.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>All Rights Reserved</i></p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<table width="75%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Introduction by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_9">9</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Author&#8217;s Preface</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_31">31</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>A Glance back&mdash;From 1820 to 1830&mdash;Kean and Macready&mdash;The Strolling Player&mdash;The Critics&mdash;Sheridan
+Knowles and <i>Virginius</i>&mdash;Douglas Jerrold&mdash;His Comedies&mdash;<i>The Rent Day</i>&mdash;<i>The Prisoner of War</i>&mdash;<i>Black-Eyed
+Susan</i>&mdash;Collapse of the Privileged Theatres&mdash;Men of Letters come to the Rescue of the Drama&mdash;Bulwer
+Lytton&mdash;<i>The Lady of Lyons</i>&mdash;<i>Richelieu</i>&mdash;<i>Money</i></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_39">39</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Macready&#8217;s Withdrawal from the Stage&mdash;The Enemies of the Drama in 1850: Puritanism; the Opera; the
+Pantomime; the &#8220;Hippodrama&#8221;&mdash;French Plays and French Players in England&mdash;Actors of the Period&mdash;The
+Censorship&mdash;The Critics&mdash;The Historical Plays of Tom Taylor and the Irish Plays of Dion Boucicault</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_73">73</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Vogue of Burlesque&mdash;Burnand&#8217;s <i>Ixion</i>&mdash;H. J. Byron&mdash;The Influence of Burlesque upon the Moral Tone of
+the Stage&mdash;Marie Wilton&#8217;s D&eacute;but&mdash;A Letter from Dickens&mdash;Founding of the Prince of Wales&#8217;s&mdash;Tom
+Robertson, his Life as Actor and Author&mdash;His Journalistic Career&mdash;London Bohemia in 1865&mdash;Sothern</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_93">93</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>First Performance of <i>Society</i>&mdash;Success of <i>Ours</i>, <i>Caste</i>, and <i>School</i>&mdash;How Robertson turned to account the Talent
+of his Actors, John Hare, Bancroft, and Mrs. Bancroft&mdash;Progress in the Matter of Scenery&mdash;Dialogue and
+Character-drawing&mdash;Robertson as a Humorist: a Scene from <i>School</i>&mdash;As a Realist: a Scene from <i>Caste</i>&mdash;The
+Comedian of the Upper Middle Classes&mdash;Robertson&#8217;s Marriage, Illness, and Death&mdash;The &#8220;Cup and Saucer&#8221;
+Comedy&mdash;The Improvement in Actors&#8217; Salaries&mdash;The Bancrofts at the Haymarket&mdash;Farewell Performance&mdash;My
+Pilgrimage to Tottenham Street</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_114">114</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Gilbert: compared with Robertson&mdash;His First Literary Efforts&mdash;The <i>Bab Ballads</i>&mdash;<i>Sweethearts</i>&mdash;A Series of
+Experiments&mdash;Gilbert&#8217;s Psychology and Methods of Work&mdash;<i>Dan&#8217;l Druce</i>, <i>Engaged</i>, <i>The Palace of Truth</i>,
+<i>The Wicked World</i>, <i>Pygmalion and Galatea</i>&mdash;The Gilbert and Sullivan Operas</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_138">138</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Shakespeare again&mdash;From Macready to Irving; Phelps, Fechter, Ryder, Adelaide Neilson&mdash;Irving&#8217;s D&eacute;but&mdash;His
+Career in the Provinces, and Visit to Paris&mdash;The r&ocirc;le of Digby Grand&mdash;The r&ocirc;le of Matthias&mdash;The Production
+of <i>Hamlet</i>&mdash;Successive Triumphs&mdash;Irving as Stage Manager&mdash;as an Editor of Shakespeare&mdash;His
+Defects as an Actor&mdash;Too great for some of his Parts&mdash;As a Writer and Lecturer; his Theory of Art&mdash;Sir
+Henry Irving, Head of his Profession</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_156">156</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Is it well to imitate Shakespeare?&mdash;The Death of the Classical Drama&mdash;Herman Merivale and the <i>White
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span>Pilgrim</i>&mdash;Wills and his Plays: <i>Charles the First</i>,
+<i>Claudian</i>&mdash;Tennyson as a Dramatist; he comes too soon and too late&mdash;Tennyson and the Critics&mdash;<i>The
+Falcon</i>, <i>The Promise of May</i>, <i>The Cup</i>, <i>Becket</i>, <i>Queen Mary</i>, <i>Harold</i></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_174">174</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER VIII</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Three Publics&mdash;The Disappearance of Burlesque and Decadence of Pantomime&mdash;Increasing Vogue of Farce
+and Melodrama&mdash;Improvement in Acting&mdash;The Influence of our French Actors&mdash;The &#8220;Old&#8221; Critics and the
+&#8220;New&#8221;&mdash;James Mortimer and his Two &#8220;Almavivas&#8221;&mdash;Mr. William Archer&#8217;s Ideas and R&ocirc;le&mdash;The Vicissitudes
+of Adaptation</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_193">193</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">CHAPTER IX</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Three Principal Dramatists of To-day&mdash;Sydney Grundy; his First Efforts&mdash;Adaptations: <i>The Snowball</i>,
+<i>In Honour Bound</i>, <i>A Pair of Spectacles</i>, <i>The Bunch of Violets</i>&mdash;His Original Plays&mdash;His Style&mdash;His
+Humour&mdash;His Ethical Ideal&mdash;<i>An Old Jew</i>&mdash;<i>The New
+Woman</i>&mdash;A Talent which has not done growing</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_212">212</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_X">CHAPTER X</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Henry Arthur Jones; his First Works&mdash;His Melodramas&mdash;<i>Saints and Sinners</i>&mdash;The Puritans and the Theatre&mdash;The
+Two Deacons: the Character of Fletcher&mdash;<i>Judah</i>&mdash;<i>The Crusaders</i>: Character of Palsam; the Conclusion
+of the Piece&mdash;<i>The Case of Rebellious Susan</i>&mdash;<i>The Masqueraders</i>&mdash;Return to Melodrama&mdash;Theories
+expounded by Mr. Jones in his Book: <i>The Renascence of the Drama</i></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_234">234</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">CHAPTER XI</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Two Portraits&mdash;Mr. Pinero&#8217;s Career as an Actor&mdash;His Early Works&mdash;<i>The Squire, Lords and Commons</i>&mdash;The
+Pieces which followed, Half-Comedy, Half-Farce&mdash;<i>The Profligate</i>; its Success and Defects: <i>Lady Bountiful</i>&mdash;<i>The
+Second Mrs. Tanqueray</i>: Character of Paula&mdash;Mrs. Patrick Campbell&mdash;<i>The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith</i></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_254">254</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XII">CHAPTER XII</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Ibsen made known to the English Public by Mr. Edmund Gosse&mdash;The First Translations&mdash;Ibsen acted in London&mdash;The
+Performers and the Public&mdash;Encounters between the Critics&mdash;Mr. Archer once more&mdash;Affinity between
+the Norwegian Character and the English&mdash;Ibsen&#8217;s Realism suited to English Taste, his Characters adaptable
+to English Life&mdash;The Women in his Plays&mdash;Ibsen and Mr. Jones&mdash;Present and Future Influence of Ibsen&mdash;Objections
+and Obstacles</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_277">277</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">CHAPTER XIII</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>G. R. Sims&mdash;R. C. Carton&mdash;Haddon Chambers&mdash;The Independent Theatre and Matin&eacute;e Performance&mdash;The
+Drama of To-morrow&mdash;A &#8220;Report of Progress&#8221;&mdash;The Public and the Actors&mdash;Actor-Managers&mdash;The
+Forces that have given Birth to the Contemporary English Drama&mdash;Disappearance of the Obstacles to
+its becoming Modern and National&mdash;Conclusion</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_300">300</a></td></tr></table>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span></p>
+<h2>INTRODUCTION</h2>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">By Henry Arthur Jones</span></p>
+
+<p>I have rarely had a more welcome task than that of saying a few words of
+introduction to the following essays, and of heartily commending them to
+the English reading public. I am not called upon, nor would it become me,
+to recriticise the criticism of the English drama they contain, to reargue
+any of the issues raised, or to vent my own opinions of the persons and
+plays hereafter dealt with. My business is to thank M. Filon for bringing
+us before the notice of the French public, to speak of his work as a whole
+rather than to discuss it in detail, and to define his position in
+relation to the recent dramatic movement in our country.</p>
+
+<p>But before addressing myself to these main ends, I may perhaps be allowed
+to call attention to one or two striking passages and individual
+judgments. The picture in the first chapter of the old actor&#8217;s life on
+circuit is capitally done. I do not know where to look for so animated and
+succinct a rendering of that phase of past theatrical life. And the
+pilgrimage to the deserted Prince of Wales&#8217;s Theatre also left a vivid
+impression on me, perhaps quickened by my own early memories.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> In all that
+relates to the early Victorian drama M. Filon seems to me a sure and
+penetrating guide. All lovers of the English drama, as distinguished from
+that totally different and in many ways antagonistic institution, the
+English theatre, must be pleased to see M. Filon stripping the spangles
+from Bulwer Lytton. To this day Lytton remains an idol of English
+playgoers and actors, a lasting proof of their inability to distinguish
+what is dramatic truth. <i>The Lady of Lyons</i> and <i>Richelieu</i> still rank in
+many theatrical circles with <i>Hamlet</i> as masterpieces of the &#8220;legitimate,&#8221;
+and <i>Money</i> is still bracketed with <i>The School for Scandal</i>. It is
+benevolent of M. Filon to write dramatic criticism about a nation where
+such notions have prevailed for half a century.</p>
+
+<p>The criticism on Tennyson as a playwright seems to me equally admirable
+with the criticism on Bulwer Lytton, and all the more admirable when the
+two are read in conjunction. Doubtless Tennyson will never be so
+successful on the boards as Lytton has been. <i>Becket</i> is a loose and
+ill-made play in many respects, and succeeded with the public only because
+Irving was able to pull it into some kind of unity by buckling it round
+his great impersonation of the archbishop. But <i>Becket</i> contains great
+things, and is a real addition to our dramatic literature. It would have
+been a thousand pities if it had failed. On the other hand, the success of
+Lytton&#8217;s plays has been a real misfortune to our drama. You cannot have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span>
+two standards of taste in dramatic poetry. Just as surely as the
+circulation of bad money in a country drives out all the good, so surely
+does a base and counterfeit currency in art drive out all finer and higher
+things that contend with it. In his measurement of those two ancient
+enemies, Tennyson and Lytton, M. Filon has shown a rare power of
+understanding us and of entering into the spirit of our nineteenth-century
+poetic drama.</p>
+
+<p>If I may be allowed a word of partial dissent from M. Filon, I would say
+that he assigns too much space and influence to Robertson. Robertson did
+one great thing: he drew the great and vital tragi-comic figure of Eccles.
+He drew many other pleasing characters and scenes, most of them as
+essentially false as the falsities and theatricalities he supposed himself
+to be superseding. I shall be reminded that in the volume before us M.
+Filon says that all reforms of the drama pretend to be a return to nature
+and to truth. I have elsewhere shown that there is no such thing as being
+consistently and realistically &#8220;true to nature&#8221; on the stage. <i>Hamlet</i> in
+many respects is farther away from real life than the shallowest and
+emptiest farce. It is in the seizure and presentation of the essential and
+distinguishing marks of a character, of a scene, of a passion, of a
+society, of a phase of life, of a movement of national thought&mdash;it is in
+the seizure and vivid treatment of some of these, to the exclusion or
+falsification of non-essentials, that the dramatist must lay his claim to
+sincerity and being &#8220;true to nature.&#8221; And it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> seems to me that one has
+only to compare <i>Caste</i>, the typical comedy of an English <i>m&eacute;salliance</i>,
+with <i>Le Gendre de M. Poirier</i>, the typical comedy of a French
+<i>m&eacute;salliance</i>, to come to the conclusion that in the foundation and
+conduct of his story Robertson was false and theatrical&mdash;theatrical, that
+is, in the employment of a social contrast that was effective on the
+stage, but well-nigh, if not quite, impossible in life.</p>
+
+<p>It is of the smallest moment to be &#8220;true to nature&#8221; in such mint and
+cummin of the stage as the shutting of a door with a real lock, in the
+observation of niceties of expression and behaviour, in the careful
+copying of little fleeting modes and gestures, in the introduction of
+certain realistic bits of business&mdash;it is, I say, of the smallest moment
+to be &#8220;true to nature&#8221; in these, if the playwright is false to nature in
+all the great verities of the heart and spirit of man, if his work as a
+whole leaves the final impression that the vast, unimaginable drama of
+human life is as petty and meaningless and empty as our own English
+theatre. A fair way to measure any dramatist is to ask this question of
+his work: &#8220;Does he make human life as small as his own theatre, so that
+there is nothing more to be said about either; or does he hint that human
+life so far transcends any theatre that all attempts to deal with it on
+the boards, even the highest, even Hamlet, even &OElig;dipus, even Faust, are
+but shadows and guesses and perishable toys of the stage?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Robertson has nothing to say to us in 1896.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> He drew one great character
+and many pleasing ones in puerile, impossible schemes, without relation to
+any larger world than the very narrow English theatrical world of 1865-70.</p>
+
+<p>In his analysis of the influence of Ibsen in England and France, M. Filon
+seems to touch the right note. I may perhaps be permitted a word of
+personal explanation in this connection. When I came up to London sixteen
+years ago, to try for a place among English playwrights, a rough
+translation from the German version of <i>The Dolls&#8217; House</i> was put into my
+hands, and I was told that if it could be turned into a sympathetic play,
+a ready opening would be found for it on the London boards. I knew nothing
+of Ibsen, but I knew a great deal of Robertson and H. J. Byron. From these
+circumstances came the adaptation called <i>Breaking a Butterfly</i>. I pray it
+may be forgotten from this time, or remembered only with leniency amongst
+other transgressions of my dramatic youth and ignorance.</p>
+
+<p>I pass on to speak of M. Filon&#8217;s work as a whole. For a generation or two
+past France has held the lead, and rightly held the lead, in the European
+theatre. She has done this by virtue of a peculiar innate dramatic
+instinct in her people; by virtue of great traditions and thorough methods
+of training; by virtue of national recognition of her dramatists and
+actors, and national pride in them; and by virtue of the freedom she has
+allowed to her playwrights. So far as they have abused that freedom, so
+far as they have become the mere purveyors of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> sexual eccentricity and
+perversity, so far the French drama has declined. So cunningly economic is
+Nature, she will slip in her moral by hook or by crook. There cannot be an
+intellectual effort in any province of art without a moral implication.</p>
+
+<p>But France, though her great band of playwrights is broken up, still lords
+it over the European drama, or rather, over the European theatre. There is
+still a feeling among our upper-class English audiences that a play, an
+author, an actor and actress, are good <i>because</i> they are French. There
+is, or has been, a sound reason for that feeling. And there is still, as
+M. Filon says in his Preface, a corresponding feeling in France that
+&#8220;there is no such thing as an English drama.&#8221; There has been an equally
+sound reason for that feeling. M. Filon has done us the great kindness of
+trying to remove it. We still feel very shy in coming before our French
+neighbours, like humble, honest, poor relations who are getting on a
+little in the world, and would like to have a nod from our aristocratic
+kinsfolk. We are uneasy about the reception we shall meet, and nervous and
+diffident in making our bow to the French public. A nod from our
+aristocratic relations, a recognition from France, might be of so much use
+in our parish here at home. For in all matters of the modern drama England
+is no better than a parish, with &#8220;porochial&#8221; judgments, &#8220;porochial&#8221;
+instincts, and &#8220;porochial&#8221; ways of looking at things. There is not a
+breath of national sentiment, a breath of national feeling,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> of width of
+view, in the way English playgoers regard their drama.</p>
+
+<p>M. Filon has sketched in the following pages the history of the recent
+dramatic movement in England. If I were asked what was the distinguishing
+mark of that movement, I should say that during the years when it was in
+progress there was a steadfast and growing attempt to treat the great
+realities of our modern life upon our stage, to bring our drama into
+relation with our literature, our religion, our art, and our science, and
+to make it reflect the main movements of our national thought and
+character. That anything great or permanent was accomplished I am the last
+to claim; all was crude, confused, tentative, aspiring. But there was
+<i>life</i> in it. Again I shall be reminded that dramatic reformers always
+pretend that they return to nature and truth, and are generally found out
+by the next generation to be stale and theatrical impostors. But if anyone
+will take the trouble to examine the leading English plays of the last ten
+years, and will compare them with the <i>serious</i> plays of our country
+during the last three centuries, I shall be mistaken if he will not find
+evidence of the beginnings, the first shoots of an English drama of
+greater import and vitality and of wider aim than any school of drama the
+English theatre has known since the Elizabethans. The brilliant
+Restoration comedy makes no pretence to be a national drama: neither do
+the comedies of Sheridan and Goldsmith. There was no <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>possibility of a
+great national English drama between Milton and the French Revolution, any
+more than there was the possibility of a great school of English poetry.
+And the feelings that were let loose after the convulsions of 1793 did not
+in England run in the direction of the drama. It is only within the
+present generation that great masses of Englishmen have begun to frequent
+the theatre. And as our vast city population began to get into a habit of
+playgoing, and our theatres became more crowded, it seemed not too much to
+hope that a school of English drama might be developed amongst us, and
+that we might induce more and more of our theatre-goers to find their
+pleasure in seeing their lives portrayed at the theatre, rather than in
+running to the theatre to escape from their lives.</p>
+
+<p>After considerable advances had been made in this direction, the movement
+became obscured and burlesqued, and finally the British public fell into
+what Macaulay calls one of its periodical panics of morality. In that
+panic the English drama disappeared for the time, and at the moment of
+writing it does not exist. There are many excellent entertainments at our
+different theatres, and most of them are deservedly successful. But in the
+very height of this theatrical season there is not a single London theatre
+that is giving a play that so much as pretends to picture our modern
+English life,&mdash;I might almost say that pretends to picture human life at
+all. I have not a word to say against these various entertainments.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> I
+have been delighted with some of them, and heartily welcome their success.
+But what has become of the English drama that M. Filon has given so many
+of the following pages to discuss and dissect? I wish M. Filon would
+devote another article in the <i>Revue des deux Mondes</i> to explain to his
+countrymen what has taken place in the English theatre since his articles
+were written. It needs a Frenchman to explain, and a French audience to
+understand, the full comedy of the situation.</p>
+
+<p>For ten years the English theatre-going public had been led to take an
+increasing interest in their national drama,&mdash;I mean the drama as a
+picture of life in opposition to a funny theatrical entertainment,&mdash;and
+during those ten years that drama had grown in strength of purpose, in
+largeness of aim, in vividness of character-painting, in every quality
+that promised England a living school of drama. It began to deal with the
+great realities of modern English life. It was pressing on to be a real
+force in the spiritual and intellectual life of the nation. It began to
+attract the attention of Europe. But it became entangled with another
+movement, got caught in the skirts of the sexual-pessimistic blizzard
+sweeping over North Europe, was confounded with it, and was execrated and
+condemned without examination. I say without examination. Let anyone turn
+to the <i>Times</i> of November 1894, and read the correspondence which began
+the assault on the modern school of English drama. Let him<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> discover, if
+he can, in the letters of those who attacked it, what notions they had as
+to the relations of morality to the drama. It will interest M. Filon&#8217;s
+countrymen to know that British playwrights were condemned in the
+interests of British morality. And when one tried to find out what
+particular sort of morality the English public was trying to teach its
+dramatists, one discovered at last that it was precisely that system of
+morality which is practised amongst wax dolls. Not the broad, genial,
+worldly morality of Shakespeare; not the deep, devious, confused, but most
+human morality of the Bible; not a high, severe, ascetic morality; not
+even a sour, grim, puritanic morality. No! let any candid inquirer search
+into this matter and try to get at the truth of it, and ask what has been
+the recent demand of the English public in this matter, and he will find
+it is for a wax-doll morality.</p>
+
+<p>Now, there is much to be said for the establishment of a system of
+wax-doll morality, not only on the English stage, but also in the world at
+large. And all of us who have properly-regulated minds must regret that,
+through some unaccountable oversight, it did not occur to Providence to
+carry on the due progress and succession of the human species by means of
+some such system.</p>
+
+<p>I say it must have been an oversight. For can we doubt that, had this
+excellent method suggested itself, it would have been instantly adopted?
+Can we suppose that Providence would have deliberately rejected so sweetly
+pretty and simple an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> expedient for putting a stop to immorality, not only
+on the English stage to-day, but everywhere and always?</p>
+
+<p>I know there is a real dilemma. But surely those of us who are truly
+reverent will suspect Providence of a little nodding and negligence in
+this matter, rather than of virtual complicity with immorality&mdash;for that
+is what the alternate hypothesis amounts to.</p>
+
+<p>But seeing that, by reason of this lamentable oversight of Providence,
+English life is not sustained and renewed by means of wax-doll morality,
+what is a poor playwright to do? I am quite aware that what is going on in
+English life has nothing whatever to do with what is going on at the
+English theatres in the autumn of 1896. Still, like Caleb Plummer, in a
+matter of this kind one would like to get &#8220;as near natur&#8217; as possible,&#8221;
+or, at least, not to falsify and improve her beyond all chance of
+recognition. I hope I shall not be accused of any feeling of enmity
+against wax-doll morality in the abstract. I think it a most excellent,
+nay, a perfect theory of morals. The more I consider it, the more eloquent
+I could grow in its favour. I do not mean to practise it myself, but I do
+most cordially recommend it to all my neighbours.</p>
+
+<p>To return. The correspondence in the <i>Times</i> showed scarcely a suspicion
+that morality on the stage meant anything else than shutting one&#8217;s eyes
+alike to facts and to truth, and making one&#8217;s characters behave like wax
+dolls. As to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> bent and purpose of the dramatist, there was so little
+of the dramatic sense abroad, that an act of a play which was written to
+ridicule the detestable, cheap, paradoxical affectations of vice and
+immorality current among a certain section of society was censured as
+being an attempt to <i>copy</i> the thing it was <i>satirising</i>! So impossible is
+it to get the average Englishman to distinguish for a moment between the
+dramatist and his characters. The one notion that the public got into its
+head was that we were a set of gloomy corrupters of youth, and it hooted
+accordingly. Now, I do not deny that many undesirable things, many things
+to regret, many extreme things, and some few unclean things, fastened upon
+the recent dramatic movement. And so far as it had morbid issues, so far
+as it tended merely to distress and confuse, so far as it painted vice and
+ugliness for their own sakes, so far it was rightly and inevitably
+condemned, nay, so far it condemned and destroyed itself. But these, I
+maintain, were side-tendencies. They were not the essence of the movement.
+They were the extravagances and confusions that always attend a revival,
+whether in art or religion. And by the general public, who can never get
+but one idea, and never more than one side of that idea, into its head at
+a time, these extravagances and side-shoots are taken for the very heart
+of the movement.</p>
+
+<p>Take the Oxford movement. Did the great British public get a glimmer of
+Newman&#8217;s lofty idea of the continual indwelling miraculous spiritual<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>
+force of the Church? No. It got a notion into its head that a set of
+rabid, dishonest bigots were trying to violate the purity of its
+Protestant religion, so it hooted and howled, stamped upon the movement,
+and went back to hug the sallow corpse of Evangelicalism for another
+quarter of a century. The movement was thought to be killed. But it was
+only scotched, and it is the one living force in the English Church
+to-day.</p>
+
+<p>Take, again, the &aelig;sthetic movement. Did the great British public get a
+glimmer of William Morris&#8217;s lofty idea of making every home in England
+beautiful? No. It got a notion into its head that a set of idiotic fops
+had gone crazy in worship of sunflowers; so it giggled and derided, and
+went back to its geometric-patterned Brussels carpets, its flock
+wall-papers, and all the damnable trumpery of Tottenham Court Road. The
+movement was thought to be killed, but it was only scotched; and whatever
+beauty there is in English interiors, whatever advance has been made in
+decorating our homes, is due to that movement. Again, to compare small
+things with great, in the recent attempt to give England a living national
+drama, we have been judged not upon the essence of the matter, but upon
+certain extravagances and side-tendencies. The great public got a notion
+into its head that a set of gloomy, vicious persons had conspired to
+corrupt the youth of our nation by writing immoral plays. And the untimely
+accident of a notorious prosecution giving some colour to the opinion, no
+further examination was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> made of the matter. A clean sweep was made of the
+whole business, and a rigid system of wax-doll morality established
+forthwith, so far, that is, as the modern prose drama is concerned. But
+this wax-doll morality is only enforced against the serious drama of
+modern life. It is not enforced against farce, or musical comedy. It is
+only the serious dramatist who has been gagged and handcuffed. Adultery is
+still an excellent joke in a farce, provided it is conveyed by winks and
+nods. The whole body of a musical entertainment may reek with cockney
+indecency and witlessness, and yet no English mother will sniff offence,
+provided it is covered up with dances and songs. I repeat that if a
+thorough examination is made of the matter, it will be found that the
+recent movement has been judged upon a small side-issue.</p>
+
+<p>We may hope that the English translation of M. Filon&#8217;s work will do
+something to reinstate us in the good opinion of our countrymen. I think,
+if his readers will take his cue that during the last few years there has
+been an earnest attempt on the part of a few writers to establish a living
+English drama, that is, a drama which within necessary limitations and
+conventions sets out with a determination to see English life as it really
+is and to paint English men and women as they really are&mdash;I think if
+playgoers will take that cue from M. Filon, they will get a better notion
+of the truth of the case than if they still regard us as gloomy and
+perverse corrupters of English youth.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>A passage from George Meredith may perhaps serve to indicate the position
+of the English drama at the present moment, and to point in what direction
+its energies should lie when the gags and handcuffs are removed, and the
+stiffness gets out of its joints. At the opening of <i>Diana of the
+Crossways</i> these memorable words occur:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then, ah! then, moreover, will the novelist&#8217;s art (and the dramatist&#8217;s),
+now neither blushless infant nor executive man, have attained its
+majority. We can then be veraciously historical, honestly transcriptive.
+Rose-pink and dirty drab will alike have passed away. Philosophy is the
+foe of both, and their silly cancelling contest, perpetually renewed in a
+shuffle of extremes, as it always is where a phantasm falseness reigns,
+will no longer baffle the contemplation of natural flesh, smother no
+longer the soul issuing out of our incessant strife. Philosophy bids us to
+see that we are not so pretty as rose-pink, not so repulsive as dirty
+drab; and that, instead of everlastingly shifting those barren aspects,
+the sight of ourselves is wholesome, bearable, fructifying, finally a
+delight. Do but perceive that we are coming to philosophy, the stride
+toward it will be a giant&#8217;s&mdash;a century a day. And imagine the celestial
+refreshment of having a pure decency in the place of sham; real flesh; a
+soul born active, wind-beaten, but ascending. Honourable will fiction (and
+the drama) then appear; honourable, a fount of life, an aid to life, quick
+with our blood. Why, when you<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> behold it you love it,&mdash;and you will not
+encourage it?&mdash;or only when presented by dead hands? Worse than that
+alternative dirty drab, your recurring rose-pink is rebuked by hideous
+revelations of the filthy foul; for nature will force her way, and if you
+try to stifle her by drowning she comes up, not the fairest part of her
+uppermost! Peruse your Realists&mdash;really your castigators, for not having
+yet embraced philosophy. As she grows in the flesh when discreetly tended,
+nature is unimpeachable, flower-like, yet not too decoratively a flower;
+you must have her with the stem, the thorns, the roots, and the fat
+bedding of roses. In this fashion she grew, says historical fiction; thus
+does she flourish now, would say the modern transcript, reading the inner
+as well as exhibiting the outer.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And how may you know that you have reached to philosophy? You touch her
+skirts when you share her hatred of the sham decent, her derision of
+sentimentalism. You are one with her when&mdash;but I would not have you a
+thousand years older! Get to her, if in no other way, by the sentimental
+route:&mdash;that very winding path, which again and again brings you round to
+the point of original impetus, where you have to be unwound for another
+whirl; your point of original impetus being the grossly material, not at
+all the spiritual. It is most true that sentimentalism springs from the
+former, merely and badly aping the latter;&mdash;fine flower, or pinnacle
+flame-spire, of sensualism that it is, could it do other?&mdash;and
+accompanying<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> the former it traverses tracks of desert, here and there
+couching in a garden, catching with one hand at fruits, with another at
+colours; imagining a secret ahead, and goaded by an appetite sustained by
+sheer gratifications. Fiddle in harmonics as it may, it will have these
+gratifications at all costs. Should none be discoverable, at once you are
+at the Cave of Despair, beneath the funeral orb of Glaucoma, in the thick
+midst of poinarded, slit-throat, rope-dependent figures, placarded across
+the bosom Disillusioned, Infidel, Agnostic, Miserrimus. That is the
+sentimental route to advancement. Spirituality does not light it;
+evanescent dreams are its oil-lamps, often with wick askant in the socket.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A thousand years! You may count full many a thousand by this route before
+you are one with divine philosophy. Whereas a single flight of brains will
+reach and embrace her; give you the savour of Truth, the right use of the
+senses, <span class="smcap">Reality&#8217;s infinite sweetness</span>; for these things are in philosophy;
+and the fiction (and drama) which is the summary of actual Life, the
+within and without of us, is, prose or verse, plodding or soaring,
+philosophy&#8217;s elect handmaiden.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Dirty drab and rose-pink, with their silly cancelling contest&#8221;&mdash;does not
+that sum up the English drama of the last few years? There was certainly a
+shade too much dirty drab outside a while back, but within there was
+<i>life</i>. What life is there in the drama that has followed? Where does it
+paint one living English character?<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> Where does it touch one single
+interest of our present life, one single concern of man&#8217;s body, soul, or
+spirit? What have these rose-pink revels of wax dolls to do with the
+immense, tragic, incoherent Babel around us, with all its multifold
+interests, passions, beliefs, and aspirations? When will philosophy come
+to our aid and depose this silly rose-pink wax-doll morality?</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But,&#8221; says the British mother, &#8220;I must have plays that I can take my
+daughters to see.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Quite so, my dear ma&#8217;am, and so you shall. But do you let your daughters
+read the Bible? The great realities of life are there handled in a far
+plainer and more outrageous way than they are ever handled on the English
+stage, and yet I cannot bring myself to think that the Bible has had a
+corrupt influence on the youth of our nation. Do you let them read
+Shakespeare? Again there is the freest handling of all these subjects, and
+again I cannot think that Shakespeare is a corrupter of English youth.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The question of verbal indecency or grossness has really very little to do
+with the matter. A few centuries ago English gentlewomen habitually used
+words and spoke of matters in a way that would be considered disgusting in
+a smoking-room to-day. We may be very glad to have outgrown the verbal
+coarseness of former generations. But we are not on that account to plume
+ourselves on being the more moral. It is a matter of taste and custom, not
+of morality.</p>
+
+<p>The real knot of the question is in the method<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> of treating the great
+passions of humanity. If the English public sticks to its present decision
+that these passions are not to be handled at all, then no drama is
+possible. We shall continue our revels of wax dolls, and our theatres will
+provide entertainments, not drama. I do not shut my eyes to the fact that
+many of the greatest concerns of human life lie, to a great extent,
+outside the sexual question; and many great plays have been, and can be,
+written without touching upon these matters at all. But the general public
+will have none of them. The general public demands a love-story, and
+insists that it shall be the main interest of the play. And every English
+playwright knows that to offer the public a pure love-story is the surest
+way of winning a popular success. He knows that if he treats of unlawful
+love he imperils his chances and tends to drive away whole classes&mdash;one
+may say, the great majority of playgoers.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then why be so foolish as to do it?&#8221; is the obvious reply.</p>
+
+<p>The dramatist has no choice. He is as helpless as Balaam, and can as
+little tune his prophesying to a foregone pleasing issue. A certain story
+presents itself to him, forces itself upon him, takes shape and coherence
+in his mind, becomes organic. The story comes automatically, grows
+naturally and spontaneously from what he has observed and experienced in
+the world around him, and he cannot alter its drift or reverse its
+significance without murdering his artistic instincts and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> impulses, and
+making his play a dead, mechanical thing. There are many stories which
+treat of pure love thwarted and baffled and at last rewarded. I do not say
+that these stories may not be quite as worth telling as the others. But
+from the nature of the case, the course of a lawful love, though it may
+not run altogether smooth, does not offer the same tremendous
+opportunities to the dramatist. In affairs of love, as in those of war,
+happy are they who have no history! Almost all the great love-stories of
+the world have been stories of unlawful love, and almost all the great
+plays of the world are built round stories of unlawful love. David and
+Bathsheba, &#8220;the tale of Troy divine,&#8221; Agamemnon, &OElig;dipus, Ph&aelig;dra,
+Tristram and Iseult, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Abelard and Helo&iuml;se,
+Paolo and Francesca, Faust and Margaret, Burns and his Scotch lassies,
+Nelson and Lady Hamilton&mdash;what have they to do with wax-doll morality?
+What has wax-doll morality to do with them?</p>
+
+<p>I know the question is a difficult one. Much may be said for the French
+custom of keeping young girls altogether away from the theatre. I believe
+Dumas <i>fils</i> did not allow his daughter to see any of his plays before she
+was married&mdash;a fact that reminds one of Mr. Brooke&#8217;s delightful suggestion
+to Casaubon&mdash;&#8220;Get Dorothea to read you light things&mdash;Smollett&mdash;<i>Roderick
+Random</i>, <i>Humphrey Clinker</i>. They&#8217;re a little broad, but <i>she may read
+anything now she&#8217;s married</i>, you know.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But whatever liberty may for the future be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> allowed to the dramatist or to
+his hearers, I am sure that no play which came from any English author of
+repute during the years included in M. Filon&#8217;s survey could work in any
+girl&#8217;s mind so much mischief as must be done by the constant trickle of
+little cheap cockney indecencies and suggestions which make the staple of
+entertainment at some of our theatres. But, as I have said, it is only the
+serious dramatist who in the present state of public feeling can be called
+to account for immoral teaching.</p>
+
+<p>I have strayed far from my immediate subject. But if I have written
+anything that cannot be considered appropriate as a preface to M. Filon&#8217;s
+book, I hope it may be accepted as a supplement. At the time M. Filon
+wrote, the English drama was a force in the land, and had the promise of a
+long and vigorous future. Now those who were leading it stand, for the
+moment, defeated and discredited before their countrymen. But the movement
+is not killed. It is only scotched. The English drama will always have
+immortal longings and aspirations, though we may not be chosen to satisfy
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime, one cannot help casting wishful eyes to France, and thinking in
+how different a manner we should have been received by the countrymen of
+M. Filon, with their alert dramatic instinct, their cultivated dramatic
+intelligence, their responsiveness to the best that the drama has to offer
+them. France would not have misunderstood us. France would not have
+treated us in the spirit of Bumble.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> France would not have mistaken the
+men who were sweating to put a little life into her national drama, for a
+set of gloomy corrupters of youth. France would not have bound and gagged
+us and handed us over to the Philistines.</p>
+
+<p>M. Filon has done us a kindness in bringing us for a moment before the
+eyes of Europe. He will have done us a far greater kindness if the English
+edition of his book helps our own countrymen to form a juster opinion of
+those who, in the face of recent discouragement and misrepresentation,
+who, with many faults and blunders and deficiencies, have yet struggled to
+make the English drama a real living art, an intellectual product worthy
+of a great nation.</p>
+
+<p class="right">HENRY ARTHUR JONES.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span></p>
+<h2>AUTHOR&#8217;S PREFACE</h2>
+
+<p>The French public has heard a great deal about modern English poets,
+novelists, statesmen, and philosophers. What is the reason that it hears
+nothing, or next to nothing, about the English drama? Your first impulse
+is, perhaps, to make answer&mdash;&#8220;Because there is no such thing!&#8221; A
+conclusive reason, and one dispensing with the need of any other, were it
+true. But is it true? As it seems to me, it was true some thirty years
+ago, but is true no longer.</p>
+
+<p>And, indeed, were there no English drama at the moment at which I write,
+this in itself would be a phenomenon well worth studying, a problem that
+it would be interesting to solve. The understanding of the miscarriages of
+the mind, of the ineffectual but not wholly vain endeavours, the
+frustrated efforts of Life, contains for the critic, just as it does for
+the follower of any other science, the most fruitful of lessons, the most
+strangely suggestive of all spectacles. Were there no English drama, we
+should have to seek for the reasons&mdash;psychological, social, &aelig;sthetic&mdash;why
+the Anglo-Saxon race, which produced a Shakespeare at a time when it
+counted a bare three millions and covered a mere patch of ground, should
+now be able to produce but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> clowns and dancers, when it is forty times as
+numerous, and has spread itself throughout the world.</p>
+
+<p>But, as a matter of fact, these premises would be false. There <i>is</i> an
+English drama. The demand for it has been felt, and the supply is
+forthcoming. Or, rather, it has come. It is a strenuous youngster,
+determined to keep alive, bearing up pluckily, if with trouble, against
+all the maladies of childhood, against the dangers of evil influences&mdash;the
+brutal roughness of some, and the undue tenderness of others. Its growth
+is slow and laborious; it recalls in no way that marvellous development of
+the early drama, which, towards the end of the sixteenth century, passed
+almost in a breath from the hesitating and halting speech of youth into
+the rich utterance of full maturity. Here we still see doubt, uncertainty,
+confusion. The struggle slackens at times. Improvement is followed by
+lamentable relapse. But there the drama is; it is alive, and it is
+growing.</p>
+
+<p>Ten or a dozen years ago, it was hard to say whether the drama was in
+process of decline or of renascence, whether there was to be an end of it,
+or a new beginning. There were many even among the critics who raised
+their eyes in sorrow to heaven, and spoke of the drama as one speaks of
+the dear departed. And they talked of the past as of a golden age&mdash;&#8220;the
+palmy days, the halcyon days.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>To-day, these pessimists are non-existent.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> Their place has been taken, it
+is true, by those intolerable carpers who, in every generation, would
+prevent youth from daring, regardless of the fact that youth&#8217;s chief
+business is to dare. But these good people remain unheeded. Everyone is
+agreed that to-day is better than yesterday; and almost everyone, that
+to-morrow will be better than to-day. Twenty or thirty years ago, the
+dozen theatres of London were almost always empty; there are now three
+times as many, almost always full. The actors, then, were for the most
+part mere clowns; they are artists now. Then, some of the best of them had
+little more than a bare sustenance; now, there are some of the second rank
+who have their house in town and their house in the country. About 1835, a
+well-known author was glad to sell a drama to Frederick Yates, manager of
+the Adelphi, for the sum of &pound;70, <i>plus</i> &pound;10 for provincial rights. In
+1884, a successful play (that had not yet exhausted its popularity)
+brought its author &pound;10,000 within a few months, of which &pound;3000 came from
+the provinces, and to which America and Australia had also contributed.
+This is a very sordid aspect of the case, but a very important one.
+&pound;10,000 to an author must prove as effectual an incentive to the modern
+English author, as did a <i>coup d&#8217;&oelig;il de Louis</i> to the French dramatist
+in the reign of the Grand Monarque. Such profits should serve to encourage
+talent, if it be beyond them to generate genius.</p>
+
+<p>It is not difficult to find the real reason why<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> the French public is kept
+so little and so ill informed as to the present prospects of the English
+drama. To read Lord Salisbury&#8217;s latest speech, all one has to do is to buy
+a paper. One need but go to a bookseller to procure for oneself a volume
+of Swinburne&#8217;s poems, or a novel by Stevenson, or a work by Lecky or
+Herbert Spencer. It is different with plays. From motives commercial
+rather than literary, it has been the custom not to print these until long
+after their production, and I could instance really popular dramas of
+twenty or forty years ago which have never yet been published. It is
+necessary, therefore, in order to study the drama, to become a regular
+frequenter of the theatre; or rather, it is necessary to have followed its
+course for a number of years in order to note, season by season, the
+changes it has been undergoing, the tendencies which have been developing,
+the growth or disappearance of foreign influences, and, finally, the
+course of each individual talent and of the taste of the public. This
+study, direct from nature&mdash;from the life&mdash;is not without difficulty, even
+to Englishmen; how much less easy must it be to a Frenchman? Ever since it
+has become the business of an actor, not merely to recite and declaim, but
+to reproduce faithfully life itself, how many small points must escape the
+ear of a foreigner?</p>
+
+<p>And if it be hard to say where the drama now stands, to foresee whither it
+is going, it is still harder to ascertain whence it has come. You<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> expect
+from a critic, and quite properly, not merely a snapshot of a literary
+movement at a certain specified moment, but some record also of its
+process of formation. Affairs in England, even more than elsewhere,
+require to be thus approached by the historical method. There is no
+understanding what they are until you have learned what they have been. In
+the present instance, before examining the resuscitated drama, it is
+necessary to see of what it died, and how long it remained entombed. All
+this has to be found out for oneself. The critics of the preceding
+generations wasted their energies upon inessential details. Theatrical
+&#8220;Reminiscences&#8221; are crowded with fictitious anecdotes. This department of
+history is like a garden that has been neglected and grown wild; the
+pathways are lost to sight.</p>
+
+<p>I have believed&mdash;fondly, perhaps&mdash;that, by my special opportunities, I
+should escape some of these difficulties. I have resided long in England.
+I know something of its people and its customs. I know how much value to
+attach to individual testimonies, aided as I am by the thousand opinions
+and feelings which are in the air, so to speak, but which find their way
+never into print. I get the impressions of the public from the public
+itself. Lastly, I love the theatre, and have been an enthusiastic
+playgoer. During the last three or four years more especially I have seen
+all the new pieces; and I may perhaps take this opportunity of expressing
+my appreciation of the courtesy so kindly extended to me in this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>
+connection by the principal managers. I may mention, among those to whom I
+am most indebted, Mr. Tree, Mr. Hare, Mr. Wyndham, Mr. Alexander, and Mr.
+Comyns Carr, the talented dramatist who, in his <i>King Arthur</i>, provided
+Sir Henry Irving with the opportunity of rendering a last homage to the
+genius of Tennyson. Indeed, I have met with wide-open doors and
+outstretched hands wherever I have sought assistance in theatrical
+circles. Many authors have been good enough to place at my disposal copies
+of their works which had been printed only for their own use, or for that
+of their interpreters upon the stage.</p>
+
+<p>But my greatest debt, of course, is to contemporary critics. After having
+first assisted me in my studies, they have done me the further kindness of
+encouraging me with their sympathy upon the publication of the successive
+instalments of my work in the pages of the <i>Revue des Deux Mondes</i>. Their
+mere attention had been a reward; their kindly approval was more than I
+had hoped for. I trust they will be able to accord the same indulgent
+reception to my book, now that it is complete, and that the spirit and
+feelings which have actuated me in my work will be more fully apparent.</p>
+
+<p>I owe a special acknowledgment to Mr. William Archer. You will see in the
+course of my book the part which he has played and is still playing, the
+excellent seeds which he has sown broadcast, not all of which have yet
+borne fruit. Here, I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> shall say only that, had I not had his books as a
+guiding thread, I should have hardly ventured to risk myself in the
+labyrinth of theatrical history.</p>
+
+<p>There are, in the England of to-day, two schools of dramatic criticism,
+whose divergence of opinion is clearly marked. They are called &#8220;New
+Critics&#8221; and &#8220;Old Critics,&#8221; though accidents of date or age are hardly at
+all accountable for their antagonisms; it is possible that during the next
+few years the old criticism may become rejuvenated and that the new
+criticism may age. For my part, I have sided with neither the one nor the
+other, because the r&ocirc;le of neutral is best suited to a foreigner. I have
+supplemented my own personal impressions by quotations, taken impartially
+from both camps, of what has struck me in their criticisms as noteworthy,
+or happy, or true. I think that the new school is right in wishing to free
+the English theatre from foreign influences, and in its efforts to give
+the drama a moral value and an ideal. But I think the old school is not
+far wrong when it defends, to a certain extent, the more popular forms of
+dramatic art, and when it would have the drama follow the indications of
+success, and not isolate itself from that public of whose feelings it
+should be the living expression.</p>
+
+<p>One word in conclusion. Among the French critics who have done me the
+honour of discussing my work during its serial publication, more than one
+has come to the conclusion that, after all, these new English dramas were
+not such great affairs, and that it was hardly worth while to make<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> so
+much fuss about them. They forget, these good people, that I promised them
+no marvels; I did not invite them to a display of masterpieces. If there
+are to be masterpieces at all, they will be of to-morrow, not to-day. What
+I have set out to do is to ascertain at what temperature the drama comes
+to flower, to see how a great section of the human race sets about making
+to itself a new vehicle of enjoyment, of emotion, of thought, and, I may
+even add, of moral education. It is an essay in literary history, but also
+in social history. The two things go together,&mdash;are, indeed, henceforth
+inseparable.</p>
+
+<p>I do not merely follow, step by step, the gradual transformation of the
+theatrical world; I have endeavoured to make clear the attitude taken up
+by the drama in presence of the crisis through which society has been
+passing during the last score or so of years. In this strange conflict
+between laws and manners, upon which side will the drama definitively take
+up its stand? What part will it play, and what place will it assume, in
+the renovation of England by the democracy? Will it help democracy with
+earnest homilies? Or check it with satire and ridicule? Or will it turn
+aside from such things altogether, and aspire to those serene heights of
+art, to which the noises of the plain can never reach? The secret of its
+downfall or glory lies perhaps in the answering of these questions. It was
+time to submit them, pending the hour of their solution.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<div class="note">
+<p class="hang">A Glance back&mdash;From 1820 to 1830&mdash;Kean and Macready&mdash;The Strolling
+Player&mdash;The Critics&mdash;Sheridan Knowles and <i>Virginius</i>&mdash;Douglas
+Jerrold&mdash;His Comedies&mdash;<i>The Rent Day</i>&mdash;<i>The Prisoner of War</i>&mdash;<i>Black-eyed
+Susan</i>&mdash;Collapse of the Privileged Theatres&mdash;Men of Letters come to the
+Rescue of the Drama&mdash;Bulwer Lytton&mdash;<i>The Lady of Lyons</i>&mdash;<i>Richelieu</i>&mdash;<i>Money</i>.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>From 1820 to 1830 the Theatre, or, to be precise, the theatres, prospered
+to all appearances exceedingly. We shall see just now the real
+significance of this prosperity; it may be compared to the great ball
+given by Mercadet on the eve of his bankruptcy. But no one foresaw the
+collapse that was impending. It was the reign of the Adonis of sixty, who
+had spent his life inventing pomades and breaking oaths. It would have
+been droll, indeed, had the man who washed his dirty linen in the House of
+Lords pretended to be scandalised by the licence of the stage. And his
+heir, also a worn-out man of pleasure, had lived for a time with an
+actress, Mrs. Jordan, who, before his accession to the throne, died of
+grief, and forsaken, at St. Cloud. The small girl named Victoria, who
+roamed at this time amongst the lonely avenues of the old park at
+Broadstairs,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> and who was destined presently to bring marital love and the
+domestic virtues back into fashion, was still engrossed in the minding of
+her dolls.</p>
+
+<p>The &#8220;privileged&#8221; theatres were frequented, or patronised,&mdash;to use the
+recognised English expression, with its savour of old-time
+condescension,&mdash;by Society. By the term &#8220;privileged,&#8221; subventioned must
+not be understood. To Drury Lane and Covent Garden alone belonged the
+right of producing the legitimate drama, the plays of Shakespeare, that is
+to say, and of his successors. This was their &#8220;privilege,&#8221; a privilege
+which might soon have become but a doubtful benefit had not great actors
+arisen to keep alive the classical drama by their command on the suffrages
+of the masses. The generation of actors who had studied in the school of
+Garrick, and had maintained its traditions, was taking its farewell of the
+stage in the person of John Kemble and Mrs. Siddons&mdash;Siddons, &#8220;whose
+voice,&#8221; one of her contemporaries tells us, &#8220;was more delicious than the
+most delicious music.&#8221; Edmund Kean had already come forward, and after
+him, Macready.</p>
+
+<p>I try to picture to myself these two men as they appeared upon the stage,
+to produce for myself from all the accounts of them that I have read the
+illusion of their living presence. The first thing that comes home to one
+is Kean&#8217;s Bohemianism, Macready&#8217;s respectability and good-breeding.
+Macready was the friend of the leading men of letters of his time, and had
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> advantage of their advice and support. Kean&#8217;s only intimate was the
+brandy-bottle that killed him. Writing to Frederick Yates, the manager of
+the Adelphi, to ask him for a box, he says, &#8220;I don&#8217;t want to herd with the
+mob. I like the money of the public, but the public itself I scorn.&#8221; He in
+his turn might be looked upon with scorn, were it not for the sufferings
+of his childhood and youth. If ever man had the right to hate life, it was
+he.</p>
+
+<p>At Madame Tussaud&#8217;s the two rivals may now be seen standing side by side,
+Kean wearing the kilt of Macbeth and Macready the chlamys of Coriolanus.
+Save for his small size, the former seems the better endowed by nature;
+his countenance is sombre and bears the stamp of the tragedian. The
+angular and wrinkled face of Macready, on the other hand,&mdash;his slitlike
+mouth, his close-compressed lips and projecting jaws,&mdash;might have made the
+fortune of a clown. He had only to emphasise or modify its effects,
+indeed, for his tragic qualities to become comic. It was thus that he
+rendered so admirably the officiousness and fussiness of Oakley, the sly
+sensuality of Joseph Surface, the English Tartufe. Alas! he evoked a smile
+sometimes as Othello; when the Moorish <i>condottiere</i>, this personification
+of a passionate, noble, and high-strung race, was lost in an insensate
+negro or, if Th&eacute;ophile Gautier were to be believed, something lower still,
+&#8220;an anthropoid ape.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Contemporaries seem agreed in attributing to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> Kean more genius, more
+talent to Macready. But there are many occasions when talent serves better
+than genius. To see Kean, said Coleridge, was to read Shakespeare by
+flashes of lightning. It is a method which has its merits, but by it one
+misses a good deal. Kean had some wonderful moments, then relapsed into
+dulness and insignificance. He would stumble, like a schoolboy reciting a
+lesson which had no meaning for him, through the whole of the speech of
+the Moor of Venice before the Senate, &#8220;letting himself go&#8221; only in the
+last verse, in which his emotion on seeing Desdemona brought down the
+house. He concentrated a whole passion into these final words. It was
+always thus with him.</p>
+
+<p>I may say of them, following Mr. Archer: of the two, Kean was the greater
+actor and Macready the greater artist. Everything that pertained to
+instinct was stronger in the one, and everything that pertained to
+intellect was stronger in the other. Macready bore himself best in moods
+of calm, rendered with most effect the more virtuous emotions,&mdash;<i>moral</i>
+passions one may call them. All that was greatest in Shakespeare, the very
+soul of his poetry, was revealed through Kean. On one point only had
+Macready the advantage: he had a way of gazing into space when his lined
+and haggard countenance seemed to tell of the seeing of things invisible.
+There was no one like Macready for the suggestion of the supernatural. In
+all the other provinces of terror Kean was the real master.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>Mr. Wilton, the father of an actress of whom I shall have much to say in
+these pages, used to tell how in his youth, when he was still a young and
+unknown actor, he had had the honour of playing with Edmund Kean. They
+were rehearsing the scene in which Shylock, baulked of his coveted gain,
+rushes frantically upon the stage crying out for his prey.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Have you ever seen me in this before?&#8221; inquired the great actor of his
+humble colleague.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, sir.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, we must rehearse it then, otherwise you would be too much startled
+this evening.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They went through it, and yet Wilton tells us that when the evening came,
+Kean terrified him so by the indescribable violence of his performance
+that he was within an ace of losing his head and fleeing from the stage as
+one might flee from the cage of a wild beast.</p>
+
+<p>It may be supposed from all this that Kean was in the habit of abandoning
+himself entirely to the inspiration of the moment. Now, inspiration upon
+the stage is almost a meaningless expression. In the very moments when the
+terrifying actor was crossing the stage like a madman, he was counting his
+steps. As for Macready, immediately before the great scene of Shylock he
+would work himself up into excitement, emitting every imaginable oath, and
+brandishing a heavy ladder until he panted actually for breath. Then he
+would rush down the stage, pallid, breathless, the sweat coursing down his
+face, the very picture of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> a man bursting with rage. The audience would
+have laughed rather than have shuddered had they seen the ladder!</p>
+
+<p>Macready&#8217;s voice was so rich and so beautiful that it delighted even those
+who could not follow the meaning of the words which it gave forth. But he
+was too intelligent an actor to make use of it as a mere instrument of
+music. Until his time verses were chanted on the stage. He himself was
+content to declaim them. English dramatic verse consists of a succession
+of five iambics, which, by the alternation of short feet and long, results
+in a regular and cadenced rhythm. From time to time an imperfection, the
+deliberate introduction for instance of a trochee, or perhaps a redundant
+syllable added at the end of the verse, has the effect of breaking this
+monotony, but it recommences at once, and the mind relapses under its
+sway, just as a child is sent to sleep again by a lullaby. My foreign ear
+was long in taking to it, but at last I began to derive from its melody
+the same delight that the music of Greek and Latin verse had given me long
+before. This verse, so interesting and curious in its structure, seems to
+bear a certain secret affinity with the genius of the English race; the
+rhythm would seem to have been suggested by the clattering of a horse&#8217;s
+hoofs, or by the murmuring of waves.</p>
+
+<p>It is, then, no easy matter to deal with it. Macready approached it
+reverentially, as was but fitting in a scholar and a devotee of
+Shakespeare. He wished to leave to it all its melody, its poetic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> beauty,
+but he wished at the same time to emphasise the most important words and
+to bring out the full force of their meaning. He wished to blend the pure
+classicism of John Kemble with the passion of Kean, and to add that
+tendency to realism which marked his own temperament, and which sometimes
+carried him too far; when as Macbeth he came back from Duncan&#8217;s room, he
+looked, according to Lewes, like an Old Bailey ruffian.</p>
+
+<p>It is enough for me to have shown that Macready, like many others in
+different parts of Europe in 1825, was prepared for a drama that should be
+in closer touch with life. In France, Romanticism came to turn aside and
+check the movement. In England, there came absolutely nothing.</p>
+
+<p>But the bankruptcy of the new school was still far off, and the literary
+atmosphere was charged with warlike sounds at the time when Macready made
+his appearance in France, with an English company, in the course of the
+year 1827. He was received as a missionary. He had come to preach
+Shakespeare to a tribe of poor &#8220;ignoramuses,&#8221; whom their fathers had
+taught to worship the idols of Lemierre and Luce de Lancival, but who were
+now anxious to be converted. The young &#8220;leading lady&#8221; was a Miss Smithson,
+whose Irish accent clashed somewhat with the verse of Shakespeare. The
+Parisians thought she had talent, and lost their hearts to &#8220;la belle
+Smidson.&#8221;<a name='fna_1' id='fna_1' href='#f_1'><small>[1]</small></a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> In London she was a joke. It is certain, however, that these
+performances revealed to him who was to be the only true dramatist of the
+romantic school&mdash;to Alexandre Dumas&mdash;the secret of a new art; that they
+made an epoch, therefore, in our literary history, and that they affixed
+the seal to the reputation of the English tragedian.</p>
+
+<p>Over and above the privileged theatres, there were a number of others,
+such as the Haymarket and the Adelphi, at which farces and melodramas were
+chiefly given. In the provinces there prevailed a curious system, without
+any analogue, so far as I know, in France, that of going on circuit,&mdash;a
+term borrowed, like the system itself, from the language and customs of
+the law. Just as the English judges make the round at certain dates of all
+the important towns within a certain district, holding assizes at each,
+and accompanied by an army of barristers, solicitors, and legal officials
+of all kinds, so the travelling companies of actors would cater for a
+whole county, or group of counties, giving a series of performances in the
+theatre of every town at certain fixed dates, in addition to f&ecirc;te-days and
+market-days. Communication was slow and costly in those days, and trips to
+London infinitely rarer than they are now. The country folk had to look to
+their travelling company to keep them in touch with the successes of the
+moment.</p>
+
+<p>On arriving in a new town, the manager&#8217;s wife would go about soliciting
+respectfully the patronage of the ladies of the place. The manager<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> busied
+himself over everything, played minor r&ocirc;les, presided over the box-office,
+undertook the scene painting, and would even take off his coat and turn up
+his sleeves and lend a hand to the machinist. His life, and the life of
+all his company, was half <i>bourgeois</i>, half Bohemian; always <i>en route</i>,
+but always on the same beat, always coming upon familiar and friendly
+faces,&mdash;a beat on which his father and grandfather before him had followed
+the same career. He had friends living in every city, dead friends in
+every churchyard. Children were born to him on his travels, and when four
+or five years old made their appearance upon the stage. These comings and
+goings, the journeyings over green fields, the stoppages and ample
+breakfastings at little hillside inns, while the horses browsed at large
+along the hedges,&mdash;the freshness and peaceful rusticity of all these
+things, alternating with the tinsel of the theatre and the applause of the
+audiences, with the artificiality and feverishness of theatrical
+life,&mdash;must have been a constant entertainment to the little actors and
+actresses of eight or nine. For the adults, however, the life was a hard
+one, and only too often their <i>roman comique</i> was a <i>roman tragique</i> in
+reality.</p>
+
+<p>The public of these small towns wanted, on their part, to know something
+of what went on behind the scenes. Sides were taken on the subject of the
+actor&#8217;s life, and hot discussions were called forth. Idle pens took to
+writing pamphlets for or against individual actors, and these had to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>
+defend themselves as best they might against their malignant inquisitors,
+using their booths as pulpits for the purpose. Here, for instance, is an
+incident that occurred one evening in a Northern town after the curtain
+had been raised for <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>. The <i>jeune premier</i> comes
+forward to the footlights, and takes the hand of one of the leading
+actresses with the stiff, staid courtliness of former days, and the
+following dialogue is exchanged between them:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Have I ever been guilty of any injustice of any kind to you since you
+have been in the theatre?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, sir&#8221; (she replies).</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Have I ever behaved to you in an ungentlemanlike manner?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, sir.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Have I ever kicked you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, no! sir!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The audience applauds. Antony and Cleopatra assume their correct attitudes
+and (this prologue to Shakespeare successfully performed) proceed with
+their r&ocirc;les.<a name='fna_2' id='fna_2' href='#f_2'><small>[2]</small></a></p>
+
+<p>From time to time a great artist came forth, after three or four
+generations of mediocrities, from one of these theatrical nurseries. The
+others remained tied to their stake, revolving ceaselessly within the
+orbit of their chain. For them there was no question of glory or fortune.
+They lived simply and happily, if only they came to the end of the year
+without having gone to prison, and if only at the end of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> their life they
+saw their children growing up and getting educated. Their courage they
+derived in part from the bottle, in part from religion. A correspondence
+which has come to light through an unforeseen chance (a grandson who had
+become famous) revivifies for us the actor-manager on circuit. He is a
+good fellow, but a trifle sententious. He quotes from the works of his
+authors, tragic and comic (he has them at his finger-ends) axioms upon all
+the incidents and experiences of life. He quotes them just as Nehemiah
+Wallington or Colonel Hutchinson used to quote the Bible. He is as easily
+excited and as easily calmed as a child. A storm troubles him as a bad
+omen. A rainbow smiles on him as a promise. Providence may be trusted, he
+believes, to look after the takings of poor players. He is the Vicar of
+Wakefield become <i>p&egrave;re noble</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Neither in this monotonous and easy-going phase of life, nor in the
+theatrical world of London, had anyone any idea of modifying the forms or
+the tendencies of the stage. Those whose duty it should have been to give
+the necessary impulse did not seem even to suspect that there was any such
+work for them to perform. The critics of the time, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt,
+Charles Lamb, have achieved a permanent place in literature. And yet when
+one reads them one is disappointed. Except for a few pages of Lamb, one
+may look to them in vain for the expression of anything like a general
+idea. They<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> are taken up almost altogether in discussing and comparing the
+different actors. It does not occur to them to attempt an appreciation or
+a classification of the plays, for these plays had already been
+definitively classified and pronounced upon. There was no drama, they
+seemed to think, except that of Shakespeare and his satellites; and as for
+comedy, it had said its last word when Goldsmith and Sheridan died. And
+they were quite content that this should be so. They saw no reason why
+they, their successors, and the general public, should not continue until
+the end of time to carp over an entry of Macbeth or an exit of
+Othello!&mdash;or why they should not sit out revivals without end of <i>The
+School for Scandal</i> or <i>She Stoops to Conquer</i>. There are eras which will
+have novelties at all cost, and eras which cling to antiquity.</p>
+
+<p>Macready, with the instinct of a &#8220;realistic&#8221; and &#8220;modern&#8221; actor, kept on
+the lookout for authors. A former Irish schoolmaster, who also had been an
+actor, and whose name was Sheridan Knowles, brought him a tragedy entitled
+<i>Virginius</i> which he had written in three months. He made a good deal of
+this point, never having read, probably, the scene of the sonnet of
+Oronte. The piece was put into rehearsal and played at Covent Garden in
+the spring of 1820. Reynolds introduced the unknown author to the public
+in a carefully-written prologue. In it he ridiculed the drama of the
+period, which he described as &#8220;stories&#8221;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>
+&#8220;... piled with dark and cumbrous fate,<br />
+And words that stagger under their own weight.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He promised to return to Truth and Nature, the invariable programme of all
+attempts at reforming the drama. And as a matter of fact, <i>Virginius</i>
+might be accepted in a certain sense as a return to Truth and Nature. It
+belonged to what we were going to call in France, twenty-five years later,
+the School of Common Sense. Or if one prefers to look back instead of
+forward, one might say that in it the rules of Diderot and Sedaine&#8217;s
+<i>Drame Bourgeois</i> seem to have been transferred to Roman tragedy. The
+piece, like the plays of Shakespeare, was partly in verse and partly in
+prose, but the verse was little more, really, than metrical prose. The
+plot developed clearly and logically with a scrupulous observance of the
+probable and natural. The heroine (one smiles at having to describe her by
+so grand a name) is for all the world a little <i>pensionnaire</i> who might
+have got her ideas on rectitude from Miss Edgeworth. She occupies herself
+with her needle in working together her initials and those of the young
+man of her choice, who is no other than the tribune Icilius. It is this
+piece of embroidery which reveals her secret. &#8220;My father is incensed with
+you,&#8221; she says to Icilius, and, her lover becoming impassioned, she covers
+her face with her hands, saying (as is correct at such a juncture), &#8220;Leave
+me, leave me!&#8221; He does not obey, and the author, not knowing how else to
+prolong the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> scene, has recourse to high-sounding language.... &#8220;Thou dost
+but beggar me, Icilius,&#8221; exclaims Virginia, &#8220;when thou makest thyself a
+bankrupt.&#8221; And Icilius replies, ... &#8220;My sweet Virginia, we do but lose and
+lose, and win and win, playing for nothing but to lose and win. Then let
+us drop the game&mdash;and thus I stop it,&#8221; and he stops it by seizing her in
+his arms.</p>
+
+<p>In the scene in which the client of Appius attempts to possess himself of
+her, Virginia remains absolutely mute. She is mute also in the great scene
+of the judgment, and she seems, moreover, to have understood nothing of
+what has been happening, for she asks her father if he is going to take
+her home. From the angels and furies of Shakespeare and Corneille we have
+come down to a virtuous idiot, and are told that this is a return to
+Nature.</p>
+
+<p>Virginius is an excellent father, a liberal-minded member of the middle
+class, interesting himself in politics. He knows his rights and does not
+stand in awe of the ministers. He reminds one of the city man who returns
+home to his comfortable residence in Chiswick or Hampstead after his day&#8217;s
+work in his Leadenhall Street office. He is a widower, but his house is
+looked after by a very respectable elderly person, in whose excellent
+sentiments and weak intelligence we recognise a housekeeper of the
+superior type. The whole household is tranquil, well behaved,
+Christian,&mdash;I might even say, Puritan.</p>
+
+<p>Doubtless the Romans of the republic were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> men like ourselves, but a true
+picture of their humanity should reveal characteristics different from
+ours. The author should either have sought out these characteristics, or
+else have restricted himself to that sphere of great passions and heroic
+madnesses in which all the centuries meet on common ground. One is
+obliged, however unwillingly, to admit the impossibility of retrospective
+realism.</p>
+
+<p>When Virginius returns from the camp to defend his child, he gazes on her
+long, and tells her he had never seen her look so like her mother&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8220;... It was her soul, ... her soul that played just then<br />
+About the features of her child, and lit them<br />
+Into the likeness of her own. When first<br />
+She placed thee in my arms&mdash;I recollect it<br />
+As a thing of yesterday!&mdash;she wished, she said,<br />
+That it had been a man. I answered her,<br />
+It was the mother of a race of men;<br />
+And paid her for thee with a kiss.&#8221;...</p>
+
+<p>There is something at once virile and moving in this passage, but how many
+such cases are to be found in this tragedy? The paternal emotion of
+Virginius prepares us but ill for the heroic crime which he is to commit.
+There is the same contrast between the antiquity of the events and the
+modernness of the characters.</p>
+
+<p>But the ruin of the piece was the fifth act.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> Virginia dead, it remains
+only to punish Appius according to the good old laws of tragic justice.
+For that, a single moment and a single gesture had been enough. Sheridan
+Knowles was in the position of being obliged to write his fifth act and
+having nothing to put into it. He had recourse to a mad scene. Merim&eacute;e has
+written that &#8220;<i>il faut laisser aux d&eacute;butants les foux et les chiens</i>.&#8221;
+This doctrine has Homer and Shakespeare against it. On the other hand, the
+example of Sheridan Knowles proves that the recourse to madness will not
+always get the beginner out of his difficulty.</p>
+
+<p>Virginius has succeeded in making his way into Appius&#8217;s prison&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8220;How if I thrust my hand into your breast,<br />
+And tore your heart out, and confronted it<br />
+With your tongue. I&#8217;d like it. Shall we try it?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>When the old centurion plunged his hands into the robes of the <i>decemvir</i>,
+as though he expected to find Virginia in his pocket, and when Appius,
+horrified at finding himself &#8220;caged with a madman,&#8221; appealed for help with
+all the strength of his lungs whilst calling out to his assailant, &#8220;Keep
+down your hands! Help! Help!&#8221;&mdash;I cannot imagine how the spectators of 1820
+can have refrained from laughter. The two men quitted the scene fighting,
+and turned up again in another room,&mdash;for the prison was a veritable suite
+of rooms. Having killed Appius, the old man grew<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> calm, and Icilius had
+but to call him by his name to bring back to him his reason. He slipped a
+small urn into his hands. &#8220;What is this?&#8221; asks Virginius. &#8220;That is
+Virginia.&#8221; And the curtain fell.</p>
+
+<p>Contemporary critics admitted that the last act was somewhat weak. It was
+curtailed, but delete it as one would, it was still too long. Had it been
+reduced to ten lines, these ten lines had been ten lines too much.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of everything, however, <i>Virginius</i>, by Macready&#8217;s help, remained
+a masterpiece for twenty-five years! Knowles made haste to produce some
+more. He tells in one of his na&iuml;ve prefaces, how he went to stop with his
+friend, Mr. Robert Dick, near an Irish lough known for its scenery and its
+fish, how he would spend the morning at his composition and the afternoon
+angling, and how his host would snatch his fishing line from his hands
+whenever he caught him using it before midday.... If only Mr. Dick had let
+him fish in peace! The trout he might have hooked had been at least as
+valuable as his verse and prose.</p>
+
+<p>If there was any sort of foreshadowing of a national drama in the years
+1830 to 1840, it must be sought for in the works of Douglas Jerrold.
+France knows little of Jerrold, who knew France so well. His was a valiant
+little soul; his life was one long battle&mdash;a battle against obscurity,
+against ill luck, against the enemies of his country, against the
+oppressors of the poor, last but not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> least, against all those whom he
+disliked. He belonged to that theatrical world at which I have glanced. He
+was the son of a provincial manager who had met with failure. In his early
+youth, while yet a child, one may say, he served as midshipman in the wars
+against Napoleon. He became a journalist later, and threw himself into the
+midst of politics. Whatever may be said of his caustic and aggressive
+temperament, he belonged, every inch of him, to that noble generation
+which aspired so fervently after better things, which strove so
+strenuously for what was right, which believed it could help humanity
+forward on the way to a progress without bounds. For forty years he
+vibrated with generous passions, and grew calm only in the presence of
+death, which he met like a stoic but with a simplicity not all the stoics
+knew. I have been brought into intimate relations with his son, who has
+repeated to me his last words&mdash;&#8220;This is as it should be.&#8221; To fight for
+justice and to accept the inevitable without fear,&mdash;this was the life of a
+man.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Rent Day</i> was played on January 25, 1832, that is to say, at the
+commencement of the memorable year which was to see the passing of the
+Reform Bill. It is the day upon which the rents have become due. The
+tenants have brought their money. There is drinking and laughing and
+singing, the while the heaps of crowns are exchanged for receipts,&mdash;for
+nothing was accomplished in England in those days without<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> drinking, and
+on rent day it had been almost a disgrace not to be at least &#8220;well on.&#8221;
+The middleman is presiding over the function. This morning he has received
+a letter from the young squire, thus expressed&mdash;&#8220;Master Crumbs, use all
+despatch, and send me, on receipt of this, five hundred pounds. Cards have
+tricked me and the devil cogged the dice. Get the money at all costs, and
+quickly.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Robert Grantley.</span>&#8221; The middleman therefore must have no pity.
+There is one farmer who cannot pay; his brother the schoolmaster comes to
+plead for him. He himself is too poor to lend&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Toby</i> (the schoolmaster): &#8220;My goods and chattels are a volume of
+<i>Robinson Crusoe</i>, ditto <i>Pilgrim&#8217;s Progress</i>, with Plutarch&#8217;s
+<i>Morals</i>, much like the morals of many other people&mdash;a good deal dog&#8217;s
+eared.&#8221;...</p>
+
+<p><i>Crumbs</i>: &#8220;Has your brother no one to speak for him?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Toby</i>: &#8220;Now, I think on&#8217;t, yes. There are two.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Crumbs</i>: &#8220;Where shall I find them?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Toby</i>: &#8220;In the churchyard. Go to the graves of the old men, and there
+are the words the dead will say to you:&mdash;&#8216;We lived sixty years in
+Holly Farm; in all that time we never begged an hour of the squire; we
+paid rent, tax, and tithe; we earned our bread with our own hands, and
+owed no man a penny when laid down here. Well, then, will you be hard
+on young Heywood; will ye press upon our child, our poor Martin, when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>
+murrain has come upon his cattle and blight fallen upon his corn?&#8217;
+This is what they will say.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>The middleman is not one to be moved by the supplications of the
+schoolmaster. He replies monotonously, inexorably&mdash;&#8220;My accounts; I must
+settle my accounts!&#8221; Grouped round him, farther back, are the instruments
+of his lowly tyrant, the beadle (for whom a young writer now hidden from
+the public eye in the gallery of the House of Commons, Charles Dickens,
+has in store so terrible a cudgelling) and the appraiser. In those days it
+was the beadle&#8217;s function to execute evictions for the benefit of young
+squires who had lost at cards. The first act of <i>The Rent Day</i> concludes
+with a spectacle of this kind. We witness the seizing of the peasant&#8217;s bed
+and of all his furniture, down to a bird-cage and the children&#8217;s toys. The
+scene follows its course; entreaties, curses, threats, then silence and
+desolation. It was thus that the social question was submitted. Had we
+been there, and in our twentieth year,&mdash;you and I who have to contest
+against the grandsons of the victims, become in their turn
+slave-drivers,&mdash;we should have joined with the rest of the pit in cheering
+Jerrold.</p>
+
+<p>The first act gives promise of a vigorous comedy of manners, but we sink
+gradually into a dense melodrama crowded with absurd incidents and
+extravagant surprises. Was this Jerrold&#8217;s fault, or that of a public which
+insisted upon monster jokes and monster crimes? I am <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>inclined to adopt
+the latter explanation, for supply is regulated by demand; a mercantile
+axiom which resolves itself in a great natural and highly scientific law.</p>
+
+<p>Jerrold could achieve a light and realistic touch at need, and he has
+given proof of it in <i>A Prisoner of War</i>. The scene is laid in France
+shortly after the rupture of the Treaty of Amiens. Quite impartially, and
+with consummate wit, Jerrold holds up to ridicule the <i>chauvinisme</i> of the
+two nations. He does not confound bombast with valour. &#8220;Soldiers,&#8221; says
+one character, &#8220;should die and civilians lie for their country.&#8221; We are
+shown&mdash;and this has some historical value&mdash;the English prisoners living
+comfortably in a French town, frequenting the Caf&eacute; Imperial, regaling
+themselves on the bulletins of the &#8220;Grande Arm&eacute;e,&#8221; with no other
+obligation than that of answering the roll-call morning and evening. They
+have money, for the lodging-house keepers compete for their favour; and
+they pay little French boys to sing &#8220;Rule Britannia.&#8221; As it seems to me,
+if Garneray&#8217;s Memoirs are to be believed, our compatriots were hardly so
+well off on the English hulks.</p>
+
+<p>But what strikes me most in <i>A Prisoner of War</i> is one really ingenious
+and moving scene. It is the evening. An old officer, a prisoner, has
+remained late over a game of cards with a comrade. Meantime his daughter
+Clary has a man in her bedroom. Don&#8217;t be alarmed&mdash;the man is her husband.
+A secret marriage is always<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> introduced in English plays wherever a
+seduction is to be found in ours. Suddenly Clary is called out to, loudly,
+by her father. She imagines herself found out, and arrives quite pallid.
+What had she been doing? her father asks. How was it she had a light still
+in her window? So she had been reading, eh? Still reading&mdash;always reading.
+And what had she been reading? Novels! As though there weren&#8217;t enough real
+tears in the world&mdash;real, scalding, bitter tears from breaking hearts&mdash;but
+we must have a parcel of lying books to make people cry double! And what
+was this silly novel of hers? Clary doesn&#8217;t know what to answer, and
+begins telling her own story&mdash;the youth of no family and fortune, the
+moment of recklessness, the giving of her heart to him and then her hand.
+&#8220;Well, and how did it end?&#8221; asks the old officer. Clary had &#8220;not come to
+the end&#8221;! Ah, then (he resumes), she had turned down the page when he had
+interrupted her? But he could tell her how it ended. The young couple went
+upon their knees, and the father swore a little, then took out his pocket
+handkerchief, wiped his eyes, and forgave them.</p>
+
+<p>At this Clary&#8217;s face lights up with hope. So that would be the ending,
+according to him! He could assure her of it? Yes, he replies, he could
+assure her of it. She is on the point of falling upon her knees. Behind
+the half-open door, behind which there glimmers the light of a candle, her
+lover waits, ready to rush forward upon a word from her. &#8220;Of course, in
+real life<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> it would be quite another thing,&#8221; goes on her father. &#8220;If it
+were I, what would you do?&#8221; &#8220;I&#8217;d kill him like a dog. And as for you&mdash;But
+there, it&#8217;s too horrible to think of! Let&#8217;s talk of something else.&#8221; And
+he tells her he has found a husband for her. Naturally she protests. The
+old man goes off again into a fury. &#8220;These cursed novels are turning your
+head. I shall go and burn them this instant.&#8221; And he steps towards the
+door, behind which Clary&#8217;s lover stands trembling.</p>
+
+<p>All this is old-fashioned enough; it dates from the time when the drama
+was made out of the materials of a vaudeville. And yet I think that even
+nowadays this scene would tell.</p>
+
+<p>But once again Jerrold had to follow the public taste which led him so
+terribly astray. His greatest success was his worst production,
+<i>Black-eyed Susan</i>, the popularity of which does not appear to have been
+even yet exhausted. The hero is a sailor, who translates the simplest
+ideas into nautical phraseology; the heroine a woman of humble birth, who
+expresses the loftiest sentiments in the finest language. The prolonged
+success of such a piece shows the delight which the lower sections of the
+public derive from the extravagant and the absurd,&mdash;the gross idealism, as
+one may call it, of the masses.</p>
+
+<p>It is more difficult to understand how Jerrold, who had some regard for
+realism, and who had himself served on the sea, could have brought himself
+to write a drama which had in it not a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> semblance of truth, not a touch of
+nature. In spite of all, however, even in <i>Black-eyed Susan</i>, one may find
+that unrestrained violence, that <i>diable au corps</i>, which our fathers
+accepted willingly as passion.</p>
+
+<p>It was not the public taste alone that was at fault; from the year 1830
+the commercial decadence of the English theatre became more and more
+marked. As often happens, contemporaries failed to appreciate the real
+meaning of this, and attributed it to accidental causes; amongst others,
+to the rivalry between Drury Lane and Covent Garden, a rivalry which was
+carried to absurd extremes under some of the managers, who bid against
+each other, both for plays and players, to an extent that ruined them.
+Then came the notion of ending this dangerous competition by uniting the
+two houses under the same management, but the enterprise proved too big
+for one man and for a single company. The separate existence had to come
+into force again. A certain Captain Polhill, who aspired to the r&ocirc;le of a
+M&aelig;cenas, lost fifty thousand pounds in two years over the management of
+Drury Lane. Then Macready in his turn had a try, and managed the two
+theatres successively from 1838 to 1843.</p>
+
+<p>The privileged theatres were no longer living on their privilege; they
+were dying of it. Theatres were springing up all round them, which
+succeeded sometimes in drawing the public by strange means. Edmund Yates,
+whose father was then manager<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> of the Adelphi, has given us in his memoirs
+some idea of the attractions then in vogue: a Chinese giant, Indian
+dancers, a legless acrobat who got himself up with spreading wings as a
+monstrous fly, and who sprang about, tied on to a thread, from floor to
+ceiling. The privileged theatres had no other course than to emulate the
+unprivileged ones. They produced Shakespeare in the form of
+curtain-raisers, or to wind up the evening before half-empty benches. They
+sliced him, carved him limb from limb, and served him up in bits, or
+floating in a dish of music, with a garnishment of loud and vulgar <i>mise
+en sc&egrave;ne</i>, of which the contemporaries of Elizabeth would have been
+ashamed. And, in spite of all, in spite even of Macready&#8217;s talent (Kean
+had died in 1833), they could not get the public to accept him. The new
+public which filled the theatres was gluttonous rather than <i>gourmet</i>, and
+wanted not quality but quantity&mdash;at least six acts every evening, and
+sometimes even seven or eight. Masterful, clamorous, ill-bred, uncouth in
+its expression both of enjoyment and of dissatisfaction, its attitude
+astounded Price Puckler-Muskau, a very careful observer who visited
+England about the time. Macready acknowledges that there were some corners
+in Drury Lane where a respectable woman might not venture. The barbarians
+had begun to arrive; it was the first wave of democracy before which the
+<i>habitu&eacute;</i>, the playgoer of the old school, was forced to flee.</p>
+
+<p>In 1832 a Commission was instituted by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> Parliament for the purpose of
+going into the question of liberty for the theatre. The members could not
+agree upon the subject, and the question was not settled until after
+eleven years of discussion. Before this ultimate surrender of Privilege
+and Tradition to the new spirit, one last effort had been made by men of
+letters to save the theatre. This was when the great tragedian undertook
+the management of Covent Garden. There was only one feeling in the world
+of literature: &#8220;We must back up Macready!&#8221; Everyone helped. John Forster
+applied himself to the stage management. Leigh Hunt left aside his
+criticisms to undertake a tragedy (based on a legend in which Shelley had
+already found inspiration), and those who could not do so much penned
+prologues and epilogues and brought them to Covent Garden, just as in
+former days, at moments of national peril, the patriotic rich brought
+their valuables to the Mint.<a name='fna_3' id='fna_3' href='#f_3'><small>[3]</small></a></p>
+
+<p>From this abortive renaissance there remain one reputation and three
+plays. The three plays are <i>The Lady of Lyons</i>, <i>Richelieu</i>, and <i>Money</i>;
+the reputation is that of Bulwer, the first Lord Lytton. Bulwer passed
+himself off as a <i>grand seigneur</i> and a genius; he was really but a clever
+man and a dandy, who exploited literature for his social advancement. He
+affected a lofty<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> originality, but his talents were mostly imitative. His
+chief gift, almost entirely wanting in his books, but very notable in his
+life, was what we call <i>finesse</i>. He took from the Byronian Satanism as
+much as England would put up with in 1840. He copied Victor Hugo secretly
+and discreetly. A sort of Gothic democrat, he managed at the same time to
+charm romantic youths and flatter the proletariat by pretending to hurl
+down that society in whose front rank he aspired to take his place. His
+novels were terribly long-winded, but there are generations which find
+such a quality to their taste. When at last it was discovered that his
+sublimity was a spurious sublimity, that his history was false history,
+his &#8220;middle-ages&#8221; bric-a-brac, his poetry mere rhetoric, his democracy a
+farce, his human heart a heart that had never beat in a man&#8217;s breast, his
+books mere windy bladders,&mdash;why, it was too late! The game had been played
+successfully and was over&mdash;the squireen of Knebworth, the self-styled
+descendant of the Vikings, had founded a family and hooked a peerage.</p>
+
+<p>He had an eye for all the popular causes which were to be served&mdash;and were
+likely to be of service. When there was talk of reforming the drama, he at
+once came to the front and took the lead. He was the heart and soul of the
+Commission of 1832. He was one of those who came to the support of
+Macready in 1838. It was to this end he wrote <i>The Lady of Lyons</i> (without
+putting his name to it at first).</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span>This is a literary melodrama; a detestable combination, for melodrama,
+considered either as a variation from drama proper or as a separate type,
+is not to be raised to the dignity of literature by the veneering of it
+with a thin layer of poetry. This operation does but produce wild and
+violent incongruities. In the first act of <i>The Lady of Lyons</i>, Madame
+Deschappelles is a Palais Royal <i>Maman</i>. Only a Palais Royal <i>Maman</i>, and
+only one of the most pronounced of them at that, could imagine she would
+become a dowager princess by marrying her daughter to a prince. Pauline
+belongs to the same repertory. What are one&#8217;s feelings, then, on hearing
+tragic verses from her lips in the third act and seeing her compete with
+Imogene and Griselda in the sublimity (and absurdity) of her
+self-sacrifice! In the fourth act she has resumed something of her natural
+temperament&mdash;the temperament of a prim and tedious governess.</p>
+
+<p>But I suppose I must put up with Pauline Deschappelles willy-nilly! It is
+one of the accepted doctrines of the old dramatic psychology that a
+character can pass from good to evil at critical moments, and pass out
+again even when all egress is barred. It is an absurd notion, but if
+Bulwer conforms to it, at least he is in the same boat with many others.
+Where he is himself at fault&mdash;that which indicates the obliquity of his
+moral outlook&mdash;is his having presented to us in Claude Melnotte a hero who
+is a double-dyed cheat. A mere peasant by birth, he passes <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>himself off as
+a prince and marries under his false name the daughter of a rich
+bourgeois; a soldier by profession, he becomes a general within two years,
+and in these two years amasses a fortune. How? By what methods of
+brigandage we are not told, but we are left to accept it as a matter of
+course. As regards the first point, love may perhaps be held to excuse the
+crime; as regards the second, no one seems ever to have raised any
+objection, and it has been left for me to state my difficulty. In a
+sufficiently disingenuous preface, Bulwer accounts for the incoherences
+and extravagances of his hero by the state of extraordinary excitement
+into which men&#8217;s minds had been thrown by the French Revolution. This
+explanation has sufficed for the author&#8217;s fellow-countrymen, and the
+Revolution has a broad back. But I am afraid that Bulwer was not clear in
+his mind as to the kind of madness to which Frenchmen were impelled by
+it,&mdash;and still more, that he has confounded our generals with our
+contractors. Our Desaix and our Ouvrards are not made of the same clay nor
+moulded in the same form; a fact as to which, unfortunately, he remained
+unenlightened.</p>
+
+<p>After having made his anonymity serve the purpose of an advertisement, the
+author consented to reveal his identity whilst announcing at the same time
+that <i>The Lady of Lyons</i> would be a sole experiment. The very next year he
+appeared before the public with the tragedy of <i>Richelieu</i>, in which
+Macready played the principal<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> r&ocirc;le. This piece may be compared with the
+Cromwell of Victor Hugo. It was marked by the same mixture of tragedy and
+melodrama; the same display of historical documents and the same ignorance
+of what is essential in history; the same use of the lowest and the most
+eccentric expedients to raise a laugh or cause a shudder; the same
+superficial and crude psychology which in each character, male or female,
+great or small, reveals the personality of the author. Even when this
+author is a Victor Hugo it is bad enough! But when it is a Bulwer&mdash;!</p>
+
+<p>When he blended into one plot the <i>journ&eacute;e des Dupes</i> and the conspiracy
+of the Duc de Bouillon, together with some features borrowed from the
+adventure of Cinq-Mars and De Thou, the author mingled together two
+periods which could not and should not be thus confounded, the beginning
+and the end of Richelieu&#8217;s career.<a name='fna_4' id='fna_4' href='#f_4'><small>[4]</small></a> He managed, too, to falsify English
+history as well, incidentally, by making Richelieu refer in Council to
+Cromwell, at that time a still obscure member of the House of Commons.
+Richelieu speaks of the antagonism between Charles and Oliver at a period
+when the latter is not even a captain of cavalry. But what is an
+anachronism of this kind compared to that which involves the principal
+character in one continued topsy-turveydom? It is the drawback both of the
+historical play and the historical<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> novel, that they put the great figures
+of history before us in a form and in an attitude that their
+contemporaries could have never witnessed; confessing, describing,
+revealing themselves just to illustrate their character by their
+conversation, always dilating on their deeds instead of doing them. But of
+all the braggarts in theatrical history, Bulwer&#8217;s Richelieu is the most
+vainglorious and the most intolerable. It is all very well for the author
+to say in his preface that the cardinal was the father of French
+civilisation and the architect of the monarchy; he may say what he likes:
+but we cannot stand Richelieu when he talks of himself in the same strain
+and in the third person, just as Michelet and Carlyle might in a fit of
+raving; nor when he counterfeits death in order to play the ghost, nor
+when he weeps theatrically, and addresses declamatory love messages to &#8220;La
+France.&#8221;&mdash;&#8220;France, I love thee,&mdash;Richelieu and France are one!&#8221; Nor can we
+believe in him when he sees modern France come to life again from out the
+cinders of feudalism. After such nonsensical dicta, indeed, one would be
+hardly surprised to hear him exclaim, &#8220;I am the precursor of 1789; what I
+cannot consummate, Bonaparte shall achieve in the Sessions of the Conseil
+d&#8217;Etat!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The secondary characters are one idea&#8217;d. Beringhen can say nothing but
+&#8220;Let&#8217;s discuss the p&acirc;t&eacute;!&#8221; and the Duc d&#8217;Orleans is limited to &#8220;Marion
+dotes on me.&#8221; To the tragi-comedy there is tacked on a melodrama made
+after the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> approved methods of the Boulevard&mdash;a succession of events and
+surprises which cancel out. You feel you are expected to shout, Bravo
+Richelieu! bravo Baradas! Just as at the Porte Saint Martin or at the
+Ambigu you cry out, Bravo d&#8217;Artagnan! bravo Mordaunt! It is the system of
+Dumas without his art.</p>
+
+<p>Lord Lytton lacked both imagination and ingenuity. His effects are poor,
+and he overdoes them. The first resuscitation of Richelieu comes near to
+impressing one, the second is simply silly. The kernel of the play
+consists of a document which passes through every pocket but never reaches
+its address. At the moment, the owner of this treasure is a prisoner at
+the Bastille. Instead of searching him, the Government sends a courtier to
+seize him by the throat and rob him of it. The scene is witnessed through
+a key-hole and described to us by a little page of Richelieu&#8217;s&mdash;the r&ocirc;le
+being played by a woman. The page throws himself on the courtier the
+moment he comes out in order to snatch from him the fateful paper, and the
+conclusion of the drama results from these two encounters. One might sum
+up <i>Richelieu</i> as a mixture of bad Hugo with worse Dumas!</p>
+
+<p><i>Money</i> is by way of depicting English Society as it was in 1840. It
+recognised itself, or rather its enemies recognised it, in this
+caricature! Are we to believe that the gambling scene in the third act
+takes place in an aristocratic club? It is more in keeping with the back
+parlour of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> public-house. A very well-known critic, who represents the
+ideas of a whole class and of a whole school, in alluding to the success
+which the piece met with in the first instance, and which it meets with
+still on every revival, declares that the spectators wished to show their
+appreciation of the &#8220;humour of a scholar.&#8221; I must confess that I can
+recognise neither the scholar nor the humour. On the contrary, what I see
+in it is a spurious sensibility and that moral obliquity to which I have
+referred. Alfred Evelyn, who has been enriched by the will of an eccentric
+cousin, and who now sees the world at his feet after having experienced
+its disdain, decides to share his fortune with an unknown girl who has
+sent &pound;10 to his old nurse at a time when he himself was too poor to come
+to her aid. It is in this silly intention that he is throwing away his
+happiness, and that the plot finds its motive. He is engaged to a young
+girl whom he doesn&#8217;t love, and in order to get rid of her, this mirror of
+refinement, this Alcestes with all his fine scorn of average humanity,
+pretends to ruin himself at play in the presence of his destined
+father-in-law. The girl whom he loves has refused (in Act <span class="smcaplc">I.</span>) to marry
+him, not because he is poor, but because, poor herself, she was afraid of
+being a drag on him in his career. But someone had entered during her
+explanation and she had not been able to finish her sentence. She finishes
+it in the last act, and it transpiring also that it was she who had really
+sent the &pound;10, the two lovers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> fall into each other&#8217;s arms. That is really
+all there is in <i>Money</i> over and above the social satire, which to my
+thinking is terribly far-fetched, and that wonderful &#8220;humour&#8221; which I have
+been unable personally to discover.</p>
+
+<p>Bulwer was not the man to save the erring Drama. Stronger men than he
+might have tried in vain to do so. It was not to the men of letters, the
+scholars, that it was to owe its salvation. The democracy had to come to
+the use of reason and to educate itself. Instead of the artificial drama
+which was offered to them, they held out for a drama sprung from its own
+loins, born of its own passions, made after its own image, palpitating
+with its own life; literary it might become later, if it could. And to
+this end, in the words of Olivier Saint-Jean, &#8220;It was necessary that
+things should go worse still before they could go better.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<div class="note">
+<p class="hang">Macready&#8217;s Withdrawal from the Stage&mdash;The Enemies of the Drama in 1850:
+Puritanism; the Opera; the Pantomime; the &#8220;Hippodrama&#8221;&mdash;French Plays and
+French Players in England&mdash;Actors of the Period&mdash;The Censorship&mdash;The
+Critics&mdash;The Historical Plays of Tom Taylor and the Irish Plays of Dion Boucicault.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>Macready played once more in Paris in 1846, but the times were changed,
+and he achieved only a <i>succ&egrave;s d&#8217;estime</i>. He then visited America, where
+his presence evoked professional jealousies and bad blood, resulting in
+serious riots in which lives were lost. On February 26, 1851, the great
+actor gave his farewell performance. A brilliant page of Lewes has kept
+alive until our own day the emotion of this memorable occasion, which
+marks an era in the history of English art. Macready was in deep mourning;
+he had just lost a daughter of twenty years of age. He did not declaim his
+speech, but gave it forth with dignified sadness. In it he laid claim only
+to two merits&mdash;that of having brought back the text of Shakespeare in its
+purity, and that of having made of the theatre a place in which decent
+folks need not hesitate to be seen. He foresaw that if his glory as an
+artist should fade<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> with the gradual disappearance of those who had
+witnessed it, his work as a literary restorer and a moral reformer would
+survive. And he was right.</p>
+
+<p>The farewell performance was followed by a banquet, at which the
+inevitable Bulwer took the chair. John Forster read aloud at it some
+verses by Tennyson. The Laureate had graven on the tomb of the tragedian&#8217;s
+career the three words, &#8220;Moral, Grave, Sublime.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Then all was over. The voice that had thrilled so many souls was to be
+heard only at charitable entertainments and provincial gatherings. And
+when he died in 1873 England had forgotten him.</p>
+
+<p>There is a story of his last days which I cannot refrain from repeating,
+though it has no bearing really upon the subject of this book. When the
+old man, confined by paralysis to his armchair, was cut off from the world
+by the loss of several of his senses, he would be seen acting to himself
+(barely so much as moving his lips the while) the masterpieces he had
+loved. There was nothing to reveal the progress of the play save the light
+that would illumine his ever-mobile countenance, to which new lines had
+been given by conscious use and solitary thought.</p>
+
+<p>How fine they must have been, these impersonations&mdash;Lear, Hamlet,
+Macbeth&mdash;in the mysterious half-shades of his life&#8217;s evening and in the
+silent theatre of his mind, where there was nothing to shackle the artist
+in his struggle after<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> perfection, where every aspiration was an
+achievement!</p>
+
+<p>If I have spoken at some length of Macready, it is because I cannot bring
+myself to regard him as the representative of a dead art, the last High
+Priest of a shattered idol. On the stage and off the stage, Macready was a
+pioneer. He was the first to see the coming of Realism, and he was the
+first actor of good breeding. But a long time was to ensue ere his example
+would be followed and understood. The stage, when he left it, was in a
+state of confusion and of squalor difficult to describe.</p>
+
+<p>Strive as Macready would to cleanse the theatre, the prejudice which kept
+certain classes apart from it seemed to grow and spread. The accession of
+the young Queen heralded one of those moods of puritanism which are
+chronic with English society. Young Men&#8217;s and Young Women&#8217;s Christian
+Associations multiplied, and, in providing innocent and free amusements
+for the artizan, they competed with the theatre at the same time as with
+the public-house. With the higher classes it was music that was injuring
+the drama by its rivalry. For a long time&mdash;as Lady Gay Spanker put it in a
+comedy of the time&mdash;the English had known no music but the barking of the
+hounds; now it was that Society began to scramble for boxes at extravagant
+prices to hear Grisi sing. A quarrel between the singer and her manager
+having led to a severance, the now &#8220;star&#8221;-less company, by a marvellous
+stroke of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> luck, was enabled to shine afresh with Jenny Lind. This rivalry
+continued, and together with the burning of Her Majesty&#8217;s Theatre it led
+to the invasion of the two great London theatres by foreign musicians. The
+opera held sway from the end of March to the end of July. The Pantomime,
+at first humble and modest, but growing stronger every year, began now at
+Christmas and lasted throughout a considerable portion of the winter. A
+short autumn season was all that remained for the drama, or rather
+melodrama, and for what was worse than the others, the &#8220;Hippodrama.&#8221; Thus
+was entitled a new kind of production in which horses had the principal
+r&ocirc;les. More than one popular author was glad to invent plots for these
+singular protagonists. Shakespeare, who had had to go turns hitherto with
+the lions of the tamer Van Ambrugh,&mdash;he and they roaring on alternate
+evenings,&mdash;had to give in completely before the Hippodrama. He took refuge
+in a suburban theatre, Sadler&#8217;s Wells, with the actor Phelps, and there he
+was able eventually to boast, like that survivor of the Reign of
+Terror&mdash;<i>J&#8217;ai v&eacute;cu</i>. To arouse any interest in him amongst the English
+public, it was necessary that he should be stumbled through by foreigners
+or lisped by babes.</p>
+
+<p>According to an old brochure of the time which groans over the depth of
+the humiliation of the theatre, people stood still to look a second time
+at the madman who could attempt to run Covent Garden or Drury Lane. To the
+reckless amateur<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> succeeded the shameless adventurer, the shy contractor
+with empty pockets that called for filling. About 1850 one of these great
+theatres was managed by an ex-policeman who had started a restaurant;
+later it passed into the hands of a theatre attendant. One manager was
+arrested for theft in the wings of his own theatre. It is easy to imagine
+how dramatic art would develop in the hands of such men. They dispensed
+with scenery and stage properties, and made shift with an empty stage;
+they squandered their substance and lavished their genius upon the art of
+advertising; their puffs and prospectuses were the only masterpieces of
+the times. There were some who sought to excite English chauvinism,
+pre-jingoism as one may call it, by such performances as that of the
+national acrobat who turned head over heels ninety-one times while his
+American rival was achieving but eighty-one, thus conquering the New World
+by ten somersaults.</p>
+
+<p>These things succeeded in attracting the public, but <i>what</i> public?
+Theatre-goers were but a small section really of the public&mdash;a group apart
+on whom lay a certain suspicion of immorality connected with an evil
+reputation of being un-English. There was some ground for this last
+reproach. Foreigners were gaining ground. It would seem that there was no
+getting along without us French between 1850 and 1865. We were translated
+and adapted in every form. Our melodramas were transplanted bodily; our
+comedies were coarsened and exaggerated into farces;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> sometimes even, that
+nothing might be lost, our operas were ground down into plays. Second-rate
+pieces were honoured with two or three successive adaptations; and dramas
+which had lived a brief hour at the Boulevard du Crime, in England became
+classics. There is a tradition that the director of The Princess&#8217;s had a
+tame translator under lock and key who turned French into English without
+respite, his chain never loosened nor his hunger satisfied until his task,
+for the time being, should be complete.</p>
+
+<p>Our actors had at this time a permanent home in London, kept for them by
+Mitchell, the Bond Street bookseller, at the St. James&#8217;s Theatre. Thence
+they made incursions upon all the others. Some years previously Madame
+Arnould Plessy, having taken into her head to act in the tongue of
+Shakespeare, Th&eacute;ophile Gautier had complimented her on the grace with
+which she had succeeded in &#8220;extracting English from her mouth.&#8221; Others now
+attempted to emulate her accomplishment and to turn it to account. Fechter
+resolved not merely to play Hamlet, but to play as it had never been
+played before, and he did so to rounds of applause for seventy nights. An
+<i>ing&eacute;nue</i>, escaped from the Com&eacute;die Fran&ccedil;aise, made a similar effort in
+the r&ocirc;le of Juliet, and despite her bad accent, and intolerable
+pretension, she was able to keep it up, thanks to powerful supporters, in
+the teeth of the quite excusable hostility of the pit. Things did not
+always pass off so harmlessly, and in more than one instance the brutal
+anger<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> of the public, as under
+Charles <span class="smcaplc">I.</span>, drove intruders from the stage, which it wished to see occupied by native actors alone.</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact, there were some notable English actors and actresses
+at this time. Helen Faucit (now Lady Martin) preserved the pure diction of
+John and Charles Kemble. Charles Kean, despite his inadequate physique,
+won for himself gradually an honourable place on the stage over which his
+father had held sway. Ryder had a presence, and a sonorous voice, deep and
+hollow and tragic, like that of Beauvallet or of Maubant. Keeley was a
+massive man, who could act with subtlety; his wife, incisive, keen,
+<i>am&egrave;re</i>, had a leaning towards the serious drama&mdash;towards the realistic
+even. Robson, a queer and wonderful little figure, made a mark in <i>le
+drame noir</i> and in outrageous caricature. Farren had made his <i>d&eacute;but</i> in
+old men&#8217;s parts at eighteen, and played them for fifty years without
+advancing in his art a step, without introducing a shade of emotion or a
+touch of humanity into his effects. Charles Mathews impersonated impudent
+youth, just as Farren impersonated unpleasant and ridiculous old age.
+Elegant, lissome, light, mobile, Mathews skipped and fluttered and
+chirruped like a bird. In his old age he reminded me of Ravel, his
+contemporary, whose method and r&ocirc;les offered some analogy with his.<a name='fna_5' id='fna_5' href='#f_5'><small>[5]</small></a>
+Buckstone<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> made the Haymarket prosper for twenty years, where I saw him,
+secure in the favour of the public, with his colleague, Compton, whose
+speciality was a certain dryness of humour. Buckstone at this time had
+lost both his hearing and his memory. But what a sly look there was in his
+eye! How his mouth would twist and turn! What irony lurked in the
+expressive ugliness of that wrinkled old mask of his!</p>
+
+<p>These good actors injured rather than served their art. They revelled in,
+and limited themselves to, their own speciality, exaggerated their
+idiosyncrasies day by day, and left them as a legacy to their imitators.
+The authors were too insignificant, did they see the danger, to oppose
+their will to that of Charles Mathews and Farren. They took their measures
+to order and tried to satisfy their patrons. Thus became gradually
+narrowed at once the field for invention and for observation. As
+substitutes for the infinity of living human types and characters, seven
+or eight <i>emplois</i>, as one may say, came into existence&mdash;<i>emplois</i> often
+further specified and characterised by the name of an actor. There was the
+low comedian and the light comedian, the villain and the heavy man. All
+diversities of womenkind were grouped into one of these four ticketed
+sections: the <i>ing&eacute;nue</i>, the flirt, the chaperon, and the wicked woman.
+The valet of Comedy had become a rascally steward whose rogueries took on
+a certain aspect of Drama. There were two or three types of old men. There
+was the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> surly old curmudgeon in whom the author vents his spleen, and who
+draws up eccentric wills. There is the old beau, cowardly and cynical, who
+in the last act marries his fianc&eacute;e to his own son and swears to reform.
+And there is the old peasant who is descended in a straight line from the
+father of Pamela, always talking of his white hairs and his contempt for
+gold, and always greeting the traveller, who has been overtaken by a storm
+and has lost his way, with &#8220;Be welcome to my humble roof.&#8221; The peasant,
+one need hardly remark, never existed. On the stage he has lived more than
+a hundred years. Hardly less indispensable to the comedy or the drama was
+the captain, the &#8220;man about town,&#8221; addicted to drink, with a diamond pin
+resplendent in his tie, wearing salmon-coloured trousers, and top boots
+that he is always dusting with the end of his riding-whip. He represents
+the selfishness, the folly, and the insolence of the higher classes, as
+imagined by a man who has never been inside a drawing-room. Did he know
+Society at his finger-ends, the man would never think of painting it. He
+never paints from nature. He copies for the thousandth time from the old
+models, Sheridan and Goldsmith, or his new masters, Scribe and d&#8217;Ennery.</p>
+
+<p>It was for the critics, one is inclined to say, to instruct the public,
+the actors, and the author. I am almost ashamed to tell of the pass to
+which dramatic criticism had come. A paragraph in an obscure corner, a
+quarter of a column on the more<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> important works,&mdash;that was about all the
+space the great newspapers accorded to the theatre. Dramatic criticism was
+a nocturnal calling that enjoyed a not too good repute, and was frowned on
+by respectable people and fathers of families. It was entrusted to tyros,
+who hoped by their good conduct to earn their advancement presently to the
+reporting staff in the police courts. The one writer undertook both drama
+and opera. Dramatic criticism and musical criticism, owing to the natural
+gifts which they require, are two absolutely different callings. What
+mattered it, however, to the writer, who was expected only to praise the
+pieces and the performers, without being too much of a bore?</p>
+
+<p>John Oxenford, the critic of the <i>Times</i>, was sent for one morning to the
+office of the editor. In analysing a new piece he had criticised freely
+the performance of a certain actor, and the latter had addressed a letter
+of remonstrance to Mr. Delane. &#8220;These things,&#8221; said the editor
+majestically to the writer,&mdash;&#8220;these things don&#8217;t interest the general
+public, and I don&#8217;t want the <i>Times</i> to become an arena for the discussion
+of the merits of Mr. This and Mr. That. So look here, my dear fellow,
+understand this well, and write me accounts of plays henceforth that won&#8217;t
+bring me any more such letters. Do you see?&#8221; &#8220;I see,&#8221; said Oxenford. And
+thus it was, continues the teller of the story, that English literature
+lost pages which might have recalled the subtlety of Hazlitt in
+conjunction with the winning humour<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> of Charles Lamb. Henceforth Oxenford,
+a scholar who had translated the &#8220;Hellas&#8221; of Jacobi and the
+&#8220;Conversations&#8221; of Goethe with Eckermann, passed for a blighted and
+discouraged genius; though of this he gave no stronger proofs than an
+English version of the operetta, <i>Bon soir, Monsieur Pantalon</i>, a farce
+which I saw fall quite flat, and some articles on Moli&egrave;re. But you should
+have heard him in a bar-parlour with his pipe between his teeth, a bottle
+of port on the table, and facing him some interlocutor who was not Mr.
+Delane!</p>
+
+<p>While the press critic neglected his duty, or was prevented from
+fulfilling it, the official censorship added one more to the troubles and
+obstacles which already hampered the progress of the stage. I may perhaps
+make some reference in this place to the origin of the Censorship, and to
+its scope and powers.</p>
+
+<p>Some writers will have it that this institution, as it now exists, is but
+a survival of the office of Master of the Revels, which flourished under
+the Tudors and the first Stuarts. As a matter of fact, the censorship owes
+its existence to a law passed in the reign of George <span class="smcaplc">II.</span><a name='fna_6' id='fna_6' href='#f_6'><small>[6]</small></a> It was
+instituted nominally for the protection of good behaviour, decency, and
+public order; in reality, to protect Walpole from the stings of
+Aristophanic comedy and to silence Fielding. A century and a half have
+elapsed since the fall of Walpole, and the censorship still exists, like
+that sentinel who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> was stationed in an alley of Trarsko&eacute; S&eacute;lo to guard a
+rose, and who was still being relieved every two hours twenty-five years
+later. The law of 1843, which was by way of according liberty to the
+theatre, did not free it from the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain,
+whose powers were delimited, so to say, geographically, in the most
+curious manner, for it is impossible to understand why certain quarters of
+the Metropolis were placed outside the reach of his authority and
+submitted to the jurisdiction of the Justices of the Peace.</p>
+
+<p>To all intents and purposes the powers of the Chamberlain are exercised by
+a gentleman who is styled the Examiner of Plays. Plays have to be
+submitted to him seven days before their production, and when he returns
+them with his signature he receives from the submitters of them fees of
+from &pound;1 to &pound;2, according to the number of acts. The author may not enter
+his presence. The manager alone has the privilege of contemplating his
+features, and of giving, or getting from him, verbal explanations. And
+even those communications are under the seal of secrecy. Above the
+examiner stands a kind of head of department, and above him the
+Chamberlain himself. When you have exhausted these three jurisdictions you
+can go no higher. Above the Lord Chamberlain, as above the Czar of All the
+Russias, there remains only Divine Justice, and to Divine Justice authors
+of vaudevilles and musical comedies cannot very well appeal. The
+censorship<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> indeed is an absurd anomaly, the sole irresponsible and secret
+authority which remains in English legislation.</p>
+
+<p>If you seek to discover how it has acted during this century, you will
+find that according as the censor was indolent or zealous his office has
+been a nullity or a nuisance. In theatrical circles that censor will not
+soon be forgotten who suppressed the word &#8220;thigh&#8221; as dangerous to public
+morals, and who exorcised from a play by Douglas Jerrold, as disrespectful
+to religion, the following phrase:&mdash;&#8220;He plays the violin like an angel!&#8221;
+The same censor found these words in a tragedy:&mdash;&#8220;<i>I</i> do homage to pride,
+debauchery, avarice!... Never!&#8221; He hastened to delete this, admitting thus
+by implication that English society, which it was his mission to protect,
+was compact of these three heinous characteristics.</p>
+
+<p>It was forbidden to make fun of Holloway&#8217;s ointment, for Mr. Holloway was
+&#8220;an estimable manufacturer who employs thousands of workmen.&#8221; It was
+forbidden to put a comic bishop on the stage&mdash;unless it were a colonial
+bishop, in which case the censor would give his sanction. A play founded
+on Oliver Twist was forbidden because it was calculated to incite to
+crime, but it was allowed for a benefit performance; whence it would
+appear that it is allowable to incite the audience to crime on such
+special occasions. This poor censorship, which has to read everything,
+which has to supervise everything,&mdash;from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> the rages of Othello to the
+grimaces of the clown and the tights of the ballet girls,&mdash;which has to
+uphold at once the constitution and propriety, to defend at once the
+Divinity and Mr. Holloway, loses its head over it all at last, and reminds
+one of the <i>bourgeois</i> broken loose who is being launched at carnival time
+into some dizzying Saraband.</p>
+
+<p>Its most absorbing task is that of barring the way against French
+immorality. Its vigilance is eluded, however, by a kind of conventional
+terminology. Where our authors have had the effrontery to write the word
+&#8220;cocotte&#8221; in black and white, they replace it by the word &#8220;actress.&#8221; Where
+we have unblushingly written &#8220;adultery,&#8221; they have inserted &#8220;flirtation.&#8221;
+The censor gives his sanction and pockets his fees, and on the performance
+of the piece the by-play of the actor and actresses completes the
+translation, re-establishing if not reinforcing the original sense.</p>
+
+<p>In the midst of all these difficulties the growth of the theatre-going
+public had made necessary long series of performances, long runs as we
+call them now, unknown up till then and inaugurated by the new theatres.
+There were a dozen in 1847, twenty in 1860. The calling of dramatic author
+began to grow lucrative and to tempt many writers. It was an easy calling,
+too, as the public was young and ignorant, ready to accept anything, and
+as, in addition, the French drama offered an almost inexhaustible amount
+of raw material. They had recourse to it unceasingly,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> just as Robinson
+Crusoe after his shipwreck used to return to his ship in order to look for
+some tool! I shall not give a long list of names because, unless
+accompanied by a short personal sketch and a few words of criticism, these
+names, obscure or even unknown, would mean nothing to French readers, and
+would be almost as wearisome as the long lists of warriors in the epics of
+olden times. Amongst the more notable, I may mention Tom Taylor and Dion
+Boucicault. Tom Taylor belonged to both the world of law and the world of
+letters. Briefs gave him his dinner, the drama gave him his supper; his
+supper got to be the more substantial of the two. From 1850 to 1875 he
+seems to have achieved ubiquity. His name was on every poster. He was
+facile, had a certain method in his work, a certain skill in putting his
+plays together, a certain discretion which passed for taste&mdash;in fine, all
+the qualities that go to form a painstaking and prolific mediocrity. He
+would probably have wished to be judged on the merits of the historical
+dramas which absorbed his whole activity during the concluding years of
+his life, and in which he thought he was achieving &#8220;literature.&#8221; But are
+they really historical dramas? They contain at once too much history and
+too little. The historical document is all-pervasive, enters into every
+scene, interrupts the action; but anything like historical psychology, any
+attempt to get at the real character of the personages presented, is
+wholly unattempted. It was characteristic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> of him that, when desiring to
+depict Queen Elizabeth, he relied upon some romantic stories by a German
+lady instead of going to the work of Froude (far more dramatic than his
+own drama), where he could have learned all he required to know.</p>
+
+<p>Dion Boucicault, the other writer whom I have singled out as
+representative of the lot, had more character and was more interesting. He
+was an actor, and an actor of some talent. He knew no other world than
+that of the theatre&mdash;the world which from eight o&#8217;clock till midnight
+laughs and cries, curses and makes love, dies and murders, under the
+gaslight, behind three sets of painted canvas. Without any real culture,
+and without having the least critical faculty, Boucicault had read
+everything about the theatre&mdash;read everything and remembered everything,
+good, bad, and indifferent, from <i>Phormio</i> to the <i>Auberge des Adrets</i>. He
+knew by heart all the <i>croix de ma m&egrave;re</i> of modern melodrama, and from his
+mass of reminiscences he concocted his crazy-quilt-like plays, imitating
+involuntarily, unconsciously. He was plagiarism incarnate. In his first
+great success, <i>London Assurance</i>, you may find not only Goldsmith and
+Sheridan, but Terence and Plautus, who had reached him by way of Moli&egrave;re.
+You will meet in it a father who speaks to his son without recognising
+him, or who at least is persuaded not to recognise him; a young lady who
+boxes her husband&#8217;s ears and calls him her doll; a master who makes a
+confidant of his valet, a valet<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> as untruthful as Dave or Scapin; a lawyer
+who is anxious to get himself thrashed like <i>L&#8217;Intim&eacute;</i>; a young drunkard
+and debauchee who falls in love with a country lass; and a young girl
+brought up in the wilds, who replies to the first compliment she has paid
+her&mdash;&#8220;It strikes me, sir, that you are a stray bee from the hive of
+fashion. If so, reserve your honey for its proper cell. A truce to
+compliments.&#8221; The piece goes from vulgarity to vulgarity, from absurdity
+to absurdity. Within a few minutes there is a ridiculous abduction, a
+comic duel and a hardly less comic marriage, all brought about by a will
+which is surely the most absurd of all the absurd wills known to the
+drama. The piece had its central figure in a clever humbug whom no one
+knows. &#8220;Will you allow me to ask you,&#8221; says Charles Courtly in the last
+scene, &#8220;an impertinent question?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;With the greatest pleasure.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Who the devil are you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;On my faith, I don&#8217;t know. But I must be a gentleman.&#8221; Upon which another
+character concludes the play with a pedantic definition of the word
+&#8220;gentleman,&#8221; and morality is satisfied.</p>
+
+<p>One fine day&mdash;it was in 1860&mdash;this playwright, who lived by borrowing, and
+who was in debt to every literature, had the singular good fortune to
+create a <i>genre</i> of his own. Perhaps it is too much to say create. A
+compatriot of his, Edmund Falconer, like himself an actor as well as an
+author, had opened the way for him. But Falconer never again met with the
+success which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> greeted <i>Peep o&#8217; Day</i>, and he wound up with the memorable
+failure of <i>The Oonagh</i>.<a name='fna_7' id='fna_7' href='#f_7'><small>[7]</small></a> Boucicault, on the contrary, was able to
+exploit for twenty years the fruitful vein upon which he had happened in
+the <i>Colleen Bawn</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Colleen Bawn</i> is a tissue of improbabilities and extravagances. What
+is the mysterious reason why we can put up with these absurdities and take
+an interest in them? It is, I think, that there is in this crack-brained
+drama a kind of ethnographic seed which enters into the mind and takes
+root there. The sad, patient, uncomplaining struggle of this poor peasant
+girl to become worthy of the man she loves,&mdash;her discouragement, which yet
+cannot exhaust her devotion,&mdash;all this is depicted by touches so
+suggestive and so strong that an elaborate analysis could not do more. But
+there is something beyond this. A sort of primitive poetry seemed to play
+round the whole character of the Colleen Bawn as she appeared thirty-five
+years ago in the person of Mrs. Dion Boucicault, with her little red
+cloak, her long black hair, and her expression half sad, half
+seductive&mdash;smiling through her tears like an angel in disgrace.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span>Until Boucicault&#8217;s time it had been the fashion to laugh over Ireland,
+never to weep over her. He brought about this change without depicting his
+country otherwise than as she really existed. He knew the strange feeling
+of England towards Ireland, the feeling of a man for a woman, devoid of
+the refinements of philosophy and civilisation. Passionate, violent, hard,
+England begins by crushing Ireland; then stops, conquered by the weakness
+of the victim, subjugated by a charm which no mere words can describe.
+Boucicault sought out this sentiment in the depths of the hearts of his
+English audiences, and ministered to it; and was instrumental thereby in
+preparing the way for an age of justice and generosity. Under the
+commonness of the means which he employed, and often also of the
+sentiments and ideas which he expressed, Boucicault hid a sort of subtlety
+which was born of instinct. His Irish psychology is true to life, and
+although he added many touches in the <i>Shaugraun</i>, in <i>Arrah-na-pogue</i>, in
+<i>The Octoroon</i>, in <i>Michael O&#8217;Dowd</i>, and in other works, it may be said to
+be already complete in <i>The Colleen Bawn</i>. When Myles-na-Coppaleen tells
+us, &#8220;I was full of sudden death that minute,&#8221; and when Eily speaks of the
+little bird that sings in her heart, the passion does not strike us as
+exaggerated nor the poetry as out of place. Father Tom, too, who smokes
+his pipe and drinks his potheen with the smugglers, but who can assume at
+will his authority as an apostle and a leader, is the personification of
+the Irish priest of old, and indeed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> of our own day too&mdash;at once the man
+of the people and the man of God.</p>
+
+<p>Altogether, one cannot but exclaim, as one looks at this crude but
+striking piece&mdash;this is Ireland! The Ireland of zealots and traitors, of
+rebels and the meek, of madmen and martyrs, of heroes and assassins.
+Ireland the irrational and illogical, who disconcerts our sympathies after
+winning them, and who has doubtless still further surprises in store for
+History, already at a loss how to record her actions, how to explain her
+character, what verdict to pronounce upon her.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<div class="note">
+<p class="hang">The Vogue of Burlesque&mdash;Burnand&#8217;s <i>Ixion</i>&mdash;H. J. Byron&mdash;The Influence of
+Burlesque upon the Moral Tone of the Stage&mdash;Marie Wilton&#8217;s <i>d&eacute;but</i>&mdash;A
+Letter from Dickens&mdash;Founding of the &#8220;Prince of Wales&#8217;s&#8221;&mdash;Tom Robertson,
+his Life as Actor and Author&mdash;His Journalistic Career&mdash;London Bohemia in 1865&mdash;Sothern.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>The taste, the rage for Burlesque, dates from almost the same moment as
+the introduction of the Boucicault drama. The two things have, however,
+nothing else in common, unless it be that neither one nor the other
+pertains to literature. Burlesque is the English form, under an un-English
+name, of that kind of musical parody in which we French used at that time
+to delight, and of which the operetta was born. In London this exotic
+<i>genre</i> became quickly acclimatised by success.</p>
+
+<p>I shall take Burnand&#8217;s <i>Ixion</i> as a type, for by reason of its
+never-ending popularity it may be regarded as a masterpiece of its kind.
+It is in verse. What kind of verse may be imagined when I add that almost
+every line contains at least one pun. The subject is a matter of no
+consequence; the whole point of the piece consists in putting modern
+sentiments and expressions into<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> the mouths of characters taken from
+antiquity. The people rebel and burn Ixion&#8217;s palace. Jupiter appears in
+answer to his invocation. &#8220;Are you insured?&#8221; he inquires. &#8220;Yes,&#8221; replies
+Ixion, &#8220;with all the best Insurance Agencies. But you see, when it comes
+to paying you the money, they let you whistle for it.&#8221; Jupiter invites him
+to come to Olympus. &#8220;We lunch at half-past one. Don&#8217;t forget.&#8221; Mercury,
+charged to conduct Ixion thither, hails an a&euml;rial omnibus. &#8220;Come on for
+Olympus! Room for one outside!&#8221; We are shown Olympus. The meal is nearly
+over. Juno asks Venus the name of her dressmaker, and sends a servant to
+tell &#8220;the Master&#8221; that &#8220;coffee is served.&#8221; Neptune talks nautical lingo
+like the hero of <i>Black-eyed Susan</i>, and goes nowhere unaccompanied by a
+French sailor and an English Jack-Tar, who are themselves bosom friends.
+The Frenchman executes a hornpipe out of good-fellowship towards his mate,
+whilst the Englishman expresses his regard for &#8220;La France&#8221; by performing
+the cancan. Apollo plays an English sun to the life&mdash;he never shows
+himself. He remains shut up in his office with his secretary, the Clerk of
+the Weather, who, like all his kind, scribbles verses and newspaper
+articles on paper bearing the Government stamp.</p>
+
+<p>Add to all this a bit of music here and there, a number of pretty girls
+scantily attired, notably nine Muses and three Graces, whose dress and
+dancing would have brought the author of the Histriomastrix in sorrow to
+the grave, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> allusions to all the topics of the day&mdash;to the victory of
+the horse &#8220;Gladiator,&#8221; to <i>Lady Audley&#8217;s Secret</i> (then all the rage), to
+vivisection, to the novels of Charles Kingsley, to the fountain in
+Trafalgar Square, to Mudie&#8217;s Circulating Library,&mdash;and a thousand other
+things which to-day have ceased not merely to be amusing, but to be
+intelligible.</p>
+
+<p>To read <i>Ixion</i>, as I read it thirty-five years after its first
+production, to read it sitting by the fire on a foggy afternoon, making
+one&#8217;s way as best one might through the thicket of allusions which had
+become enigmas, and through all the <i>d&eacute;bris</i> of these used-up fireworks,
+was a singularly dismal undertaking. To form any just impression of the
+piece, you must try to picture to yourself the little theatre (The
+Royalty) on the occasion of the First Night, the thousand or so of
+spectators, who have dined well and who incline to an optimistic view of
+things in general, the pervading odour of the <i>poudre de riz</i>, the
+<i>flonflons</i> of the orchestra, the quivering of the gasaliers and of the
+dazzling electric light, the diamonds, the gleaming white shoulders and
+the soft silk tights, the superabundance of animal life and high spirits
+which seem almost to glow like kindling firewood. A d&eacute;butante destined to
+a higher kind of success, Ada Cavendish, regaled the opera-glasses with
+the sight of her beauty as Venus. Another attraction was to be found later
+in the appearance on the stage of a member of a great family, the Hon.
+Lewis W. Wingfield, who impersonated (with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> the contortions of a madman)
+the Goddess of Wisdom.</p>
+
+<p>But the real home of Burlesque was the Strand, then under the management
+of Mrs. Swanborough, famous for her incessant conflicts with English
+grammar. Her wants were provided for by Henry James Byron, a good-looking
+fellow who appeared in his own pieces, but not to great advantage. It used
+to be said that he was a descendant of Lord Byron. How is this
+genealogical mystery to be solved? I have been unable to find a clue to
+it. Theatrical folk are no great scholars, they take but little note of
+dates, and they are apt to treat history in a somewhat offhand fashion.
+For them Lord Byron was lost in the mists of antiquity, and it was easy
+for them to believe that their colleague, born about 1830, might have had
+him for an ancestor. Whatever his origin, H. J. Byron was an actor, and
+had begun on the lowest steps of the profession, with engagements at ten
+shillings a week, and even less. Suddenly he struck a vein of success in
+the writing of burlesques, and thenceforth he wrote as much as ever one
+could wish, and even more,&mdash;so much so that the list of his works, were I
+to print it here, would fill many pages. He did not worry himself about a
+subject. A subject was a nuisance, he held; you had to keep to it, and
+work it up,&mdash;you have to give it a beginning and an ending. Hang the
+subject! He thought only of the witticisms with which his burlesque should
+be stocked. He collected them<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> together in notebooks which in time must
+have come to rival the volume of Larousse&#8217;s Dictionary. In the street he
+would follow up some comic notion, jot it down on an envelope or on his
+sleeve, or on the margin of a newspaper, using his hat as a writing-desk,
+or else making shift with a wall. One day he was writing up against a hall
+door. The door opened, and in rolled Byron on top of an old lady who had
+been making her way out. He got up again smiling just as he would from his
+mishaps in the theatre. He was possessed with the demon of punning, which
+never left him an instant&#8217;s peace. Having failed as a manager in the
+provinces, he made puns upon his bankruptcy. He punned in the last moments
+before his death. Is it not one of the rules of his profession to bring
+down the curtain on a witticism?</p>
+
+<p>Byron used to boast that he had never given offence to delicate ears. And,
+as a matter of fact, he said a million of nonsensical things but not a
+single indecent thing. Yet he helped to depreciate the moral tone of the
+theatre by lowering the standard of decency in regard to female costume
+upon the stage, and by bringing on to it those pseudo-actresses whom, in
+the slang of the green-room, we call <i>grues</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In this connection I ought to point out that the social ostracism under
+which the stage then suffered was due less to the bad morals of the
+actresses than to the bad manners and vulgarity of the actors. The former
+were much nearer to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> being ladies than the latter were to being gentlemen.
+Watched and warded, first by a father, then by a husband connected with
+the theatre, obliged to give their first thoughts to their professional
+and domestic duties, they had neither the power, nor the leisure, nor the
+inclination to think of evil. Tom Hood, in his <i>Model Men and Women</i>,
+paints a picture of the theatrical woman which reminds one of the
+biographies of the <i>Prix Montyon</i>. She goes late to bed, rises early,
+learns her r&ocirc;les while washing her children&#8217;s linen, rehearses in the
+afternoon, performs in the evening, and has no time to eat or to attend to
+her <i>toilette</i>, still less to think, or make merry, or make love. &#8220;School
+mistresses and governesses, shop-girls, dressmakers, cooks,
+housemaids,&mdash;what are your fatigues to those of an actress?&#8221; So spoke a
+writer<a name='fna_8' id='fna_8' href='#f_8'><small>[8]</small></a> who was well acquainted with theatrical life.</p>
+
+<p>These habits were now to be changed. Burlesque, pantomime, comic opera,
+were throwing open the stage to actresses of a new type who posed but did
+not perform, and who were called upon to fill not r&ocirc;les but tights. The
+respectable woman would not suffer herself to be vanquished on her own
+ground; she competed with the newcomers by the same means: sometimes she
+won&mdash;and lost. This was the transformation which Byron abetted. But it was
+the public, of course, as always, that was most to blame.</p>
+
+<p>Poor Byron was not without the ambition of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> an artist: he aspired to
+raising himself above the level of the <i>genre</i> to which he owed his first
+success,&mdash;to writing a comedy. And it so happened that by his side on the
+stage of the Strand there was a quaint little body whose hopes ran
+parallel with his. This was Marie Wilton. I do not know how old she was
+then. In her pleasant Memoirs, written in collaboration with her husband,
+she has quite forgotten to give us the date of her birth. So much we know,
+however, that she was the child of somewhat obscure actors, and that she
+herself made her <i>d&eacute;but</i> when she was five years old. At Manchester she
+had the honour of playing some small r&ocirc;le with Macready, who was then
+making his last rounds before finally quitting the stage. The great
+tragedian sent for her to his dressing-room, lifted her on to his knee and
+questioned her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I suppose,&#8221; he said, &#8220;that you want to become a great actress?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, sir.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And what r&ocirc;le are you most anxious to play?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Juliet.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Macready burst out laughing. &#8220;Then,&#8221; said he, &#8220;you&#8217;ll have to change those
+eyes of yours!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Marie Wilton did not change her eyes, but she changed her ideas, which was
+an easier matter. At fifteen she was acting fearlessly in every kind of
+r&ocirc;le. One evening she (who was too young, they thought, to assume the r&ocirc;le
+of any of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> Shakespeare&#8217;s heroines) impersonated the old mother of Claude
+Melnotte in <i>The Lady of Lyons</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It was in Bristol that they began to realise that there was something in
+her. An actor on tour, then very well known, Charles Dillon, was playing
+<i>Belphegor</i>, a monstrous emotional drama,<a name='fna_9' id='fna_9' href='#f_9'><small>[9]</small></a> the hero of which was an
+acrobat. Marie Wilton, in the r&ocirc;le of a little boy, had to give him the
+cue in one of the great scenes. She hit on a little piece of business, and
+risked it at the rehearsal. The London actor lost his temper at first,
+then reflected, questioned the little actress, listened to her
+explanations, and finally gave in. The public was carried away. Dillon
+remembered this, and when he returned to London he engaged Marie Wilton at
+the Lyceum. Here she made her real <i>d&eacute;but</i> towards the end of 1858.
+<i>Belphegor</i> was followed by a farce in which Marie Wilton had also a r&ocirc;le.
+On the same evening, at the same theatre, in the same piece, there
+appeared for the first time in London, John Toole, the king of English low
+comedians. With these two names we come to the living generation, and have
+to deal at last with the contemporary stage.</p>
+
+<p>But let us first follow Marie Wilton, for her little barque, though none
+had any inkling of it, not even she herself, carries with it the destinies
+of the English Comedy still to be born.</p>
+
+<p>From the Lyceum she passed to the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>Haymarket, where she was treated as a
+spoiled child by the three old men who there held sway. She played Cupid
+here with so much verve, point, impudence and sprightliness, that other
+Cupids were created for her. This is the public all over; na&iuml;vely selfish,
+it condemns the actor to maintain for a quarter of a century the posture
+which has taken its fancy, to repeat unceasingly the gesture or the tone
+which has amused or touched it. Marie Wilton had played the Haymarket
+Cupid for ever had she not betaken herself to the Strand. Here she was the
+inevitable principal boy of the burlesques.</p>
+
+<p>For some time past Mrs. Bancroft has played only when in the mood and at
+long intervals, and has not felt inclined for the exertion of carrying a
+whole piece on her shoulders a whole evening as of yore. I have seen her
+only in two subsidiary r&ocirc;les, and for an estimate of her talents I must
+rely upon other judgments than my own. M. Coquelin thinks that she reminds
+one at once of Alphonsine and of Chaumont, and that she holds a middle
+place between the two. But M. Coquelin had in his mind, when he was
+writing, an actress of more than forty, appearing in the r&ocirc;le of eccentric
+ladies of fashion. There is a gulf between this and the imp of 1860 who
+rattled across the boards of the Strand. All that I know of her at the
+time of her <i>d&eacute;but</i> is that she had still those twinkling merry eyes which
+forbade her to attempt tragedy, and the figure of a child of twelve,&mdash;a
+figure so slight that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> when the man who was to marry her first saw her, he
+declared she was the thinnest actress in London. But here is a letter
+which will place Marie Wilton before our eyes as she was when the
+barristers of the Inns of Court made verses in her honour and half
+Aldershot came to town every second night to applaud her. It is from
+Charles Dickens to John Forster:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;I escaped at half-past seven and went to the Strand Theatre; having
+taken a stall beforehand, for it is always crammed. I really wish you
+would go, between this and next Thursday, to see the <i>Maid and the
+Magpie</i> burlesque there. There is the strangest thing in it that ever
+I have seen on the stage. The boy, Pippo, by Miss Wilton. While it is
+astonishingly impudent (must be, or it couldn&#8217;t be done at all), it is
+so stupendously like a boy, and unlike a woman, that it is perfectly
+free from offence. I never have seen such a thing. Priscilla Horton as
+a boy, not to be thought of beside it. She does an imitation of the
+dancing of the Christy Minstrels&mdash;wonderfully clever&mdash;which in the
+audacity of its thorough-going is surprising. A thing that you <i>can
+not</i> imagine a woman&#8217;s doing at all; and yet the manner, the
+appearance, the levity, impulse and spirits of it, are so exactly like
+a boy, that you cannot think of anything like her sex in association
+with it. It begins at eight, and is over by a quarter-past nine. I
+never have seen such a curious thing, and the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span>girl&#8217;s talent is
+unchallengeable. I call her the cleverest girl I have ever seen on the
+stage in my time, and the most singularly original.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>But Miss Wilton was sick and tired of Pippo no less than of the Cupids.
+She begged of all the managers to let her play the r&ocirc;le of a heroine in
+long dresses. They turned a deaf ear to her. Buckstone said to her, &#8220;I
+shall never see you otherwise than in the part of this wicked little
+scamp.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Every evening she set her audiences in roars and every afternoon she spent
+in tears over her lot. When one day her married sister said to her&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;As the managers won&#8217;t have you, take a theatre yourself.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But I have no money.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ll lend you money,&#8221; said her brother-in-law.</p>
+
+<p>A partnership between Byron and Miss Wilton was the immediate result. <i>He</i>
+brought his reputation and his puns. <i>She</i> the &pound;1000 which was not hers.</p>
+
+<p>A theatre had now to be found. Near Tottenham Court Road, one of the
+noisiest and commonest quarters of the town, there was a squalid,
+miserable-looking street where ill-fed and ill-famed Frenchmen were at
+this time beginning to congregate; and in it there was a place of
+entertainment where all sorts of things had been achieved, but bankruptcy
+oftenest of all.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> Fr&eacute;d&eacute;ric Lemaitre had played Napoleon there in French,
+and had in this capacity passed in review some half-dozen supers who stood
+for the &#8220;Grande Arm&eacute;e&#8221; and who cried &#8220;Viv&#8217; l&#8217;Emprou!&#8221; The house bore the
+high-sounding name of the &#8220;Queen&#8217;s Theatre,&#8221; but the people of the
+neighbourhood called it the &#8220;Dust-Hole,&#8221; and in doing so proved their
+acquaintance with it. The aristocratic seats were a shilling, and when the
+Stalls had dined well they were given to bombarding the Boxes with orange
+peel.</p>
+
+<p>It was now cleaned, restored, freshened up at an outlay more of pains than
+of money. The &#8220;Dust-Hole&#8221; was transformed into a blue and white
+<i>bonbonni&egrave;re</i>. The little manageress did not spare herself, and on the
+evening of the first night, whilst the <i>queue</i> was already forming outside
+the door of the theatre, she was busy hammering in a last nail. What would
+have been said by the devotees of fashion, wandering in the muddy
+Tottenham Street, and astonished at finding themselves in such a locality,
+had they seen their favourite squatting on a stool, hammer in hand?</p>
+
+<p>The company she had gathered round her consisted of Byron, John Clarke,
+transplanted from the Strand, Fanny Josephs&mdash;an actress of delicate and
+agreeable talent, the excellent <i>du&egrave;gne</i> Larkin, and two other sisters
+Wilton. It included also a tall young man of twenty-four who had not
+previously acted in London, and who was not therefore of any interest to
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> public, though to his manageress he was; his name was Bancroft.</p>
+
+<p>He was a gentleman by birth, breeding, and bearing. But, his family being
+ruined, he had followed the vocation which led him to the stage. In four
+and a half years he had played four hundred and forty-six r&ocirc;les. In one
+engagement of thirty-six days in Dublin he had played forty. This hard
+life as a provincial comedian had broken him into his business. Tall and
+slender, he owed a sort of air of distinction combined with stiffness to
+his short sight and to his stature. The rendering of cool, well-bred
+nonchalance came naturally to him, but in the depth of his eye there
+lurked a gleam of irrepressible humour. He had spent much time in
+observing and reflecting, he knew much more of things than did his
+colleagues, and he felt vaguely conscious of possessing qualities which
+had only to be drawn out. And now fortune, in the guise of a young girl,
+had come to him and taken him by the hand.</p>
+
+<p>Thus there was both ambition and love in the air that April evening in
+1865 when the little &#8220;Prince of Wales&#8217;s&#8221; opened its door as wide as it
+could. In order not to startle the public or disturb its habits, a
+burlesque and a comedy were offered it pending the preparation of the new
+repertory. Marie Wilton&#8217;s friends supported her in their hundreds, but
+their sympathies were soon to be lost. The pieces themselves were almost
+worthless; Byron would seem to have lost his <i>verve</i> during the removal.
+Something<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> new had to be found for the autumn. It was then that Robertson
+was thought of.</p>
+
+<p>Thomas William, or more familiarly, Tom Robertson, was at this time next
+door to a failure. He was thirty-six, and was fighting an uphill fight
+against ill-fortune with a desperation that was growing into rancour. The
+son, grandson, and great-grandson of actors, he had passed the first years
+of his life in a touring company in the midst of those <i>bourgeois</i>
+vagabonds whose joys and sorrows I have endeavoured to depict. His father
+had been manager of the company which worked on the Lincoln circuit, and
+had ended by giving it up. Tom himself had appeared upon the boards whilst
+still a child, but, as it would seem, without giving evidence of any
+remarkable talents. Later, his speciality was the taking off of
+foreigners&mdash;a sorry means of inciting to laughter for a man of intellect.
+In fine, though there are some who would fain mislead us in the matter, it
+is clear that Robertson was but a second-rate actor.</p>
+
+<p>At the age of nineteen, on the strength of a newspaper advertisement,
+Robertson set out for Holland to secure a place as usher or junior master
+in a boarding school. After unspeakable misadventures, of which he talked
+afterwards quite merrily, and curious experiences which must have been
+useful to him in his capacity of dramatist, he was despatched home by a
+good-natured consul, and took up his actor&#8217;s life again with its three
+r&ocirc;les and one meal a day. In 1851 we find<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> him in London trying to earn a
+livelihood. He has written one piece, <i>A Night&#8217;s Adventure</i>, which by a
+lucky chance has been accepted and performed. But it fails. He has a
+quarrel with Farren, the manager, who has produced it, his only employer;
+and behold! he is again at sea. Now he comes to the assistance of his
+father, who is making desperate efforts to keep open a suburban theatre.
+Anon he is fulfilling insignificant engagements here and there. He goes to
+Paris with a company which gets paid on the first Saturday and never
+again. He becomes prompter at the Olympic. He translates French plays,
+writes farces, produces a heap of wretched stuff for which he cannot
+always find a market. When hunger drives him to it, he sells his &#8220;copy&#8221;
+for a few shillings to a bookseller, of whom it is difficult to say
+whether he was merely a shrewd man of business or a friend in need. For,
+after all, to the recipient these shillings meant his daily bread, and the
+bookseller was not always sure of reimbursing himself.</p>
+
+<p>He has introduced into one of his comedies a bitter memory of his
+beginnings as a dramatist of the objections which met him everywhere. The
+speaker is a composer of music. &#8220;In England, yesterday is always
+considered so much better than to-day&mdash;last week so superior to this&mdash;and
+this week so superior to the week after next&mdash;and thirty years ago so much
+more brilliant an era than the present.... I shall explain myself better
+if I give my own personal reasons for making a crusade<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> against age. In
+this country I find age so respected, so run after, so courted, so
+worshipped, that it becomes intolerable. I compose music; I wish to sell
+it. I go to a publisher and tell him so; he looks at me and says, &#8216;You
+look so young,&#8217; in the same tone that he would say, You look like an
+impostor or a pickpocket. I apologise as humbly as I can for not having
+been born fifty years earlier, and the publisher, struck by my contrition,
+thinks to himself, Poor young man, after all, he cannot help being so
+young, and addressing me as if I were a baby, says, &#8216;My dear sir, very
+likely your compositions may have merit&mdash;I don&#8217;t dispute it&mdash;but, you see,
+Mr. So-and-So, aged sixty, and Mr. Such-an-one, aged seventy, and Mr.
+T&#8217;other, aged eighty, and Mr. Somebody, aged ninety, write for us; and the
+public are accustomed to their productions, and we make it a rule never to
+give the world anything written by a man under fifty-five years old. Go
+away now, and keep to your work for the next thirty years; during that
+time exert yourself to get older&mdash;you will succeed if you try hard; turn
+grey, be bald&mdash;it&#8217;s not a bad substitute&mdash;lose your teeth, your health,
+your vigour, your fire, your freshness, your genius,&mdash;in one short word,
+your terrible, abominable youth, and some day or other, if you don&#8217;t die
+in the interim, you may have the chance of being a great man.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>As though in obedience to this ironical advice, Tom was already almost old
+after fifteen years of so dreadful an existence. His handsome face had
+assumed a melancholy cast which it was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> never to lose. Once in the depth
+of his misery he took it into his head to enlist. The army would have
+nothing to say to him. Then, recklessly, he married a beautiful girl who
+imagined she had a vocation for the stage. Children came, but neither
+success nor money. She died, and Robertson then tried his hand at
+journalism. He tried to &#8220;place&#8221; work of every kind wherever he could, from
+riddles and comic anecdotes of a dozen lines up to serial stories. He got
+connected with a score of London and provincial papers&mdash;the <i>Porcupine</i>,
+of Liverpool; the <i>Comic News</i>; the <i>Wag</i>, which his friend Byron had
+started; <i>Fun</i>, just started by Tom Hood, and the <i>Illustrated Times</i>, on
+which he succeeded Edmund Yates as dramatic critic, and in whose columns,
+under the title of &#8220;The Theatrical Lounger,&#8221; he sketched the features of
+the whole stage-world from leading actor to fireman and call-boy. It is
+all written with easy, familiar humour, with a spice of impudence thrown
+in, not unlike the style of our old weekly <i>Figaro</i>; at the same time, it
+is observant, natural, alive, with here and there a gust of passion and a
+vent of spleen.</p>
+
+<p>Robertson lived in the very centre of Bohemia&mdash;that vaguely-defined
+district in which &#8220;men of the world&#8221; whom the &#8220;world&#8221; bored, among them
+officers who found the military clubs too solemn, came to drink and make
+merry with the night-birds of the law, the theatre, and the press. They
+would meet at the Garrick, the Arundel, the Savage, the Fielding, of which
+last Albert Smith<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> has left us a description in mock-heroic verse. Tom
+Hood, a clerk in the War Office, and editor of <i>Fun</i>, used to give Friday
+supper-parties&mdash;frugal meals, just cold meat and boiled potatoes. But
+those who met there, Clement Scott tells us, were the best fellows in the
+world.</p>
+
+<p>Conversation flowed until daybreak in a kind of torrent. It still flowed
+as the guests made their way homewards at the hours when the carts of the
+market gardeners began to rumble through Knightsbridge and the rising sun
+to gild the treetops of Hyde Park.</p>
+
+<p>Were they all such very &#8220;good fellows&#8221;?&mdash;I have my doubts. This Bohemia
+was not a country where everyone was young and kindly and gay. It was just
+a backwater, or a little world apart where one talked instead of working,
+and where night took the place of day; it was the antechamber to the real
+world of literature, a place of impatient waitings, of feverish suspense.
+I am sure there were half a dozen malcontents and failures there for one
+man who could claim success.</p>
+
+<p>These lines<a name='fna_10' id='fna_10' href='#f_10'><small>[10]</small></a> of Robert Brough (one of the most characterised members of
+the body, one of the first to disappear from it), written by him on his
+birthday, give an instructive glimpse at the life&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8220;I&#8217;m twenty-nine! I&#8217;m twenty-nine!<br />
+I&#8217;ve drank too much of beer and wine;<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>I&#8217;ve had too much of toil and strife,<br />
+I&#8217;ve given a kiss to Johnson&#8217;s wife,<br />
+And sent a lying note to mine,&mdash;<br />
+I&#8217;m twenty-nine! I&#8217;m twenty-nine!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>After having written a few newspaper articles and two or three plays,
+Brough grew embittered at not having attained wealth and fame. That he
+should have failed to do so seemed a sufficient indication of the infamy
+of society. He wrote and published the &#8220;Songs of the Governing Classes,&#8221;
+the satire of which is as corrosive as vitriol, as scalding as molten
+lead. The &#8220;Song of the Gentleman&#8221; in particular might well be given a
+place in the anarchist anthologies of the future.</p>
+
+<p>Something of this bitterness was to find its way into the impassioned
+outbursts of Robertson and the philosophic irony of Gilbert. But at these
+nocturnal repasts of Hood&#8217;s, at which Robertson was one of the most
+brilliant, fearless, and enthralling of talkers, there was question not so
+much of reconstituting society as of renewing art and reforming the
+theatre. They ridiculed the wretched stage management of the day, the
+fatuity of the comedians of the old school, the tyranny of conventional
+routine,&mdash;everything connected with the stage. And what was it they had to
+offer in place of the old order? Truth more carefully observed, nature
+more closely followed. It is always the same ideals, or the same
+pretensions: the generation which holds them up against its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> senior never
+seems to suspect that its junior may invoke them against itself.</p>
+
+<p>Pending the consummation of these great projects, Robertson <ins class="correction" title="original: had had">had</ins> acted at
+the Strand in 1861 a little play called <i>The Cantab</i>, which achieved a
+sort of success. He offered another burlesque to Mrs. Swanborough but she
+refused it. Then came a stroke of luck. Sothern, who was at this time
+attracting all London in a piece by Tom Taylor entitled, <i>Our American
+Cousin</i>, heard tell of a piece which Robertson had written. Sothern, who
+was getting sick of the inexhaustible popularity of Lord Dundreary, was
+anxious to appear before the public in the r&ocirc;le of David Garrick. He was
+anxious to get completely away from the field of caricature, to play a
+really serious part which should bring out all his gifts. Unluckily the
+piece had not much success, nor did it merit much. It was an adaptation
+from the French with Garrick substituted for the original French hero.
+Strange beginning for one who aimed at a &#8220;Return to Truth,&#8221; this sticking
+of a historic head upon the shoulders of &#8220;a gentleman unknown&#8221;!</p>
+
+<p>It was after this that he wrote his comedy <i>Society</i>. He took it to
+Buckstone, who refused it flatly. &#8220;My dear fellow,&#8221; he said, &#8220;your piece
+wouldn&#8217;t reach a fourth performance.&#8221; The author went off, fingers
+twitching, beyond himself with rage, and wandered into the Strand, where
+one of his friends met him. &#8220;Look here,&#8221; said Robertson to him, &#8220;here is a
+capital play and these asses won&#8217;t have it.&#8221; A provincial manager<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> took it
+up. It succeeded in Liverpool. Marie Wilton secured it and produced it on
+November 14, 1861, at her little theatre. From that evening dates not only
+the success of the Prince of Wales&#8217;s Theatre, but a new era for English
+Comedy&mdash;the era of Robertson.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<div class="note">
+<p class="hang">First Performance of <i>Society</i>&mdash;Success of <i>Ours</i>, <i>Caste</i>, and
+<i>School</i>&mdash;How Robertson turned to account the Talent of his Actors, John
+Hare, Bancroft, and Mrs. Bancroft&mdash;Progress in the Matter of
+Scenery&mdash;Dialogue and Character-drawing&mdash;Robertson as a Humorist: a scene
+from <i>School</i>&mdash;As a Realist: a scene from <i>Caste</i>&mdash;The Comedian of the
+Upper Middle Classes&mdash;Robertson&#8217;s Marriage, Illness, and Death&mdash;The &#8220;Cup
+and Saucer&#8221; Comedy&mdash;The Improvement in Actors&#8217; Salaries&mdash;The Bancrofts at
+the Haymarket&mdash;Farewell Performance&mdash;My Pilgrimage to Tottenham Street.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>That evening of the 14th of November has been described to us by several
+eye-witnesses, so that we are able to realise the feelings that prevailed
+both on the stage and amongst the audience. The first act seemed gay and
+lively, with a sort of mordant raillery in it with which the audience was
+unfamiliar. Then came an idyll, evolving amidst the trees of a London
+square. What! love&mdash;youthful, tender, tremulous love&mdash;in the very heart of
+this city of mud, fog, and smoke! Love, so near that you might touch his
+wings! This was the kind of impression it evoked&mdash;an impression that
+pleased and moved the more, that the public, always over-curious
+concerning the private life of its favourites, was acquainted with the
+tender relations of actor and actress. It<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> was a real &#8220;honeymoon&#8221;&mdash;the
+full moon which shone on this love duet from over the shrubbery of
+coloured canvas. The hearts of the audience went out to them, and all was
+well.</p>
+
+<p>But no one could say what sort of reception was in store for &#8220;The Owls&#8217;
+Roost.&#8221; This &#8220;roost&#8221; was a picture from the life of the clubs which I have
+already described as the principal resorts of Bohemia. Now, the
+&#8220;Savages&#8221;&mdash;the members, that is, of the Savage Club&mdash;as well as the
+frequenters of the Garrick, the Fielding, and the Arundel, were all there
+in force. How would they take this caricature of themselves? The laughter
+which broke out in <ins class="correction" title="original: uninterruped">uninterrupted</ins> peals soon reassured the anxious ears
+behind the scenes.</p>
+
+<p>There is a point at which one of the chief characters is at a loss for
+half a crown wherewith to pay for the hansom in which he is going off to a
+ball. Having no money in his pocket he asks a friend for the sum. &#8220;I
+haven&#8217;t got it,&#8221; the friend replies, &#8220;but I&#8217;ll see if I can&#8217;t get it for
+you.&#8221; He asks a third, who makes a similar reply; and so the appeal makes
+the whole round of the club, until at last a half-crown is found in the
+depths of a pocket, and is passed on from hand to hand, borrowed and lent
+a dozen times, to the man who had asked for it in the first instance. The
+incident was taken from actual life. Thus reproduced upon the stage, it
+seemed indescribably comic, and proved the turning-point in the fortune of
+the play&mdash;the happy crisis after<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> which everything was greeted with
+applause. It was a trivial illustration, but it was thoroughly
+characteristic. It was Bohemia in a nutshell&mdash;to have nothing and give
+everything.</p>
+
+<p>As the &#8220;owls&#8221; were so much diverted by the faithful portrayal of their
+resorts and of their customs, thus presented for the first time upon the
+stage, there was no reason to expect that Society would take offence over
+the extraordinary and incongruous proceedings at the establishment of Lord
+and Lady Ptarmigant. This kind of comic libel was not unknown;&mdash;Bulwer,
+for instance, had set himself to depict the union of the old aristocracy
+with the new, the na&iuml;ve veneration displayed by Riches for Rank, and on
+the other hand, the prostration of Rank before Riches. No one showed
+astonishment at seeing Lady Ptarmigant smilingly take the arm of old
+Chodd, though his language and his manners were those of a costermonger,
+and though his lordship&#8217;s valet would probably have hesitated about
+letting himself be seen with him in a public-house. As for Lord Ptarmigant
+himself, he was just what we call a <i>panne</i>. The whole character resolved
+itself into a mere eccentricity, as monotonous as it was far-fetched and
+extravagant,&mdash;a habit of dragging about his chair with him wherever he
+went, and of falling asleep in it the moment he sat down, with the result
+that everyone who came in or went out could not fail to tumble over his
+stretched-out old legs. Who would have imagined that such a r&ocirc;le as this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>
+would be one of the causes of the success of the piece, and would be the
+means of revealing to London an admirable actor? His name was John Hare.
+He was still quite young, and he had wished for this strange r&ocirc;le in which
+to <ins class="correction" title="original: made">make</ins> his <i>d&eacute;but</i>. Profiting by the example of Garrick, Hare had
+realised that an actor does not make his name by giving out a witticism or
+telling phrase with effect, but by putting before us a live human figure,
+if only a silent figure, in all its eccentricity of brain. His facial
+expression was wonderful, and his mimicry excellent;&mdash;he had in him the
+genius of metamorphosis; he has it still, and gives evidence of it in a
+hundred different r&ocirc;les. By a sort of intuition not easy to explain, there
+was hardly a spectator who did not divine the future great actor from this
+one performance.</p>
+
+<p>The success of <i>Society</i>&mdash;it lasted for one hundred and fifty nights&mdash;was
+followed almost at once by the success of <i>Ours</i>, which lasted still
+longer, and filled the theatrical season 1866-67. Then came <i>Caste</i> in
+1867 and 1868. <i>School</i> in 1869 surpassed its predecessors in popularity,
+being played nearly four hundred times. In the intervals between these
+four great triumphs there were two pieces which, without achieving so long
+a run, still maintained in the fortunate little theatre the same joyous
+atmosphere of success.</p>
+
+<p>When the &#8220;Prince of Wales&#8217;s,&#8221; however, had recourse to any other than its
+regular caterer, a check in its fortunes was sure to come, and there<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> was
+no alternative to falling back on Robertson. And when Robertson tried his
+fortune elsewhere, even when supported by a popularity so well established
+as that of Sothern, the result was invariably but a <i>succ&egrave;s d&#8217;estime</i>,
+when not a disastrous failure. From these circumstances a certain
+superstition grew up. Superstitions are rife in the theatrical world.
+Marie Wilton, it was felt, had her lucky star, and Robertson had his, but
+the two had to be in conjunction for their benign influence to be exerted.
+Perhaps the coincidence may be explained without having recourse to the
+stars. Tom Taylor, on the day after a new triumph, wrote to the young
+manageress: &#8220;The author and the theatre, the actors and the r&ocirc;les, all
+seem made for one another.&#8221; This was quite true, and it may be added, that
+the public and the time were in harmony with the spirit of the pieces and
+the talent of the performers. Everything had come about as it should; so
+it was called chance!</p>
+
+<p>Robertson was not much of an actor, but he was a wonderful reader. When
+you heard Robertson read one of his comedies, Clement Scott tells us, you
+understood it in all its details. Under the sway of his moving elocution
+the actors laughed and cried. The author knew their weaknesses and their
+gifts better than they themselves; he knew, therefore, how to make the
+most of the peculiar constitution of this small company which formed a
+kind of family, closely united by common interests, ambitions, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>
+affections. Until then a piece was often nothing more than a star actor
+planted well in the front of the stage, taking his time and prolonging his
+effects, and behind him a dozen or so nonentities mumbling mere odds and
+ends of dialogue and addressing themselves to the back of their more
+famous colleague. For the first time there was now at the &#8220;Prince of
+Wales&#8217;s,&#8221; an <i>ensemble</i> moulded by assiduous rehearsals and perfected by
+the practice of every night.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>Ours</i>, John Hare, who played the r&ocirc;le of Prince Perofsky, had only to
+utter a dozen sentences&mdash;hackneyed and affected compliments&mdash;yet he made
+out of it a really striking portrait of a Slavonic Grand Seigneur, with a
+smouldering passion in his heart veiled under the most perfect manners.
+Besides his impressiveness there was something enigmatic about him that
+set one speculating as to the part he was to play in the plot,&mdash;an enigma
+to which there was to be no solution.</p>
+
+<p>At length, in <i>Caste</i>, Robertson gave him a real r&ocirc;le, that of Sam
+Gerridge. I imagine, indeed, that author and actor contributed equally to
+the creation of this character. The same might be said, perhaps, of that
+of Captain Hawtree, created by Bancroft in the same play. Seldom, surely,
+has the use of this big word &#8220;created&#8221; (so often applied in the papers to
+the most insignificant performances) been warranted so fully as in these
+cases.</p>
+
+<p>Before Sothern&#8217;s time the man of the world used<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> to be represented on the
+English stage as an absurd figure treading on tiptoe while in ladies&#8217;
+society and ogling them <i>&agrave; bout portant</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The type had been changed as regards costume, but not as regards language,
+from that of the Macaroni of 1770. The dandy of 1840 does not seem to have
+found his way on to the stage until 1865.</p>
+
+<p>It was a complete change from this type to the character presented by
+Bancroft as Captain Hawtree, humorous but not ridiculous; not in the least
+essential to the play, yet attracting a large share of interest and
+sympathy. An elegantly languid air, which yet spoke of weakness neither of
+muscles nor of character; a blind acceptance of the social code, which was
+not incompatible with generous feelings and a sense of humour; a mixture
+of soldier-like cordiality and worldly cynicism, which amounted to an
+<i>&eacute;tat d&#8217;&acirc;me</i> if not to a philosophy: these were some of the features that
+went to make up the character.</p>
+
+<p>When circumstances&mdash;quite simple and natural&mdash;lead to Hawtree&#8217;s taking tea
+in humble East End lodgings, between a little dancing-girl and an old
+plumber, nearly all the fun of the scene comes from his mute expression of
+continual astonishment. Hawtree presents a curious combination of
+awkwardness and goodwill in the scene in which he brings the plates to
+Polly Eccles in the pantry to be washed. At bottom it is the attitude of
+the English gentleman towards the social question,&mdash;somewhat scornful,
+somewhat<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> amused, but ready to turn up his sleeves and put a shoulder to
+the wheel at need.</p>
+
+<p>As for Marie Wilton, with what wonderful insight Robertson had made out
+the real genius of this little woman, whose talents were so real, if all
+her ambitions were not attainable! She looked back with horror at her
+successes at the Strand; she wanted never again to play a <i>gamin&#8217;s</i> part
+(as we should call it) or to appear in burlesque. Robertson wrote her a
+succession of <i>gamin&#8217;s</i> parts and burlesque scenes. But the <i>gamin</i> was
+petticoated and the burlesque scenes set in a comedy. I am not referring
+to <i>Society</i>, which was not written for the &#8220;Prince of Wales&#8217;s.&#8221; But what
+is it she has to do in the three other pieces? In <i>School</i> she climbs a
+wall. In <i>Ours</i> she takes part in a game of bowls, mimics the affectations
+of the swells of &#8217;65, plays at being a soldier, bastes a leg of mutton
+from a watering pot, and as a climax makes a roley-poley pudding, adapting
+military implements to culinary uses for the purpose. In <i>Caste</i> her
+operations are still more varied&mdash;she sings, dances, boxes people&#8217;s ears,
+plays the piano, pretends to blow a trumpet, puts on a forage cap, and
+imitates a squadron of cavalry. If this is not burlesque, what is it?</p>
+
+<p>Some months ago I saw her in a revival of <i>Money</i>, in which she plays the
+r&ocirc;le of a woman of the world, and in one scene of which&mdash;a scene which
+owed much more to her than to Bulwer&mdash;she shows the steps of a dance. At
+this moment I seemed to see the legs of Pippo moving under<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> the skirts of
+Lady Franklin,&mdash;those legs which five and thirty years before had made so
+lively an impression on the brain of Charles Dickens.</p>
+
+<p>Whether he was conscious of it or not, Robertson made her play Pippo all
+her life. These fantastic r&ocirc;les, sketched on to the margin of domestic
+dramas, were to have a remarkable and twofold success; they were largely
+responsible for the good fortune of Robertson&#8217;s comedies, and in the
+reading of these they constitute, as it were, appetising <i>hors
+d&#8217;&oelig;uvres</i>. If I say to the admirers of <i>Caste</i> that Polly Eccles is an
+excrescence spoiling the artistic merit of the piece, they reply at once
+that, on the contrary, she is its life and soul; and from the point of
+view of stage effect, they are quite right.</p>
+
+<p>The Bancrofts&mdash;they married shortly after the opening of the theatre&mdash;were
+the complements of each other. She was all fun and fancy, harum-scarum,
+irresponsible, indescribable. He was chiefly notable for thought, taste,
+careful observation, and truthful representation of real life. One of his
+first acts, as soon as there was some money in the exchequer of the
+&#8220;Prince of Wales&#8217;s,&#8221; was to introduce a certain amount of intelligent
+realism into the scenery. He felt the need of doors with locks instead of
+the wretched folding-sashes, which shook before the draughts from the
+wings. In <i>Caste</i> he gave ceilings to the rooms. The last Act of <i>Ours</i>
+takes place in Crimean barracks during the winter of 1855; every time the
+door was opened a gust of snow came into the room<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> with a whirl and
+whistle, which produced so strong an illusion that the audience shivered.
+In the gardens, real flowers were introduced, and living birds. Charles
+Mathews was thought very enterprising because he had ventured to have some
+chairs placed in a drawing-room upon the stage. Bancroft went so far as to
+assign a different character to different suites of furniture. Thus in a
+revival of the <i>School for Scandal</i>, Joseph Surface&#8217;s furniture was
+different from that of Sir Peter Teazle; his furniture, hypocritical as
+himself, seemed to make a pretence of being plain and simple, lied for him
+and bore out his lies. As for the actresses, instead of being made guys of
+by the theatrical costumiers, they had real dresses made for them by real
+dressmakers.</p>
+
+<p>Robertson approved of these innovations, but he was never more than half a
+realist, and this from several causes. Like all Englishmen, he delighted
+in the warfare of words; he shared with them all, big and little, ancient
+and modern, that liking for brilliancy which is perhaps evolved from the
+liking of savages for brilliants. Once he began concocting repartees he
+forgot all else and gave his pen its head. He made his characters play a
+game of verbal battledore and shuttlecock. He dragged in by the nape of
+the neck, as it were, tirades whose proper place had been in a leading
+article. When he went too far, however, in these directions, he was often
+the first to make fun of the result. &#8220;What has that got to do with what we
+are talking about?&#8221; asks<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> a character in <i>Ours</i>. &#8220;It has nothing to do
+with it, that&#8217;s why I said it.&#8221; And in the same piece another character
+remarks of something that has happened, &#8220;If an author put that into a
+play, everyone would say that it was impossible and untrue to life.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Thus it was he would forestall gaily, with a sort of impudent frankness,
+the objections of the critics. The public enjoys this kind of thing. What
+it enjoys most of all, in England at anyrate, is the <i>grain de folie</i>, the
+lurking, unlooked-for quaintness, which characterises some of their
+humorists, Dickens, for instance, and Ben Jonson. It is this quality which
+is responsible for their creation of strange types whose ideas and
+conversations are all topsy-turvy.</p>
+
+<p>It was in <i>School</i> that Robertson poured it out most plentifully. It was
+the most frivolous of his plays, and in this perhaps may be found the
+explanation of its success. The heroines are boarding-school girls; they
+are just at the age and in the situation in which no absurdity would seem
+too great or out of place. By a convention which the spectator agrees to
+willingly, they are girls in Act I. and women three weeks later in Act
+III. In these three weeks they have learned the meaning of life.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What is love?&#8221; asks one of the youngest in the first scene. &#8220;Why,
+everyone knows what love is,&#8221; Naomi tells her. &#8220;Well, what is it then?&#8221;
+asks another, and the first speaker insists that no one seems to know.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span>Then comes the time for them to pass from vague theory to real experience.
+It is the evening, in the orchard. There are two flirtation scenes, one
+following the other, full of childishness, but full of <i>na&iuml;vet&eacute;</i>,
+freshness, and charm. There is question of the distance from the earth to
+the moon, of the play of light and shade, of a little milk-jug which it
+takes two to carry, of the Crimean War, and of Othello. Of love there is
+no word, but it underlies their every feeling, hides behind every word,
+peeps out through every glance, mingles with the very air they breathe.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Naomi</i>: ... &#8220;I like to hear you talk.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i> (<i>bows</i>): &#8220;The fibs or the truth?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Naomi</i>: &#8220;Both. Have you ever been married?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>: &#8220;Never.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Naomi</i>: &#8220;What are you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>: &#8220;Nothing. It&#8217;s the occupation I am most fitted for.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Naomi</i>: &#8220;Oh, you must be something?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>: &#8220;No.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Naomi</i>: &#8220;What were you before you were what you are now?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>: &#8220;A little boy.&#8221;...</p>
+
+<p><i>Naomi</i>: &#8220;Mr. Farintosh was saying at table that you had been in the
+army. Were you a horse-soldier or a foot-soldier?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>: &#8220;A foot-soldier,&mdash;a very foot-soldier.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Naomi</i>: &#8220;And that you were in the Crimea?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>: &#8220;Ya-as, I was there.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Naomi</i>: &#8220;At the battle of Inkermann?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span><i>Jack</i>: &#8220;Ya-as.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Naomi</i>: &#8220;Then why didn&#8217;t you mention it?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>: &#8220;Not worth while, there were so many other fellows there.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Naomi</i>: &#8220;Did you fight?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>: &#8220;Ya-as, I fought.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Naomi</i>: &#8220;Weren&#8217;t you frightened?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>: &#8220;Immensely.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Naomi</i>: &#8220;Then why did you stay?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>: &#8220;Because I hadn&#8217;t the pluck to run away.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Naomi</i>: &#8220;Did they pay you much for fighting?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>: &#8220;No, but then I didn&#8217;t do much fighting, so that I was even
+with them in that respect!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><strong><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="spacer">&#183;</span><span class="spacer">&#183;</span><span class="spacer">&#183;</span><span class="spacer">&#183;</span><span class="spacer">&#183;</span><span class="spacer">&#183;</span><span class="spacer">&#183;</span><span class="spacer">&#183;</span></span></strong></p>
+
+<p><i>Naomi</i>: ... &#8220;Are you fond of reading?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>: &#8220;Ya-as. Middling.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Naomi</i>: &#8220;Did you ever read Othello?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>: &#8220;Ya-as. But I don&#8217;t think it nice reading for young ladies.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Naomi</i>: &#8220;Othello told Desdemona of the dangers he had passed and the
+battles he had won.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>: &#8220;Ya-as. Othello was a nigger, and didn&#8217;t mind bragging.&#8221;...</p></div>
+
+<p>It would be but an ill service to Robertson to give an outline of his
+plays. A mere outline would give the impression that they were childish
+and absurd, and they were neither the one nor the other. He never invented
+a striking situation, so far as I am aware. He never settled (or even
+raised) a moral or social problem in any of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> productions. He gave all
+his attention to the characters and the dialogue. A scribbled synopsis
+found amongst his papers reveals his method of character-drawing. He stuck
+down three words, one after another&mdash;a name, a profession, a ruling
+passion, such as love, ambition, cupidity, pride. With these words he
+thought he had summed up the ordinary conventional man, as nature had
+formed him, and society had reformed or deformed him: a very elementary
+but very sane psychology, which he enriched, embellished, elaborated, with
+the flowers of his fancy and the fruits of his observation. I have given
+some specimens of the former. I may now give some specimens of the second,
+to justify the title of half-realist which I have given him.</p>
+
+<p>He wanted nothing better than to be a realist and to reproduce what he had
+actually seen. He knew nothing of great ladies, as one may well
+understand. When he had to portray them he was obliged to copy from bad
+models. His Lady Ptarmigant is a regular <i>bourgeoise</i>; his Marquise de
+Saint Maur, who learns bits of Froissart by heart and gives lessons in
+history to her son, is either a myth or an anachronism. His Hawtree, on
+the other hand, is as real as can be; Robertson had met him probably in
+the clubs which he frequented. In <i>School</i> he introduced a foolish yet
+ferocious usher, who was, it seems, a reminiscence of his youthful
+expedition to Holland. His rancour had not become extinguished in the
+twenty years that had intervened, and he could not resist the somewhat
+brutal satisfaction of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> inflicting a physical punishment in the last act
+upon his old enemy. He used to ask his small boy, whilst walking with him
+in Belsize Park, what he would answer to such and such a question? How
+would he set about enraging his master? And the boy would receive sixpence
+or a florin according to the nature of his reply.</p>
+
+<p>Soldiers, theatrical folk, artistic and literary Bohemians, are painted as
+they live, slightly idealised. In <i>Caste</i> we have two specimens of the
+people&mdash;bad and good&mdash;in the persons of Eccles and Sam Gerridge. &#8220;Work, my
+boy,&#8221; says Eccles to his future son-in-law; &#8220;there&#8217;s nothing like
+work&mdash;when you&#8217;re young.&#8221; As for him,&mdash;well, it was some years since he
+worked (as a matter of fact he had lived on his daughters, and not touched
+a tool for twenty years), but he loved to see young folk at work. That did
+him good,&mdash;did them good too. He declaims against the upper classes; but
+when a marchioness passes his threshold, he bows down before her, and
+conducts her back to her carriage, only to return to his real self,
+insolent and venomous, the moment she has gone. When he makes his way to
+the public-house to drink, he gives a &#8220;business appointment&#8221; as his
+pretext&mdash;&#8220;a friend who is waiting for him round the corner.&#8221; Always posing
+and aiming at effect, he uses big words for the smallest matters, and can
+produce a tear in his eye at will. He has a few garbled bits of literature
+at his command, and makes use of mangled quotations from <i>King Lear</i>.
+And,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> wretched actor though he be, he is able, with the aid of filial
+affection, to produce an illusion in the mind of one of his daughters.
+&#8220;Poor dad,&#8221; says Polly, &#8220;he is so good at heart&mdash;and <i>so</i> cute.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>No money in the house! He has been left at home by himself to mind the
+child of his eldest daughter, married to an officer who was well-born and
+rich, but who, it is supposed, has perished in the Indian Mutiny. The old
+drunkard rocks the cradle, angrily puffing his tobacco smoke in the baby&#8217;s
+face.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Eccles</i>: ... &#8220;Mind the baby, indeed! (<i>Smokes and puffs angrily short
+cloud.</i>) That fool of a ge&#8217;l to go and throw away her chances
+(<i>rises</i>) for the sake of being an Honourable-ess. (<i>Goes up centre.</i>)
+To think of her father not having the price of an early pint, or a
+quartern of cool refreshing gin! Rock the young Honourable! (<i>Kicks
+the cradle.</i>) Cuss him! Are we slaves, we working-men? (<i>Sings.</i>)
+&#8216;Britons never, never, never&#8217;&mdash;(<i>Snatches pipe from his mouth, throws
+it over the fireplace, takes chair front of table.</i>) However, I shan&#8217;t
+stand this much longer! I&#8217;ve writ the old cat!&mdash;the Marquizzy, I mean;
+I told her her daughter-in-law and her grandson were starving! That
+fool Esther is too proud to do it herself. I &#8217;ate pride&mdash;it&#8217;s beastly.
+(<i>Rises.</i>) There&#8217;s no beastly pride about me! (<i>Goes up centre, clacks
+his tongue against the roof of mouth.</i>) I&#8217;m as dry as a limekiln! Of
+course, there&#8217;s nothing in the house fit for a Christian to drink!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>
+(<i>Looks into the jug on dresser.</i>) Empty! (<i>Lifts teapot on mantel.</i>)
+Tea! (<i>Turns up his nose. Turns to table, looks into jug on it.</i>)
+Milk! (<i>Contempt.</i>) Milk for this aristocratic young pauper! Everybody
+in the &#8217;ouse is saggrefized for him! To think of me, Member of the
+Committee of Banded Brothers, organised for the Regeneration of Human
+Kind by an Equal Diffusion of Labour and an Equal Division of
+Property!&mdash;to think of me, without the price of a pot of beer, while
+this aristocratic pauper wears round his neck&mdash;a coral of gold&mdash;real
+gold. Oh, Society! Oh, Governments! Oh, Class-degradation! Is <i>this</i>
+right? Shall this mindless wretch enjoy in his sleep a jewelled gaud
+while his poor old grandfather is <i>thirsty</i>? It shall not be! I will
+resent the outrage on the Rights of Man! In this holy crusade of class
+against class, of (<i>very meekly</i>) the weak and lowly against the
+(<i>loudly, pointing to cradle</i>) powerful and strong! I will strike one
+blow for freedom. (<i>Stoops over cradle.</i>) He&#8217;s asleep! This coral will
+fetch ten &#8220;bob&#8221; around the corner! If the Marquizzy gives anythink, it
+can be easy got out again! (<i>Takes coral.</i>) Lie still, darling&mdash;lie
+still, darling! It&#8217;s grandfather a-watching you! (<i>Sings.</i>) &#8216;Who ran
+to catch me when I fell? who <i>kicked</i> the spot to make it well?&mdash;My
+grandfather!&#8217; (<i>Goes R.</i>) Lie still, my darling!&mdash;lie still, my
+darling!&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>These comedies reveal the date of their composition in every line.
+Everybody cries out in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> them against money, but as against a master. Love
+cuts but a poor figure in comparison, though for form&#8217;s sake it may
+triumph for five minutes before the curtain fails. Sam Gerridge, the
+virtuous plumber, who acts as counterpoise to the old wretch Eccles, has
+concocted a philosophy for himself out of the notices which he has seen on
+public conveyances&mdash;&#8220;First Class,&#8221; &#8220;Second Class,&#8221; &#8220;Third Class,&#8221; &#8220;Holders
+of Third-Class Tickets must not enter Second-Class Carriages.&#8221; As for him,
+he proposes to establish himself, and, from being a workman, to become an
+employer. John Burns will tell you that this kind of democracy is a
+negation of true democracy; in 1868 the formula seemed wide and generous
+enough.</p>
+
+<p>In such a manner was it that Robertson, who had wished that the world were
+a football which he could send into space with one kick, that the same
+Robertson, who, as he quitted those nocturnal symposia at Tom Hood&#8217;s,
+would bring down his stick upon the pavement with a noise that made the
+silent streets resound, as he held forth indignantly against
+society,&mdash;grew in time and unconsciously, though in a manner easy to
+under-stand, to be the interpreter of the feelings and ideas of this very
+same society. The former assailant now defended the social rank which he
+had attained against both the enemies above and the enemies below. The new
+strata which came into being in 1832 were now half-way through their
+evolution. In 1850 they had been content with melodramas, vulgar farces,
+and Hippodramas.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> In 1865 they asked already for wit, sentiment, satire,
+poetic feeling, all flavoured, it might be, with Cockneyism, but this
+demand was an indication of progress, and Robertson satisfied it by
+writing the middle-class comedy.</p>
+
+<p>The change which took place just then in the life of the dramatist
+convinces me that I am right. He hastened to take leave of his irregular
+life, and to feel after <i>bourgeois</i> comforts. He worked out for himself a
+happiness which made him, like the poor vagabond in the fable, weep for
+very joy. The Eve of this new-opened Paradise was a fair German whom he
+had met at the house of the editor of the <i>Daily Telegraph</i>, whose niece
+she was. Robertson did not long enjoy the sweets of this happy land. His
+mental and physical powers seemed to die away together. Mrs. Bancroft, who
+accompanied him to the first night of <i>The Nightingale</i>, saw him, livid
+with rage, shake his fist at the hissing members of the audience,
+muttering, &#8220;I shall never forgive them for this!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctors ordered him to Torquay, where, however, he grew worse. I have
+read a letter which he wrote thence to his young wife,&mdash;a pitiful letter,
+all in little jerky sentences, set in rhythm by the sick man&#8217;s pants for
+breath. Pitiful, yet gay, for he could not give up being facetious. On his
+return to London he experienced a literary misfortune of which it was the
+lot of little Tommy, then thirteen or fourteen years old, to bring the
+news. Father and son looked upon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> each other with tearful eyes, and
+grasped each other&#8217;s hands. &#8220;If they had seen me thus,&#8221; said the writer
+sadly, &#8220;they would have had pity.&#8221; Robertson was wrong. The public should
+know nothing of these things. There are no extenuating circumstances for
+literary mistakes.</p>
+
+<p>He died some days later. He was only forty-four. A friend who attended the
+funeral remarked, lying in the death chamber, its limbs dangling and
+disjointed, a doll whose injured stomach gave out sawdust through a wide
+opening. It was a doll with which he used to amuse his little girl to the
+very end. As for the puppets with which he had so long amused the world,
+they were to have a longer life. His comedies were destined to be
+continually revived, applauded, and imitated. Out of the six thousand
+performances given by the Bancrofts in a period of twenty years which
+formed one long success, three thousand belonged to Robertson. He alone
+furnished half their repertoire, and that the better half. From the depths
+of the out-of-the-way district which it had brought into fashion, the
+Prince of Wales&#8217;s company sent colonies into the heart of the metropolis.
+It was by actors who had been brought out in it, as in a <i>conservatoire</i>,
+that the Vaudeville, the Globe, and the Court Theatres were founded. The
+inexhaustible success of <i>The Two Roses</i>&mdash;of which there will be question
+further on&mdash;placed the name of James Albery almost as high.</p>
+
+<p>Byron, in his turn, took a leaf out of the book of his old comrade, and
+succeeded, in <i>Our Boys</i>,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> in producing a comedy without (or almost
+without) puns. <i>Our Boys</i> resembles Robertson&#8217;s comedies just as a cook
+resembles her mistress when she is decked out in her mistress&#8217;s hat and
+gown, or as Cathos and Madelon resemble the Marquise de Rambouillet and
+Julie d&#8217;Angennes. Even in this unintentionally caricature-like form the
+Robertsonian comedy continued to please, and it looked as though <i>Our
+Boys</i> would never leave the bills.</p>
+
+<p>The exacting, the fastidious, those who had begun to dream of a purer and
+more penetrating art, dubbed Robertsonian comedy &#8220;Cup and Saucer&#8221; comedy.
+The school accepted the nickname, and gloried in it. For the tea-table,
+fifteen or twenty years ago, was still the centre of the home, the symbol
+of the family, the core of English life, such as it had been formed by the
+combination of the spirit of Puritanism with that of middle-class
+Utilitarianism.</p>
+
+<p>The name of the Bancrofts remained associated with the &#8220;Cup and Saucer&#8221;
+comedy as long as the movement lasted. As soon as they became sensible of
+their favourite author&#8217;s decline in the eyes of the public they called
+Sardou to their assistance. By 1880 the Prince of Wales&#8217;s had become too
+small for them and they emigrated to the Haymarket, which Mr. Bancroft had
+reconstructed as it is now, after a new plan, without the conventional
+proscenium, with the orchestra out of sight, the stage encased in a gilt
+frame like a picture, and no pit.</p>
+
+<p>This last innovation is characteristic. The pit<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> from having composed the
+whole arena of the hall, had been moved back bit by bit, until at last it
+was confined to a few back benches behind the dress circle. To suppress it
+altogether was not so much an act of authority as of emancipation. It has
+been said that Mr. Bancroft thought too much of his gentility, and that he
+seemed anxious to reserve his theatre for the <i>&eacute;lite: Satis est equitem
+mihi plaudere</i>. But even then? After all, it was only a case of an
+extremely able man keeping pace with the democratic generation to which he
+belonged, in his rise towards fortune and its accompanying enjoyments. He
+raised the price of stalls from six to seven shillings, and then to
+ten-and-sixpence. The public was evidently able to pay, for the stalls
+were always full.</p>
+
+<p>It should be added that, under the management of the Bancrofts, the rise
+in salaries was out of all proportion to the rise in the price of seats.
+The weekly salary of one actor, continuing to play in the same r&ocirc;le, went
+from &pound;18 to &pound;60, and that of another from &pound;9 to &pound;50. Mrs. Stirling had
+created the r&ocirc;le of the Marchioness in Caste at the &#8220;Prince of Wales&#8217;s,&#8221;
+and received seven times as much for appearing in it at the Haymarket.
+Douglas Jerrold said to Charles Mathews: &#8220;I don&#8217;t despair of seeing you
+yet with a good cotton umbrella under your arm, carrying your savings to
+the bank.&#8221; Many years afterwards Mathews, presiding over the Theatrical
+Fund, recalled this remark, and added, &#8220;The first part of Jerrold&#8217;s wish
+has been fulfilled. I have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> bought an umbrella.&#8221; Thanks to the Bancrofts
+and the managers who came after them, the bank has been in receipt of the
+savings of many actors who previously would have been content if only they
+might earn their daily bread.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft saw the time approaching when the monopoly they had
+secured of the works of Robertson would cease to exist; they felt at once
+that the vein was being exhausted, and that the new generation would have
+new needs. Able and far-sighted, they determined to retire at the zenith
+of their success, and if not in their youth, at least in their prime and
+in the full activity of their intellect. Neither of them was forty-five
+when in 1885 they gave their farewell performance at the Haymarket.</p>
+
+<p>Amongst the innumerable tokens of esteem which conduced to the triumph of
+this withdrawal, I shall cite only one. It is a letter from Arthur W.
+Pinero, who had belonged as an actor to the Bancroft Company, and who has
+taken since then a foremost place amongst English dramatists. He wrote to
+his former manager:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;It is my opinion, expressed here as it is elsewhere, that the present
+advanced condition of the English stage&mdash;throwing as it does a clear,
+natural light upon the manner and life of the people, where a few
+years ago there was nothing but moulding and tinsel&mdash;is due to the
+crusade begun by Mrs. Bancroft and yourself in your little Prince of
+Wales&#8217;s Theatre. When the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> history of the stage and its progress is
+adequately and faithfully written, Mrs. Bancroft&#8217;s name and your own
+must be recorded with honour and gratitude.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>I took it into my head not long ago to pay a visit to the little theatre
+in which Fr&eacute;d&eacute;ric Lema&icirc;tre appeared, in which Napoleon and Count d&#8217;Orsay
+rubbed shoulders with Dickens and Thackeray, in which there was difficulty
+once in finding a seat for Gladstone, and in which Beaconsfield received a
+memorable ovation. The Salvationists have succeeded to the comedians, and,
+whether or not it be that their trumpets have the virtue of those of
+Jericho, these historic walls are crumbling to ruin. The place is empty,
+cold, and desolate. It was on an evening of last winter that I stood
+pensively under the porch&mdash;the porch through which had flowed like a
+stream all the elegance and talent of a whole generation. The light of a
+gas jet shone mournfully on the notice, mouldy already, &#8220;To be let or
+sold&#8221;; and the rain trickled down on me from a gaping hole whence the
+electric light used once to glare upon pretty women issuing in all their
+finery from their carriages. My curiosity was not satisfied. In order to
+obtain admission inside, I gave myself out as a lecturer in search of a
+hall, but the ruse failed. I was told that I should have to pay &pound;4500 or
+&pound;6000, and was asked whether this trifling outlay would interfere with me.
+I did not pursue the negotiations, and the door remained closed.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<div class="note">
+<p class="hang">Gilbert: compared with Robertson&mdash;His first Literary Efforts&mdash;The <i>Bab
+Ballads</i>&mdash;<i>Sweethearts</i>&mdash;A Series of Experiments&mdash;Gilbert&#8217;s Psychology and
+Methods of Work&mdash;<i>Dan&#8217;l Druce</i>, <i>Engaged</i>, <i>The Palace of Truth</i>, <i>The
+Wicked World</i>&mdash;<i>Pygmalion and Galatea</i>&mdash;The Gilbert and Sullivan Operas.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>When Marie Wilton&#8217;s company, during their first holiday, went on tour to
+Liverpool, they happened upon the autumn assizes. The young London
+barristers who followed the circuit made haste to fraternise with the
+theatrical folk, and a sort of little colony came into being in which
+everyone rejoiced and made merry. Grotesque trials were represented in
+which Marie Wilton, got up as the Lord Chief Justice in wig and gown, gave
+forth admirable verdicts; she tells of these frolics in her Memoirs,
+adding pleasantly: &#8220;We were all young then, and the fun perhaps appeared
+greater than it would now, but it was a very happy time.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Among these young barristers there was one named Gilbert. He was soon to
+throw aside his gown in order to devote himself to the calling in which he
+was to achieve a reputation as great as Robertson&#8217;s,&mdash;a reputation which
+still lives. The contrast between the two dramatists is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> striking.
+Robertson is a craftsman, brought up in the theatre, amenable to outside
+influences; he collaborates with his actors, with the public,&mdash;one may
+say, with his entire generation. The ideas of his time, good, bad and
+indifferent, exude from him at every pore. He becomes, therefore,
+unconsciously, a representative man and the leader of a school. Where
+Robertson is a natural product, a symptom, Gilbert is a freak, an
+accident. He might have &#8220;occurred&#8221; at any time in the century, or indeed
+in any century. One can neither trace his ancestry nor imagine his
+posterity. Born and bred a gentleman, he loved the theatrical world
+without being of it. Actors have accused him of being cold in his manner
+to them, high and mighty, even disdainful. So much for his personal
+character;&mdash;in discussing a living writer, more than this would be
+improper. As to his bent of mind, its originality was evident from the
+first, but that originality was at all times somewhat shallow and liable
+to run dry; and instead of widening it, he scooped it out.</p>
+
+<p>He exploited his talent by a kind of mathematical system, to its utmost
+limit, to the point of absurdity, in fact, and even further. His literary
+career may be described as containing three periods: in the first he felt
+his way; in the second he achieved brilliant and legitimate successes; in
+the third he met with even more fruitful triumphs, but of a kind which
+arouse little sympathy in a critic, and of which, I think,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> even he
+himself grew a bit tired. But he is so true an artist, and at the same
+time so typically English, that a French critic may well study him, even
+in his errors, without feeling that it is waste of time.</p>
+
+<p>It was some verses which he contributed from week to week to <i>Fun</i> that
+first attracted attention to him. He reprinted them under the title, <i>Bab
+Ballads</i>, and as the public seemed to want them he followed these up with
+<i>More Bab Ballads</i>. Some of them were set to music and are still popular
+as songs, but these are not the ones which have the most flavour. It is
+difficult to describe this flavour; it consisted in a kind of na&iuml;ve irony,
+expressed in a form that was sometimes extravagant, sometimes studiously
+careless,&mdash;a blend of the deliberately prosaic with amazing fantasy. Some
+of these ballads finished up with a surprise, the others did not finish up
+at all,&mdash;which was a surprise too.</p>
+
+<p>Gilbert offered to his friends at the Prince of Wales&#8217;s a pleasant little
+comedy entitled <i>Sweethearts</i>. A young man is about to start for India,
+where he is to make a career for himself, but he is in love with a young
+girl who lives near his country home. She has but to say a word and he
+will not go, or will not go alone. She does not say this word. What
+prevents her? Is it timidity, bashfulness, pride, or that strange spirit
+of contradiction or of coquetry which sometimes keeps the tongue from
+obeying the dictates of the heart? However that may be, she lets<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> him go.
+Thirty years ensue. The lover returns, grey haired now,&mdash;a lover, indeed,
+no longer.</p>
+
+<p>Distance in time, as in space, makes things look small. His &#8220;grande
+passion&#8221; seems to him now a boyish fancy. He merely wishes to see the spot
+again; that is all. She, too, is there, seated under the shade of the tree
+which they planted together, retaining still the flower which he had given
+her, faithful to the memory of the love she had seemed to scorn. The old
+boy&#8217;s scepticism gives way to tenderness. They marry. But will they ever
+find the thirty years that they have lost?</p>
+
+<p>Here is one of those pleasingly fanciful ideas that a man like Octave
+Feuillet may work out delightfully. Sadness and gladness should alternate
+in it like mist and sunshine on an autumn day. Now, Gilbert is a cynic,
+though a refined cynic, and he could deal only with half of his subject.
+In his little comedy, one or other of its two characters is always carping
+at love. In the first act it is the woman, in the second the man. Gilbert
+speaks, and very cleverly, through the mouth of this railer, but, alas!
+there seems nothing to be said on the other side. From the moment of this
+first attempt of his, the young author had to face the fact that he had a
+great disqualification for the writing of dramas; he could neither depict
+love nor reproduce its language. Is it out of a kind of revenge that he
+has continued to rail at love ever since?</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, he made some further efforts during the years which
+followed. He wrote<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> <i>Broken Hearts</i>, a fantastic drama in verse, and made
+it clear even to himself that he was unequal to such high flights. He
+aimed at freeing Goethe&#8217;s Margaret from all that philosophy which
+surrounds and obscures her, and he discovered that the idyll thus
+disencumbered, and naturally told, became flat and commonplace. He was
+then inspired by history, and the idea entered his head&mdash;probably after
+some reading that had moved him and awakened in him some dormant atavistic
+instinct&mdash;that his misanthropy would have a new force in the mouth of a
+puritanical peasant of the seventeenth century. But how difficult it is
+for a university man, a Garrick Club man, to feel and speak like such a
+character! As far as mere language is concerned, the author was fairly
+successful; <i>Dan&#8217;l Druce</i> is a pleasing mosaic of archaic phrases, an
+ingenious transcription of the speech of those days. (But was the public
+which applauded <i>School</i> and <i>Society</i> sufficiently advanced in its
+artistic education to enjoy these things?) Can one say the same, however,
+of the ideas? Had one submitted, for instance, to a contemporary of John
+Fox or of Bunyan the moral question on which Mr. Gilbert&#8217;s drama turns,
+would he really have solved it after the fashion of <i>Dan&#8217;l Druce</i>? Surely
+not.</p>
+
+<p>It is an interesting problem, though, of course, not new. To which of the
+two does the child belong&mdash;to him who begat but abandoned it, or to him
+who took pity on it and brought it up? It is the modern conscience that
+decides in favour<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> of the second; the Puritan conscience of former days
+would have feared to interfere with that natural order of things in which
+it saw the guiding hand of God. As all things in this world and the next
+were pre-ordained, the father must remain the father in spite of
+everything, just as the chosen remained chosen, and the evil evil; the
+heart might bleed, but Divine Providence must have its way. This, it seems
+to me, had been the Puritan solution. But while we are reflecting upon
+these things, this problem, by a characteristic Gilbertian stroke, is
+turned upside down through a series of utterly incredible complications,
+the real father becomes the adoptive, and the adoptive father the real.
+Thenceforth we tumble from psychology into melodrama, and there remains no
+problem to solve.</p>
+
+<p>A love-scene was required in the play, as there were a young man and a
+girl amongst its characters. Their conversation&mdash;apart from certain pretty
+archaic touches which continue to delight me&mdash;is a sort of subtle
+intellectual game. Each seizes upon some one word in the last phrase of
+the other, works it up into a new phrase and darts it back. Thus the
+dialogue is bandied about to and fro, the great thing being to keep it up.
+Sometimes, however, it falls to the ground. &#8220;I don&#8217;t know what to say,&#8221;
+Dorothy&#8217;s answer to her lover&#8217;s proposal, seems to suggest that the author
+himself is in a difficulty. This Dorothy is a thoroughly ingenuous young
+person, na&iuml;vely outspoken to the point of silliness.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> She is not sure of
+being in love, and discusses the subject like a question of conscience
+with him whose interest in it is most at stake. &#8220;These are my feelings,&#8221;
+she tells him. &#8220;Is this love or is it not?&#8221; This self-analysing <i>ing&eacute;nue</i>
+is the only woman&#8217;s character in the whole of Gilbert&#8217;s dramatic work.</p>
+
+<p>Before writing <i>Engaged</i>, some such thoughts as these must have passed
+through his mind. &#8220;I shall turn out the human soul like a bag and show its
+lining instead of its cover. It will be very ugly, but all the more
+amusing. What does a man want when he puts aside all hypocrisy and all
+regard for social conventions, and gives the rein to his appetites and
+instincts?&mdash;To eat, to drink, to sleep, to be at his ease; to see all
+those die off from whom legacies are to be expected; to win, honourably or
+otherwise, every pretty woman who comes across his path. And what does a
+woman want?&mdash;To shine in society, to have fine dresses, to be admired, to
+marry a man who may give her a good position in the world. What is the
+meeting-point of the feelings of both man and woman?&mdash;The greed for money
+wherewith to buy the rest.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My <i>dramatis person&aelig;</i> shall be neither good nor bad, they shall be
+na&iuml;vely and absolutely selfish,&mdash;their selfishness shown clearly, but in
+the thousand shades which civilisation has imparted to characters; it
+shall be expressed not bluntly but in the thousand shades which well-bred
+people bring into the utterance of fine sentiments<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> and correct
+commonplaces. They shall lack only the moral sense; of this organ I shall
+deprive them as neatly and gently as possible. <i>Fianc&eacute;</i> and <i>fianc&eacute;e</i>,
+father and daughter, friend and friend, shall become enemies the moment
+their interests clash; the moment their interests agree they shall clasp
+hands and kiss again as before. Three couples will perform these
+evolutions and man&oelig;uvres before the audience, and the young girls will
+change their lovers as complacently as they would their partners in a
+quadrille. In a few minutes Cheviot Hill will propose to three different
+women; within the same space of time Simperson will throw his daughter at
+the head of Cheviot Hill, and drive his intending son-in-law to suicide.
+Belvonny will expend all his energies in the first half of a scene in
+denying a certain fact, and during the second half of it will make no less
+desperate efforts to establish this fact. Thus will the changeableness of
+men be demonstrated at the same time as their egoism. These puppets are
+monsters and these monsters puppets: my audience will not need to be told
+that &#8216;<i>Il faut se h&acirc;ter d&#8217;en rire de peur d&#8217;&ecirc;tre oblig&eacute; d&#8217;en pleurer</i>.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>So cruel a farce had never been seen. The public was accustomed in farces
+to two or three comic characters, to satire at the expense of two or three
+ridiculous types. Here was a caricature of all mankind. The spectators
+laughed, but the jest was too bitter for their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> palate. It was at once too
+unreal and too true. Such cynical outspokenness might mark the
+conversation of the inhabitants of some dreamland. But it was incongruous
+where people travelled by railway and read the daily paper. Gilbert had
+but to transfer his puppets to the enchanted region where he located his
+<i>Palace of Truth</i> for the big children who composed the public to accept
+them with glee.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Palace of Truth</i> is a pleasant piece based on the same notions of
+psychology as <i>Engaged</i>, but the satire is less bitter and less obvious.
+Here there is no mistake possible. Before seeing the characters as they
+really are, we have seen them playing every r&ocirc;le in the human comedy. In
+the second act the faithful husband flirts indiscriminately to every side
+of him; the devoted girl-friend is a machiavelian coquette; the ardent
+lover, so generous of madrigals and sighs, is a vain and selfish coxcomb;
+the <i>ing&eacute;nue</i>, chaste and correct almost to the point of coldness, is
+beyond herself with love; the honey-lipped courtier becomes candid and
+insolent to all the world; finally, the most amusing metamorphosis of all,
+the professional boor, who has achieved notoriety by his merciless
+criticisms, is the only person sincerely content with his life. Alceste
+has changed skins with Philinthe.</p>
+
+<p>In this world of fantasy, Gilbert was at last thoroughly at home. He
+experimented without restraint, like those physiologists who practise upon
+animals, depriving this one of viscera, that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> one of a cerebral lobe, a
+third of some nerve essential to motion. His <i>Creatures of Impulse</i> do
+everything that comes into their heads, obeying every dictate of their
+instincts. In the case of the inhabitants of the <i>Palace of Truth</i>, their
+language is sincere enough, it is their manner that is hypocritical. The
+denizens of fairyland in <i>The Wicked World</i> are unacquainted with love;
+they form a kind of puritanical society up in the clouds. Once they are
+made to know the sentiment which they have lacked, every evil springs from
+the Pandora&#8217;s box. Selen&egrave; passes through every stage of the malady. Joy,
+ecstasy, absolute security,&mdash;the celestial period; then vague disquietude,
+anxiety, with fierce jealousy on their heels; then anger, quarrels,
+threats of vengeance, finally, profound humiliation. The mocker had it all
+his own way, hitting to right and to left. On the one side, at the
+colourlessness, the shabbiness, the squalid monotony of virtue; on the
+other, at the enervating and degrading effects of vice.</p>
+
+<p>But Gilbert never soared so high either in his philosophy or in his art as
+in <i>Pygmalion and Galatea</i>. This was one of the great successes of the
+Haymarket in 1871 and 1872. Galatea was impersonated by Madge Robertson,
+the young sister of the dramatist, then in the flower of her twenty-second
+year; and Kendal, whose wife she was soon to be, was Pygmalion. Miss
+Robertson&#8217;s grace of person, her pure and noble diction, were aids to
+success, though it was not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> to them that success was due. Even had the
+piece fallen quite flat, however, I should still give it a place above all
+the other productions of the author.</p>
+
+<p>I know, of course, what captious critics have had to say on the subject.
+Nothing is easier, indeed, than to pull to pieces the figure of Galatea;
+to show how far it is from plausibility; how inconsistent Gilbert was in
+his composition of it; to show how, almost in the same breath, she asks
+the most childish, almost imbecile, questions, and indulges in an analysis
+of her emotions as subtle as Joubert&#8217;s or Amiel&#8217;s; how this absolutely
+ignorant creature, who asks whether the room in which she comes to life is
+the world, has yet the faculty of explaining the stages of consciousness
+through which she has passed on her way to full existence; how she can
+distinguish between an original and a copy, and be jealous at another&#8217;s
+having sat as a model for her features, although she does not know the
+difference between a man and a woman.</p>
+
+<p>Then, again, there is her characterisation of a soldier, when she has the
+meaning of the word explained to her, as a &#8220;hired assassin.&#8221; Her
+comprehension of these two words &#8220;assassin&#8221; and &#8220;hired&#8221; presuppose some
+rudimentary knowledge of the principal social institutions which affect
+the preservation of life, as well as of penalties, and salaries, and of
+the circulation of money and of the economic laws which it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> obeys. The
+soldier, she is told, attacks only the strong. That may be so; still war,
+she insists, is cruel. As for hunting, it is cowardly. All these
+reflections and comparisons, all this reasoning in a brain of marble which
+could not think, which did not exist, a few hours before!</p>
+
+<p>These examples might be multiplied, but to no end. All such criticisms are
+vain, because they assume our acceptance of a general thesis more
+improbable than all the minor ones which it involves. No statue ever did
+come to life, but if one were to, it would find itself in the position of
+a newborn child. Before learning to moralise, it would first have to learn
+how to walk and how to talk; its first movement would be a tumble, its
+first utterance inarticulate: whoever submits such myths to this kind of
+critical examination is to be sincerely pitied, for whether he realise it
+or no he thus deprives himself of whatever of poetry or of suggestiveness,
+of charm, or of profundity, they may contain.</p>
+
+<p>For Gilbert the fable of Galatea, of the statue come to life, was
+something more than it had ever been either for artist or man of thought:
+it offered a form to that dream by which he was haunted, a frame for that
+favourite picture he had so often sketched out already&mdash;the woman whose
+heart is a <i>tabula rasa</i>, whose mind is an instrument that has never been
+used, but is perfected and ready for use, who for the expression of her
+unsophisticated feelings has all the resources of intelligence and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span>
+language at her command. What <i>we</i> learn during the toilsome schooling of
+twenty or thirty years <i>she</i> apprehends at a glance, and it would seem
+that she is the better able to judge of life in that she sees it
+reflected, as it were, in a single picture suddenly unveiled.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Gilbert&#8217;s Pygmalion is married to a woman whom he loves, and who sits
+to him as a model. He is not in love with the statue at the outset. He is
+jealous, however,&mdash;and in this conception the author is more Greek than
+the Greeks themselves,&mdash;of the gods, in that they alone have the power of
+giving life. <i>He</i> is capable only of producing this inanimate figure. As
+for death, any common murderer can achieve that better than he. It is not
+Venus who gives life to Galatea to satisfy mere lust; it is Diana, whose
+priestess Cynisca he had taken from her, and who avenges herself by this
+cruel gift, whilst humbling at the same time the pride of the sons of
+Prometheus. Thus it comes that Pygmalion&#8217;s feeling upon first noting the
+aspect of the living statue is not rapture but wonder, a sort of religious
+awe, the exaltation of a lofty and intellectual paternity. It is the
+gradual passage from this feeling to that of love which constitutes the
+life and, I may add, the beauty of this scene. You can guess what is the
+first question of Galatea, &#8220;Who am I?&#8221;&mdash;&#8220;A woman.&#8221; &#8220;And you, are you also
+a woman?&#8221;&mdash;&#8220;No, I am a man.&#8221; &#8220;What, then, is a man?&#8221; Upon this the pit
+would burst out in a roar of laughter which must have hurt the ears of the
+author.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> How few of those who laughed were qualified to appreciate
+Pygmalion&#8217;s reply&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">&#8220;A being strongly framed,</span><br />
+To wait on woman, and protect her from<br />
+All ills that strength and courage can avert;<br />
+To work and toil for her, that she may rest;<br />
+To weep and mourn for her, that she may laugh;<br />
+To fight and die for her, that she may live!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Galatea learns the right which another woman possesses to Pygmalion, the
+thousand shackles by which men are content to limit their slender liberty
+and to diminish their fugitive enjoyments. The evening comes, and with it
+sleep. She thinks she is turning again to stone, then she dreams, and then
+she sees the light once more. But is life the dream or is the dream life?
+She asks Myrine, Pygmalion&#8217;s sister, for an explanation of all these
+things. Myrine replies&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem"><i>Myrine</i>: &#8220;Once every day this death occurs to us,<br />
+Till thou and I and all who dwell on earth<br />
+Shall sleep to wake no more!&#8221;<br />
+<br />
+<i>Galatea</i>: (<i>Horrified, takes Myrine&#8217;s hand</i>) &#8220;To wake no more?&#8221;<br />
+<br />
+<ins class="correction" title="original: Pgymalion"><i>Pygmalion</i></ins>: &#8220;That time must come, may be, not yet awhile,<br />
+Still it must come, and we shall all return<br />
+To the cold earth from which we quarried thee.&#8221;<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span><br />
+<i>Galatea</i>: &#8220;See how the promises of newborn life<br />
+Fade from the bright life-picture one by one!<br />
+Love for Pygmalion&mdash;a blighting sin,<br />
+<i>His</i> love a shame that he must hide away.<br />
+Sleep, stone-like, senseless sleep, our natural state,<br />
+And life a passing vision born thereof,<br />
+From which we wake to native senselessness!<br />
+How the bright promises fade one by one!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>At this point the idea reaches its full expression. The scenes written for
+old Buckstone, as an Athenian dilettante who judges statues by their
+weight; his dialogue with Galatea, in which the piece returns to the old
+groove of fun and folly and sinks almost to the level of burlesque, and
+finally, the domestic drama in which Pygmalion and Cynisca are concerned,
+and then the renunciation of self which moves Galatea to become once again
+the lifeless statue, that she may thus bring back peace and happiness to
+those upon whom she had entailed trouble and disunion: all this adds but
+little to the value of the piece, though it cannot be said to spoil it. It
+remains one of the most delicate, graceful, and ingenious of modern
+English plays.</p>
+
+<p>Gilbert had felt the need more than once of providing some sort of musical
+accompaniment for his paradoxical fantasies, for is not music the natural
+background to the land of dreams? This accompaniment seemed to soften the
+outlines of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> his thought and to temper the bitterness of his satire. The
+writer had experimented first with the music of his own verses, but this
+was not a success. Why then should he not secure the aid of real music by
+a musician? He did so in <i>Trial by Jury</i>, a very amusing one-act piece,
+suggested in part by his joyous reminiscences of Liverpool. It was a
+little piece, but it had a big success. Then came the long series of comic
+operas which have rendered the Gilbert and Sullivan combination as popular
+in England as that of Meilhac and Hal&eacute;vy with Offenbach was with us during
+the last ten years of the Empire. The English owe a debt of gratitude to
+their compatriots for having dethroned burlesque and operetta, two imports
+from France which competed with the national manufacture. So far so well,
+but I doubt whether the native comic opera will survive its originators.
+Already they are out of fashion.</p>
+
+<p>For my part, I never yawned so much as I did at <i>Princess Ida</i>, unless it
+was at <i>Patience</i>. The first is a parody of the unsuccessful work of
+Tennyson, which bears the similar title <i>The Princess</i>, and is a satire
+upon the higher education of women; the second is a parody of the
+aesthetic movement. In <i>Iolanthe</i> I saw a Lord Chancellor who has been
+married to a fairy come at midnight to a spot in Westminster, with his
+colleagues of the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords, all dressed in
+their scarlet and ermine, and to sing (and dance) a judicial sentence
+(expressed in the correct legal phraseology), whilst the shining<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> face of
+Big Ben lit up the background and a grenadier on guard paced up and down
+before Whitehall.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>The Pirates of Penzance</i>, and in <i>Pinafore</i>, mankind seems to be
+walking on its head. Everything happens contrariwise. The fun consists in
+making everyone say and do exactly the opposite of what might be expected
+from them, considering their character and profession. Here, briefly, is
+the plot of the <i>Pirates</i>. Frederic&#8217;s nurse was charged by his parents to
+make him an apprentice to a pilot, but, being deaf, she had misunderstood
+and had handed him over to a pirate. The young man fulfilled his contract
+of apprenticeship, which provided for a certain number of years. This duty
+accomplished, it remains for him only to accomplish his duty as a citizen
+of proceeding to the extermination of his ex-companions. He has set
+himself ardently to this when the pirate chief points out to him that by
+the terms of his indenture he is not to be free until his birthday shall
+have come round a certain specified number of times. Now Frederic was born
+on the 29th of February in leap year! He has therefore many long years
+still to serve with the pirates. An outlaw&#8217;s devotion to strict
+legality&mdash;this may be said to be the idea, which is worked out in the
+production with a methodical determination to overlook no single aspect of
+the question, the characters being dealt with like so many briefs. Would
+you have supposed that there would be material enough in this to furnish
+forth three hours&#8217;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> entertainment? But the author was justified by the
+result.</p>
+
+<p>Gilbert never quite succeeded in shaking off the dust of Chancery Lane and
+Lincoln&#8217;s Inn. In many respects he may be said to have remained a lawyer
+all his life: by his professional scepticism, by the variety of his
+dialectical resources, by his proneness to subtle distinctions and
+interpretations, by his cleverness in setting up appearances against
+realities, and words against ideas, but above all, by his curious faculty
+for losing good cases and winning bad ones.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<div class="note">
+<p class="hang">Shakespeare again&mdash;From Macready to Irving; Phelps, Fechter, Ryder,
+Adelaide Neilson&mdash;Irving&#8217;s <i>D&eacute;but</i>&mdash;His Career in the Provinces, and Visit
+to Paris&mdash;The R&ocirc;le of Digby Grant&mdash;The R&ocirc;le of Matthias&mdash;The Production of
+<i>Hamlet</i>&mdash;Successive Triumphs&mdash;Irving as Stage Manager&mdash;As an Editor of
+Shakespeare&mdash;His Defects as an Actor&mdash;Too great for some of his Parts&mdash;As
+a Writer and Lecturer; his Theory of Art&mdash;Sir Henry Irving, Head of his Profession.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>What became of the &#8220;legitimate&#8221; drama the while Robertson busied himself
+with his attempts to bring comedy into the domain of reality, and Gilbert
+worked away at the exploiting of his fancy? In a preceding chapter I have
+shown to what a depth of degradation it had fallen towards 1850. The old
+privileged theatres which had possessed the monopoly of it had abandoned
+it, and when it became public property the new theatres scorned to take it
+up. The two little Batemans, aged six and eight, piqued in <i>Richard III.</i>
+the curiosity of an unsophisticated, uneducated public, which was the
+readier to enjoy these childish exhibitions in that it was itself childish
+in its literary tastes. These little girls were symbols of a &#8220;Shakespeare
+Made Easy.&#8221; An actor named Brooke made things still worse;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> with him it
+was a case of Shakespeare made ridiculous. He was laughed at up till the
+day which brought the news of his &#8220;Hero&#8221;-like end on a ship which was
+taking him to America, and which was wrecked; the poor tragedian had come
+upon real tragedy for the first time, in the hour of his death. From 1850
+to 1860 the permanent home of Shakespeare was the theatre of Sadler&#8217;s
+Wells at Islington. Imagine Corneille exiled to the <i>Bouffes du Nord</i>, or,
+further still, to the <i>Th&eacute;&acirc;tre de Belleville</i>!</p>
+
+<p>Phelps, whose undertaking it was, was not a great actor, but he was a good
+actor. He had, besides, the sacred fire, the key to certain r&ocirc;les which up
+till then had been left to inferior performers, but which suited his
+personality, as he had the discrimination to perceive. They say his Bottom
+was a masterpiece of innocuous fatuity and conscientious blundering,&mdash;that
+crazy preoccupation of a workman, one sometimes encounters, with matters
+beyond the scope of his intelligence. In <i>A Midsummer Night&#8217;s Dream</i>, the
+fantastic parts were represented behind a curtain of gauze, which threw
+between the spectator and the scene a faint mist producing the illusion of
+the vagueness and indistinctness of a dream.<a name='fna_11' id='fna_11' href='#f_11'><small>[11]</small></a> Kean and Macready had
+&#8220;popularised&#8221; Shakespeare, as had Garrick and Kemble before them, to the
+best of their ability; they tried to extract from all his plays every bit
+of the melodrama therein contained. Phelps, as it seems to me, brought out
+another<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> and nobler distinctive quality&mdash;that of <i>po&egrave;mes en action</i>. This
+does no small credit to the intelligence of a Shakespearian actor.</p>
+
+<p>The Frenchman, Fechter, came next. The same Fechter who, with Madame Roche
+in <i>La Dame aux Cam&eacute;lias</i>, set our mothers weeping, brought back
+Shakespeare in triumph to the Princess&#8217;s and to the Lyceum. In <i>Macbeth</i>,
+he was only middling; but while they say his <i>Othello</i> was the worst
+imaginable, his <i>Hamlet</i>, according to the same critics, could not be
+surpassed. He brought to light, indeed, an aspect of this great r&ocirc;le which
+had been ignored. On the evening of his last performance of it, Macready,
+taking from him Hamlet&#8217;s velvet coat, addressed to him, in tones of some
+emotion, Horatio&#8217;s words&mdash;&#8220;Adieu, dear Prince!&#8221; and added, &#8220;It seems to me
+that I understand now for the first time all that there is of tenderness,
+humanity, and poetry in the character.&#8221; Fechter found out traits which had
+escaped his predecessors. He imparted grace and elegance to the tranquil
+and pleasing parts of the action&mdash;a refined intellectual elegance proper
+to a prince who had passed through the University of Wittemberg. The
+advice of Hamlet to the players&mdash;the actor&#8217;s Ten Commandments&mdash;he rendered
+with much art and spirit.</p>
+
+<p>After Fechter there came a new, but only a partial eclipse. Beginners
+became old stagers and appeared in principal r&ocirc;les. Between 1870 and 1875
+I saw Ryder, whose voice varied in tone from that of an organ to that of a
+hunting-horn,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> on several occasions, notably in <i>Anthony and Cleopatra</i>,
+with Miss Wallis, who had not the beauty, and could not suggest the charm,
+one ascribes to a woman for whom an empire were well lost. I recall, too,
+the countenance, with its delicately tragic aspect, of Adelaide Neilson,
+who shook with passion from top to toe, and shrieked and writhed, and yet
+kept her good looks. She met with a sudden death at Pr&eacute;-Catelan,&mdash;it was a
+glass of milk that killed her within two hours; and in London they say
+that the proprietor of the hotel in which she was stopping was inhuman
+enough to threaten to thrust her out in her agony upon the streets.</p>
+
+<p>He who was to bring back Shakespeare, and to make of him the most
+flourishing and most warmly applauded of dramatic writers, had already
+been long upon the stage,&mdash;he was already an actor of repute even; but the
+Shakespearian revival to which I allude dates from October 31, 1874. It
+was then that Henry Irving played Hamlet for the first time at the Lyceum.</p>
+
+<p>There was an institution in the City, at one time frequented by amateurs
+of the drama, which was known as the City Elocution Class. A certain Mr.
+Henry Thomas conducted it according to the principle of mutual instruction
+associated with the name of Pestalozzi. As soon as each student had
+recited his piece, his colleagues had their say upon his delivery of it,
+pointing out any faults they discovered in his manner of giving it out, in
+his pronunciation, accent, or emphasis;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> the master summed up these
+criticisms and pronounced his own judgment upon the subject. From time to
+time they gave public performances.</p>
+
+<p>It was at one of these that there appeared one evening&mdash;in 1853&mdash;a
+strange-looking and attractive youth. His eyes, intelligent and full of
+fire, lit up a face whose features were delicate as a woman&#8217;s. He wore a
+jacket of the old-fashioned cut and a great white collar. His long raven
+locks covered his neck and reached even to his shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>He was then fourteen years old, and was employed in the office of an East
+India merchant. His early childhood had been spent in an out-of-the-way
+corner of Somerset, amongst sailors and miners. The library of the house
+in which he lived consisted of only three books, which he devoured&mdash;the
+Bible, <i>Don Quixote</i>, and a collection of old ballads. From these Western
+expanses, where the imaginative soul of the Celt has left something of its
+reveries, he had been transported when eleven to a mean little house in
+London, in one of those central districts which swarm and overflow like
+very ant-hills of humanity.</p>
+
+<p>Two years of school-life ensued; then his commercial apprenticeship, the
+stereotyped office-life. How was it that under these conditions Henry
+Irving&#8217;s vocation for the theatre came out? He will tell us the story some
+day, perhaps, and tell it admirably. This, at least, is known, that his
+vocation, once it had declared itself, was distinct,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> absolute, not to be
+shaken. We have before us one of those rare careers which are so perfectly
+ordered towards the accomplishment of some end by a resolute and
+inflexible will, that there is to be found in them no single wasted minute
+or ill-directed endeavour.</p>
+
+<p>Young Irving frequented Phelps&#8217; theatre, Sadler&#8217;s Wells; an old actor who
+belonged to it, David Hoskyns, gave him lessons, and on going off to
+Australia left him a letter of recommendation with the address blank.
+Phelps would have given him an engagement, but the young aspirant deemed
+himself too unworthy, and was anxious to commence his novitiate in the
+provinces. Doubtless he had an inkling already of the truth he expressed
+pithily at a later period: &#8220;The learning how to do a thing is the doing of
+it,&#8221;&mdash;one of the most thoroughly English aphorisms ever given out in
+England. Thus it was that the bills of the Lyceum at Manchester, on
+September 26, 1856, contained the name of Henry Irving, who was to play
+the r&ocirc;le of the Duke of Orleans in Lord Lytton&#8217;s <i>Richelieu</i>. Thence he
+proceeded to Edinburgh, and in the next three years he played a hundred
+and twenty-eight parts. On September 24, 1859, he made his <i>d&eacute;but</i> in
+London at the Princess&#8217;s, in an adaptation of the <i>Roman d&#8217;un Jeune Homme
+Pauvre</i>. His part was limited to six lines. What was he to do? Repeat
+those lines evening after evening till he got addled? He preferred to
+break off his engagement. But before returning<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> to the provinces he gave
+two lectures at Crosby Hall, which drew from the <i>Daily Telegraph</i> and the
+<i>Standard</i> the prediction that he would have a fine career. Then came
+seven years of study and of growing success in Glasgow, Manchester, and
+Liverpool theatres. And then, the creation of a r&ocirc;le in one of
+Boucicault&#8217;s dramas having brought him into greater prominence, he at last
+set his foot firmly on the stage of the St. James&#8217;s, whence he passed
+first to the Queen&#8217;s, later to the Vaudeville, and finally to the Lyceum.</p>
+
+<p>More than one Parisian must remember the posters with which the actor
+Sothern covered all our walls during the Exhibition of 1867, that haunting
+vision of Lord Dundreary with his long frock-coat, his hat slightly tilted
+over his forehead, and his glass fixed in his eye. In the second, perhaps
+it would be more correct to say the third, rank of this company which
+visited us, hid Henry Irving.</p>
+
+<p>There are often two distinct phases of success. The first is that during
+which the conquest of one&#8217;s professional brethren is achieved. Now, one&#8217;s
+professional brethren maintain silence, sometimes with singular unanimity,
+upon the talents they have discovered, and thus retard that second period
+during which the greater and ultimate public success is at length
+attained. Irving was still in the first phase when he played Digby Grand
+in James Albery&#8217;s <i>Two Roses</i>. Digby Grand is an impecunious gentleman
+who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> accepts alms with an air of conferring favours,&mdash;a singular blend of
+pride and baseness, brazen-faced, insolent, a liar and a blackguard. The
+opening scene of the piece, in which he induces a landlady who has been
+pressing him for rent to offer him a loan of twenty pounds, is so
+brilliantly carried through, that it compels one to compare it with the
+scene of Don Juan and M. Dimanche. But how far is all the rest of it from
+fulfilling the promise of this beginning! From this out we have nothing
+but a tumult of words, a confusion of <i>jeux de scenes</i>, interrupted here
+and there by silly <i>preciosit&eacute;s</i> which are intended to serve as aphorisms.
+However, the vogue of the piece was inexhaustible, and such was the taste
+of the public, that two or three other actors attracted their attention
+more than Irving. On the occasion of the two hundred and ninety-first
+performance of <i>The Two Roses</i>, he recited &#8220;The Dream of Eugene Aram,&#8221; and
+his delivery of it was a revelation. In it, indeed, the scope of the
+actor&#8217;s art was immensely widened&mdash;what he actually expressed in his
+recital was nothing to what he was able to suggest. With the whole
+province of life for his subject, what was most impressive was the glimpse
+beyond, into the region of the unseen and the unknown.</p>
+
+<p>Irving was able not only to impart more meaning to his words than they
+expressed in themselves, but he was addicted even to making them
+subservient to his own ideas, and of making the public accept his
+conception in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> face of a text which was in flat contradiction with it.</p>
+
+<p>At this critical moment of his career a happy chance brought to him the
+very piece of all others calculated to bring out his gifts&mdash;a piece which
+should enable him to depict the wonderful and awful dualism of thought and
+language, of a man&#8217;s outward aspect and his soul within,&mdash;this was <i>The
+Bells</i>, an almost literal translation of Erckmann and Chatrian&#8217;s <i>Polish
+Jew</i>. Irving bought the MS. and offered it to his manager, Bateman, who
+tried it as a last chance. Irving acted Matthias, and in one evening the
+actor of talent became the actor of genius. Clement Scott hurried to his
+newspaper, <i>The Daily Telegraph</i>, and wrote so enthusiastic an account of
+the performance that next morning the editor chaffed him on the subject,
+and wanted to know who this Irving might be. In an article in the <i>Times</i>,
+John Oxenford analysed with much penetration that suggestive power of the
+actor, and that striking dualism of which I have spoken. Matthias, for all
+that idyllic existence in which everything succeeded with him and smiled
+upon him, seemed, said Oxenford, to wear the aspect of one living in a
+world of terrors, where all was torture and impending destruction. The
+horrors of the second and third acts would not have been intelligible, and
+would have missed their effect, if they had not been foreshadowed in the
+first by the glances, the tremors, the lapses into silence, the
+indescribable atmosphere of fatefulness which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> seemed, under the bright
+morning sunshine, to envelop the murderer as with a shroud. The actor was
+to give proof of many other gifts, to traverse triumphantly every province
+of his art in the course of his splendid career, but it was by his
+psychological suggestiveness, by his engendering of fear, both physical
+and mental, that he won his first great theatrical victory.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Bells</i> was succeeded by <i>Charles I.</i>, by Wills. From the Alsatian
+inn-keeper to Charles Stuart was a big jump. Irving managed it without
+apparent effort.</p>
+
+<p>It was as though the portrait by Van Dyck had stepped down from its
+frame&mdash;this stately figure with its cold and lofty aspect, the look of
+sadness in the eyes, the lips smiling bitterly under the thin moustache,
+the pale veined forehead that bore the seal of destiny. I seem still to
+see him, now playing with his children on the grass slopes of Hampton
+Court, now crushing Cromwell with his kingly scorn. That phrase of
+his&mdash;&#8220;Who&#8217;s this rude gentleman?&#8221; still rings in my ears. The picture of
+Charles clasping little Henriette and her younger brother in his arms in
+the heartbreaking farewell scene at the close is still before my eyes....
+Then, in a village graveyard, that more terrible figure takes its place,
+the sombre phantom-form of Aram, long and lank, the assassin reasoning
+with his remorse.</p>
+
+<p>In these fruitful years one creation followed another in quick succession,
+each excellent, all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> different. Finally, on October 31, 1874, Irving
+appeared as Hamlet.</p>
+
+<p>This was his Marengo; up to the third act, the battle seemed lost. His
+anguish must have been terrible. The audience was mute, frigid, and their
+frigidity seemed to increase. The third act produced a complete change.
+From the scene with the players and the description of the imaginary
+<ins class="correction" title="original: protraits">portraits</ins> the evening was a continual triumph. The public had before them
+a Hamlet they had never seen or even dreamt of; all the Hamlets that had
+ever appeared upon the stage seemed to have been assimilated by an
+original and powerful temperament, and blended harmoniously into one. <i>The
+Bells</i> had been played a hundred and fifty-one times, <i>Charles I.</i> eighty
+times. <i>Hamlet</i> filled the Lyceum for two hundred nights without
+interruption.</p>
+
+<p>Irving took up <i>Richelieu</i> next, and in it strove victoriously against
+memories of Macready. At the close of the performance the house rose at
+him&mdash;men waved their hats in their enthusiasm in the midst of the wildest
+cheering. Such a scene had not been witnessed in an English theatre for
+half a century! It proclaimed Irving Kean&#8217;s successor. As though to
+complete the rites of this coronation, the sword which clanked at his side
+when he played Richard <span class="smcaplc">III.</span> was that which Kean had carried in the same
+r&ocirc;le, and the ring which shone on his finger was a ring of Garrick&#8217;s. A
+colleague, old Chippendale of the Haymarket, had given him the one; the
+other<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> was a present from the Baroness Burdett-Coutts. They formed, as it
+were, the insignia of royalty.</p>
+
+<p>He continued to make himself master of all the great Shakespearian r&ocirc;les,
+like a conqueror annexing provinces. Of course, he was not equally good in
+all, though to all he brought his understanding and his inspiration, and
+to all gave the stamp of his individuality. He sighed and sang of love as
+Romeo, railed and mocked at it as Benedick; raged with Othello, trembled
+with Macbeth; laid bare, as Wolsey, the inner working of the soul of the
+statesman-priest; as Lear, went raving over the desolate heath in the
+storm and the darkness of the night. Throughout he has had the
+co-operation of Miss Ellen Terry, an actress of the finest and most
+delicate talent, whose charm has resisted the passing of the years. Around
+them there has grown up a generation of younger actors and actresses, who
+to-day adorn the stages of other theatres.</p>
+
+<p>Irving is to be looked on not merely as an interpreter of Shakespeare.
+Hardly less important has been his work in editing the plays for the
+modern theatre, and in staging them worthily: at the Lyceum he has given
+them a setting than which the great dramatist, had he lived in our days
+(and read Ruskin), could have wished for nothing better. He has told us in
+a few lines, which I regard as the expression of his mature judgment, the
+result of thirty years of theory and practice, what sort of staging is
+required for masterpieces. <i>The mise en sc&egrave;ne</i>, he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> tells us, should not
+give the spectator any separate impression, it should be in keeping merely
+with the impression of the piece. It should envelop the performers in an
+atmosphere, provide them with suitable surroundings, afford the special
+kind of lighting that is required for the action. Its r&ocirc;le is a negative
+one. It should introduce no incongruity, no discordant note; that is all
+that is required. To attempt more is a mistake, and is apt to do injury to
+the general effect. Whenever I have been to the Lyceum I have found this
+programme strictly adhered to.</p>
+
+<p>The restoration of Shakespeare&#8217;s text, however, was a still more important
+achievement. Everyone congratulated him on his good sense in freeing us
+from Colley Cibber&#8217;s version of <i>Richard III.</i> He continued the good work
+with all the other dramas he took up; and we have to thank him to-day for
+an &#8220;acting edition&#8221; of the Shakespearian masterpieces,&mdash;an actable
+Shakespeare that is yet a real Shakespeare. The principle which he has
+followed in this task may be summarised, I think, as follows:&mdash;Omissions,
+often; transpositions, sometimes; interpolations, never.</p>
+
+<p>I am far from pretending that Irving as an actor is without fault, that he
+is not liable to go wrong like everyone else, that the richness of his
+artistic nature attains to universality. There can be no doubt that he is
+better as Richard <span class="smcaplc">III.</span> than as Macbeth, as Benedick than as Romeo. The
+first time you see him, his play of feature seems exaggerated, his motions
+jerky and irregular.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> A critic has compared his gait in <i>Hamlet</i> to that
+of a man hurrying over a ploughed field; another critic has found in that
+curious gesture, which periodically throws up his shoulders and draws his
+head down into his collar-bone, a resemblance to the motion of a savage
+making ready to spring upon his foe. His elocution is far from being
+perfect,&mdash;a fact he has recognised himself, for he has worked hard to
+correct the defects of delivery which have been charged against him. But
+these are slight shortcomings of which a year of technical study at the
+outset of his career would have freed him completely.</p>
+
+<p>A more serious drawback, to my mind, is that he is too great for many of
+his r&ocirc;les, that he is out at elbow in them, so to speak. He himself has
+told us that the first duty of an actor is to fit his part, to <i>be</i> the
+character, to personate; and, it must be admitted, that in following this
+principle he has given proof of a versatility unsurpassed by Garrick
+himself: yet it would seem that the greater he has grown by study and
+thought, (with the growth of his years and of his fame,) it has become
+more and more difficult for him to squeeze himself into the smaller
+personalities he has had to represent upon the stage, to sink in them that
+magnetic individuality of his own which constitutes his power, and to
+which he owes his success. Just as that young actor called out &#8220;Burbadge&#8221;
+instead of &#8220;Richard,&#8221; we also, in Irving&#8217;s case, forget the r&ocirc;le, and see
+only the actor; and the play assumes for us the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> character of an admirable
+lesson in the art of recitation.</p>
+
+<p>Although he reverences the great actors who have preceded him, Irving
+takes but little note of tradition. His method is essentially individual
+to himself, and he does not hesitate to recommend this method to all
+members of his profession, even beginners.</p>
+
+<p>It may be said to have three phases, involving three successive processes.
+First, a patient and conscientious study of the text: it is essential to
+understand the author&#8217;s meaning. When this has been mastered, you may
+trust to your instinct, to inspiration. Then, amongst the ideas thus
+discovered, you make your selection, of the good ones by a species of
+mental process which will enable you to reproduce them artificially at
+will.</p>
+
+<p>Thus it is that Irving passes, smiling, by Diderot&#8217;s paradox about the
+actor. Diderot is right, of course, when he says that the actor does not
+abandon himself on the stage to the promptings of inspiration; but he is
+wrong in concluding that the whole business of acting is mechanical. As
+Talma well expressed it in speaking of his own case, the emotions
+represented by an actor, and communicated through him to us, are often
+worked up from old experiences really met with and stored by study as
+material. But shall we exact from him that he should have a real craving
+to deceive when he impersonates a hypocrite? or that he should be in love
+with the actress who has to enact a love<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> scene with him? or thirst for
+blood when he accomplishes a stage murder? These violent and often
+contrary emotions&mdash;supposing, that is, that any one man should be capable
+of them&mdash;would paralyse the actor instead of inspiring him. We expect of
+him not that he should himself experience personally all these passions,
+but that he should understand and be able to portray them. What culture,
+though&mdash;what a combination of gifts, does this portrayal require and call
+into play! An actor may be in turn, painter, sculptor, poet, musician,
+psychologist, moralist, historian, and yet be inadequately equipped for
+his calling.</p>
+
+<p>Does one go to the theatre to see life depicted upon the stage, or, on the
+contrary, to escape from life and forget it? Irving takes up a position
+half-way between the realist and that of the ultra-idealist. What one
+should see at the theatre is indeed life, but an intenser life, with
+emotions that are keener, a pulse that beats more quickly,&mdash;a life in
+which the potentialities of men and women are at their full, and in which
+there is a standard of good and evil to give a moral conclusion, a lesson
+in the art of living. &#8220;Get the working-man to go to the theatre,&#8221; he
+declares; there is no better way of keeping him out of the public-house.
+The theatre should be really a school, should teach the young how to live,
+and reconcile the weary and the sad to their existence, by setting before
+them the ideal poetic justice which hovers over their heads.</p>
+
+<p>This is the substance of the great actor&#8217;s<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> teaching, as set forth by him
+on many occasions,&mdash;I shall not say in defence of his profession: the
+theatre, he has declared proudly, no longer needs to be defended&mdash;but
+rather in glorification of it. Quite recently, in an address to the Royal
+Society, in February 1895, he demonstrated that acting was truly one of
+the Fine Arts. Taking a definition of Taine&#8217;s as his starting-point, he
+dealt with that great writer&#8217;s opinions on the same plane of thought, in a
+style that was no less brilliant than clear and concise. Irving has too
+keen an appreciation of beauty of form not to be conscious of the value
+lent to his ideas by his method of expressing them. If he was not a writer
+born, he has made himself a writer; his sentences are marked by a purity,
+a nobility, a lofty and serene simplicity which communicates to the reader
+the same spell his acting has wrought upon the spectator. His first
+lectures were full of good things, happy phrases and observations that set
+one thinking. In his later ones he has taken up the philosophy of his art,
+and has revealed the tireless ambition of an intelligence ever striving
+after higher things. To-day it has reached the summit. The royal decree,
+therefore, which entitled him &#8220;Sir Henry&#8221; in May 1895, could not have come
+at a more fitting moment. When this favour is bestowed on an official who
+has grown old in service, or on a major-general who can no longer mount a
+horse, the world takes no notice; this everyday distinction dazzles only
+&#8220;my lady&#8217;s&#8221; dressmaker<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> and the tradesmen with whom she deals. In Irving&#8217;s
+case, it is an historical occasion, an epoch-making event. He is the first
+actor to be invested with the emblem of rank. What is for him a reality is
+a possibility for every actor. Thus he has raised them in being raised
+above them.</p>
+
+<p>Irving seems to me&mdash;may I venture to say it without seeming unappreciative
+of the excellent and even great actors of whom our own country can
+boast?&mdash;to be pre-eminent in his art, the leader of his profession. He
+compels this admission by the beauty and unity of his life, by the
+splendid strength of his vocation, by the magnificent variety of his
+gifts, by his intelligent feeling for all the other arts and for the ideas
+which belong to the spirit of his time. And, on the other hand, by the
+slow growth, the gradual development of his talent, by his spirit of
+independence and initiative, tempered by regard for the past, he is one of
+the incarnations of his race, one of those men in whom to-day we may see
+most clearly the features of the English character. He has failed in
+nothing,&mdash;he has not even failed to make a fortune. And in respect to
+this, should anyone charge it against him as a fault, he has given his
+defence in a saying which I shall quote in conclusion as a finishing touch
+to his portrait:&mdash;&#8220;The drama must succeed as a business, if it is not to
+fail as an art.&#8221; And in truth, does Shakespeare cease to be Shakespeare
+because in Irving&#8217;s hand he is also a mine of gold?</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<div class="note">
+<p class="hang">Is it well to imitate Shakespeare?&mdash;The Death of the Classical
+Drama&mdash;Herman Merivale and the <i>White Pilgrim</i>&mdash;Wills and his Plays:
+<i>Charles the First</i>, <i>Claudian</i>&mdash;Tennyson as a Dramatist; he comes too soon
+and too late&mdash;Tennyson and the Critics&mdash;<i>The Falcon</i>, <i>The Promise of
+May</i>, <i>The Cup</i>, <i>Becket</i>, <i>Queen Mary</i>, <i>Harold</i>.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>Irving&#8217;s personality has filled the preceding pages so completely that I
+have been unable to find space in which to do justice to those men and
+women who, near at hand, or from afar, have helped to uphold the Colossus
+upon the stage. Ellen Terry, first of all, who has not only been an
+incarnation, delicate, moving, impassioned, of Shakespeare&#8217;s heroines, but
+who, even more perhaps than her illustrious colleague, has in her pure and
+sweet elocution set the poet&#8217;s dream to music. From America have come Mary
+Anderson, whose statuesque attitudes are well remembered; and, more
+recently, Ada Rehan, who gave us so modern and so alluring a Rosalind. It
+was possible for a critic to declare,&mdash;speaking of the vogue towards which
+everything seems to have worked,&mdash;that of all the dramatists of the day,
+Shakespeare was the most successful; adding with truth, that, having been
+brought<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> into fashion in the theatre, Shakespeare in his turn had brought
+the theatre into fashion.</p>
+
+<p>But is the resuscitation of Shakespeare productive of nothing but good?
+Has it not been accompanied by certain drawbacks which are still evident,
+and by certain dangers all of which have not been successfully surmounted?
+One has taken to doubting whether Shakespeare be really the best of guides
+for a new generation of dramatic writers, especially when one has studied
+closely what the imitation of Shakespeare involves in practice. To imitate
+Shakespeare is to copy in the most superficial manner his locutions and
+turns of phrase, his complicated plots, his successions of changing
+scenes; to mingle prose and verse, and to indulge in puns and <i>coups de
+th&eacute;&acirc;tre</i>; above all, to assume certain mannerisms that are held to bear
+the stamp of the master. To come near him, on the other hand, it is not
+merely prose and verse that must alternate, but the realism and the poetry
+of which these are but the outward signs; it is not puns and <i>coups de
+th&eacute;&acirc;tre</i> that are essential, but the power to divert and to move, which is
+quite another matter. Shakespeare&#8217;s spirit is not to be assimilated; this
+is impossible to a man of our time: one can but dress oneself up in the
+cast-off garment which served as a covering to his genius. This garment
+does not suit us,&mdash;it is either too long or too short, or both together.
+One dresses up as Shakespeare for an hour, and resembles the great man
+about as much as a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> lawyer&#8217;s clerk, masquerading <i>en mousquetaire</i>,
+resembles d&#8217;Artagnan, or as the Turk of carnival time resembles the
+genuine Turk smoking his pipe outside his caf&eacute; in Stamboul. This
+tremendous model, all whose aspects we cannot see because it goes beyond
+the orbit of our perspective glass, oppresses and paralyses our
+intelligence: did one understand it, one would not be much the better off.
+It would be sheer folly to wish the modern English dramatist not to read
+his Shakespeare, for it is in Shakespeare that he will find the English
+character in all its length and breadth; let him absorb and steep himself
+in Shakespeare by all means: but let him then forget Shakespeare and be of
+his own time, let him not walk our streets of to-day in the doublet and
+hose of 1600. The choice has to be made between Shakespeare and life, for
+in literature, as in morals, it is not possible to serve two masters. It
+is possible that Shakespeare has been, and is still, the great obstacle to
+a free development of a national drama. Nor is there anything to be
+astonished at in this. The Shakespeare whom we know could not have been
+born when he was had there been another Shakespeare two and a half
+centuries before.</p>
+
+<p>These are <i>a priori</i> considerations, but they are confirmed by the
+experience of the last twenty years. These years have seen the apotheosis
+of Shakespeare and the death of the classical drama. Amongst the last who
+tried to galvanise it into life, I hardly know what others to mention
+besides<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> Wills and Herman Merivale. In the drama entitled <i>The White
+Pilgrim</i>, Merivale achieved some really beautiful passages: in them may be
+felt the first thrill of those sombre and impalpable reveries, come
+towards us with the cool breath of the North, in which we find a balm for
+our fever. As for Wills, for a moment he gave rise to hopes. There was
+room for false expectations as to the future of his career. He was, says
+Mr. Archer, &#8220;so strong and so weak, so manly and so puerile, so poetic and
+so commonplace, so careful and so slovenly.&#8221; His Bohemian life, his
+impassioned character, his hasty methods of production, added to the
+illusion, and gave him, in the distance, a look of genius. But it was a
+misleading look. I have seen two of his pieces, <i>Charles the First</i> and
+<i>Claudian</i>. The first called up on the stage&mdash;for the last time
+doubtless&mdash;that legend of the martyr king which the historical labours of
+Gardiner have shivered into atoms. And here is the story of Claudian. A
+man who has killed a monk falls for this crime under a curse which,
+instead of attaching itself to him, attaches itself to all those who cross
+his path. He does evil unwittingly, when he would fain do good; he brings
+about the death of those he loves. In the end he is saved. So that this
+horrible waste of human lives, this torrent of tears and blood, these
+sufferings, agonies, despairs, all serve but to gain a seat for a
+white-robed criminal at the banquet of Life Eternal. &#8220;In order that the
+world may be Claudian&#8217;s purgatory, it must first be the hell<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> of an entire
+generation.&#8221; Thus it is with all the pieces of Wills; they are founded
+upon conceptions which crumble away upon analysis, and the versification
+is too poor to veil or redeem the weakness of the dramatic idea.</p>
+
+<p>Despite the efforts of Henry Arthur Jones and some other living writers,
+tragic verse, blank verse, the impression of which I have tried to
+characterise, is dead. Were there still authors to work in it, there would
+yet lack actors to speak it, and I do not know who would venture to chant
+it after Ellen Terry.</p>
+
+<p>One name, however, comes to mind, a great name which it would be most
+unjust to overlook in this review of the contemporary drama,&mdash;the name of
+Tennyson. Mr. Archer has remarked that Tennyson, so fortunate in his life
+as a poet, was inopportune in his career as a dramatist. He wrote his
+plays too late and too early: too early for the public, and too late for
+his talent. As a matter of fact, he was sixty-six when he published <i>Queen
+Mary</i>, the first in date of the six pieces which constitute his dramatic
+output. That was twenty years ago, and the education of theatre-goers was
+far from being as advanced as it is now. It was not their fault if they
+brought to the poet a taste somewhat coarsened by the success of <i>Our
+Boys</i> and the <i>Pink Dominoes</i>, and a soul closed to the higher enjoyments
+of the imagination.</p>
+
+<p>The actors did their duty, and even more than their duty, to the Laureate;
+it was the critics&mdash;and I am borne out in this by the most eminent<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> of
+their number,&mdash;it was the critics who decided the fate of Tennyson&#8217;s
+plays; if they did not exactly condemn him unheard, at least they listened
+to him under the sway of prejudice. I shall borrow the sardonic expression
+of Mr. Archer: the critics were prepared to be disappointed&mdash;it was for
+this they came. What business had this old man to start on a new career,
+and a career requiring all the powers of youth? What induced him to
+believe that he had developed faculties at an age at which it is more
+usual to repeat and re-read oneself? Had a man any right to be a success
+in two trades at once? Was there not a law against this kind of pluralism,
+tacitly agreed upon by critics, and applied by them with remorseless
+rigour? For the beauty of these methods of reasoning, it was necessary
+that Tennyson should fail upon the stage; therefore he failed.</p>
+
+<p>But as this check was an unfair one, he recovered from it, and his
+theatrical work, even when it is mediocre, even when it is bad, belongs to
+the living drama.</p>
+
+<p>I myself have fallen into the common error. I spoke of Tennyson in 1885 as
+if the tomb had closed over him already. I may have been right in saying
+that in the garden of the poet, upon which winter had fallen, certain
+flowers would bloom no more. But what I did not perceive then, and what
+to-day is manifest to me and to many others, is the fact that the latter
+days of the poet not only preserved some of his early<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> graces, but brought
+out for us qualities which his youth had not known. He remained in touch
+with the mind of the humble until the very end. Moreover, he revealed
+himself a master in the art of giving expression in verse to the social
+and religious discussions which carry one away. He has displayed in his
+theatrical work an historical sense and a dramatic sense of the highest
+order, and if these two gifts have clashed sometimes to the point of
+cancelling each other, their combination at certain more fortunate moments
+had issue in some precious fragments of masterpieces. The slightest of all
+his pieces is <i>The Falcon</i>. The action takes place in some vague region in
+an Italy of romance; neither the scene nor the century is defined. It is
+like a tale by Boccaccio, but by a Boccaccio who is ingenuous and pure.
+Federigo, an impoverished gentleman, is in love, at a distance and without
+hope, with the rich and beautiful widow Monna Giovanna. His greatest
+possession, his pride and his joy, his only means, too, of securing a
+subsistence, is a wonderful falcon which he himself has trained for
+hunting. One morning Monna Giovanna pays him an unexpected visit, and,
+ignorant of the neediness of her neighbour, invites herself
+unceremoniously to lunch. Federigo, whose larder is empty, kills his
+favourite bird, that he may serve it up for the lady. It happens that it
+was this very falcon that the lady had come to beg for, to fall in with
+the fancy of a sick child. Federigo is obliged to acknowledge the
+sacrifice to which hospitality<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> and her love impelled him, and Monna
+Giovanna is so keenly touched by it that she falls, and for ever, into his
+arms.</p>
+
+<p>When <i>The Falcon</i> was put before the public in 1879 at the St. James&#8217;s
+Theatre, John Hare, who is a manager of cultured taste as well as an
+excellent comedian, had mounted it with the utmost care, and had given it
+a <i>mise en sc&egrave;ne</i> that was at once realistic and poetic. Federigo and
+Monna Giovanna were impersonated by the Kendals, and those who saw Madge
+Robertson&#8217;s performance think of it as one thinks of some painter&#8217;s
+masterpiece seen in the picture galleries of Italy or Germany. In mere
+outward form, her Giovanna was a pendant to her Galatea. But neither the
+charm of the scenery, nor the perfection of the acting, nor the music of
+the verse, could obtain a long life for the piece. It was not to be
+expected that there would be more than a few hundreds of elect spectators
+to delight in this delicate trifle, the joy of an hour, the enthusiasm of
+an evening. From the morrow, Cockneydom was obliged to recapture the
+house, and call out for its wonted entertainment. The critics made common
+cause with Cockneydom, but from reasons less foreign to art.</p>
+
+<p>They pointed out that if there is any subject at all in <i>The Falcon</i>, it
+is apparently Federigo&#8217;s sacrifices. Now this subject, such as it is, is
+not dealt with. Two words in an aside to his servant, a whispered order,
+that is all that leads up to and justifies the death-sentence on the bird.
+Even<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> more deceptive than the <i>d&eacute;jeuner</i> offered to Monna Giovanna, the
+<i>menu</i> presented by Lord Tennyson to his spectators was composed but of
+delicate <i>hors d&#8217;&oelig;euvres</i>, and there was not enough in them for healthy
+appetites.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<p><i>The Promise of May</i> had a worse fate than <i>The Falcon</i>. It failed
+outright. A certain section of the public pretended to believe that the
+poet spoke through the mouth of his hero when he denounces, with so much
+bitterness and so indiscriminately, the principles and prejudices upon
+which society has its base. These spectators were sadly wanting both in
+patience and in intelligence. Harold&#8217;s theories are answered in the play.
+When he has been declaiming upon the evil that religions have wrought upon
+man, Dora does her best to show him the good influences they have wielded.
+Whereas he prophesies the imminent and universal abolition of the bonds of
+marriage, Dora sets forth with simplicity, yet not without grace and
+feeling, her ideal of a perfect union of man and wife. &#8220;And yet I had once
+a vision of a pure and perfect marriage, where the man and the woman, only
+differing as the stronger and the weaker, should walk hand-in-hand
+together down this valley of tears, as they call it so truly, to the grave
+at the bottom, and lie down there together in the darkness which would
+seem but for a moment, to be wakened again together by the light of the
+resurrection, and no more partings for ever and ever.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span>In the first part of the play, too, when Harold pulls down for Eve a
+branch of an apple-tree in blossom, this farmer&#8217;s daughter looks upon it
+sadly. &#8220;Next year,&#8221; she says, &#8220;it will bear no fruit,&#8221;&mdash;a moving piece of
+symbolism; one likes to see a poet condemning in this way the morality of
+the impulse which, in plucking the flower, forbids it to bring forth the
+fruit, and destroys the very seeds of the future.</p>
+
+<p>The comparative success of <i>The Cup</i> at the Lyceum surprises me less than
+it does Mr. Archer. I see no need to seek the secret of this success in
+the grace of Ellen Terry, or in the splendid scenery of Diana&#8217;s Temple.
+<i>The Cup</i> has certain qualities which were calculated to please the
+general public. The subject is taken from Plutarch&#8217;s <i>De Claris
+Mulieribus</i>, and from a passage which had already suggested a tragedy to a
+Frenchman, a German, and an Italian. It is possible that, without being
+quite conscious of it, Tennyson adopted to a certain point the tone of the
+original author and the manner of his predecessors. He was less English,
+less Shakespearian, less himself, in this piece than in his other dramatic
+works. The dialogue is rapid and effective; the characters do not give
+themselves up to poetical fancies; instead of formulating theories, they
+express sentiments that are in no way complex or strange. One of them,
+Synorix, is interesting. Except for the Don Juanism which seems to impart
+to him too modern a note, this double-faced type, half Roman, half
+barbarian,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> whose intelligence has been sharpened but whose passions have
+not been extinguished by civilisation, is an exceptional creature, a sort
+of monster, who is conscious of his intellectual superiority and his moral
+decay; he unites these two qualities in a sadness that has about it
+something that seems great.</p>
+
+<p>The attractiveness of this character was what made a failure of Tennyson&#8217;s
+piece; the English poet avoids the subject which Plutarch puts before him,
+and which Thomas Corneille and Montanelli had seized upon; the latter,
+cleverly and with success, despite the inflation of his style. This
+subject lies in the action of Camma, widow of the Tetrarch of Galatia,
+whom Synorix, with the aid of the Romans, has killed and supplanted.
+Synorix loves her, and is anxious to make her his wife. Camma, seeing no
+escape from this odious marriage, pretends to assent to it. After the
+sacred rites she has to put her lips to the same cup as Synorix before the
+altar of Diana. She gives him death to drink from it, and drinks death
+from it herself. That this <i>d&eacute;nouement</i> should awaken no objections in our
+mind, it would be essential that we should have been brought to hate
+Synorix as Camma hates him. Now, Tennyson seems to have done everything in
+his power to minimise the repulsiveness of the character. He has woven
+round him the fascination of a noble sadness, the palliation of a great
+love; has in some sort constrained him to kill his rival, by importing
+into the action an element of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> justifiable self-defence. Not content with
+this, he depicts Camma&#8217;s husband as an unintelligent brute, who ill
+deserves her regrets and her sacrifice.</p>
+
+<p>It may be added, that of the real drama&mdash;the conflict of emotion in
+Camma&#8217;s soul&mdash;we know nothing until the last scene. A <i>coup de th&eacute;&acirc;tre</i>
+does not make a play, and Mr. Archer is doubtless right in placing the
+work of Montanelli above that of Tennyson; but these defects
+notwithstanding, I think <i>The Cup</i> would be accorded the same favourable
+reception from the public again now that it enjoyed in 1881. It bears a
+distinct resemblance to our French tragedies, in its dignity, its
+propriety, in the seriousness, the freedom from any comic element, by
+which it is marked, by the consistency in the characters, its continuity
+of tone and unity of action,&mdash;qualities which undoubtedly give more
+pleasure, whatever may be said to the contrary, than the most faithful
+imitation of the contrasts and inconsistencies of life.</p>
+
+<p>Had he written nothing but <i>The Falcon</i>, <i>The Cup</i>, and <i>The Promise of
+May</i>, Tennyson would hold but a very low place among play-writers. If he
+is to live as a dramatist, it must be by his three historical plays,
+<i>Queen Mary</i>, <i>Harold</i>, and <i>Becket</i>.</p>
+
+<p>These dramas, it has been declared, were bound to be inferior, even before
+they ever saw the light, to the historical dramas of the age of Elizabeth,
+whose aspect and character they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> recalled so completely; for whereas the
+histories of Shakespeare and his contemporaries were hewn out of the old
+Chronicles which, almost equally with reminiscences, preserve the vivacity
+of personal impressions, and something, as it were, of the warmth of life,
+Tennyson&#8217;s dramas are taken from &#8220;History,&#8221; properly so called, and
+&#8220;History&#8221; is a serious scientific person who studies life by dissecting
+it, who is addicted to discussion rather than to the telling of tales, and
+who substitutes modern judgments for ancient passions. The objection is
+more plausible than real. First of all, this definition of History, though
+true enough of a Guizot, a Hallam, or a Lecky, is quite inapplicable to a
+Carlyle, a Michelet, or a Taine.</p>
+
+<p>In reading Freeman and Froude, was Tennyson less in touch with the soul of
+the past than Shakespeare was in making his way through the cold and often
+tedious pages of Holinshed? Moreover, even had Froude been as sententious
+and frigid as he was in reality picturesque and impassioned, Tennyson&#8217;s
+own faculties would have made good these defects.</p>
+
+<p>It may be well at this point to attempt to do justice to the delicacy and
+quite exceptional strength of Tennyson&#8217;s sense of history. I must explain
+clearly what I mean by sense of history. I do not refer to the critical
+faculty of the historian, but to the gift bestowed upon few, of living
+over again in imagination the emotions of a century long gone to dust. It
+was thus that Michelet was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> present at the doing to death of Joan of Arc;
+Macaulay at the flight of James <span class="smcaplc">II.</span> and at the trial of Warren Hastings;
+Carlyle at the taking of the Bastille, at the return from Varennes, and at
+the battle of Marston Moor. Had the men and the scenes been really painted
+upon their retina, the effect upon the brain could not have been stronger.
+This intellectual vision of theirs is worth a hundred times more than the
+actual physical vision of such men as Holinshed and Ayala.</p>
+
+<p>This rare gift belonged to Tennyson, and took in him that feminine
+acuteness which was in harmony with all his poetical faculties. As
+evidence of this, take the by-play in his historical dramas,&mdash;that is to
+say, all that is not essential in them, the mere accessories,
+illustrations of manners, minute traits of character, scraps of history;
+for instance, the account of the marriage of Philip and Mary, and that of
+the execution of Lady Jane Grey by Bagenhall, in <i>Queen Mary</i>, and in
+<i>Becket</i> the sarcasm directed against the Church of Rome by Walter Map,
+the witty precursor of the bitter and sombre Langland.</p>
+
+<p>A Bulwer or a Tom Taylor may be able to cut out bits from the Chronicles,
+and introduce historic utterances into their flabby and declamatory prose,
+but beyond and underneath these words, will they be able, like Tennyson,
+to set before us <i>un &eacute;tat d&#8217;&acirc;me</i>, and plunge us into the depth of the life
+of olden days?</p>
+
+<p>I am fully aware, of course, that this is not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> everything, or rather that
+it is nothing, unless the poet possesses also the dramatic faculty. Is
+there a dramatic idea underlying <i>Becket</i>, <i>Queen Mary</i>, and <i>Harold</i>? I
+shall reply after the manner of the Gentlemen of the Jury: No, to the
+first question; Yes, to the second and third.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that <i>Becket</i> achieved a startling success in the summer of
+1892. But three-fourths of the success were due to Irving. Those who have
+been long familiar with the great actor, know how episcopical he
+is&mdash;hieratical, pontifical. Medi&aelig;val asceticism is one of the forms of
+life which his artistic personality fills most perfectly, and fits into
+most easily; I know of only one other man who could have represented
+Becket nearly as well, and that was Cardinal Manning. It was well worth
+one&#8217;s while to travel far, and put up with hours of boredom, to be present
+at that symbolical game of chess, in which the struggle between the bishop
+and the king foreshadowed the whole piece; to hear that absorbing dialogue
+in which Becket recounts to his confidential friend his tragic career and
+his prophetic dreams, and that stormy discussion, too, at Northampton,
+when the archbishop puts his signature to the famous constitutions and
+then cancels it; and to witness the scene of the murder. A scene which
+follows history, step by step, and which, by the way, might have been
+carried through by dumb show without words at all.</p>
+
+<p>Those who saw Irving, mitred and crozier in hand, totter under the blow,
+and fall upon the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> altar steps, whilst the chanting of the monks came in
+gusts from the church above&mdash;mingled with the cries of the people beating
+against the door, and the rumbling of the thunder shaking the great
+edifice to its foundation&mdash;experienced one of the strongest emotions any
+spectacle ever gave.</p>
+
+<p>And yet there is no drama in the piece, for a drama involves a situation
+which develops and changes, a plot which works out. The duel between the
+king and prelate in the play, no less than in our history books, is merely
+a succession of indecisive encounters. The metamorphosis of the
+courtier-soldier into the bishop-martyr is indicated hardly at all by the
+poet. And what is one to say of the love idyll appended to the historical
+drama, in spite of history, in spite of the drama itself? All Ellen
+Terry&#8217;s tact did not suffice to save this insipid Rosamund. The
+complications surrounding the mysterious retreat of this young woman
+savour more of farce even than of melodrama, and as for the facetious
+details by which this episode is enlivened, they form so common and flat a
+piece of comic relief, that one listens to them ashamed and ill at ease. I
+may observe silence on this point, in order to avoid the ungrateful
+function of ridiculing a man of genius, but I cannot refrain from
+protesting against the irreparable error Tennyson committed in dragging
+Becket into this shady intrigue, and giving him the king&#8217;s mistress to
+care for at the very time when he is holding the king in check with so
+much hardihood.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>I have not the same objections to make against <i>Queen Mary</i> and <i>Harold</i>.
+In the first piece, the human psychological drama, which is half submerged
+in history, but not so as to be out of sight, is the development of the
+character and of the sad destiny of this unfortunate queen; the road,
+strewn first with flowers and then paved with sharp-edged stones and lined
+with thorns, along which she passed, in so brief a period, from a
+protracted youth to a premature old age, from irrepressible joyousness to
+agonising solitude, misfortune, and despair. Here was a life thrice
+bankrupt. As queen, she dreamt of the greatness of her country, and left
+it under the blow of a national humiliation, the loss of Calais. As a
+Catholic, she strove to restore her religion, and, far from succeeding,
+she dug a chasm between Rome and her people which the centuries have not
+sufficed to fill. As a woman, she loved a man of marble, an animated
+stone: her heart was crushed by him, and broke. She was to learn before
+her death the failure of all her projects; she read contempt and disgust
+in the eyes of the man she worshipped, the man to whom she had offered
+human sacrifices to win his favour. This is the drama Tennyson sketched
+out, if he did not quite complete it, in <i>Queen Mary</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The subject of Harold stands out more clearly, in stronger relief. It is
+the struggle of religious faith against patriotism and ambition. All the
+feelings that are at variance, are indicated with a power worthy of the
+great master of the drama<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> in the successive scenes which take place at
+the Court of William when Harold is a prisoner. After the political aspect
+of things has been set forth by the old Norman lord, there comes the
+episode in which Wulfuoth, Harold&#8217;s young brother, describes to him the
+slow tortures of the prison-life, the living death of the prisoner,
+deprived of all that he loves best,&mdash;of the sight of the green fields, of
+the blue of sky and sea, as of the society of men; his name gone out of
+memory, eaten away by oblivion, as he, in his dungeon, is being eaten away
+by the loathsome vermin of the earth.</p>
+
+<p>When Harold has yielded, it is moving to see him bow down with Edith in a
+spirit of Christian resignation, and sacrifice, as ransom of his violated
+oath, his personal happiness to his duty as a king. The dilemma changes,
+and its two new aspects are personified by two women, whose rivalry has in
+it nothing of the banality, or of the vulgar outbursts of jealousy, to
+which we are too often treated in the theatre.</p>
+
+<p>Edith gives up the hero to Aldwyth while he lives; dead, she reclaims him,
+with a nobility and pride of tone that thrill one.</p>
+
+<p>These two dramas&mdash;I dare not say two masterpieces&mdash;set in a framework of
+history, which in itself is infinitely precious, form the legacy left by
+the great lyrist to the theatre of his country.</p>
+
+<p>A pious hand, to extricate these two dramas from the rest, and so let in
+air and light upon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> their essential lines; a great actor, to understand
+and incarnate Harold; a great actress, to throw herself into the character
+of Mary,&mdash;and Tennyson would take his proper place amongst the dramatists.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Note.</span>&mdash;I have decided to make no reference here to the dramas of
+Browning or Mr. Swinburne. These belong rather to the history of
+poetry than that of the theatre.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<div class="note">
+<p class="hang">The Three Publics&mdash;The Disappearance of Burlesque and Decadence of
+Pantomime&mdash;Increasing Vogue of Farce and Melodrama&mdash;Improvement in
+Acting&mdash;The Influence of our French Actors&mdash;The &#8220;Old&#8221; Critics and the
+&#8220;New&#8221;&mdash;James Mortimer and his Two &#8220;Almavivas&#8221;&mdash;Mr. William Archer&#8217;s Ideas
+and R&ocirc;le&mdash;The Vicissitudes of Adaptation.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>Is it not a sign of the times that the Lyceum should have been filled
+through two consecutive months, in the midst of the heat of summer, by a
+reverent crowd, come to listen to and to applaud <i>Becket</i>?</p>
+
+<p>Attribute it, if you will, partly to Irving, partly to fashion, the fact
+remains, that fifty or sixty thousand persons showed a keen, a passionate
+interest in this struggle between Mind and Power&mdash;between the National
+Throne and the Roman Priesthood&mdash;resuscitated by a poet. Many other
+symptoms go with this one, and confirm it.</p>
+
+<p>I do not wish to assert that low tastes and vulgarity have gone out of
+London: nothing could be more untrue. Never has the <i>b&ecirc;te humaine</i> been so
+completely at large there; never has sensualism, since the distant days of
+George <span class="smcaplc">IV.</span>, and those more distant still of Charles <span class="smcaplc">II.</span>, held its way so
+unblushingly. But these tastes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> are catered for in certain special
+resorts. Every evening in the year more than thirty music halls spread out
+before the multitude a banquet of indelicacies that are but slightly
+veiled, and of flesh scarcely veiled at all. So much the worse for
+morality. So much the better for art. For, this being so, nothing is
+looked for in the theatres except emotion and ideas. All the ideas may not
+be right, nor all the emotions healthy. No matter. The <i>b&ecirc;te humaine</i> is
+outside the door.</p>
+
+<p>I have told of the initial vogue of burlesque at the Royalty and the
+Strand. This vogue was later to bring fortune to a larger and more
+luxurious theatre, the Gaiety, under Nellie Farren, as the successor to
+Mrs. Bancroft, whose former r&ocirc;les she vulgarised to a remarkable degree.
+If you mention her name before an elderly &#8220;man about town,&#8221; who was young
+and went the pace from 1865 to 1875, you will set his eye aflame. To-day
+you hear no more of Nellie Farren, no more of burlesque.</p>
+
+<p>The operetta, too, is vegetating; the pantomime serves hardly to amuse the
+children. Of inferior dramatic forms, two still survive, and have even
+extended their client&egrave;le. Farce has called for elbow-room; it takes three
+acts now, instead of one, to spread itself in. Melodrama, which used to
+inhabit only outlandish regions, chiefly to the East and South,&mdash;districts
+of London whose geography was hardly known,&mdash;at the Surrey, the Victoria,
+the Grecian, the Standard, returned<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> once again to the charge. It holds
+sway at Drury Lane, the Adelphi, and the Princess&#8217;s. In that immense
+conglomeration of human beings, of which London boasts, there is a third
+public for these two popular forms of the drama, an uncultured but
+respectable public, which is to be confounded neither with the public of
+the music halls nor with that of the great theatres in which the literary
+drama and the light comedy are produced. The persisting, and even growing,
+popularity of farce and melodrama, is not a disquieting symptom. These
+forms meet mental requirements that are primitive, but quite legitimate.
+It is hardly necessary to prove that it is a good thing to make people
+laugh, and that this laugh is a beginning of their education. Those who
+despise the absurdities of melodrama do not reflect that the very
+acceptance of these absurdities reveals an idealising instinct in the
+masses which people of culture often lack.</p>
+
+<p>When dealing with Irving, I asked the question, so often discussed,
+whether we go to the theatre to see a representation of life, or to forget
+life and seek relief from it. Melodrama solves this question, and shows
+that both theories are right, by giving satisfaction to both desires, in
+that it offers the extreme of realism in scenery and language together
+with the most uncommon sentiments and events. These multitudes who delight
+in the plays of R. Buchanan and G. R. Sims, or even&mdash;to descend a degree
+lower&mdash;of Merritt and Pettitt, often pass quite naturally to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> Shakespeare,
+for there is a melodrama in every drama of Shakespeare&#8217;s; and were it not
+for the archaism of the language, this melodrama would thrill the people
+to-day, in 1895, as it did in 1595.</p>
+
+<p>Melodrama does not lack its moral, but the moral is always incomplete, in
+that it is the issue of an accident. A foot-bridge over a torrent breaks
+under the steps of the villain; a piece of wall comes down and shatters
+him; a boiler bursts, and blows him to atoms. These people should be
+taught that a criminal&#8217;s punishment ought to be the natural outcome of his
+own misdeeds. Will they ever be brought to understand? If not, at least
+their children will, and will take their seats beside us in the same
+places of entertainment. But in their place, new strata of uncultured
+spectators will appear, who will continue to call out for melodrama.</p>
+
+<p>As for the literary drama and for comedy, whose destinies I am here
+following, they have been cultivated only by the Lyceum, the Haymarket,
+the Garrick, the St. James&#8217;s, the Court, and the Comedy; I should add,
+perhaps, the Criterion, where, under the management of that excellent
+actor, Charles Wyndham, they have often found a home. The <i>personnel</i> of
+these theatres presents a remarkably distinguished body of actors and
+actresses, ceaselessly recruited and strengthened. We have seen the
+advances that have been made by the profession as regards its material
+well-being, its personal dignity, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span> social status. It has made a yet
+more notable advance in the matter of intelligence. To what is this due?
+To observation, to study, to that striving after improvement by which
+individuals, and classes, and communities are set in movement and kept
+going. Twenty or twenty-five years ago a manager&#8217;s first question of a
+girl coming to him for an engagement would be&mdash;&#8220;Can you sing? Can you
+dance? Have you got good legs?&#8221; To-day his first requirement would be that
+she should have intelligence.</p>
+
+<p>English actors and actresses owe much to ours. Sarah Bernhardt especially,
+and now R&eacute;jane, have exerted an influence so decided that it might be made
+the subject of a separate study; and the visits of the Com&eacute;die Fran&ccedil;aise
+are regarded in England as events. Clement Scott, in his <i>Thirty Years at
+the Play</i>, tells, as only a genuine playgoer could, of the improvised
+performance given by our comedians at the Crystal Palace, after the
+banquet given to them by the theatrical world of London. That evening
+Favart and Delaunay played <i>On ne badine pas avec l&#8217;Amour</i> before the
+keenest and most impressionable of &#8220;pits,&#8221; composed exclusively of actors
+and authors. When, at the <i>d&eacute;nouement</i>, there was heard the sound of a
+fall behind the scenes and of a muffled cry, and Favart appeared, pallid
+to the lips, and rushed across the stage, like a whirlwind of despair,
+crying out, &#8220;<i>Elle est morte! Adieu Perdican!</i>&#8221;&mdash;so exquisite was the
+sense of anguish, that the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> audience forgot to applaud, and there was a
+second of strange stupor, of respectful silence, as if in the presence of
+some real catastrophe: the finest tribute ever paid to histrionic talent.
+I should not be surprised if that evening marked a date in the career of
+more than one English actor.</p>
+
+<p>Dramatic criticism had at last emerged from that lowly and precarious
+stage of existence in which I have shown it in the first part of this
+study. It had now the independence and intelligence which were required to
+enable it to aid in the movement which was shaping, and even to take a
+large part in it. When the history of the English stage of the nineteenth
+century comes to be written, place must be reserved in it for men like
+Dutton Cook, Moy Thomas, Clement Scott, and all those who, having made
+their first appearance during the years of drought and famine, have led
+the community of critics, and with it the whole of the people of Israel,
+out of the land of bondage. It is not so long since the critic sold his
+soul for an advertisement; since Chatterton, who, from being a theatrical
+attendant, had become the master of three theatres, and who suffered his
+toadies to call him the &#8220;Napoleon of the Theatrical World,&#8221; would fain
+have had Clement Scott, of the <i>Weekly Despatch</i>, dismissed from his post,
+and presumed to deny him the <i>entr&eacute;e</i> to his theatres, and even to refuse
+his money at the ticket-office; since the actor who had been criticised
+appealed to the jury, and the jury, being composed of business men, and
+looking at the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> case always from a business standpoint, decided invariably
+in the actor&#8217;s favour;&mdash;for the truer the adverse criticism, the more
+injury it did to its object.</p>
+
+<p>Truly, there were some hard years to weather. Perhaps one of the men to
+whom criticism owes its emancipation most is James Mortimer, the founder
+of the <i>London Figaro</i>. An American by birth, Mortimer lived for many
+years in Paris; he was known to Napoleon <span class="smcaplc">III.</span>, and it was in the palace of
+St. Cloud that I made his acquaintance. He possessed a thorough knowledge
+of our drama, no less than of our politics, and when his newspaper, by
+reason of the withdrawal of certain financial support, from being a daily,
+became a weekly or bi-weekly, Mortimer gave plenty of room and plenty of
+freedom to criticism. He not only opened his columns to Clement Scott and
+William Archer, but, far from disclaiming connection with them in cases of
+complaint, he backed them up sturdily, and I have seen him, with his hat
+on the side of his head, staring boldly at a gang who hooted at him as he
+entered the theatre. The gallant and witty little journal has lived its
+life; Mortimer himself, since that time, has fallen upon hard times in his
+career as publisher. It is not the less one&#8217;s duty to accord him, under
+the eye of French theatre-goers, the tribute due to him, and paid to him
+by his old colleagues; so that, having undertaken the toil, he should now
+carry some of the honour, the victory being won and the barbarian driven
+from the theatre.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span>The critics have often made mistakes since that time, have erred in their
+judgments, have condemned good pieces and glorified bad ones, have
+pandered to vanity and spite, have backed up speculators and cliques, have
+abused their new power, and fallen back to their old feebleness; but, on
+the whole, dramatic criticism in England is worth more to-day than it was
+yesterday, and this must content us&mdash;this is as much as we have any right
+to expect.</p>
+
+<p><i>The London Figaro</i> was published in a mean little shop near Old Temple
+Bar, facing the site where the Law Courts were to be erected. Two writers
+in succession undertook the theatrical chronicle, and signed it with the
+pseudonym of &#8220;Almaviva.&#8221; The reader is already <ins class="correction" title="original: aquainted">acquainted</ins> with the real
+names of &#8220;Almaviva <span class="smcaplc">I.</span>&#8221; and &#8220;Almaviva <span class="smcaplc">II.</span>&#8221;; he has encountered them several
+times in these pages. Clement Scott and William Archer had only a
+difference of a few years between them, but they represented in their
+profession two periods, schools, temperaments, that were absolutely
+opposed. Scott was the critic of the Robertsonian era; Archer is the
+critic of the drama of to-day, and to a certain point of the drama of
+to-morrow.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Archer&#8217;s passion for the theatre&mdash;he has told us in a charming preface
+addressed to his friend, Robert Lowe, how this passion began in him&mdash;dates
+from his earliest youth, and it was entirely free from any alloying
+element. He has never written plays; or, at least, has never put<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> them on
+the stage. On principle, he has abstained from frequenting the green-room,
+and from personal intercourse with actors. He has devoted himself entirely
+to his critical mission; and, to carry it through the better, he has
+studied the past of the national drama and every kind of dramatic
+literature, living and dead. Mr. Archer is an encyclop&aelig;dia, a library of
+references, but, unlike so many men of learning, his every item of exact
+information goes side by side with some pregnant thought, some suggestive
+idea; not content to instruct, he thinks and sets one thinking. He is at
+once a penetrating critic and a first-rate <i>petit journaliste</i>. Humour, of
+which he is full, flows freely through all his writings; an easy, limpid,
+lively, delicate humour, in which I have never detected a lapse of taste
+or a touch of pedantry. I don&#8217;t believe that in all his life he has
+perpetrated an obscure or insipid line; in fact, he could not become a
+bore, if he would.</p>
+
+<p>The best way of giving French readers an idea of him would be to compare
+him with one of our dramatic critics of this generation, or of that which
+preceded it, and to show in what respects he resembles, for instance, M.
+Francisque Sarcey or M. Jules Lema&icirc;tre, and in what respects he differs
+from them. But the comparison is impossible, because their positions and
+circumstances are even further removed than their talents. The excellent
+writers whom I have mentioned are with us the guardians and interpreters
+of a tradition consecrated by masterpieces;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> they strengthen or refine it,
+now by the vivacity and gaiety, now by the delicacy and grace, of their
+personal impressions. The public to whom they address themselves is more
+<i>blas&eacute;</i> than ignorant, and has more need to be stirred up than to be
+taught. William Archer, on the contrary, is an initiator; he has had to
+hew a passage for himself through a forest of prejudices; he has had
+always to go back to the elements of his subject, to demonstrate
+principles which, with us, are taken for granted,&mdash;to accomplish, in fact,
+a task which bears some resemblance to that of Lessing in the
+<i>Dramaturgie</i> of Hamburg. Were one to extract from the thousands of
+articles which he has published during the last twenty years the questions
+which he has set himself to discuss, one would amass a sufficiently
+complete code upon all the problems, great and small, which touch upon the
+arts and professions of actor, playwright, and critic.</p>
+
+<p>His conception of the theatre is a very wide one. He regards it as a
+meeting-place, a <i>rendez-vous</i>, of all the arts. Its province, he holds,
+is co-extensive with life itself. He welcomes all forms and all kinds,
+provided they are not exotic growths, and answer to some need of the soul
+of the people. Thus melodrama is but an illogical tragedy for him. As for
+farce, he cares nothing for its progress; for although a really lively
+farce is worth more than a pretentious and unsuccessful drama, it would be
+folly to judge it by &aelig;sthetic laws. One does not take the height of a
+sugar-loaf,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> he remarks, from barometric observations. The drama can exist
+outside the domain of literature. It was thus with the English drama ten
+or fifteen years ago. The business of criticism, Mr. Archer holds, was to
+raise it to the dignity of a department of literature, to reconcile it
+with literature. What sort of criticism was required to this end?
+Analytical or dogmatic, comparative, anecdotical or facetious? They may
+all be resorted to, each in its own place and time, provided only that
+they are sincere and independent.</p>
+
+<p>Every piece should contain these three elements: a picture, a judgment,
+and an ideal. On the first rests the great question of realism on the
+stage. Mr. Archer has put the objections to realism in the form of a
+dilemma. &#8220;Either you show me on the stage,&#8221; he says, &#8220;what I see and go
+through myself every day; in which case, where is the point of it&mdash;what do
+I learn from it? Or else you put before me things, ideas, and modes of
+life of which I know nothing; and how am I to determine their degree of
+truth and reality?&#8221; To this he replies himself, that the theatre obliges
+us to observe&mdash;that is to say, to see and feel more intensely&mdash;what we see
+and feel in our daily life, without taking much notice of it and without
+reflecting upon it. As for the sensations we have never experienced, and
+of the depicting of which we are unable, therefore, to judge the truth,
+the English critic pins his faith to an intuitive sense, which accepts or
+refuses the portrayal of an unknown world. When Zola describes the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span>
+financial methods of the Second Empire, when Pierre Loti transports us to
+the side of Rarahu or of Chrysanth&egrave;me, an infallible instinct tells the
+reader if it be truth or fancy. Why should not the spectator also be
+endowed with the same critical instinct?</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Archer will not allow that the Robertsonian comedy had this realistic
+character; or he maintains, at least, that if it ever had it, it very soon
+lost it. The author kept pouring hot water into the famous tea-pot until
+there was nothing to offer the public but an insipid decoction, whose
+staleness he tried in vain to hide by alternating it with the bitterness
+of French coffee, accompanied by the inevitable cognac. The English drama,
+Matthew Arnold had written, lay between the heavens and the earth&mdash;it was
+neither realistic nor idealistic, but just &#8220;fantastic.&#8221; Mr. Archer took up
+Matthew Arnold&#8217;s idea, and carried it a step further. Over and beyond the
+portrayal of manners and of character, the theatre puts before us a
+succession of events, a phase of life, upon which we are to pronounce
+judgment. It was in this field that the critic had entirely new truths to
+put before his countrymen. The English drama thought itself very moral;
+the critic deprived it of, and set it free from, this illusion. He was
+inclined even to admit the truth of M. Got&#8217;s declaration, that our drama
+was the more moral of the two; or rather, he held, that whereas the French
+drama was deficient in morality, the English drama had no morality at all.
+Does a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> play become moral by having for its climax the destruction of the
+villain and the rewarding of virtue, that triumph of good which is lost in
+the general rummaging for overcoats and shuffling of feet? No; a play is
+moral if it works out a psychological situation, a problem of conduct to
+which it suggests or allots a right solution. Now, Mr. Archer could see no
+drama in 1880 written upon this model; nothing but colourless
+sentimentalities, a minute corner of life, and for sole problem the
+antagonism of poverty and riches, ever smoothed over by love.</p>
+
+<p>He wished to see soaring above every dramatic work, an aspiration towards
+better things, towards a life superior to our common life,&mdash;the life,
+perhaps, of to-morrow.</p>
+
+<p>He wished the theatre to have an ideal; not a retrospective, and, so to
+speak, reactionary ideal, as so often happens in a country where tradition
+retains its force, and where it is held that there is no reform like that
+of restoration; but an ideal of advance and progress.</p>
+
+<p>His articles were like a series of vigorous shakes to a sleeper. Any kind
+of effort, he maintained, was better than apathy. He cast about in every
+direction, ransacked every hole and corner, raised every imaginable
+question, whether of trade or theory. Up to what point may Shakespeare be
+imitated with profit? Is the censorship more favourable to manners than it
+is oppressive to talent? Is the establishment of a national theatre, which
+should serve<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> at once as a school and a standard, a practicable idea? And
+would such an institution really help to the perfecting of the art? What
+is one to think of Diderot&#8217;s paradox about the actors&#8217; art, and what do
+actors think of it themselves? What was the social position of actors in
+former times, and what will it be in the future? Will they be respected
+because of their profession, like the judge, the clergyman, the officer,
+or only in spite of it? What are the rights and the duties of the critic?
+What are the dangers, and what the advantages, inherent in the system
+which leaves all the great theatres in the hands of actor-managers? Ought
+the English dramatist to accept the collaboration of the actor-manager,
+and to what extent? These are some of the questions he has discussed and
+answered with a variety of information, a freedom of judgment, an
+unfailing argumentative power that command our respect even when our own
+opinions are at variance with his.</p>
+
+<p>This is not all. Perhaps the most important part of Mr. Archer&#8217;s r&ocirc;le has
+consisted in his labours in connection with the dramatic literature of
+foreign countries. He was one of the first to make known the Norwegians
+and the Germans; and better than anyone else he has understood the works
+of our French dramatists, and realised to what account they were to be
+turned in the development of the English stage. Of the influence exerted
+by Ibsen and Bj&ouml;rnson on the generations of to-day and to-morrow, I shall<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span>
+speak later. Here I shall indicate only the new way in which French works
+have come to be adapted since 1875 and 1880; a curious movement of which
+Mr. Archer is by no means the sole author, but of which he has been a very
+attentive and perspicacious observer, and to which his counsels have lent,
+as it were, a character of scientific precision.</p>
+
+<p>The way in which the English used to imitate our pieces half a century ago
+resembled the hasty procedure of a band of thieves plundering a house,
+doing their utmost, but against time and without method, and in
+consequence burdening themselves with worthless nick-nacks and overlooking
+jewels of price. When the London managers came to Paris post haste, vieing
+with each other for our manuscripts, and resorting to every kind of dodge
+to secure the prize, it was sometimes but the potentiality of becoming
+bankrupt that was thus held up, as it were, to auction.</p>
+
+<p>From 1850 to 1880 they took everything indiscriminately, translating
+sometimes a second and a third time the same inept <i>vaudeville</i>. A
+melodrama from the Boulevard du Temple, but long forgotten there, became
+the <i>Ticket of Leave Man</i>, a play whose success is not yet exhausted; on
+the other hand, a great comedy by Augier or Feuillet, still to be found in
+our repertory, would languish and die after a few weeks before the
+indifference of the English pit, without anybody&#8217;s attempting to draw a
+moral from the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> event. But the legal aspect of things began to alter; the
+idea of international literary property had been started, and was making
+way. The successive steps were as follows. The principle was settled by an
+Act of Parliament in 1852; the foreign author retained his copyright for
+five years, but this affected translation only, adaptation not being
+covered by the laws; then it was sufficient to add a character, or to
+invert two scenes, to evade all dues. In 1875 a new law brought adaptation
+into the same category as translation. Finally, in 1887 as the result of
+the Treaty of Berne, and the interesting discussions which led up to it,
+an Order in Council laid it down in black and white, that the literary
+property of foreigners is, in every respect, identical with that of the
+natives of this country, and is protected in the same way.</p>
+
+<p>These are very liberal provisions, and do honour to the statesmen to whom
+we owe them, but I am obliged to say they have greatly reduced the
+importation of French goods into the English theatrical market, and that
+they threaten it with complete extinction in the future. One has to think
+twice before taking up a piece which is burdened with the necessity of
+paying two authors; it seems preferable to study our methods, and learn
+from us, if possible, how to dispense with us. Nothing has contributed so
+efficaciously, for some years past, to the progress of the native English
+drama.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>It is here that the teaching of the critic comes in, with the <i>flair</i> of
+the actor-manager.</p>
+
+<p>From the English point of view, there are two kinds of pieces included in
+the domain of our <i>Haute Com&eacute;die</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The one, including such plays as those of Dumas and Augier, requires
+almost literal translation, and ought to be put before the public as
+finished specimens of Parisian civilisation and art; to alter them would
+be to spoil them&mdash;<i>sint ut sunt aut non sint</i>. It is different with the
+pieces of M. Sardou. Once you have torn off the outer covering, and
+detached the thousand adventitious details with which the French author
+has ingeniously set out his subject, there remains an idea to be worked
+out, an idea with a strong foundation, capable of supporting an entirely
+new structure. It is possible to make an entirely English thing out of the
+excellent foreign materials from which one has chosen. It is a matter of
+taste, adroitness, and inspiration, and I quite understand this kind of
+work having a certain fascination for the playwright.</p>
+
+<p>To understand thoroughly the process of adaptation, we ought to have been
+in a certain first-class carriage on the way from Paris to Calais one
+spring morning in 1878. It was occupied by three Englishmen, Mr. Bancroft,
+Mr. Clement Scott, and Mr. Stephenson. They had been present at the
+performance of <i>Dora</i> on the previous evening. Bancroft had bought the
+English right from M. Michaelis, who had himself<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> bought them from M.
+Sardou. How were they to make an English play out of it? Someone suggested
+the introduction of the Eastern Question, which at the moment, under the
+sedulous treatment of Disraeli, was stirring British <i>amour propre</i>. All
+the music halls were re-echoing the refrain, &#8220;But by jingo if we do.&#8221; The
+idea hit upon was to turn this jingoism to account in the adaptation, by
+making Disraeli collaborate with Sardou. &#8220;By the time we got out at Amiens
+to drink our <i>bouillon</i>,&#8221; one of them tells us, &#8220;the play was fully
+planned out.&#8221; And, under the title of <i>Diplomacy, Dora</i> enjoyed an even
+more brilliant success in England than it had had in France.</p>
+
+<p>This, of course, was only a combination of smartness and good luck. The
+new kind of adaptation was in sight, however, which was to have the double
+advantage of evading the law and elevating the art. All that was taken
+from the French author was a social thesis, a dramatic situation, a moral
+problem. Thesis, situation, and problem were carried bodily into the midst
+of English life, provided only that English life allowed of them. Then, in
+complete disregard of the original, a solution was sought for afresh. If a
+new <i>d&eacute;nouement</i> resulted, a solution quite opposed to that in the French
+play, it was felt to be so much the better, for in this case the
+adaptation was seen to be independent, and it had but opened the field to
+a fruitful and suggestive comparison between the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> two races, the two arts,
+and the two codes of morality.</p>
+
+<p>This is where we stand at present: this form of adaptation is the more
+interesting of the two, and constitutes the last stage previous to the era
+of complete emancipation, of absolute originality.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+<div class="note">
+<p class="hang">The Three Principal Dramatists of To-day&mdash;Sydney Grundy; his First
+Efforts&mdash;Adaptations: <i>The Snowball</i>, <i>In Honour Bound</i>, <i>A Pair of
+Spectacles</i>, <i>The Bunch of Violets</i>&mdash;His Original Plays&mdash;His Style&mdash;His
+Humour&mdash;His Ethical Ideal&mdash;<i>An Old Jew</i>&mdash;<i>The New Woman</i>&mdash;A Talent which
+has not done growing.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>If you were to ask a London theatre-goer to name the most popular
+dramatists of the present day, to designate the ripened talents which tell
+most clearly of the present and of the future of the English drama, I
+think I may affirm that the names that would come immediately to his lips,
+with scarcely a moment&#8217;s pause for reflection, are those of Arthur Wing
+Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones, and Sydney Grundy. There would doubtless be
+some demurrings on the part of those contrary or eccentric spirits who
+will never admire except out of opposition and in disagreement, not merely
+with the uncultured many, but with the critical few. The theatre has its
+sects and its chapels, or rather, its crypts and its unknown idols, to
+whom a dozen votaries offer incense with weird rites. But we have no time
+to study the vagaries of individual minds. A <i>pl&eacute;biscite</i> of West-End
+playgoers would certainly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> point to the three men whose names I have
+mentioned as the leaders of the dramatic movement of the day.</p>
+
+<p>They all began work about the same time&mdash;a score of years ago, as nearly
+as possible. They have encountered the same difficulties. Their progress
+has been slow. The commencement of their career was marked by vain efforts
+and misdirected labour: whether it was that opportunity was lacking, or
+that they could not find their way, certainly no one of them gave evidence
+of his full capacity, or even gave any real promise, in his earliest
+works. They were long mere imitators, without seeming to suspect that they
+were worth more than their models; and they hardly were aware of their
+originality before the public discovered it for them. There is something
+almost depressing in the story of these three theatrical <i>autodidactes</i>,
+but it is very human and very instructive. It shows the will dragging
+along the intelligence; the investigation by means of experiment preceding
+science; the effort giving birth to the ability. And even now, they are
+only half-way along their arduous paths.</p>
+
+<p>So much they have in common. But their temperament and their ideas are
+dissimilar, and every day adds to this dissimilarity. With whom should one
+commence? Clearly with him who retains most in him of the past, who
+adheres still&mdash;largely through his antecedents, and partly through his
+natural disposition&mdash;to the school of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> Robertson, and to the imitation of
+the French: with Sydney Grundy.</p>
+
+<p>If I am not mistaken, his first appearance dates from 1872. At long
+intervals during the subsequent years he succeeded in getting quite small
+pieces upon the stage, contenting himself very often with provincial
+theatres. Two things served to draw him forth from obscurity&mdash;an affray
+with the censorship, and the very thorough success of a farce in three
+acts, entitled <i>The Snowball</i>. There was question, in the first case, of
+an adaptation of <i>La Petite Marquise</i>, which he wrote in collaboration
+with Joseph Mackayers. To my mind, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius contain
+nothing more frankly moral than <i>La Petite Marquise</i>. The story of the
+piece, for all the licence of its treatment, is one calculated to deter a
+virtuously inclined woman from succumbing to temptation. Unfortunately its
+moral is a moral of&mdash;shall I say?&mdash;fastidious abstention; a moral it is
+difficult to appreciate or put into practice, except at an age when
+passion has lost its fire and its poison.</p>
+
+<p>It serves, therefore, despite its subtle humour and clever observation, no
+more useful purpose than the entertainment of philosophers. The English
+censor did not, or would not, see the lesson it taught; he saw only the
+posturings and the language, and was alarmed. He had &#8220;passed&#8221; the <i>Petite
+Marquise</i> in French in all her original licence; he refused her his
+sanction when she turned up respectably attired by two of his
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span>fellow-countrymen. Mr. Sydney Grundy made a great outcry, greater,
+perhaps, than was necessary. He was in the right; but one might have
+wished that he had kept in the right without so much passion and
+indignation. However that may be, he made his name known to many people
+who were destined to keep it in mind.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Snowball</i> is an English version of <i>Oscar, ou le mari qui trompe sa
+femme</i>. Mr. Sydney Grundy&#8217;s originality consists in his having introduced
+into the English farce qualities which were foreign to this
+species&mdash;cleverness and ingenuity, wit, some bits of comedy, and not a
+single pun. The author holds his puppets adroitly suspended from his
+finger-tips, without ever entangling their threads. But if, in listening
+to or reading <i>The Snowball</i>, you look out for a single trait of English
+manners or character, you will do so in vain, for there is not one.</p>
+
+<p>The well-merited success of <i>The Snowball</i> retarded Mr. Grundy&#8217;s dramatic
+career, because it condemned him to the work of adaptation&mdash;so ungrateful
+in those days&mdash;for long years. But this period of ill-fortune had its good
+side, for he knew how to turn it to account. Just as a good painter,
+obliged to earn his livelihood by painting portraits, looks on the wealthy
+Philistines whose features he has to depict as mere models who pay instead
+of being paid; so Mr. Grundy learned the technique and methods of his
+business from Sardou, Labiche, and Scribe. I shall not follow in detail
+these literary jobs of his, some of which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> were very humble, though none
+of them useless. I shall draw attention merely to three of these
+adaptations, in which Mr. Grundy seems to me to have put some of his
+personal quality, and to have grafted his own talent on the talent of
+another.</p>
+
+<p>The first in date, <i>In Honour Bound</i>, is at once a condensation and a
+critical commentary on Scribe&#8217;s piece, <i>Une Cha&icirc;ne</i>. The heroine is a
+young wife whose husband has neglected her, and who has sought
+distractions. How far has she gone in her search? We are not told; and it
+is better that we should not know, for this doubt adds to the interest of
+a piece which, whilst wearing the outward aspect of comedy, borders
+throughout upon serious drama, and keeps it always within sight. The young
+man who has consoled her, or who has come near to consoling her, and has
+had strength enough to flee to the ends of the earth from his guilty
+happiness, comes back presently with a new love in his heart, a love that
+is to be consummated in a happy and brilliant marriage, if the girl&#8217;s
+guardian gives his consent. Now&mdash;and it is here that Scribe&#8217;s hand is
+discovered&mdash;this guardian and the husband, whose honour has been
+threatened or destroyed, are one and the same, the famous barrister, Sir
+George Carlyon. He it is who bears the burden of the play; and the plot is
+unrolled in a kind of cross-examination of the guilty youth at his hands,
+under the guise of a friendly conversation. How<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> much does Sir George
+know? And whither is he making? Therein lies the interest. You follow
+every move in the clever and perilous game played by the husband whose
+happiness is at stake; and you follow it with the intenser interest that
+he never for a moment loses his <i>sang-froid</i>, his grace, or his wit. At
+bottom, his policy consists in counting upon the innate generosity of the
+woman. After devoting a world of skill and patience to the trapping of
+Lady Carlyon, at last, when he has in his hands the written proof of her
+guilt, he throws it into the fire, and, instead of listening to the
+confession which has been offered him, accuses himself.</p>
+
+<p>There results a mutual pardon, discreetly covering over and absolving all
+the past. Thus finishes this little piece, which runs smilingly,
+breathlessly, along the edge of a precipice. It is the Drama in essence,
+cunningly distilled.</p>
+
+<p><i>A Pair of Spectacles</i> is an imitation (Mr. Grundy modestly calls it a
+translation) of <i>Les Petits Oiseaux</i>, by Labiche and Delacour. The subject
+is well known. It is the crisis of distrust which every man goes through,
+sooner or later, who has believed too much in the goodness of mankind. He
+passes from a blind optimism to a ferocious pessimism, then returns to a
+more moderate estimate of average human nature&mdash;prepared now and again to
+come across a wretched creature who abuses his charity, and many shallow
+natures who accept it and forget it. This indulgent theory, this
+easy-going attitude,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> finds expression in a pretty apologue, explanatory
+of the title chosen by Labiche. The old fellow&#8217;s future daughter-in-law
+congratulates him on the good he effects all round him. &#8220;You are so good!&#8221;
+she cries; &#8220;but people are so ungrateful!&#8221; &#8220;What does that matter?&#8221; she
+makes answer; &#8220;I feed the sparrows every morning that come to my
+window-sill. They never say &#8216;Thanks.&#8217; Often, indeed, one of them, hungrier
+than the others, pecks at my finger. But that does not stop me from
+feeding them again next day.&#8221; At the <i>d&eacute;nouement</i>, he recalls this lesson
+read to him by the innocent girl, and applies it to his own experience.
+The pecking is the deception of which he has been the victim; and as for
+the ingratitude of people, well, there is nothing to be surprised at in
+that&mdash;the sparrows don&#8217;t say &#8220;Thanks!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It is a symbol, nothing more nor less,&mdash;a symbol in a play by Labiche!
+Labiche poaching upon the fields of him who has written <i>Solness, the
+Master-Builder!&mdash;n&#8217;est ce pas un comble!</i> A second symbol is added to the
+first in order to justify the title which Mr. Grundy has given to the
+English piece. In his ill-temper over the discovery that human nature is
+not perfect, Benjamin Goldfinch has broken his spectacles. From this
+moment he uses those which have been lent to him by his brother Gregory,
+the misanthrope. At the <i>d&eacute;nouement</i>, his own come back to him from the
+optician&#8217;s. He seizes upon them with delight, and there is nothing to
+prevent<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> the spectator, should the superstition be to his taste, from
+believing that all that has happened has resulted from the changing of
+these pairs of spectacles. The author&#8217;s idea is obvious to all. Our mind
+is the prism by which everything is distorted or refracted. So long as we
+look at things through the glasses of our intellectual vision, it is
+probable that they will always appear to us as they appeared at first. The
+pair of spectacles is in us. Experience breaks them, and illusions mend
+them again.</p>
+
+<p>In France the <i>Petits Oiseaux</i> had a provincial success. In Paris the
+piece produced but little effect when first performed; and when revived at
+the Com&eacute;die Fran&ccedil;aise some years ago, the critics thought it childish.</p>
+
+<p>In London, on the contrary, in the form given to it by Mr. Grundy, it was
+given a brilliant reception, which was renewed later on its revival, as I
+myself can bear witness. Whence is this difference? From the superiority
+of Parisian taste? Such an explanation would be pleasing to our <i>amour
+propre</i>. I shall venture upon another, which will, perhaps, dispense with
+this one. Namely, that <i>Les Petits Oiseaux</i> is a fairy tale, and that
+Labiche has no gift for fairy tales. His big honest hands&mdash;I speak
+figuratively, never having seen the author of <i>Perrichan</i> and <i>La
+Grammaire</i>&mdash;were made to seize and keep hold of the comic aspect of
+realities. But for this gracefully fanciful subject, the touch of a real
+writer, such as Mr. Grundy, was required, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> this is why I think the
+copy is better than the original.</p>
+
+<p>The third adaptation which has struck me is that of <i>Montjoye</i>. So far
+back as 1877 Mr. Grundy offered a first version of it, under the title of
+<i>Mammon</i>, to the English public. He must, while profiting by opinions
+already passed upon it, have made a full and detailed critical study of
+the piece before he touched it at all. The result of his reflections was
+the suppression of a valueless character, that of Montjoye&#8217;s son, and the
+introduction of an excellent one, that of Parker, the old clerk, whose
+fidelity and modesty everyone admires, and who, having found out all his
+employer&#8217;s secrets, and treasured up in his dogged and unforgiving heart
+all the grievances he has experienced, follows him step by step, acquires
+his property bit by bit, and becomes eventually his master&#8217;s master.</p>
+
+<p><i>Mammon</i> is certainly a better made piece than <i>Montjoye</i>, but this was
+not enough for Mr. Grundy. More than sixteen years later he took up the
+same subject again, and subjected it to a new examination, from two points
+of view. How had the type of the company-promoter been modified in the
+course of thirty years? In what particulars does the English speculator
+differ from his French compeer? The scene will be recalled in which
+Montjoye, the positivist, laughs at the enthusiastic Saladin, his old
+schoolfellow, who remained poor through having retained his illusions, his
+belief in mankind. &#8220;That is all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> rubbish,&#8221; Montjoye declares,&mdash;&#8220;<i>Tout
+cela, c&#8217;est du bleu!</i>&#8221; Whatever is not practical, whatever cannot be
+expressed clearly in black and white, he calls &#8220;Bleu.&#8221; Poetical illusions,
+childish preconceptions, romantic superstitions, sickly sensibilities,
+sonorous and empty sayings&mdash;&#8220;<i>Voila le royaume de bleu!</i>&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Thus Montjoye, &#8220;<i>ou l&#8217;homme fort</i>,&#8221; declaimed, in language which now seems
+somewhat out of date. For to-day he has changed r&ocirc;les with Saladin. He is
+the enthusiast who gains the confidence of the simple and the credulous,
+he is the <i>virtuoso</i> of sickly sensibility&mdash;the Paganini of the sonorous
+and empty sayings; he has found a mine of gold in the <i>Royaume du Bleu</i>.
+His <i>Tartufferie</i> is social rather than religious. He is not content to
+issue shares in the port of Bohemia, and bonds on a railway from Paris to
+the moon; he is anxious that these magnificent enterprises should serve
+the interests of humanity. The modern Montjoye rides upon politics and
+finance, the Bible and Socialism; he succeeds through chauvinism and
+through philanthropy. Transport him to London, and clothe him in that
+hypocrisy of which our neighbours have made an art, and you will have Sir
+Philip Marchant, the hero of <i>A Bunch of Violets</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Thus Montjoye, who comes home at seven in the morning after a spree,&mdash;like
+a college boy who has been out of bounds,&mdash;and who sacrifices his
+financial eminence, his reputation, and his peace of mind to an
+adventuress, escorted and aggravated<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> by a Palais Royal husband, would
+never go down in England, and I think the French public of to-day would
+refuse to stand him.</p>
+
+<p>I had the honour of personal acquaintance with Octave Feuillet. He was a
+man of delicate, nervous, solitary disposition. He depicted these aspects
+of the <i>vie mondaine</i> and <i>demi-mondaine</i> of 1865 from afar and <i>de chic</i>.
+Mr. Grundy eliminated this na&iuml;ve and old-fashioned Don Juanism of his. In
+order to bring about the necessary crisis, he has recourse to bigamy. The
+expedient is not new, and is even somewhat repellent, but I admit that it
+gives a solidity to the English piece which the French piece lacks.</p>
+
+<p>Philip Marchant has married twice, Montjoye has not married at all. &#8220;What
+would the world say if it knew you had allowed your mistress to invite it
+to dinners and dances under the guise of being your wife?&#8221; The objection
+is submitted to Montjoye by his unfortunate accomplice, and by the public
+to the author who is no better able to reply to it than his hero. At all
+events, Sir Philip Marchant has not been guilty of this blunder. His
+second marriage is a crime certainly, but it is not a mistake. And then we
+escape that ultimate conversion, a lamentable concession made by Feuillet
+to the optimistic playgoers of the fair sex of thirty years ago. Sir
+Philip swallows his laudanum (or is it strychnine?) without turning a
+hair&mdash;a method of settling one&#8217;s differences with social morality and the
+criminal code resorted to, as we know,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> in every country, when no other
+method is available.</p>
+
+<p>On one point Mr. Grundy has shown himself even more fanciful and
+sentimental than Octave Feuillet. I refer to the little bunch of violets
+which gives its name to the piece. Sir Philip, the bigamist, the swindler,
+who has defrauded public societies, defrauded the poor, defrauded even his
+own wife, refuses to give the little penny buttonhole of violets, his
+daughter&#8217;s present to him that morning, in exchange for a sum of five
+thousand pounds&mdash;a sum which would enable him to keep up the fight for
+another twenty-four hours and&mdash;who knows?&mdash;perhaps escape bankruptcy and
+suicide. &#8220;These violets are not for sale,&#8221; he thunders, and the audience
+is carried away. The men applaud and the women weep. By this single trait
+the criminal is redeemed and absolved.</p>
+
+<p>Even in his original plays, Mr. Grundy has been haunted by the memory of
+his French studies, and no one will think of reproaching him for having,
+now and again, made use of semi-unconscious reminiscences, floating, as it
+were, between the regions of his imagination and his memory. A more
+serious cause for complaint is, that having concerned himself for a great
+portion of his life with the French theatre, he has ended by confounding
+our dramatic types with characters from real life. At the same time, as he
+is gifted with a very lively sense of humorous observation, which he has
+employed in every direction upon things and people, he has managed to
+produce<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> some curious mixtures. Sometimes we have Scribe&#8217;s marionettes
+moving in an English atmosphere, sometimes we have English characters
+unfolding themselves through the course of sentimental plots very much
+like ours. Thus, in <i>The Glass of Fashion</i>, we have depicted for us the
+havoc wrought by society journalism of the worst type. A silly fool who
+has come in for a fortune has allowed himself to be persuaded into buying
+a journal of this class. It traduces his best friends, and even his very
+wife. A little more and he must institute proceedings against it for
+libelling himself. The whole of this amusing picture of manners,
+thoroughly racy of the soil, is framed in a melodramatic affair in which
+women are juggled out of sight, like a thimble-rigger&#8217;s peas, in
+accordance with our traditional method. Mr. Grundy pins his faith to
+Scribe, whom he looks upon with reason as a marvellous stage-carpenter,
+and he cannot see the need for a divorce between ingenious scenic
+contrivance and sincerity of dramatic emotion. And indeed, it is not
+essential that a theatrical piece should be badly constructed that it may
+contain human feeling and truth to life. But how to get nature and art to
+combine together in the same work? That is the enigma, and there are many
+still who have to search for the secret of this mysterious collaboration.</p>
+
+<p>In every play of Mr. Grundy&#8217;s there is to be found an element which is
+very old in the initial situation, and also an element which is very new
+and very personal in the treatment, the working<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span> out,&mdash;the individual
+note, in short, which relieves even the smallest points, and stamps them
+with a special character that cannot be counterfeited. It is to Mr. Grundy
+the writer that Mr. Grundy the dramatist owes his greatest success, and it
+is the writer, too, who has covered the retreat when the dramatist has
+entered the fray too rashly, and been threatened with disaster.</p>
+
+<p>This gift of writing is not displayed in rhetorical tirades, or in
+brilliant discourses and philosophisings upon social problems, as with our
+writers of the Second Empire; it is concentrated chiefly upon quick
+rejoinders that are rapped out short and sharp. Humour flows in such
+abundance through Mr. Grundy&#8217;s theatrical work that it floods even his
+serious dramas. <i>A Fool&#8217;s Paradise</i>, that sombre story of poisoning, is so
+saturated with gaiety that one laughs throughout, from start to finish;
+and the murderess is so conscious of it that she betakes herself
+considerately behind the scenes to die, in order not to dissipate our good
+humour by the sight of her agonies. In <i>The Late Mr. Castello</i> there is
+nothing at all of tragedy&mdash;nothing but the whims of a pretty woman, whose
+amusement it is to woo the lovers of all the rest of her sex; thus causing
+general indignation.</p>
+
+<p>The author&#8217;s wit follows her with rare agility through these dangerous
+gymnastics, which the less nimble would attempt at the risk of a broken
+neck. Coynesses, childishnesses, contrarinesses, moods of jealousy,
+endearing terms used in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> earnest and in jest, outbursts of passion
+artificial as well as real, shades and half shades and quarter shades of
+expression, fibs, feint upon feint, nothing disconcerts the writer,
+nothing finds this light, subtle, railing, emotional tongue at a loss&mdash;the
+tongue which recalls Marivaux sometimes, and sometimes Musset. You can
+understand, then, why Mr. Grundy&#8217;s plays are popular with the public,
+without satisfying the critics. The public is carried away by the charm of
+his dialogue; the critics stop to discuss the age of his subject and the
+truth of his thesis.</p>
+
+<p>One of Mr. Grundy&#8217;s peculiarities&mdash;and, together with his fancy and his
+originality as a writer, it is my chief reason for delighting in
+him&mdash;consists in the strange contrast presented in his theatrical work
+between the passions called into play and the impression produced. Severe
+judges accuse him of being over-indulgent to the weaknesses of unlawful
+love, and perhaps they are right. But of this I am sure, that you go from
+one of his plays in an excellent frame of mind, with a genuine wish to
+lead a good life, and to attain happiness through the giving of happiness
+to others. How does he set about the management of this? He does not set
+about managing it at all. There is something in the depth of his nature
+that gushes out in good-will, a source of generous emotions which
+strengthen and refresh and reanimate us. In place of the thousand little
+rules and regulations by which conventional and machine-made morality hems
+us<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> in, a broader, if less clearly defined, morality is to be found, one
+which contrives the avoidance of evil, not by the observance of laws, but
+by the sparing of pain and suffering to our fellows.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>Sowing the Wind</i>, Mr. Grundy has pleaded the cause of illegitimate
+children with a warmth and eloquence Dumas would not have been ashamed to
+acknowledge. I am told that the third act, when a good actress has taken
+part in it, has never failed to produce its effect, and I am not
+surprised. The piece is well conceived and is touching; and there is a
+suggestion of history in it, tactful and pleasing. You would say it had
+really been written over sixty years ago, in this England of 1830, in
+which the scene is laid.</p>
+
+<p>But I shall cite <i>An Old Jew</i> as the best example of those plays of his
+which do not satisfy ordinary morality, and which yet leave a man better
+and more strong. It is a curious play. It would be easy to point out its
+faults; it is very difficult to explain its charm. A man who has been
+deceived by his wife, instead of showing her up, punishing her, driving
+her from his house, condemns himself to exile, and allows himself to be
+suspected at once of hardness and infidelity. Why? Because a father can do
+without his children, a woman cannot. Left all alone, she would lapse into
+despair or into shame; her children will be her safeguard, her redemption,
+her virtue. This conduct of Julius Stern is magnanimous; but if he is
+ready to ignore himself, should he not think rather of his innocent
+children than of his guilty<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> wife? Has he not run too great a risk in
+confiding the education of a pure-minded girl to an adulteress? The
+dangerous experiment succeeds, and if you ask me why, I can only say,
+because Mr. Grundy so decided it. Julius has been mistaken only on one
+point,&mdash;on the powers of endurance of a father deprived of his daughter&#8217;s
+caresses, and the companionship of his son.</p>
+
+<p>He returns therefore, and draws near to his deserted family; he remains in
+concealment, but close beside them, ready to guard and help them.</p>
+
+<p>His daughter plays <i>ing&eacute;nue</i> parts in a London theatre, and although the
+morality of the wings is a little better on the other side of the channel
+than on ours, the girl is exposed to such proposals as that of a certain
+Burnside, who asks her calmly and coolly, without any pretence of love or
+any beating about the bush, to come and live with him. It is time for the
+father to show himself. But Julius has a method all his own for watching
+over his daughter. Every evening he goes to see her act, and, the piece
+over, returns to bed. As for the young man, his dream is of literary
+glory, and it is now that the second subject is introduced, a satire upon
+the ways of contemporary English journalism, which is made to go side by
+side with the domestic drama of the Sterns. How do we find Julius
+intervening in the interests of his son? First he buys him a rare edition
+of &#8220;The Dramatists of the Sixteenth Century,&#8221; which he seems to recommend
+to him as a model (a mistaken and ill-timed <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span>recommendation, as I think,
+for the reasons I have indicated already in a previous chapter). The young
+man has written a comedy. Without having read it, and, in consequence,
+without knowing whether he is encouraging a real or only an imagined
+vocation, Julius buys a theatre in which the piece may be performed, and
+he buys also two or three newspapers wherewith to secure its success. Here
+he assumes proportions that are almost fantastic. His sadness, his
+wandering and mysterious life, his authority of voice and bearing, that
+fatal gift of his for turning everything he touches into gold, point to
+some symbolical intention in the author&#8217;s mind, and to a <i>third</i> subject.</p>
+
+<p>It is no longer <i>A Jew</i>; it is <i>The Jew</i>&mdash;the Jew rehabilitated, and
+becoming now, in his turn, a dispenser of social justice. But how does he
+set about it, this reformer? By loading rascals with gold. Not a good way,
+truly, of closing the <i>march&eacute; aux consciences</i>. And then the whole
+structure falls to pieces before a very simple reflection. The newspapers
+that give success are not to be bought. Those that are to be bought don&#8217;t
+give success.</p>
+
+<p>I could proceed with these criticisms, but I am almost ashamed really, as
+it is, of having gone so far, for they make me look ungrateful. If the
+play be theoretically bad, how is it that we listen to it, moved or
+amused, without a moment of fatigue? It is a play without love, for one
+cannot regard the incident of Burnside&#8217;s<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> base proposal as a love scene. A
+whole act passes in the smoking room of a club, in which we do not catch
+sight of even the shadow of a petticoat. But one would not miss a line of
+this frank, direct, live dialogue; one is thrilled by certain sentences,
+strangely deep or bitterly eloquent, as by lightning flashes; one feels
+that there are real souls behind these unreal incidents. And then,&mdash;shall
+I acknowledge it?&mdash;one is keenly interested in the absurd but affecting
+spectacle of this father, who thirsts for his daughter&#8217;s forehead, as a
+lover thirsts for the lips of his mistress. Why should not such love as
+this have its drama and its romance, as it has its anguishes, its
+sacrifices, and its joys?</p>
+
+<p><i>The New Woman</i>, played in the autumn of 1894, gives us the same emotions,
+without suggesting to the mind the same doubts and objections. It had a
+well-merited success. It is, of course, open to criticism. It is a wholly
+modern picture of manners, the <i>dernier cri</i> of social satire, serving as
+a background to the working out of a very old dramatic subject. Does the
+play bear out the promises of its title? I see in it three episodical
+types, of which two, at least, are caricatures; an impudent lady-doctor,
+who takes herself very seriously; a sort of <i>gar&ccedil;on manqu&eacute;</i>, who smokes
+and wears her hair short; and a sort of half-faded flirt, who is much more
+taken up with angling for a husband in troubled waters than with the
+reformation of society.</p>
+
+<p>I see also a married woman, who bores herself<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> at home, and who tries to
+appropriate another woman&#8217;s husband, by collaborating, or pretending to
+collaborate, with him on a book. But I have no difficulty in recognising
+in her the everlasting would-be adulteress, of whom our drama has made
+such abuse. Her case is complicated with literature; she is the old
+Blue-Stocking darned anew. Thus escapes us once more the New Woman, this
+obsessing phantom of which everyone speaks and which so few have seen.</p>
+
+<p>The real theme of the play is the folly of a man of the world in marrying
+a little farmer&#8217;s daughter, who has been brought up at home in the
+country. I have said that it is an old subject, but it is well to remark
+that it is generally approached from another side. The authors of a
+certain epoch were fond of describing the origin of one of these passions
+which level the differences of rank and education. They led the hero and
+heroine up to the point of marriage, but it is the morrow of their
+marriage, and the day after that still more, that one would like to hear
+of. This is precisely what Mr. Grundy sets out to show us, but is his
+representation of it accurate, lifelike, credible?</p>
+
+<p>In reality, were this marriage to come off, it is very likely that the
+newly-wedded wife, made giddy by the sudden plunge, would surpass in
+frivolity those who belong to the gay world into which she has been
+introduced, and who have lived in it. But this idea would be too true and
+too simple for the theatre. Or else this little<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> country girl would show
+herself inferior to the people amongst whom she has to mix, as much by the
+vulgarity of her ideas as that of her manners. It is not the world who
+would repulse her, it is she who would be unable to suit herself to the
+world; whence it would come, that her husband must either cast her off or
+become a pariah with her. This version, also, would fail to please the
+pit. Mr. Grundy, therefore, has preferred to devote all his <i>savoir
+faire</i>, his wit and his emotional power, to the task of making us accept,
+as a compromise between realism and idealism, a solution as pleasing as it
+is illogical and essentially theatrical. In the second act, Marjery
+commits blunder upon blunder. Everybody makes fun of her, and her husband
+declares she is &#8220;hopeless.&#8221; In the third act she is the admired of all,
+for her eloquence and dignity, her virtue and tact; those who made fun of
+her have prostrated themselves at her feet. Is it possible that she has
+learnt all this during the entr&#8217;acte, whilst the orchestra got through a
+waltz? She takes refuge with her father, whose country dialect is just
+strong enough to raise a smile. She milks the cows and plucks the apples,
+the only occupations permissible on the stage to a pretty farmer&#8217;s lass.
+The youthful husband comes in search of her to this retreat, and obtains
+her pardon. She will never be a lady, but she will be a &#8220;woman&#8221; <i>par
+excellence</i>. The public seemed to me to be delighted with this conclusion.
+An assembly of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> two thousand snobs will never stint its applause to an
+author who chastises snobbery.</p>
+
+<p>To sum up, Mr. Sydney Grundy has never yet had the good fortune to utilise
+all his gifts at once&mdash;to put his whole strength into one important work.
+But he has not said his last word: he may give us to-morrow a vigorous
+comedy, taken whole and entire from actual life, a drama palpitating with
+living passion. Has he not everything required for the purpose?
+Sensibility, humour, individuality, the knowledge of the theatre, and the
+favour of the public.<a name='fna_12' id='fna_12' href='#f_12'><small>[12]</small></a></p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+<div class="note">
+<p class="hang">Henry Arthur Jones; his First Works&mdash;His Melodramas&mdash;<i>Saints and
+Sinners</i>&mdash;The Puritans and the Theatre&mdash;The Two Deacons; The Character of
+Fletcher&mdash;<i>Judah</i>&mdash;<i>The Crusaders</i>; Character of Palsam; the Conclusion of
+the Piece&mdash;<i>The Case of Rebellious Susan</i>&mdash;<i>The Masqueraders</i>&mdash;Return to
+Melodrama. Theories expounded by Mr. Jones in his book: <i>The Renascence of the Drama</i>.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>The start of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones was not less difficult than that of
+Mr. Sydney Grundy. He could get only short and light pieces accepted at
+first. The earliest play of his within the memory of London play-goers was
+performed at the Court Theatre, and was entitled, <i>A Clerical Error</i>. The
+second was an idyll in two short acts, called <i>An Old Master</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The young author found it necessary to seek refuge in provincial theatres.
+The world remained unwilling to learn his name&mdash;a somewhat undistinguished
+name, and easily forgotten. When, in 1882, Mr. Archer included him in his
+<i>Dramatists of To-day</i>, there were many who asked, &#8220;<i>Who</i> is this Mr.
+Jones?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was then he worked at melodrama. He served seven years with Laban, and
+married Leah, upheld by the hope of one day obtaining<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> Rachel. This was
+his apprenticeship. As Mr. Grundy had learnt his craft by adapting our
+French authors, Mr. Jones learnt his by writing great popular dramas. It
+was in this <i>genre</i>, one which gives full scope to the imagination, that
+he came to know his own individual temperament, and developed those
+poetical faculties which were to be put to better uses; it was by this
+unlikely pathway that he found the road to Shakespearian emotions. His
+qualities and his defects date from this time.</p>
+
+<p>The great success of <i>The Silver King</i> set Mr. Jones at liberty. I have
+neither seen nor read the piece, which has not been printed. It is a good
+melodrama, I understand. People found in it, together with some new types
+and <i>coups de th&eacute;&acirc;tre</i>, observation, gaiety, a rare freedom of handling,
+some really moving touches, and, here and there, flashes of imagination
+and poetry.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Jones thought he could now take a step further, and please himself,
+having succeeded in pleasing the public. He wrote <i>Saints and Sinners</i>.
+The little Margate Theatre was the scene of the first performance of the
+new play in September 1884, this first performance having for object only
+the perfecting of the actors in their parts, and the testing of the
+public. The piece passed thence to the Vaudeville, where it held the bills
+until the middle of the following year, much talked about and applauded.</p>
+
+<p>It marks an important date, not merely in the career of Mr. Jones, but in
+the history of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> English drama. It denotes the revival of active
+hostility, in that ancient conflict between the Puritans and the stage,
+which began in 1580, and will last as long as English literature and
+English civilisation. This conflict had assumed a sluggish and inactive
+character in the nineteenth century. Shattered by the scorn of the
+Puritans, the stage had not dared to raise its arm for a blow. Suddenly it
+took the offensive, and carried the war into the enemy&#8217;s camp. <i>Saints and
+Sinners</i> is only the first of a series of dramas and comedies, in which
+Mr. Jones has fearlessly attacked the hypocrisies of religion, in their
+most characteristic form. He has let fly some darts, indeed, which have
+sped even further, and which he has not shot at random. Has he not
+declared, in his high-spirited and witty preface to <i>The Case of
+Rebellious Susan</i>, that the theatre was perhaps destined to succeed to the
+tottering pulpit, and to teach morality to the professional moralists?</p>
+
+<p>Already, in 1885, he had claimed energetically for the drama the right to
+deal with any subject, even with religious subjects. Elsewhere, he
+declared that the theatre was one of the organs of the national life, and
+one of its essential organs; that one could no more imagine England
+without the theatre, than England without the press and the platform.</p>
+
+<p>He seems to say&mdash;and this boldness does not displease in a man of
+talent&mdash;&#8220;We want liberty. Free our hands; give us permission to produce<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span>
+masterpieces, and the masterpieces will not be delayed.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>What Mr. Jones satirised in <i>Saints and Sinners</i>, was the money-making
+spirit that went hand in hand with bigotry. This combination is incarnated
+by Hoggard and Prabble, the two deacons of the dissenting congregation of
+Steepleford. Hoggard is a business man on a small scale, and in a small
+town; Prabble is an easy-going grocer. The one is repulsive, the other
+merely comic; but, at bottom, they represent the same spirit, in different
+degrees, and after different fashions. Hoggard is fully aware of his
+rascality, and there is nothing sincere about him except his pride. He is
+convinced that there is a special moral code for clever men of his own
+stamp.</p>
+
+<p>Prabble, on the other hand, is of opinion that the minister would be doing
+no more than his duty were he to denounce from the pulpit the co-operative
+stores by which his shop is being ruined. &#8220;I keep up his chapel. He ought
+to keep up my custom.&#8221; Even in the last scene, in the midst of the tragic
+emotions of the <i>d&eacute;nouement</i>, when he wishes to express to the minister
+they have driven away the remorse of his ungrateful congregation, his one
+fixed idea comes out again. If only Mr. Fletcher could manage, without
+inconvenience, to slip in a word on Sunday&mdash;just one word about the
+co-operative stores!</p>
+
+<p>Does this grocer, who would prop up his shop against his chapel, reason
+and act otherwise at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> bottom, than did the great king when he allied his
+throne with the pulpit of Bossuet? In both cases the policy proved
+successful&mdash;at least, for a time.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You know, my dear Prabble,&#8221; Hoggard says to his friend, &#8220;it is we who are
+the greatness of England; it is we who have made her what she is.&#8221; And
+what is so terrible about it is, that he is not wholly wrong. Hoggard and
+Prabble represent one of the various types of that Puritan democracy,
+which accomplished great things in former days, but which has learnt
+nothing for two centuries, except to make money. They belong to what is
+called the middle class, and the middle class, so different from our
+<i>Classe Moyenne</i>, is regarded with real contempt by superior
+intelligences. Matthew Arnold congratulated Mr. Jones ten years ago on
+having given it, in his admirable picture of these two deacons, one of the
+hardest blows it had yet received. What neither Mr. Arnold nor Mr. Jones
+took the trouble to point out is, that in ordinary life the minister
+cannot belong to a different race of men from those who of their own
+accord have placed him at their head. Like flock, like pastor, and&mdash;I
+shall venture to add&mdash;like creed.</p>
+
+<p>In default of prudence, an artistic consideration (which I can understand)
+would have strongly impelled Mr. Jones to offer us a pastor differing from
+his flock, as the suave tenderness of the New Testament differs from the
+harshness of the Old. This minister, who allows himself to be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> robbed by a
+poulterer, and who says such sublime things, has not been taken from real
+life, but from <i>The Vicar of Wakefield</i>,&mdash;Goldsmith&#8217;s irrational,
+delightful work. At times he rises to the height of Myriel, the bishop in
+<i>Les Miserables</i>, and it is not at these times I like him best. I
+acknowledge that he has tried my temper by his blindness, that I have been
+aggravated by his meekness, have lost all patience with his patience. He
+is very human, very virile, when before his assembled congregation he
+makes the confession which is so cruel to him, of his daughter&#8217;s sin, and
+relinquishes the spiritual functions which have been his livelihood. There
+is real grandeur in this self-abasement&mdash;a dignity full of impressiveness
+in this confession of shame. The words are at once plain and delicate,
+they come from the depths of his nature, and go straight to the soul of
+his hearers. But when he hides his mortal enemy, in order to shield him
+from the vengeance he has earned, and shares with him his last piece of
+bread, I feel that he is going too far, and that pity, as sometimes
+happens, is clashing with justice. Then, when he cries out, &#8220;Christians,
+will you never learn to forgive?&#8221;&mdash;the words thrill me, and I change my
+mind again&mdash;I tell myself that one must sometimes exaggerate beyond the
+bounds of reason to bring even a little goodness into the souls of the
+pitiless.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Jones&#8217;s talent achieved a fresh advance in <i>Judah</i>, produced on May
+21, 1890. There is no longer any trace of melodrama, either in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span>
+situations or in the characters. The nobility of mind, and the need of
+spontaneous confession, which mark the finest scene in <i>Saints and
+Sinners</i>, are used as motives again in <i>Judah</i>, with great power, and
+form, so to speak, the mainspring of the play. A young girl named Vashti
+Dethic, has been brought up by her father to the r&ocirc;le of <i>clairvoyante</i>
+and miracle-worker. Extreme poverty, extreme youth, moral force carried
+perhaps to the point of terrorising,&mdash;she has abundant excuses for
+adopting this horrible career. Now, her interests, her pride, the
+enthusiam of her stupid devotees, constrain her to persevere in an
+imposture which she loathes.</p>
+
+<p>We pity her, and are grateful to the author for diverting our scorn to the
+wretched Dethic. We are even willing to believe that a high-strung,
+nervous girl may imagine herself to be the subject of miraculous
+influences. When Vashti is subjected to a fast of three weeks, and when,
+by the merciless vigilance of her watchers, this fast threatens to become
+too real, the young girl&#8217;s heroism touches us, in spite of ourselves, as
+much as though it were devoted to a better cause. We form the absurd wish
+that her father may succeed in smuggling some food to her&mdash;we are all for
+the miracle against science, for charlatanism against the truth; which is
+going as far as can be gone! Or rather, we have developed an interest in a
+poor human creature in serious peril, and, without reflecting upon her
+character, we hope she may escape. How would it be if we were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span>
+passionately in love with her? Thus it is with Judah Llewellyn.</p>
+
+<p>These two names are noteworthy; the author calls our attention by them to
+the dual origin of his hero, Celtic and Jewish. This mixed ancestry
+explains, doubtless, both the fanatic and the impulsive side of his
+nature, and the mastery of the religious instinct in its conflict with the
+ardours and passions of the imagination. Judah is endowed with a burning
+eloquence, the secret of which he gives in the simple statement, &#8220;I
+believe what I say.&#8221; This faith, which carries away the uncultured,
+inspires the respect of men of the world. One listens to him without a
+smile, when he talks of the voices which have called upon him in the
+night; some may not believe that the voices did so call upon him, but all
+believe that he heard them calling. Thus his church becomes too small for
+the multitudes who come to seek nourishment, or rather intoxication, in
+his words.</p>
+
+<p>This man has to pass through various phases of mind before our eyes. At
+first, he loves Vashti with a humble, ecstatic love, in which religious
+enthusiasm seems to enter more than human passion. In his eyes she is a
+superior being&mdash;privileged, the elect of God. He dares not defile her with
+a carnal thought; it is enough for him to kiss the hem of her robe. But it
+chances one evening that he is an involuntary witness of the desperate
+efforts of Vashti&#8217;s father to get some food to her during her fast. At<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span>
+once, almost without transition, by the force of circumstances that permit
+no time for deliberation, he becomes her accomplice, he saves her by a
+lie, and a lie which carries the more weight in that his veracity has
+never been called in question. A vulgar writer would not have failed to
+show us Judah raising himself to his full height, and invoking curses upon
+the woman he had protected, and fleeing afterwards to a solitude where he
+would be tortured by the visions of lost happiness. Mr. Jones has done
+just the opposite. Judah&#8217;s first sensation is a burst of wholly human joy.
+Vashti is not an angel or a saint, but a woman, a frail creature, like to
+himself, whom he may love without thought of sacrilege! It is not until
+later that remorse makes itself felt in his soul, and that his conscience,
+terrible and tempestuous like passion, asserts its rights.</p>
+
+<p>To all appearances Judah and Vashti are triumphant: they are to be united;
+Lord Asgarby&#8217;s daughter, the subject of the imposture, is cured because
+she believes herself cured; the world pays its homage at once to Vashti&#8217;s
+miraculous powers, and to the virtue and eloquence of the man she is to
+marry. What is lacking? Peace of mind, self-respect. In what poignant
+terms Judah recounts to Vashti his mental agony! With what imagination of
+poet, or of the lost, does he give voice and form to all the terrors of
+the Puritan mind,&mdash;those terrors which, for some mere trifle, some shadow
+of a sin, so tortured Bunyan, and prostrated<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> Cromwell, pallid, gasping,
+on the bare boards of his chamber! Yet love has not gone from Judah&#8217;s
+heart. Better Hell with her than Heaven without!</p>
+
+<p>The champion of science, Dr. Jopp, for his part, has instituted an inquiry
+into the whole thing; he is inclined to bracket Dethic and his daughter
+together. Judah becomes aware of what is in preparation, is free to
+separate his lot from that of Vashti; but he does not do so. Then when
+Jopp, on the entreaty of his old friend Lord Asgarby, has consented to
+spare Vashti, it would be easy for Judah to maintain silence, and to
+accept, together with his wife, the favours with which they are being
+overwhelmed. But no, he must speak; he must confess himself! The
+confession issues with the explosive violence born of long compression, in
+a strange frenzy of humiliation and of repentance, impetuous, vibrating,
+almost triumphant, like a blare of trumpets. Beyond the awful but not
+impassable ordeal, the guilty man and woman see the divine horizon of
+paradise regained.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You won&#8217;t? Then hear me, hear me, all of you! I lied! I lied! Take back
+my false oath; let the truth return to my lips! Let my heart find peace
+and my eyelids sleep again! You all know me now for what I am; let all who
+honoured me and followed me know me too. Hide nothing! Let it be blazed
+about the city. (<i>Pause. To</i> <span class="smcap">Lord A</span>.) Take back your gift. (<i>Gives deed
+to</i> <span class="smcap">Lord A</span>.) We will take nothing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span>
+from you! Nothing! Nothing! (<i>Goes to</i> <span class="smcap">Vashti</span>.) It&#8217;s done. (<i>Takes her hand.</i>) Our path is straight; now we can
+walk safely all our lives.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It is the pride of penitence, and this expression of feeling has never
+been given a prouder tone. In the previous play, <i>Saints and Sinners</i>, old
+Fletcher, on learning of his daughter&#8217;s shame, had cried out, &#8220;How shall I
+ever hold up my head again?&#8221; To hold up his head, that is an Englishman&#8217;s
+first need. And when Letty Fletcher had effaced her transgression by dint
+of heroism and devotion, she said, not, &#8220;I have expiated my sin,&#8221; but, &#8220;I
+have conquered.&#8221; By such expressions it is that I can see that the
+artificial psychology of the drama is yielding place to a truer and more
+real psychology. Hitherto, almost everything that has been written in
+England, would seem to have had for object, to conceal and not to make
+clear the English mind. A new generation of writers has come forth, whose
+work it will be to depict this mind as it really is, and to make its
+confession with the fierce sincerity of Judah.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Crusaders</i>, produced on November 2, 1891, is a piece of quite another
+stamp. It is not the unfolding of a character contending with
+circumstances: it is a satirical representation of a <i>c&ocirc;terie</i>, a group, a
+social movement. This kind of piece has but a first act, in which the
+theme is expounded and a brilliant array of characters presented to the
+audience. The plot of <i>The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> Crusaders</i> is a mere imbroglio, fastened on
+somewhat artificially to a satirical and ethical homily; it turns upon an
+open window and shut door, which endanger the reputation of a young widow.
+Unfortunately, we do not take much interest in this young widow, or in the
+two men who love her; one of them is a faded copy of Judah, the other is
+nothing at all.</p>
+
+<p>But what is a mere accessory in the view of the ordinary playgoer,
+constitutes the essential part of the play for the critic, for the
+historian of the drama and of life.</p>
+
+<p>When the time comes for depicting the state of English society during the
+last years of the nineteenth century, this curious first act of <i>The
+Crusaders</i> will certainly be drawn upon for material. There will be found
+in it the confusion of elements that stir and mingle, without uniting, in
+the vague social movement of this period: enthusiasm lacking a clear end
+in view, devotion lacking a definite object, a pilgrimage which leads no
+one knows whither, and on which no single pilgrim will reach his
+destination. It deals with the reformation of London; a programme so vast
+and complex as to be none at all. This association counts amongst its
+members a number of pretty women who play at charity; young idlers for
+whom the reformation of London is merely an opportunity for flirting, just
+like private theatricals, <i>tableaux vivants</i>, and garden parties; pushing
+women who turn the occasion to their own profit by bringing about
+relations with this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> &#8220;dear Duchess of Launceston,&#8221; and who raise
+themselves thus in the world, step by step. One of these good ladies, Mrs.
+Campion Blake, invites an old statesman to dinner, to meet a kind of
+apostle whom she defines as a &#8220;new variety of inspired idiot&mdash;something
+between an angel, a fool, and a poet! And atrociously in earnest! a sort
+of Shelley from Peckham Rye. He&#8217;s rather good fun, if you take him in
+small doses.&#8221; After dinner, an American lady gymnast will give a
+performance in the dining-room. &#8220;She&#8217;s adorable. She gives drawing-room
+gymnastics after dinner. It isn&#8217;t the least indelicate&mdash;after the first
+shock.&#8221; Be sure the Minister will accept the invitation. He is quite ready
+to reform London, provided only that no one calls upon him to alter his
+own mode of life. He acknowledges that he has no ideals. No ideals! his
+hearers exclaim horrified. Alas! no; had he not become a member of the
+House of Commons in his twenty-second year! Which of the two is Mr. Jones
+turning into ridicule? Idealism, or the House of Commons? Both, I fancy.
+Why should there not be a double irony for the clever, just as there is a
+<i>galimatias double</i> for the dull?</p>
+
+<p>In this movement there are many who are in earnest. First of all we have
+the credulous, ingenuous Ingarfield, dragging in his train Una, the
+petticoated apostle of the prison and the house of ill-fame, the young
+virgin whose joy it is to attempt the conversion of rogues and
+prostitutes. But the most real type is that of Palsam.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> This individual is
+wholly repulsive. A voluntary spy, a detective by his own choice, he is
+the incarnation of that spirit of sneaking, which rages so cruelly in
+certain sections of English society. Basile, in comparison with him, is a
+&#8220;good sort,&#8221; an amiable companion. He stoops to expedients to which an
+<i>agent de m&oelig;urs</i> would blush to have recourse against an <i>habitu&eacute;e</i> of
+Saint Lazare; and it is against women of the world, too, that he resorts
+to them! He is so insensible to indignity that a box on the ear has no
+effect upon him. How do people put up with him? How is it they let him
+into their houses? In France we would throw him out without troubling
+about his calumnies, which would be welcomed only by the lowest kind of
+newspaper; or rather, a complete Palsam, a perfect Palsam could not be
+found in France. In England he is a reality and a power. But is he so vile
+as he seems, as at first we are inclined to regard him? No; his conduct
+seems mean to the utmost degree; but consider, please, two things: first,
+that he acts thus, quite disinterestedly; secondly, that he deprives
+himself of those incorrect enjoyments of which he is so bent upon
+depriving others. Give him the benefit of these two admissions, and,
+little by little, the man will begin to wear for you a different aspect.
+The ascetic will rehabilitate the spy, you will be forced to find a kind
+of heroism in his meanness, and to admire, while you hate, his hideous
+virtue, which is perhaps one of the hundred ways of doing good to men in
+their own despite.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span>Perhaps it was not Mr. Jones&#8217;s intention to suggest so many reflections by
+his Palsam, but whether he wishes it or no, his work is thus suggestive,
+and it is the special note of this very straightforward, very masculine,
+very generous satire, that it never ridicules the enemy without letting us
+see the redeeming traits in his character, and the good motives which he
+might plead in self-defence, thus putting the real man before us whole and
+entire.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Jones ridicules the would-be reformers of London, and represents their
+efforts as resulting in a pitiable fiasco. But he has not contended, of
+course, that London is all right as it is, and that the bringing of the
+great city into a state of moral health has ceased to be one of the dark
+problems which demand, and baffle, the good intentions of honest folk. He
+himself has indicated a solution, and the true solution; &#8220;To reform
+London, it is necessary, first of all, that each of us should reform
+himself.&#8221; Such is the moral of the piece; and this sermon is worth more
+than many others.</p>
+
+<p>Through alternate successes and failures, Mr. Jones&#8217;s popularity has gone
+on increasing during the last four years. <i>The Tempter</i>, it is true, gave
+the public something of a shock. Despite the intelligently devised
+splendours of the <i>mise en sc&egrave;ne</i>, and the admirable resources of his own
+talent, Mr. Tree, who had a special liking for the piece, and was not
+wholly unconnected, they say, with its conception, did not succeed in
+bringing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> his audience round to his way of thinking. In the <i>Triumph of
+the Philistines</i>, Mr. Jones resumed his campaign against Puritanism, but
+after a pettier, less vigorous fashion than in his preceding works. The
+hero and heroine of this comedy were empty, formless shadows, and the
+public would not have known <i>&agrave; quoi se prendre</i>, had not the piece been
+given a fillip quite unexpectedly by the appearance of an inessential
+character, that of a whimsical little Frenchwoman, acted to perfection by
+Miss Juliette Nesville. The study is a brilliant one, and at moments
+really profound. It is the first time, if I mistake not, that an English
+dramatist, in introducing a Frenchwoman into his work, has turned out
+anything more than a collection of mere external peculiarities, tricks of
+facial expression, mistakes in pronunciation and in language, and that he
+has penetrated into the very soul, or at least into the <i>&eacute;tat d&#8217;&acirc;me</i>, of
+another nation, differentiating it from his own.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Case of Rebellious Susan</i> is a very amusing comedy. I know of none
+with so lively a beginning. In his ironical dedication to Mrs. Grundy, Mr.
+Jones begs of that good lady to find out a moral in his play. There should
+be one in it, he tells her&mdash;indeed, there should be several; they have but
+to be looked for.</p>
+
+<p>I don&#8217;t know what will be the outcome of Mrs. Grundy&#8217;s researches. I, for
+my part, have searched also, but from a different standpoint, and have
+found nothing, unless it be that Susan is Francillon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> with certain
+differences, which transform both the character and the dramatic
+situation. The idea of revenging herself against an unfaithful husband, by
+paying him back in his own coin, must have taken shape, one thinks, first
+of all in the mind of an Englishwoman, for the Englishwoman has in her
+nature much more of pride than of love. Susan&#8217;s grief is not a tearful
+grief. She is violent, bitter, vindictive; she carries through her little
+exploit with much self-possession and without a sob. How far has her
+vengeance carried her? Has she been guilty or merely imprudent? No one
+knows, and, lacking information upon the subject, neither Mrs. Grundy nor
+I can solve the problem put before us. Her husband has been unfaithful to
+her, her lover forgets her, and the last crime is worse than the first.
+She returns, but dispassionately, to the domestic hearth. Oh! cries the
+repentant husband, how I am going to love you! Yes, love me, she replies;
+I need to be loved. But to judge by his hungry glances at her whilst he
+helps her off with her opera-cloak, I am afraid we are witnesses of a
+fresh misunderstanding. The love that she is offered and the love she
+wants are not the same love. An omen full of menace for the future. It is
+to the President of the Divorce Court, I fear, that it will fall in the
+end to lay down the moral of the whole business.</p>
+
+<p>Very different is the heroine of <i>The Masqueraders</i>, who, as impersonated
+by Mrs. Patrick Campbell, fascinated London during the season<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> of 1894.
+Dulcie Larondie is a coquette, at first ambitious, giddy, keen on
+enjoyment, anxious to shine; become a mother, she adores her child; then
+love takes possession of her; and then duty reasserts its claims. She is
+the plaything of her own feelings, and of the passions she raises up all
+round her. She obeys every voice that calls to her, abandons herself with
+a kind of gracious pitiful passiveness to these unknown forces and these
+mysterious fatalities, within her and without, which break her strength
+and oppress her will.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Jones had taken leave of melodrama in order to write <i>Judah</i>; he
+returned to it in <i>The Masqueraders</i>, not from listlessness or
+unwittingly, but deliberately and systematically. A husband staking his
+wife at a game of &eacute;cart&eacute;&mdash;is not this melodrama? But what cares the author
+of <i>The Masqueraders</i>, whether the incidents be improbable and his
+situations artificial? Mr. Jones will not hear of the &#8220;well-made&#8221; piece;
+he seems to have recognised that the architecture of a play does not count
+for much, and that the science of Scribe and Sardou is a snare. Nor will
+he hear of realism or of logic. He defends himself against the charge of
+being a realist as though it were a disgrace, and ridicules those who pay
+for admission to a theatre to see paper lamp-posts and canvas houses, when
+they can see real lamp-posts and real houses in the streets for nothing.
+Realism, he contends, is only a vast field of preliminary studies and a
+store-room of materials. As for logic, it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> may be left to the professors
+who teach it, and thus make a comfortable living. Why should the drama be
+logical when life is not? A drama should contain four principal elements,
+amongst which neither logic nor realism finds a place; and these elements
+are&mdash;Beauty, Mystery, Passion, and Imagination. The drama, he is
+convinced, is returning now to the mysterious and imaginative side of
+human life.</p>
+
+<p>And if the critic press too hard upon the author of <i>The Masqueraders</i>, he
+has recourse for his defence&mdash;and quite rightly&mdash;to the great name which
+is worth ten thousand arguments. For it must be again asserted,
+Shakespeare&#8217;s plays, with the exception of four or five, are melodramas,
+traversed and fertilised by streams of poetry, lit up by flashes of
+thought, and here and there softened, brightened, animated, by some
+passing glimpses of real life.</p>
+
+<p>To the lessons of Shakespeare, Mr. Jones has added those of Ibsen. They
+are great masters, but there comes a time of life when no one can have any
+master, save himself. I do not know whether the theories developed of late
+by Mr. Jones will lead him on to works which shall throw <i>Judah</i> and <i>The
+Crusaders</i> in the shade. But he is certainly passing through a crisis in
+his career, and I cannot refrain from remarking that the structure of his
+later plays has been less solid, and that their meaning has been apt to be
+obscure and vexing to the mind. Whether or no he issue from behind this
+cloud, he has already<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span> played a great part in the resuscitation of the
+drama, and he is the most English of all the living English dramatists;
+the one who expresses most sincerely and most brilliantly the mind of his
+generation and of his race.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+
+<div class="note">
+<p class="hang">Two Portraits&mdash;Mr. Pinero&#8217;s Career as an Actor&mdash;His Early Works&mdash;<i>The
+Squire</i>, <i>Lords and Commons</i>&mdash;The Pieces which followed, half Comedy, half
+Farce&mdash;<i>The Profligate</i>; its Success and Defects&mdash;<i>Lady Bountiful</i>&mdash;<i>The
+Second Mrs. Tanqueray</i>&mdash;Character of Paula&mdash;Mrs. Patrick Campbell&mdash;<i>The
+Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith</i>.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>Meanwhile, it was to Mr. Pinero that fell the lot of writing the most
+human work yet known to modern English dramatic literature,&mdash;the work,
+too, approaching most nearly to perfection.</p>
+
+<p>I have never gazed on Mr. Pinero in the flesh, but I have seen two
+portraits of him which have struck me. In one I seem to discover the
+pensive <i>bonhomie</i> of a philosopher, who looks on at the world from afar;
+the other suggests rather the frequenter of drawing-rooms&mdash;the look in the
+eyes is more alive, the smile more knowing, less calculated to leave one
+at one&#8217;s ease. Which of these portraits tells the truth? Both of them
+perhaps. There are aspects of Mr. Pinero&#8217;s work which respond to these
+different moods of a single mind. Then, the two physiognomies, which I try
+to reconcile with each other, have this trait in common: they both show us
+a man who observes and who reflects.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span>And, in truth, a man must look about him and within him a good deal in
+order to be able to pass, like Mr. Pinero, from the formless efforts of
+his youth, or even from such pieces as <i>The Squire</i> and <i>Lord and
+Commons</i>, to a work like <i>The Second Mrs. Tanqueray</i>. His career as an
+author has been a long-continued ascent, delayed by many incidents and
+accidents, but from which the horizon of art has seemed larger at every
+stage. To-day he is in the heights, almost at the summit.</p>
+
+<p>In his early youth he had felt his vocation and had written a play, but he
+knew nothing of the theatre. He learnt his art, as Dion Boucicault and H.
+J. Byron and Tom Robertson before him, by acting in the plays of
+others.<a name='fna_13' id='fna_13' href='#f_13'><small>[13]</small></a> He maintained a good position upon the Edinburgh stage, and
+then came to London, where he became connected first with Irving&#8217;s company
+and then with the Bancrofts&#8217;.</p>
+
+<p>After getting some small pieces produced, he tried his hand at the kind of
+plays then in vogue,&mdash;farces, melodramas, and sentimental comedies. He
+adapted some French pieces also; and it was then he realised what was
+lacking in his first models, in Robertson and his emulators. A play is a
+living organism. Under the flesh one should find organs, muscles, an
+articulated skeleton.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> It was this frame-work that Mr. Pinero wished to
+give to his dramatic works; and his ambition did not, perhaps, aspire
+beyond sustaining Robertson by means of Scribe. What he himself possessed,
+and what was already recognised in his work, was a gift for the writing of
+bright and natural dialogues, free from those tricks and artificialities
+which until then had served as wit upon the stage. This dialogue was the
+language really called for by the plot; but it was the plot, precisely,
+that was weak in Mr. Pinero&#8217;s earliest efforts.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Squire</i> was an unlifelike story of a case of bigamy, annulled by an
+unexpected death. The piece pleased, by reason of its idealised
+representation of rural life. There was a breath of the woods in it, and a
+smell of hay. But even this attraction the author had borrowed from a
+pretty novel, by Thomas Hardy, <i>Far from the Madding Crowd</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>Lords and Commons</i> carries a degree further the romantic strangeness of
+the Swedish drama, by which it is inspired. A great nobleman has married a
+young girl of illegitimate birth, in ignorance of her history. He
+discovers the fact, and drives her ignominiously from the house. After
+some years, she comes across his path again, without his recognising her.
+She has a double end in view&mdash;to win back her husband&#8217;s love in her new
+guise, and to awaken his remorse in regard to <i>that other</i>, thus torturing
+him with conflicting emotions. Finally, she sends him, his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> heart torn in
+twain, to a <i>rendez-vous</i> with his former victim to obtain her pardon.
+When Mr. Pinero was content to write a <i>d&eacute;nouement</i> of this kind, who
+could have divined in him the future creator of <i>Mrs. Tanqueray</i>?</p>
+
+<p>But at this very moment he had discovered another vein, which he worked
+for a number of years with increasing success. This was a kind of hybrid
+production, which partook of farce in regard to plot, and of the comedy of
+manners in regard to ideas and to dialogue. In short, it belonged to the
+same province of the drama as <i>Divor&ccedil;ons</i>, sometimes on a higher plane,
+sometimes on a lower. You would say that characters from Dumas and
+D&#8217;Augier had fallen by accident into a scenario of Labiche. <i>The
+Magistrate</i> is thoroughly French in character. A London Magistrate, who
+finds it necessary to hide himself under a table in a restaurant of
+doubtful reputation, and who, under this table, knocks up against his own
+wife, and who, in the following act, having escaped by a miracle from this
+fearsome situation, finds himself called upon to pronounce judgment upon
+this guilty spouse of his (who, needless to say, is guilty only in
+appearance),&mdash;this kind of thing does not belong to English life or even
+to English humour. In <i>Dandy Dick</i> and in <i>The Hobby-Horse</i>, I find, in
+the midst of fanciful incidents, a number of delicate and noteworthy
+sketches of provincial life, of clerical society, of the racing world, and
+those who belong to it, including a queer kind of female centaur,&mdash;a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span>
+woman jockey,&mdash;whom Mr. Pinero has certainly not borrowed from our
+<i>r&eacute;pertoire</i>. There are many brilliant features really, much ingenuity of
+invention, as well as a real sense of fun and fertility of resource in
+<i>The Times</i> and <i>The Cabinet Minister</i>. I have read these two pieces a
+number of times, and found them amusing in their deliberate exaggeration.
+But when I look into them closely, I ask myself whether the phase of
+social evolution through which we are passing is really like that which
+the author holds up to ridicule, and whether his caricatures are not a
+generation or two behind the time. And it is always thus. In the matter of
+satire, it is the newspaper always that opens the way; the novel comes
+after it, and then, after a long interval, the theatre. The manners it
+describes have often ceased to exist; the types it portrays have
+disappeared, or have become changed. We laugh over Egerton Bompas, the
+rich shopkeeper, who wants to marry his daughter to a peer of the realm;
+and over Joseph Lebanon, the vulgar little stockbroker, who dreams of
+getting invited, through the influence of his sister, the fashionable
+modiste, to a shooting-party at a castle in the Highlands. But we know
+quite well that nowadays it is the other way about. It is the peers of the
+realm who seek to ally themselves with Bompas; and, instead of trembling
+before them in Parliament, he imposes his social and political programme
+upon them, turning against land, which is in extremity already, the storm<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span>
+which has been threatening capital. Mr. Joseph Lebanon&#8217;s part is not to
+accept invitations, but to give them. It is he who gives shooting-parties,
+and invites the peers; he allows his house to be used for aristocratic
+dances, and if he does not appear at them himself, it is from disdain, not
+from discretion. If he be distinguishable from his new companions, it is
+through his carefulness in aspirating his h&#8217;s, his punctiliousness in the
+matter of etiquette, of his dress, of his servants&#8217; livery, of his stud,
+and of his table. And then if he does make solecisms, they are thought
+delightful. The only failing for which he could not be forgiven would
+be&mdash;failure. And he is on his guard.</p>
+
+<p>I am afraid, therefore, that Mr. Pinero&#8217;s comedies, although very
+pleasant, are already somewhat aged at their birth. It is in vain to get
+them up in the latest fashions; their age is evident, especially when they
+are looked at side by side with that first act of <i>The Crusaders</i>, in
+which the satire is so modern and so full of life.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Pinero had not renounced the serious drama, and all his theatrical
+friends, watching his progress in light comedy, yet expected to see him in
+this field in which, so far, he had achieved but half-successes. On April
+24, 1889, the Garrick opened its doors with a drama of his, entitled <i>The
+Profligate</i>. Marvels were expected from the new theatre which John Hare
+had erected for himself and his company. As had been the case with the
+opening of the Prince of Wales&#8217;s, it was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> felt that the first night at the
+Garrick ought to mark a date in the history of the drama. The critics,
+&#8220;old&#8221; and &#8220;new,&#8221; were enthusiastic. &#8220;At last,&#8221; exclaimed Mr. Archer, &#8220;we
+have a real play; a play which has faults, with a third act which has
+none!&#8221; Those triumphant assertions, made in the heat of the moment, must
+unfortunately be taken with a considerable discount. <i>The Profligate</i> is a
+melodrama, treated with delicacy and distinction, but incontestably a
+melodrama in every aspect and in every part, that wonderful third act
+included; it is even one of the most fanciful, most romantic melodramas
+that have been written in England for fifteen years.</p>
+
+<p>Whom shall I recognise as an English character, or even as a human type?
+Hugh Murray, the sentimental lawyer, who loses his heart at first sight to
+a schoolgirl, and who buries this beautiful passion in the depths of his
+heart, to disinter it just at the wrong moment? Janet?&mdash;who has given
+herself, without the temptation of love, to a seducer in the forties, and
+who, during the remainder of the piece perseveres in the accomplishment of
+acts of delicacy, of renunciation and of self-abnegation without number,
+veritable <i>tours de force</i>&mdash;<i>morale</i>. Leslie?&mdash;the heroine of the play, a
+schoolgirl who giddily exclaims, a quarter of an hour before her wedding,
+that she wonders whether the world will seem of the same colour when she
+is the wife of Duncan Renshaw; and who, after a month spent <i>t&ecirc;te-&agrave;-t&ecirc;te</i>
+with her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span> husband in a villa near Florence, where a fresco of Michael
+Angelo is to be seen, seems to know life better than we do ourselves. I
+know, of course, the explanation that is forthcoming: only a single moment
+was required to alter this character, to bring light to that one. It is
+precisely in this explanation that I find the mark of melodrama. In
+serious psychology, it is not so easy to believe in these &#8220;moments&#8221;&mdash;in
+these sudden revelations, these flash-like crises, which transform an
+individuality completely, annulling nature and education.</p>
+
+<p>And what is one to say of the &#8220;Profligate&#8221; himself? He is just the
+traditional libertine of all the innumerable English novels published
+during the last fifty years, nor is he unknown to our own old Boulevard du
+Crime. We see him coldly and deliberately cynical up to the moment when
+love touches him with its magic ring. That is a kind of conception that
+has passed its prime. Nowadays we are inclined to regard Don Juan as a
+kind of dupe, the plaything of woman from puberty to decrepitude. We
+picture him to ourselves more engaging when he first begins to sin, and
+less easy to convert when he has become hardened to it. We find it
+difficult to believe that thirty days of wedded bliss suffice to awake a
+conscience which has lain dormant for forty years. If the sense of
+morality were innate, it must have shown itself earlier; to have been
+acquired and to have reached such a degree of perfection and
+sensitiveness, it would<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> have needed more time than the average duration
+of a honeymoon.</p>
+
+<p>The situation which delighted so the English critics may be thus
+described. The seducer&#8217;s wife has, without knowing it, given shelter to
+his victim. She wishes to help her to confront the man who has wronged
+her, and her heart breaks when she sees upon whom the penalty has to fall.
+I admit that the scenes leading up to this discovery, contrived with great
+ability, produce a veritable anguish in the spectator&#8217;s mind, and that the
+scene between the husband and the wife, which follows after it, is on the
+same plane of emotion. But by what a number of improbable coincidences had
+this precious moment to be bought! Chance had to take Janet to Paddington
+station at the same moment as Leslie and her brother; Chance had to give
+this same Janet as &#8220;companion&#8221; to Miss Stonehay, Leslie&#8217;s school friend;
+to send the Stonehays travelling towards the environs of Florence and the
+villa of the Renshaws; to synchronise Janet&#8217;s illness and Dunstan&#8217;s
+departure so that the two women may interest themselves in each other. And
+it is Chance again that makes Janet see Dunstan in Lord Dangars&#8217; company
+in order that the confusion may arise regarding the two men, and that this
+Lord Dangars, who is Dunstan&#8217;s friend, may become engaged to Irene
+Stonehay, the friend of Leslie. And even after Chance has made all these
+thoughtful arrangements, Renshaw&#8217;s happiness might yet be saved, and this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span>
+terrible danger by which it is threatened be avoided (and this great scene
+of Mr. Pinero&#8217;s never come to pass), if only Janet were allowed to go as
+she desires, and as good sense and modesty make it right that she should.
+What is it that makes her stay? Who is it that advises her to bring about
+this scandal? No one but Leslie, and I cannot but think her ideas on the
+subject singularly gross for so refined a person. This advice she gives is
+grounded on the slenderest and most irrational of arguments; a score of
+conclusive replies could be given to the pitiful considerations she puts
+forward. But Janet has to be convinced. Otherwise, what would become of
+the crisis of this &#8220;Faultless Third Act&#8221;?</p>
+
+<p>What surprises me most of all is the number of useless excrescences with
+which the author has encumbered his piece. What is the point of this
+solicitor who bores us, and who gives himself such important airs
+throughout the play without having the slightest influence upon the
+development of the plot? When, by a final stroke of chance, Leslie has
+come to know of the absurd love of which he is the victim, why should she
+let him see that she has heard? All she can find to say to him is,
+&#8220;Good-night.&#8221; And &#8220;Good-night&#8221; is all he has to say in reply. This scene
+in four words could only be sublime or grotesque: I am inclined towards
+the latter view of it.</p>
+
+<p>Had I been present at one of the first performances of <i>The Profligate</i>, I
+should have imagined<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> myself in the presence of a talent that had lost its
+way, turning its back on the goal to which it should direct its steps,
+seeking beyond the confines of reality for some imaginative source of
+tears. I should have been wrong. Mr. Pinero is of a reflective turn of
+mind; he learns from his mistakes, and is not blinded by his successes.
+Before the echoes of the applause which greeted <i>The Profligate</i> in London
+had yet died out in the provinces and abroad, Mr. Pinero was at work upon
+another drama, conceived after a fashion quite different&mdash;quite contrary,
+in fact&mdash;a drama in half tints, with realistic touches; a sort of novel in
+dialogue. This was <i>Lady Bountiful</i>, produced on March 7, 1891.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>Lady Bountiful</i> there is no question of any great fundamental truth,
+no great human interest. It is a very unequal piece of work, in turn very
+moving and very irritating, for of the two women in whom its interest
+centres, it happens unfortunately that one has the sympathy of the author
+and the other that of the public. But it showed, at least, that its author
+had found its way into the domain of psychological observation.</p>
+
+<p>It was on May 27, 1893, that <i>The Second Mrs. Tanqueray</i> was performed for
+the first time at the St. James&#8217;s Theatre. It must be said, to the credit
+of the public, that its success was immediate, universal, and continued.
+The critic whom I have quoted so often exclaimed in a burst of joy, that
+here was a piece &#8220;which Dumas might sign without a blush.&#8221; No one is
+entitled to speak in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span> the name of our greatest dramatist; but quite
+recently, when I re-read <i>The Second Mrs. Tanqueray</i>, I said to myself
+that if the greatest gift of M. Alexandre Dumas was that of embodying deep
+psychological and social observation in splendid eloquence or dazzling
+wit, this rare faculty is to be found almost in an equal degree in
+Pinero&#8217;s masterpiece.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The limitations of <i>Mrs. Tanqueray</i>,&#8221; Mr. Archer goes on to say, &#8220;are
+really the limitations of the dramatic form.&#8221; I would go further still,
+and say that such a piece enlarges the province of the theatre. Minute
+details are to be found in it, brought out by intelligent and carefully
+thought-out acting, which one would have regarded as too small to attract
+attention on the stage, shades that the theatre had left to the novel up
+till then. <i>The Second Mrs. Tanqueray</i> is, like <i>Lady Bountiful</i>, an acted
+novel, but a novel excellently constructed. Its four acts are its four
+chief chapters, and it should be noticed that the first two of these
+chapters are purely analytical; but emotion is introduced imperceptibly
+into the play, and we step from psychology into drama without being
+conscious of the passage.</p>
+
+<p>It is not the old, old subject of the courtesan in love, but that of the
+mistress raised to the dignity of wife. One of Mr. Pinero&#8217;s clever notions
+is that of having in a sense left passion out of the question. It is
+clear, of course, that Tanqueray is very sensible of Paula&#8217;s personal
+attractions. Who would not be, in the presence of so charming<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> a woman?
+But there is another feeling mingled with this. He is neither a satyr nor
+a stoic, he assures his friend Cayley; he has a quite rational affection
+for &#8220;Mrs. Jarman&#8221;; hitherto she has never met a man who has been good to
+her; he, Tanqueray, will be good to her, that is all. Is he absolutely
+sincere? Is his affection quite so rational as he asserts? Cayley has his
+own ideas upon the subject, and so have we. Mr. Pinero has been charged
+with not having told us to what extent philanthropy&mdash;the craze for
+redeeming&mdash;entered into Tanqueray&#8217;s marriage, to what extent the desire to
+have a pretty woman all to himself. But after all, was it incumbent on the
+author to give us Tanqueray&#8217;s psychology? Was it not rather an indication
+of his &aelig;sthetic sense to keep the husband in the background, to leave him
+in half-tints so as not to mar the effect of the principal figure? That
+excellent actor, Mr. Alexander, seems to have felt this, for he effaced
+himself in the presence of Mrs. Campbell, though quite capable of filling
+the stage unassisted, as he showed in <i>The Masqueraders</i> and many other
+pieces. In regard to Tanqueray&#8217;s character, this, however, should be
+noted, that, being rich and young enough to keep a mistress without
+looking ridiculous, he might, if he chose, have become Paula&#8217;s lover. If
+he decided to make her his wife, it was first of all to give her pleasure,
+but also to satisfy a sense of devotion and of virtue in himself. This I
+believe to be quite true to life. He was born to believe in women&mdash;not to
+be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> deceived by them, but to deceive himself in their regard: which is a
+different thing, and perhaps more serious. His first wife was like a nun.
+He ends with a courtesan. The law of moral oscillation requires that he
+should go from the iceberg (it is thus the first Mrs. Tanqueray is
+described to us) to a volcano. Like all weak men, he would play the part
+of <i>un homme fort</i>. With Paula&#8217;s arm passed through his, he is ready to
+look the world in the face; but when on the eve of their wedding she comes
+to see him at eleven o&#8217;clock at night, his first remark is, &#8220;What will
+your coachman say?&#8221; This remark lights up his whole character, and for my
+part I require nothing more.</p>
+
+<p>But Paula! What a complex character is hers, and how true in all its
+aspects! How important to the delineation of this character, and how
+suggestive, is everything she says&mdash;even her most trifling remarks; with
+what tact and cleverness are her very silences contrived! And with what an
+infinity of deft and delicate touches has the masterpiece been brought to
+perfection! She is a courtesan, but with an elegance of manners which
+imparts to her an air of poetry, and which makes her more akin to a Gladys
+Harvey than to a Marguerite Gautier. There are women who traverse muddy
+ways with so light a step that they do not sink in them, and that one but
+guesses where they have passed from little stains upon the tips of their
+shoes. One or two traits reveal to us the irregularity of Paula&#8217;s life;
+the mobility<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span> of her impressions, the manner at once fanciful and passive
+in which she allows chance to regulate her actions. She has forgotten to
+order her dinner; her cook, a &#8220;beast&#8221; who &#8220;detests&#8221; her, has pretended to
+believe that she was not dining at home, and has given himself an evening
+out. So she has got herself up in <i>grande toilette</i> and has taken up her
+position in her dining-room, her feet on the fender. Here she has fallen
+asleep and dreamt. She tells us her dream later, the while she sups off
+the dessert of the farewell dinner Tanqueray had given to three old
+bachelor friends. To sup instead of dining, does not this in itself
+suggest a whole conception of life? Whoever gets into the way of it will
+never be able to reconcile himself to the respectable regularity of the
+family joint.</p>
+
+<p>Thus it is with her in everything. She has acquired a certain <i>ton</i>, now
+brusque, now bewitching, an air of Bohemianism, and a whole host of
+opinions which could never tally with the r&ocirc;le of married woman; and these
+characteristics have become embedded in her nature. Her irregularity of
+word and deed goes with a like incoherence of thought and feeling. Sombre
+moods succeed suddenly to extreme gaiety and vanish as suddenly again. The
+idea of suicide comes to her; next moment she bursts into laughter at the
+sight of the mournful expression she has evoked on Aubrey&#8217;s countenance.
+She has so serious a way of saying the wildest things, and says the most
+serious things so frivolously, that you don&#8217;t know<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> what to believe; her
+every word leaves you under her spell, and this effect is intensified more
+and more. She is a really &#8220;good&#8221; woman, Tanqueray will declare just now to
+his friend. It is neither an illusion on his part nor even an
+exaggeration. Paula is &#8220;good&#8221; and loyal; she has kept back from Aubrey
+nothing of her past. Better still, she has spent this last day writing out
+a general confession, with a precision and scrupulousness in which there
+is a touch of childishness, a touch of cynicism, and a touch, I think, of
+heroism. She weighs the letter with a smile. It is heavy! She wonders if
+the post would take all that for a penny! She says to Aubrey, quite
+simply, without affectation of any kind, without any airs of tragedy about
+her, that she wants him to read this letter and to think over it; and
+then, on the morrow, at the last moment, if he changes his mind, let him
+send her a line before eleven o&#8217;clock, and&mdash;&#8220;I&mdash;I&#8217;ll take the blow!&#8221;
+Aubrey puts the letter into the fire and she throws her arms round his
+neck; she tells him quite frankly she had counted upon his doing so, an
+admission which would quite spoil her &#8220;effect,&#8221; had she sought one.</p>
+
+<p>Has the question ever been better set? Think of the <i>Mariage d&#8217;Olympe</i>.
+The insolent and hypocritical <i>gueuse</i> stood revealed before she had
+uttered half a dozen words. We knew she could never become acclimatised to
+that family of honest folk, amongst whom fortune had thrown<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> her. Where,
+then, was the problem? All Augier&#8217;s wonderful cleverness hardly sufficed
+to make us await during two hours the punishment of the wretched woman.
+Paula is sincere; she is a woman of heart and brain; she is as good as the
+women of that world in which she hopes to take her place. In the absence
+of a <i>grande passion</i>, she feels a grateful tenderness for the gallant
+fellow who would lift her up; she is fully resolved to be faithful to him
+and to make him happy. We desire ardently her success. Why should she not
+succeed?</p>
+
+<p>We learn in the second act. First of all, because, once she is married,
+Paula gets bored. The world will not visit her, and custom does not permit
+of her taking the initiative. She is a kind of prisoner in the beautiful
+country-house in Surrey. The monotonous tranquillity of &#8220;home&#8221; oppresses
+her after the feverish, exciting existence she has led; the quiet wearies
+her to death. Here is her account of her day&#8217;s occupations from hour to
+hour.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;In the morning, a drive down to the village, with the groom, to give my
+orders to the tradespeople. At lunch, you and Ellean. In the afternoon, a
+novel, the newspapers; if fine, another drive&mdash;<i>if</i> fine! Tea&mdash;you and
+Ellean. Then two hours of dusk; then dinner&mdash;you and Ellean. Then a game
+of B&eacute;sique, you and I, while Ellean reads a religious book in a dull
+corner. Then a yawn from me, another from you, a sigh from Ellean, three
+figures suddenly rise&mdash;&#8216;Good-night!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span> good-night! good-night!&#8217; (<i>Imitating
+a kiss.</i>) &#8216;God bless you!&#8217; Ah!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>With Cayley she speaks out more strongly. He asks her how she is.</p>
+
+<p><i>Paula</i> (<i>walking away to the window</i>): &#8220;Oh, a dog&#8217;s life, my dear Cayley,
+mine.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Drummle</i>: &#8220;Eh?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Paula</i>: &#8220;Doesn&#8217;t that define a happy marriage? I&#8217;m sleek, well-kept,
+well-fed, never without a bone to gnaw and fresh straw to lie upon.
+(<i>Gazing out of the window.</i>) Oh, dear me!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Drummle</i>: &#8220;H&#8217;m, well, I heartily congratulate you on your kennel. The
+view from the terrace is superb.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Paula</i>: &#8220;Yes, I can see London.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Drummle</i>: &#8220;London! Not quite so far, surely?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Paula</i>: &#8220;I can. Also the Mediterranean on a fine day. I wonder what
+Algiers looks like this morning from the sea? (<i>Impulsively</i>) Oh, Cayley!
+do you remember those jolly times on board Peter Jarman&#8217;s yacht, when we
+lay off&#8221;&mdash;(<i>Stopping suddenly, seeing Drummle staring at her</i>).</p>
+
+<p>Has she ceased to love her husband and to appreciate the sacrifice he has
+made for her? By no means. When he asks her tenderly what he can do for
+her, she tells him he can do nothing more. He has done all he could do. He
+has married her. She accuses herself. Fool that she was, why did she ever
+want to be married? Because the other women of her world were <i>not</i>. The
+title of married woman looked so fine, seen<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> from afar. Instead of trying
+to make her way into a circle of people who would have nothing to say to
+her, why not have lived happily with Aubrey in her own sphere, in which
+she would have experienced neither the cold insolences of well-bred people
+nor the inexorable uniformity of well-to-do, respectable life?</p>
+
+<p>But these are Paula&#8217;s least serious trials. There is another woman in the
+house&mdash;the daughter by the first marriage. She has shut herself up in a
+convent, but just when her father is marrying again she decides to resume
+her place in his household. This young girl inspires in Paula a double
+jealousy. Paula envies her the tenderness shown her by Tanqueray; she
+feels that this tenderness is very different from the love she herself
+inspires. Then she would fain win the love of this child, who, warned by
+some instinct, draws away from her and shrinks from her caresses. It is a
+shame, she cries, for after all the girl knows nothing&mdash;she ought to love
+her. Then, forgetting that love does not come to order, that advice cannot
+produce it, that it is begged for in vain, she exclaims to Tanqueray, that
+he should command Ellean to love her. This love would do her so much good.
+It would expel from her nature that mischievous feeling which carries her
+into deeds of rashness and folly.</p>
+
+<p>A neighbour, a lady who has for long been a family friend of the
+Tanquerays, comes to call on her at last, but it is only to take her
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span>step-daughter to some extent from under her care. What is it intended to
+do? To find some distractions for Ellean and get her married if possible
+(it being obvious that Paula cannot take her into society), and thus to
+bring about a freer and quieter time for Paula and her husband. But Paula
+can see in all this nothing but a conspiracy formed behind her back, and
+in which her husband is mixed up. Then ensues a passionate scene in which
+bursts out all the terrible violence of this spoilt-child-like character,
+embittered by a false position. Now there remains nothing more for us to
+learn about her.</p>
+
+<p>When we see Ellean again in the third act, a great change has come over
+her. On her travels she has come across a man whom she loves and who wants
+her to marry him. Paula is overwhelmed with delight. She sees an
+opportunity of playing the part of a mother. She will help on this
+love-affair, and Ellean will love her out of gratitude. Already the ice in
+which the young girl&#8217;s heart has been locked is beginning to melt. She is
+to be found acknowledging to Paula the feeling of repulsion she at first
+had entertained for her, and trying to explain away, and express her
+sorrow for, her conduct. But the man who has gained the love of the girl
+is one of the former lovers of the woman!</p>
+
+<p>This is the situation which forms the subject of the last two acts, and
+which leads Paula in the end to suicide. The circumstance which brings her
+face to face with a man whom she had known<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span> before her marriage is likely
+enough; that which makes of him a suitor for the hand of Ellean is less
+natural, but not impossible, and it would be ungracious&mdash;after the author
+has so richly catered for our psychological curiosity by his rare gifts of
+analysis&mdash;to carp at the means he has employed of stirring our
+sensibility. He has made it clear to us from out the close of the second
+act that the domestication of the courtesan is an impossible dream; and
+the appearance of Captain Ardale, bringing things to a crisis, does but
+render the antagonism between Past and Present, visible, palpable,
+crushing. And the Future, what of it? We are to be shown it; for nothing
+has been overlooked by the stern logic which informs this play, underlying
+and disguising itself, but not altogether hidden, under the aspect of
+humour and emotion. Paula, her mind already full of those thoughts of
+death she had, as it were, flirted with in the first act, replies to her
+husband, who has suggested as a remedy their migration to some distant
+land:&mdash;She sees her beauty, she tells him, fading little by little, her
+beauty that was her one strength, her one unfailing excuse; she sees
+herself <i>t&ecirc;te-&agrave;-t&ecirc;te</i> with this cruel and insoluble problem, with the
+bitter memory of her misdeeds, with the consciousness of the harm she had
+suffered and had wrought.... I shall never forget this scene. How her
+hoarse voice vibrated, and its accents of despair! How her every word went
+to the heart and sank in it! The actress had her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span> share in this great
+triumph, and it was one of the strokes of luck attending this fortunate
+play that it was the means of revealing a great artist.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Patrick Campbell is a woman of Society who was led by circumstances
+and an unusually strong vocation to embrace the stage. She is said to have
+Italian blood in her veins; hence, no doubt, that nervous delicacy of
+hers, that <i>morbidezza</i> which shades, veils, tempers, refines her talent
+no less than her beauty. She has neither the originality, nor the
+knowledge, nor the voice of Sarah Bernhardt, but she possesses that
+magnetic personality of which I have spoken with reference to Irving, and
+with which there is no such thing as a bad part. If this personality must
+be described, I would say that Mrs. Campbell&#8217;s province as an actress is
+more particularly that of dangerous love. That voice of hers, though it
+has but little sonorousness, power, or richness, produces in one a sense
+of disquiet and distress, straitens the heart with a kind of fascinating
+delicious fear that I would describe as the <i>curiosit&eacute; de souffrir</i>. You
+feel that if you love her you are lost, but once you have seen her it is
+too late to attempt resistance. The generations which believed in the
+human will, which asked for simple tenderness, pert coquetry or imperious
+passion in a heroine, would never have understood her. She has come just
+in time to lull our dolorous philosophy, to show incarnate in woman the
+victim and the instrument of destiny.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span>It was with the same ally that Mr. Pinero risked his next battle, in
+January 1895, at the Garrick. I shall not analyse <i>The Notorious Mrs.
+Ebbsmith</i>. I acknowledge that the piece is full of charming traits, and
+that the melodramatic element has been carefully eliminated from it. But I
+am obliged also to say that the author has seized one of the serious
+questions of the time, the emancipation of woman, and her revolt,
+justified in some respects, against marriage, and that this great subject
+has been allowed to slip through his fingers. Agnes Ebbsmith is on the
+point of seeking consolation in free love for the troubles and
+humiliations of her married life. She has rejected a copy of the Bible
+which a friend has offered as a last resource. She has thrown it into the
+fire, then in a sudden reaction she rushes to the fireplace, plunges her
+arm into the flame, rescues the sacred book, and falls upon her knees. The
+scene is a very fine one, and Mrs. Patrick Campbell never failed in it to
+bring down the house. But the conversion of Agnes is a <i>d&eacute;nouement</i>,&mdash;not
+a solution, unless Mr. Pinero would have us believe that the modern woman
+will find in the Bible a response to all her anxieties, a remedy to all
+her ills. It is a delicate thesis, and not wishing to discuss it I shall
+remain silent. I prefer to bring my account of his talent to a stop,
+provisionally, with this admirable <i>Mrs. Tanqueray</i>, which submits and
+solves a moral problem at the same time that it sets forth and brings to
+its natural close a drama of domestic life.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+
+<div class="note">
+<p class="hang">Ibsen made known to the English Public by Mr. Edmund Gosse&mdash;The First
+Translations&mdash;Ibsen acted in London&mdash;The Performers and the
+Public&mdash;Encounters between the Critics&mdash;Mr. Archer once more&mdash;Affinity
+between the Norwegian Character and the English&mdash;Ibsen&#8217;s Realism suited to
+English Taste; his Characters adaptable to English Life&mdash;The Women in his
+Plays&mdash;Ibsen and Mr. Jones&mdash;Present and Future Influence of
+Ibsen&mdash;Objections and Obstacles.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>&#8220;There <ins class="correction" title="original: is is">is</ins> now living at Munich a middle-aged Norwegian gentleman, who
+walks in and out among the inhabitants of that gay city, observing all
+things, observed of few, retired, contemplative, unaggressive.
+Occasionally he sends a roll of MS. off to Copenhagen, and the Danish
+papers announce that a new poem of Ibsen&#8217;s is about to appear.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was by these characteristic lines that England learnt of the existence
+of the singular man who exerts to-day so great an influence over the art
+and the thought and the moral life of the whole of Europe. He was shut up
+at that time in his meagre Dano-Norwegian glory, like that genie whom the
+Eastern tale shows us imprisoned in a bottle. As for the author of the
+article which brought him before the English public, he was a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span> quite young
+man, a subtle poet and delicate critic, Mr. Edmund Gosse. Nowadays he
+occupies in the literary world one of the foremost places amongst those
+who create and who criticise, but the best pieces of good fortune fall to
+one&#8217;s youth. In his distinguished career as a critic, he has had no more
+precious stroke of luck than that of the finding of Ibsen, at an age at
+which as a rule one has been hardly able to find oneself.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Gosse made known Ibsen&#8217;s published works, his historical and
+historico-legendary dramas, his first efforts towards taking up his
+position in the domain of modern realism. He showed an indulgent
+partiality towards <i>The Comedy of Love</i>, and justified it by ingenious
+translations into verse of his own. He condemned <i>Emperor and Galilean</i> as
+only a half-success, although his faithful and penetrating analysis of it
+did no wrong to any of the beauties of the piece. He rendered full justice
+to the sombre grandeur of <i>Brand</i> and the dazzling fancy of <i>Peer Gynt</i>.
+In short, he heralded a poet and a satirist. Ibsen has long ago renounced
+the first of these titles, and as for the second, Mr. Gosse must find him
+somewhat <i>gr&ecirc;le</i> for the part. He could not, in 1873, foresee the
+realistic dramatist, the reformer, the psychologist, and the symbolist,
+who in turn have appeared before us. But he touched the right note, I
+think, when he paid his homage to Ibsen as &#8220;a vast and sinister
+genius&#8221;&mdash;&#8220;a soul full of doubt and sorrow and unfulfilled desire.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Ibsen entered into correspondence with his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span> young critic, as Goethe before
+him had done under analogous circumstances with Carlyle. Mr. Gosse was one
+of the first to be informed of the internal crisis which was transforming
+the poet&#8217;s talent, and which was to be a starting-point for the series of
+social and psychological dramas. &#8220;The play upon which I am now at work, he
+wrote,&#8221;&mdash;it was <i>The Pillars of Society</i>,&mdash;&#8220;will give the spectator
+exactly the same impression as he would have watching events of real life
+running their course before his eyes.&#8221; The stage was to be merely a room,
+one of whose walls had been taken down that two thousand people might look
+on at what was happening inside it. Mr. Gosse entreated the author of
+<i>Brand</i> and <i>Peer Gynt</i> not to abandon poetry, but Ibsen followed his
+destiny.</p>
+
+<p>In England they began now to translate him. In 1876 Miss K. Ray gave an
+English version of <i>Emperor and Galilean</i>; three years later the British
+Scandinavian Society printed at Gloucester a selection of extracts from
+his works. In 1882 Miss H. F. Lord translated <i>The Dolls&#8217; House</i> under the
+title of <i>Norah</i>, and prefixed to it an introduction in which she
+represented Ibsen as a champion of Woman&#8217;s Rights. Women like to form some
+concrete picture of their friends, and Miss Henrietta Lord was careful to
+inform her sisters that their defender has a powerful forehead, &#8220;a
+delicate mouth which has no lips, but shuts energetically in a fine line,&#8221;
+small blue eyes that almost disappear behind his spectacles, and a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> nose
+quite northern in its irregularity; that he speaks softly, moves slowly,
+and rarely gesticulates, and that his &#8220;self-command amounts to coldness,
+but it is the snow which covers a volcano of wild and passionate power.&#8221;
+In 1886 Mr. Havelock Ellis published in the Camelot Classics three of
+Ibsen&#8217;s plays, <i>The Pillars of Society</i>, <i>Ghosts</i>, and <i>An Enemy of the
+People</i>, accompanied by a general study in which he passed in review the
+dramas of the social and psychological series, indicative of a strong
+sympathy with the new ideas and marked in an extreme degree by a fine
+literary sense. To this library <i>Ondine</i> was added in 1888, and Mr. Gosse
+returned to the scene to take matters up where he had left them in 1877.
+Arrived now at the full maturity of his talent, he offered in 1889 an
+analysis and appreciation of these prose dramas which may be regarded as
+final in some respects.</p>
+
+<p>It was in the year 1889 that a new period began for Ibsen&#8217;s fame and
+influence in England. People were no longer content to read him, they
+attempted now to put him on the stage. He was tried at afternoon
+performances, or, as a last resource, as a <i>fin de saison</i>, when there was
+nothing any longer to be lost or gained, in some second-rate theatre which
+was about to be closed, or which might be said to be only half open; a
+little later he was played under the auspices of the Independent Theatre,
+which is the <i>The&acirc;tre Libre</i> of London, but which might be called even
+more aptly the Nomadic Theatre, for it has no<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span> home of its own, and has to
+take refuge, like a tramp, in houses that have no habitant. It may be said
+that from 1889 to 1893 the Ibsenite drama lived in London a thoroughly
+Bohemian life, never knowing whether it would dine nor where it would
+sleep on the morrow. Yet there was a good side to this precarious
+existence, namely, that there was involved in it no thought or care for
+the question of shillings and pence. Business men have summed up an
+undertaking or a man when they have said that it or he &#8220;does not pay.&#8221; Now
+Ibsen has never paid. If I might venture to invert that saying of Irving&#8217;s
+which I quoted in a previous chapter, I would affirm that artistic success
+is most real when business is worst.</p>
+
+<p>Little by little a group of actors and actresses was got together who gave
+themselves up to the work, and interpreted their author with faith,
+passion, and courage, ready to &#8220;confess&#8221; him, and to endure for him, and
+with him, not death but hisses: I may mention Mr. Waring and Miss Robins,
+and above all Miss Achurch. An Ibsenite public was coming into existence
+at the same time, having for its nucleus a small group of those who had
+been devotees from the first. In addition, there was a great number of
+hostile critics come to condemn, but behaving themselves on the whole very
+respectably. Again, there were some who were merely curious, genuinely
+curious, who brought to these moving representations minds entirely open
+and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span>unprejudiced. These returned in thoughtful mood and exchanged
+opinions upon the remarkable productions they had witnessed.</p>
+
+<p>It was in the press that the great battles were waged. Many of the critics
+lost their temper and their manners, and passed, without realising it,
+from ridicule to mere rudeness. I do not confound these excesses either
+with the serious discussion to which men of talent submitted Ibsen&#8217;s
+philosophy in lectures and in the Reviews, or with merry skits such as
+those of Mr. Anstey, who gave us a &#8220;Pocket Ibsen&#8221; in the pages of <i>Punch</i>;
+these parodies suggest, to my mind, a lack neither of comprehension nor of
+respect. I refer to the furious and savage attacks which seemed to have
+for object the driving back of Ibsen to Norway, much as the East-End
+tailors would like to drive back to Hamburg those German immigrants who
+lower the rate of their wages.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Archer was the target for the fiercest volleys of these battles, in
+which he commanded the courageous little phalanx of Ibsenites; but he
+returned shot for shot, and with usury, for his fire was infinitely more
+destructive than that of his foes. Just as Mr. Gosse had revealed Ibsen to
+the literary world fifteen years before, Mr. Archer introduced him now
+into the world of the theatre.</p>
+
+<p>If he entered into the Ibsen controversy so much later than his colleague,
+it must not be concluded on this account that he was less well<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span> equipped
+as regards preliminary study, or that he was upholding convictions that
+were newly born. To him, also, Ibsen was an early love. So far back as
+1873 he knew by heart, in the original, those admirable scenes in <i>Brand</i>,
+which touch the soul to its depths. Before the performance of each new
+play he would try to explain the Monster, and to get the public into the
+way of looking it straight in the face; he would translate the symbolism
+into the most intelligible terms, speaking as one speaks to children, with
+an authoritative gentleness, a clearness of expression, and wealth of
+exposition, to which his quick intelligence does not often have resort.
+But the greatest service he has rendered to the cause, is his series of
+translations, which are now in everybody&#8217;s hands; not only do they convey
+into English the intense realism of Ibsen&#8217;s dialogues, but young authors
+may learn from them, also, new flexions of familiar speech, and thus get a
+step or two nearer to life.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Archer has been followed, and perhaps outrun, in his apostolate by
+other writers full of ardour and talent. Amongst these vanguard critics it
+is impossible not to mention Mr. Arthur B. Walkley, known to the readers
+of the <i>Star</i> as &#8220;Spectator,&#8221; and to those of the <i>Speaker</i> by his
+initials, &#8220;A. B. W.&#8221; To his name must be added that of Mr. George Bernard
+Shaw, whose articles in the <i>Saturday Review</i> have attracted much notice
+during the year 1895, and have constituted a veritable campaign in Ibsen&#8217;s
+honour.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span>The theatrical managers, as you may suppose, gave Ibsen a wide berth. Mr.
+Tree was the first of them who ventured to tackle him; this actor
+possesses an inquiring mind, and a spirit ever ready to accept&mdash;even, at
+need, to initiate&mdash;reforms. As long ago as 1891, in a lecture read before
+the Playgoers&#8217; Club, he had given a very clever analysis of one of the
+most striking of M. Maeterlinck&#8217;s plays. In 1893 he produced a play of
+Ibsen&#8217;s at the Haymarket. The drama which he chose was <i>The Enemy of the
+People</i>. He had supposed, not unreasonably, that the geniality, courage,
+and invincible optimism of Stockmann would win the public. I imagine he
+did not regret the experiment, for since then he has made a similar one
+with a piece of Bj&ouml;rnson&#8217;s. Therein he has set a good example to a greater
+actor, and in this connection I would venture to ask a question. Is Irving
+to quit the stage without attempting an Ibsen part? However that may be,
+the time is approaching when the Norwegian drama will pay. Not, of course,
+like <i>Charley&#8217;s Aunt</i>! One must not expect too much when one has only
+genius. Ibsen can and should keep alive without robbing or coveting a
+single one of lucky Mr. Penley&#8217;s spectators.</p>
+
+<p>Now that Ibsen is known in England, what influence does he exert, or will
+he continue to exert in the future, upon English dramatic literature? By
+what racial affinities was the way for this influence prepared? By what
+prejudices&mdash;religious, philosophical, &aelig;sthetic&mdash;has it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span> been impeded? To
+what does it owe its strength? To the dramatist&#8217;s art, or to the ideas
+which inform his work? This is the last big question I have to face before
+bringing my study to an end.</p>
+
+<p>I do not wish to carry this question on to the moving bog of ethnography;
+I should lose my life. I shall say only that the English turn towards the
+Scandinavian world, much as we turn towards the Greco-Latin, with a vague
+feeling of tenderness and of filial curiosity. If the Teuton is their
+cousin, the Scandinavian is their brother; if not the eldest of the
+family, at least the one who has best kept up his tradition. Thus it is to
+him they have recourse when they would renew or seek inspiration in these
+traditions. Is it not a significant fact that Mr. Gosse and Mr. Archer,
+two of the most brilliant minds of their generation, should be familiar at
+the age of twenty-five with the literary idiom of Denmark and Norway? Is
+it not curious that the Sagas should have been the common source of
+Carlyle&#8217;s last work, and of the most important poem of William Morris? The
+Sagas are the Commonplace Book, the <i>livre de raison</i>, in which this soul
+of the North, free from all taint of the South, and from all antique
+serfdom, has left its mark. For the Englishman, who reflects and ponders,
+it is the real Bible of his race.</p>
+
+<p>Just because the Norseman was the incarnation in the medi&aelig;val world of the
+Teutonic genius in all its purity, a certain number of enthusiasts will
+not allow his descendants to exist in the present,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span> and play their part in
+modern life. To make of this little country a museum of Runic relics, to
+make a mere caretaker of this vigorous little race, is worse than
+pedantry; it is cruelty. Will it be believed that it was from such a
+standpoint that objection was first raised against the acceptance of
+Ibsen? The idea was so curiously retrograde and artificial, that it could
+not long hold up against the force of the current. These arch&aelig;ologists,
+strayed into the field of criticism, made two mistakes: they misunderstood
+the law which imposes movement and progress upon all living organisms; and
+they were unable to recognise in Ibsen, beneath his modern aspect and
+present-day doubts, that valiant temperament, at once fearless and blunt,
+of the ancient Vikings,&mdash;as brave before the enigmas of thought as <i>they</i>
+had been of yore before the perils of battle and the tempest.</p>
+
+<p>Thus it was that Ibsen, like Oehlenschl&auml;ger before him and Bj&ouml;rnson in his
+own day, made the Sagas his starting-point. It is in the Sagas that the
+Norse genius had its root, as in deep and tranquil waters, its stem rising
+towards the light and flowering above the surface. Even to-day, Norway and
+Denmark take more pleasure in Ibsen&#8217;s historical and semi-legendary dramas
+than in his more recent works; but whatever they themselves and the
+devotees of Runic tradition may think, their national character has
+undergone change since the twelfth century. Many races have contributed to
+the formation of their character, just as they have to that of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span>
+English, and it is worthy of remark that in both cases the elements are
+almost identical. The vigorous and energetic Finn, the weak and mystical
+Laplander, the blue-eyed, fair-haired Norseman, silent and profound, could
+all find their equivalents, if not their like, amongst the ancestors of
+the British people. Their history has been different, and yet has had
+points in common. Like England, Norway has had religious and political
+individualism for school or rather for model. Absolute independence under
+a nominal monarchy; freedom of the press and religious intolerance; no
+nobility and no class distinctions&mdash;Norway has been since 1814 very much
+what England would have been, had the semi-republican establishment of
+Cromwell and Puritan Democracy endured.</p>
+
+<p>In his strange poem, <i>Peer Gynt</i>, Ibsen intended to depict the Norwegian
+type; and he has done so after a fashion which is the more intelligible to
+a foreigner in that he has in some cases exaggerated the principal
+features of this model to the point of caricature. The Norwegian mind is
+full of wild dreams, which seem to him as real as actual facts. Leading a
+hard and lonely existence amidst natural surroundings that seem to dwarf
+and threaten them, the people learn to live in themselves and for
+themselves. They have much pride and much ambition, and plenty of
+political wisdom. It is their imagination that sends them into maritime
+commerce, this being one of the ways left open to the spirit of adventure.
+Peer<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> Gynt sells idols to the Chinese and Bibles to the missionaries; this
+second transaction redeeming the first. Twice he makes his fortune and
+twice he loses it; but he is a spirited gambler, and a few oaths suffice
+to comfort him for his most serious mischances. When, at the moment of his
+death, he is enabled to rest his head upon the bosom of the woman he has
+vilely betrayed, he accepts this final stroke of luck like all the
+rest&mdash;grateful but unastonished. The most ludicrous scene of all is that
+of a death agony! Peer Gynt&#8217;s old mother is about to meet her end, and she
+is seized with violent tremors. Her son, however, reminds her how, when he
+was a boy, the two of them used to play together at horse and cart.
+Supposing they had a game now? Where shall we drive to, mother? And off
+they go to where God lives! They come to the gates and call upon St. Peter
+for admission,&mdash;he&#8217;s <i>got</i> to let Peer Gynt&#8217;s old mammy into Heaven! The
+old woman breaks out into a guffaw, and in the midst of all this frolic,
+cheered now and brightened up, she achieves the dread crossing. To French
+readers this scene may seem a ghoulish farce: English humour accepts it
+from Norwegian humour without demur. In copying from Peer Gynt the
+portrait of one race, I had it in my mind to paint the portrait of a
+second. The picture has two models. That is why Ibsen comes so easy to the
+English mind&mdash;less difficult to understand than was Carlyle in his earlier
+works. The Norwegian cosmopolitan is more<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span> intelligible than the Scottish
+peasant, Germanized by a too long intimacy with Goethe and Jean Paul.</p>
+
+<p>Everyone knows that Ibsen has his own way of constructing a drama, a way
+which differs sensibly from ours. Is it better or worse? That is a
+question with which I am not concerned. What should be noted, however, is
+that the English, who have proved such wretched pupils in our school, and
+who, after fifty years have been unable to master their Scribe, have
+grasped everything they could turn to their own account in Ibsen&#8217;s
+methods. To understand this, we must remember that the English have a
+horror of our realism, even when toned down and filtered through America.
+Their compatriot, George Moore, despite his incontestable talent, has been
+unable to get them to accept him. They read his works with curiosity but
+without pleasure. We have seen in the preceding chapters that of their
+three most prominent dramatists, two turn their backs resolutely against
+realism, one by instinct, the other of set purpose; whilst the third
+cannot acclimatise himself to it, his temperament carrying him off towards
+the realm of fancy and humour. On this point they are at one with the
+public. <i>The Second Mrs. Tanqueray</i> is an exception. It is a compromise
+between the dramatic system of <i>Francillon</i> and that of <i>Hedda
+Gabler</i>&mdash;the second, I think, prevailing. Ibsen has brought to the English
+the form, the kind, and the degree of realism they can put up with.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> Not
+that they accept everything without demur, even in Ibsen&#8217;s realism. They
+draw the line at the brutality of certain details, and the almost childish
+minuteness of others. Thus it was that Madame Solness&#8217;s nine dolls
+produced some tittering in the stalls.<a name='fna_14' id='fna_14' href='#f_14'><small>[14]</small></a> In <i>Little Eyolf</i>, if Alfred
+Allmers be allowed to make the avowal in the midst of his despair at the
+tragic death of his little boy, that he had caught himself wondering what
+he was going to have for dinner, I should not be surprised if there were,
+at this point, a shudder of protest. But these moments in which the
+dramatist and his English spectators are out of sympathy are rare.
+Shakespeare taught them to be surprised in no way at seeing human nature
+sink to the lowest depths after rising to giddy heights. What they want is
+to pass quickly from facts to ideas, and from ideas to fancies, and then
+to return suddenly to facts. The exact reproduction of life will never
+seem to them, as at certain literary epochs it has seemed to us, the
+supreme and final end of Art. It satisfies them only when it leads towards
+the solution of some problem of conduct, towards the explanation of some
+enigma<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span> of destiny, or of the fascinating secrets of this psychical world
+in which we live without ever seeing it,&mdash;of what is in it, and beside it,
+and beyond it. It must not be forgotten that symbolism is not a mere
+pastime and amusement to the Northern races which are addicted to it, but
+a real need born of their peculiar nature, a need which is not to be
+replaced by that idolatry of forms and colours which prevails in the
+joyous and sensuous South. When it is not satisfied, this need is
+accentuated to the point of a longing, a craving. The fact translates and
+suggests, follows or precedes, the thought; without the thought, it were
+but an empty envelope, a dress without a wearer, a box containing nothing.
+It serves, so to speak, as handmaid to the idea, and I would venture to
+suggest this formula (which I believe truthful, though it seem strange):
+In England, realism will be symbolical or non-existent.</p>
+
+<p>If Ibsen&#8217;s art, then, is to prove to be to English taste, it is because
+this art is subordinated to the expression of certain moral feelings, and
+secret tendencies of the inner life; and also because all the questions
+with which the dramatist is taken up, are precisely those by which the
+English race is absorbed and divided into opposing camps; because in fine,
+Ibsen&#8217;s message, to make use of the expression of Carlyle, is addressed to
+this race more than to any other.</p>
+
+<p>With regard to its bearing upon philosophy, let us take for instance that
+theory of Atavism which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span> is developed, first of all, in a lugubrious
+episode in <i>The Dolls&#8217; House</i>, and which pervades <i>Ghosts</i>, and
+<i>Rosmersholm</i>, and <i>The Lady from the Sea</i>; does it not find a fit and
+well-equipped audience in the readers of Darwin, Huxley, and Herbert
+Spencer? From a social standpoint, the ulcers which Ibsen cauterises are
+the ulcers which eat also into the life of England. That tyranny of the
+majority, that conventional and machine-like morality which stifles all
+initiative, that cavilling, degrading charity which is not Christian, but
+sectarian, are all well known to England. In Pastor R&ouml;rland and Pastor
+Manders these things find expression,&mdash;in the former violent, impetuous,
+fanatical, in the latter sheeplike and pusillanimous; the one is the
+incarnation of intolerance, the other of human respect; and England is
+well aware that she has both her R&ouml;rlands and her Manders. When, too, she
+is shown a Consul Bernick upon the stage, who is full of fine sentiments,
+but whose fortune is founded upon lies, and who sends out gallant fellows
+on a ship destined to be wrecked, she must be reminded of her own
+philanthropic ship-owners, enriched by the insuring of coffin-ships. And
+just as she is capable of a Bernick, so she is not unequal to producing a
+Stockmann, nor, in consequence, to understanding and loving this genial
+<i>bavard</i>, this impassioned devotee of truth and virtue, this Don Quixote,
+this Pangloss who would go to the martyr&#8217;s stake, but prefers to stop on
+the road. His enemies have broken his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span> windows: what does he do? Sends for
+a glazier! He picks up the stones that have been thrown at him, examines
+them and criticises them. &#8220;Why, these are mere pebbles. There is hardly a
+decent stone in the lot!&#8221; He has returned from a public meeting with his
+trousers torn, and he comments thus philosophically upon the misadventure:
+&#8220;When you propose to stand up for justice before men, you should be
+careful not to wear your best pair of breeches.&#8221; If these traits are not
+English, I don&#8217;t know what the English character is.</p>
+
+<p>Were I to pass Ibsen&#8217;s types in review one by one, I should find it easy
+to show with what ease they adapt themselves to English life. Engstrand,
+the man of the people, always a sinner and always lamenting his sin, who
+makes a career and a livelihood out of his repentance; and L&ouml;vborg, that
+noble but feeble character whom drunkenness drags into debauchery, and in
+whom the temptations of one night nullify years of virtue and honest
+endeavour;&mdash;these would require no modification or commentary upon the
+London stage. But it is English women that Ibsen seems to have divined
+best of all. Nearly all those demands of the Anglo-Saxon woman which evoke
+so much talk to-day are contained in germ in the last scene of <i>The Dolls&#8217;
+House</i>, which dates from 1879. The woman is tired of being a servant and a
+plaything to the man; she sees herself confronted with responsibilities
+and duties for which she has had no preparation; she wants to live her own
+life<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span> as a reasoning and thinking being. This note is being re-echoed
+daily in the Reviews and on the platforms open to women, and thus Norah&#8217;s
+cry is indefinitely prolonged.</p>
+
+<p>It is more than fifteen years since Ibsen wrote: &#8220;In democracy will be
+found the only solution of the social question. But the new state of
+society should contain an aristocratic element, not the aristocracy of
+birth or of the money-chest, not even the aristocracy of intellect, but
+the aristocracy of character, of the will and of the soul. I expect much
+in this direction from woman and from the working-man, and it will be to
+the bringing nearer of their hour that my whole life-work shall be
+devoted.&#8221; I do not know whether this double promise has been kept. It
+seems to me that the people have found in him but a wayward and
+intermittent champion, and women a friend too pitilessly clear-sighted.</p>
+
+<p>Women, both the good and the bad, are given traits of character, in
+Ibsen&#8217;s dramas, which are common to the Northern races. That <i>joie de
+vivre</i>, which in Norah gushes forth into affectionate sympathy, but which
+in Regina (in <i>Ghosts</i>) takes the form of a cold and marble-like
+indifference, which can be touched by nothing save self-interest and
+self-love; the jealousy and pride of Hedda Gabler, who prefers to send a
+man to his death, rather than see him repentant, and brought to happiness
+through the agency of another woman, and who decides to die herself rather
+than submit to the yoke or endure the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span> scorn of the world; the na&iuml;vely
+animal sensualism of Rita Allmers (in <i>Little Eyolf</i>), who puts her
+husband before her child, and plays the wanton to rekindle the fire which
+had gone from his heart&mdash;to secure the marital attentions which are her
+due: these are all characteristics which are to be met with beyond the
+fiftieth parallel and north of the Pas de Calais, no less than north of
+the Sound.</p>
+
+<p>I shall not go so far as to say that Ibsen has taught the English
+dramatists to understand the women of their race, but, at least, he has
+brought out certain aspects of them which had remained unportrayed,
+whether because the requisite psychological knowledge, or that rare
+quality, pluck, had been lacking in those who had attempted to depict
+them. Not all these dramatists accept Ibsen as their master; Sydney
+Grundy, whilst disapproving most strongly of the insults with which a
+certain section of the critics attack Ibsen and his partisans, has
+declared outright that he himself is no disciple of the author of <i>The
+Master Builder</i>. We can easily believe it; even without the declaration,
+his work in itself would have told us as much. Mr. Pinero, also, does not
+seem to me to have accepted any of Ibsen&#8217;s ideas; but he must have
+reflected upon his methods, and to some purpose, for if the brain which
+conceived <i>Hedda Gabler</i> is a powerful brain, the hand which constructed
+its various parts, and wove them together, is a cunning hand.</p>
+
+<p>As for Mr. Jones, he indeed has followed both<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> the artist and thinker in
+Ibsen. In speaking of his plays, I omitted designedly the adaptation which
+he made of <i>A Dolls&#8217; House</i>, in collaboration with Mr. Herman, an
+Alsatian, resident in London since 1870, who died three years ago. In
+certain respects the English piece is better constructed than the
+original, in as much as it rids us of Dr. Rank, who is an excrescence, and
+of the love-affair of Krogstad and Madame Linden, which is really wanting
+in common sense. But Mr. Jones, ill advised, I fancy, by a collaborator of
+rather a timid and commonplace order of mind, shrank from that last scene
+which may be repellent to some people, but which is really the whole play.
+For that terrible door which shuts with so inexorable a clang, in the
+midst of the silence of the night, separating husband and wife perhaps for
+ever, and leaving Norah to seek her way in the dark and the cold,&mdash;symbols
+of a life of which nothing is known, save that hardships will be met in
+it,&mdash;the authors of <i>Breaking a Butterfly</i> substituted a general
+reconciliation. They justified the optimistic <i>d&eacute;nouement</i> by making the
+husband rise to that act of heroic devotion, which, in the original, Norah
+declares she hoped for from him. Ibsen did not intend this, and he was
+right. It is necessary that Norah should look for this sacrifice, and that
+she should look in vain. Thus the man and the woman maintain their
+individual characters: the one remains faithful to his practical logic,
+the other to her romantic conception of life; and if everything does not
+turn out well, at least<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> everything is true in this most disunited of
+<i>m&eacute;nages</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Jones has been much happier when inspired by Ibsen than when he has
+translated him. It is, above all, when he is depicting women that he seems
+to me to be haunted by the memory of the Norwegian&#8217;s heroines. It may be
+said, speaking generally, that a breath of Ibsen has passed through all
+his works during the last seven or eight years. But his dialogue is too
+lively, he yields too much to the temptation of turning his wit to
+account, he is of too gay a temperament, to be a veritable Ibsenite. It is
+in these respects, indeed, that the divergence begins between the author
+of <i>Hedda Gabler</i> and his admirers on the other side of the Channel. The
+English are ready to rail at life, but not to condemn it root and branch;
+despite an apparent sombreness they know how to enjoy themselves, and they
+consent to travel only as tourists in that world of Ibsen&#8217;s, in which for
+the few smiling and sunlit spaces, there frown such vast and mournful
+solitudes, where nothing sings and nothing flowers.</p>
+
+<p>It has been said that Ibsen is the Winter of the North and Bj&ouml;rnson its
+Spring. This Bj&ouml;rnson is a strange personality. Intellect and temperament
+have made a battlefield of his life. Born to write idylls, he has thrown
+himself heart and soul into the warfare of journalism. He has come under,
+and even sought, a thousand influences, instead of trying to find himself.
+The friendly antagonism with Ibsen has done him more harm<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span> than good. This
+connection has made him known to readers in Western Europe, but it has
+drawn him into channels for which his faculties did not fit him, and have
+failed to support him. By his faith in the future, and by his confident
+and combative spirit, he seemed destined to please the English. Long
+before Ibsen&#8217;s name had been even mentioned in London, his <i>Arne</i> and
+<i>Synnov&eacute; Solbakken</i> had been read there, two sketches of peasant life
+which will bear comparison with <i>La Mare au Diable</i> and <i>La Petite
+Fadette</i>; and the idealist novels he has published during the last ten
+years became popular with his countrymen only after they had first
+achieved success in England. But his plays up to the present have made but
+little show upon the English stage, and he shares only to an infinitesimal
+degree in the sympathies and antipathies of his illustrious rival.</p>
+
+<p>When Ibsen attacks that class of puritans and hypocrites who turn away
+their faces when they pass the entrance to a theatre, there is no
+hesitation about applauding him and imitating him. But when he would shake
+the whole edifice of society, and when he calls in question all the ideas
+and customs upon which the edifice is based, the theatre hesitates to
+follow him, for it feels that a portion of its client&egrave;le, and that the
+best,&mdash;that which has always been constant in its support,&mdash;will be
+startled and alarmed. The theatre is reactionary, and has good reason to
+be: it is to its commercial interest to range itself alongside privilege
+and tradition, against change and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span> progress. It is on the side of those
+who have money in their pockets, and who wish to amuse themselves, for
+these are the people to whom it opens its doors. These people are
+indignant when, having come to weep or to laugh, they are made to think;
+when a man to whom they cannot but listen speaks to them of their rights
+and their duties, of life and of death, of their most secret thoughts, of
+what they would fain ignore or forget, and all this with a freedom, an air
+of authority, a depth the theatre had never known before, the pulpit knows
+no longer. Here is the key to the exclamations of surprise, the gusts of
+anger, the broadsides of satire and ridicule, which Ibsen and his devotees
+have had to face. But one gets used to everything, even to being insulted,
+and gets even to like it. It is one of the amusements of the decadent.
+Perhaps some day we shall see Ibsen&#8217;s adversaries, fascinated by his
+genius, follow his barque like the rats that followed the ratwife&#8217;s in
+<i>Little Eyolf</i>, and plunge into the deep waters to the music of his
+flute.<a name='fna_15' id='fna_15' href='#f_15'><small>[15]</small></a></p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+
+<div class="note">
+<p class="hang">G. R. Sims&mdash;R. C. Carton&mdash;Haddon Chambers&mdash;The Independent Theatre and
+Matin&eacute;e Performances&mdash;The Drama of To-morrow&mdash;A &#8220;Report of Progress&#8221;&mdash;The
+Public and the Actors&mdash;Actor-Managers&mdash;The Forces that have given Birth to
+the Contemporary English Drama&mdash;Disappearance of the Obstacles to its
+becoming Modern and National&mdash;Conclusion.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>I have given an account of the beginnings of the contemporary dramatic
+movement, have indicated the various influences from within and from
+without which have affected it, by which it has been stimulated or held
+back; have analysed what seem to me the most characteristic of those
+dramas which have already seen the light. There remains nothing then for
+me to do, except to ascend a tower, as it were, and to scan the horizon,
+and to foretell, if I can do so, what we may expect from the drama of
+to-morrow.</p>
+
+<p>There is a group of writers who keep near the confines of drama and
+melodrama, torn between literary ambition and the very natural wish to
+earn money. What will they do? Will they be artists or artizans? Will they
+stoop to the conditions of the trade, or rise to the requirements of the
+art? There are many of their kind<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span> whom Sir Augustus Harris has made away
+with, and whom we shall never get back.</p>
+
+<p>I can remember the hopes given rise to by Mr. Buchanan. But, as Oronte
+says in Moli&egrave;re&#8217;s <i>Misanthrope</i>&mdash;&#8220;<i>Belle Philis, on d&eacute;sesp&egrave;re alors qu&#8217;on
+esp&egrave;re toujours</i>.&#8221; The case of Mr. G. R. Sims is different. There has been
+no apostasy with him; he has remained what he always was, and has given
+what he was bound to give. Story-teller, journalist, or playwright, he is
+an improviser, who does not aim too high, but who combines with a gift of
+observation, a certain imaginative faculty and a kind of popular humour,
+together with a touch of Zolaism. Above all, he is a Cockney, and nothing
+that belongs to Cockneydom is unknown to him. The only play of the period
+in which you can really smell the East End, as the <i>ma&icirc;tre</i> of Medan would
+say, is <i>The Lights o&#8217; London</i>, and that perhaps is why all the London
+managers, one after the other, returned it to Mr. Sims, &#8220;with thanks.&#8221;
+<i>The Lights o&#8217; London</i> got produced in the end, however, and had an
+immense success, but a success that was not to endure. It is not towards
+realism, as we have seen, that the English stage is making.</p>
+
+<p>Who will take the lead amongst the younger school of dramatists? Who will
+write the <i>Judahs</i>, <i>The Second Mrs. Tanquerays</i> of to-morrow? Will it be
+Mr. Louis N. Parker, Mr. Malcolm Watson, or Mr. J. M. Barrie? Or will it
+be Mr. Carton, author of <i>Liberty Hall</i> (one of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span> the successes of 1893)
+and of <i>The Squire of Dames</i>, an adaptation, or rather an abridged
+translation, of <i>L&#8217;Ami des femmes</i>, which has been attracting the public
+to the Criterion? Up to the present, Mr. Carton has shown that he
+possesses wit and talent, but neither observation nor the inventive
+faculty. But in the near future he may give proof of both.</p>
+
+<p>Or will it be Mr. Haddon Chambers, who is already known in Paris, one of
+his works, <i>The Fatal Card</i>, having crossed the channel? Since then he has
+written a piece entitled <i>John-a-Dreams</i>, played at the Haymarket in 1894,
+in which Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Mr. Tree joined their talents. It is
+not a good play, but it is one in which the tendencies of the new drama
+are clearly shown. I recall one scene of the utmost simplicity, the
+restrained and sober emotion of which contrasts curiously with the fine
+phrases a situation such as it contains would inspire in an author of a
+quarter of a century ago. Kate Cloud loves, and is loved by, Harold Wynn.
+Before consenting to marry him she gets herself introduced to Harold&#8217;s
+father, a country clergyman.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You do not know me, sir,&#8221; she says to him (I quote from memory), &#8220;but I
+know you. You came to preach ten years ago at the village of &mdash;&mdash;. I was
+with Mrs. Withers then.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, indeed,&mdash;an excellent person,&#8221; he replies; &#8220;but it is strange that I
+did not make your acquaintance.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span>&#8220;No, it is not strange, really,&mdash;do you remember the kind of work she was
+engaged upon?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The redemption of unfortunates, was it not.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, exactly. And you, doubtless&mdash;you helped her?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No,&#8221; Kate replies gravely, sadly, her voice trembling. &#8220;No, it was she
+who helped me.&#8221; She tells him her story, the sad, perennial story, or
+rather, having begun it, she leaves him to divine the rest. &#8220;They came to
+my help,&#8221; she goes on, &#8220;but no one came to the help of my mother. She fed
+and clothed me when I was little; I in my turn fed and clothed her later
+on.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Then had come years of endeavour, and the hard apprenticeship by which she
+had made herself an honest woman.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now, sir, if a man who had a heart wanted to marry me in full
+consciousness of my past, should I have the right to accept him?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Certainly, my child,&#8221; the old man answers.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You would still be of the same opinion even though the man were of your
+own rank, ... were a friend of yours, ... were your son?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Harold&#8217;s father gives a gesture of anguish and horror, of physical recoil
+and inexpressible confusion. Then he stammers, tries to recover himself,
+seeks to call to his aid the merciful doctrine of the sacred Book which he
+has all his life upon his lips, and which he thought he had within his
+heart. But Kate does not give him time. A gesture has decided her future;
+she holds herself bound by this instinctive display of a social prejudice<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span>
+which has become his second nature, his second conscience, even to the
+point of effacing the idea of pardon in him who should be its interpreter
+and messenger. The title of the play is not misleading, the action being
+pervaded and, as it were, impregnated by, steeped in, dreaminess. Mr.
+Haddon Chambers dares to dream in the theatre, and the public seem to me
+to be ready to keep him company. That anyone should go to the theatre to
+dream will seem incredible to many Parisians. But we must remember always
+that the English mind has literary needs, and to a certain point emotional
+propensities, that are different from ours. We should have in our minds,
+too, in the place of these theatres of ours so brightly lit, in which the
+spectacle lies often as much in the boxes and balcony as on the stage,
+those London theatres, plunged in a semi-obscurity which induces to
+forgetfulness of oneself and of the ordinary conditions of life. The stage
+appears like the fabric of a vision. The dull-looking, uninterested faces
+of the musicians are no longer interposed between us and the scenery. The
+jingling of a bracelet, a slight rustling of satin, the faint and delicate
+odour of a rose, the quick breathing of some neighbour who is moved, bring
+home to us only at moments the presence of other human beings. Perhaps it
+is the place of all others where one gets furthest away from the thought
+of reality, where one is readiest to wish for the unlifelike and to love
+the impossible.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span>After the writers whom I have named, there are others, and yet others
+still, whose names the public hardly knows, and at whose manuscripts the
+managers look askance. The Independent Theatre gave them an opening, but
+this theatre itself has ceased its existence, beset with difficulties, and
+there is nothing to suggest that it will come to life again. There remain
+for them only those matin&eacute;es in the regular theatres which lend their
+stage, more or less disinterestedly, for these ephemeral performances in
+which young actors are to be found interpreting unknown authors to the
+strangest of publics. The house is full of friends&mdash;if it be not empty
+altogether. A certain number of long-suffering play-lovers attend these
+tentative representations, sustained by the hope of being the first to
+discover a talent in process of formation, or a new formula of art: they
+have come across little up to the present except the <i>gaucherie</i> which
+feels its way, and the deliberate exaggeration which aims at exciting
+wonder.</p>
+
+<p>Those who have followed me in this long study of mine, and who have
+watched the evolution of the English drama through its successive stages,
+are in a position to see for themselves what advance it has made already
+during the last thirty years. There is the advance first of all in the
+taste of the public. The democracy has gone through its course of
+education; it has &#8220;settled,&#8221; so to speak, and the dregs have sunk to the
+bottom. Three classes of spectators have gradually<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span> been formed by a
+process of natural selection. The music halls provide for the feasting of
+the eye; melodrama and farce have attracted and retain an enormous mass of
+clients; the literary drama and Comedy have secured their own homes, to
+which one looks only for artistic emotions and refined amusements.</p>
+
+<p>In these are to be found that highest rank of actors and actresses whose
+rise in fortune, talent, and esteem I have described. To the names already
+mentioned I would add those of some to whom I have not had occasion to
+refer in these pages, but whom I have often had the pleasure of
+applauding: Mr. Willard, Mr. Wilson Barrett, and Mr. Forbes Robertson; Mr.
+Charles Wyndham, whose confident and brilliant style would do honour to
+the best of our <i>soci&eacute;taires</i> of the Rue Richelieu; Mr. Robson, whose gift
+of humorous naturalness almost made a realistic play out of <i>Liberty
+Hall</i>; Lionel Brough, who for thirty years has set the stamp of his
+whimsical originality upon all his r&ocirc;les; Miss Evelyn Millard, who recalls
+Mrs. Patrick Campbell without imitating her; and Miss Kate Rorke, who is,
+on the contrary, her exact opposite, and who incarnates the sweet
+freshness of pure affection, the innocence which weeps and smiles, just as
+Mrs. Campbell personifies the love that is disquieting and dangerous; Miss
+Winifred Emery, an actress of varied and supple talent, capable of
+depicting caprice no less than virtue and devotion. The list is far from
+being complete.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span>There have always been a number of good actors, but what was constantly
+lacking before the Bancrofts&#8217; time was unison. To-day the <i>ensembles</i> are
+far better than they were, and they would be better still were it not for
+that perpetual <i>va-et-vient</i> in the theatrical world which is so injurious
+to the homogeneity of the various companies.</p>
+
+<p>The art of <i>mise-en-sc&egrave;ne</i> did not exist. To-day it not merely exists: it
+has reached a certain degree of perfection. I am not referring now to the
+scenic splendours and illusions of Drury Lane, though I have no wish to
+make light of these, but to that appropriate framing, that scrupulous
+accuracy in the matter of historical details, no less than in the matter
+of modern accessories, that living atmosphere, to use Irving&#8217;s formula,
+with which the intelligent stage-manager should clothe the action of the
+piece. I have already alluded to the Shakspearian revivals at the Lyceum.
+No one knows better than Mr. Tree, of the Haymarket, how to give us a
+glimpse of the real world of fashion, and how to bring home to us the
+poetry underlying the play which he is producing. Mr. Haddon Chambers must
+have been grateful to him for that yacht which sped so swiftly past the
+Needles, bathed in the pale radiance of the moon; and for the scenery in
+the last act which imparted a sense of austere and solemn grandeur to the
+conclusion of the play. In the same piece, when Harold, after a sleepless
+night, threw open his window, and we saw the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span> fields lying under their
+covering of morning mist, and the fresh and joyous sunlight flooded the
+room, and there came to our ears the song of the awakening birds, the
+sensation was full of a rare charm, serving as <i>andante</i> to the loftiest
+feelings.</p>
+
+<p>It would seem that the dramatists have not so much influence in the matter
+of <i>mise-en-sc&egrave;ne</i> as they might wish. But may this not be that for one
+reason or another their competency, except in the case of some of them, is
+inferior to their pretensions? It is the custom to abuse the
+actor-managers, and to point to them as one of the obstacles to the
+complete development of the drama. It is a domestic quarrel, and there is
+no good in interfering between husband and wife. It is possible that some
+actor-managers succumb to the temptation of ordering their parts to
+measure, and call for even more docility than talent from the young
+authors whom they employ. It is possible also that the ill-feeling of a
+dramatist who has had his work refused, or of an actor who has been left
+in the background, may have done something to exaggerate the evil. Make a
+study of the author-manager who has to minister to his own personal
+vanity, to his own literary prepossessions, and to the needs of his own
+special circle of admirers and sympathisers; the commercially-minded
+manager for whom questions of art find their answer in the yearly
+balance-sheet; the worldly, pleasure-seeking manager, <i>amateur de th&eacute;&acirc;tre</i>
+and to an even greater degree <i>amateur de femmes</i>: you will find<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span> that
+each has his faults, and that these faults are just as bad on the whole as
+the actor-manager&#8217;s.</p>
+
+<p>Another obstacle is the Censorship. I have shown how absurd it is in
+principle; it is my duty to add that in practice it is not wholly
+unreasonable, though it relapses into prudishness every now and then. I
+have read lately a moving drama, from the pen of Mr. William Heinemann,
+the celebrated publisher whose enterprising spirit is well known in the
+world of literature, and who has it in him to make no less a mark in the
+world of the theatre. The Censorship would not sanction <i>The First Step</i>:
+this piece might have made it known to Londoners that there are couples in
+their great city whom the registrar has not united and whom the clergyman
+has not blessed, men of good position who get drunk and beat their
+mistresses, young girls who leave home in the morning and don&#8217;t return at
+night. The Censorship thought it better to spare them this revelation.</p>
+
+<p>But such instances are rare. The Censorship is changing bit by bit, like
+the beefeaters of the Tower, who replaced their hose by breeches some
+years ago without warning. These breeches do not go, I am aware, with the
+hood, doublet, and halbert, but this is our poor way of imitating nature
+in her transformations. For the Censorship there is only one way of
+adapting itself to modern life, and that is to disappear. Disappear it
+will, but slowly and gradually, confining its action to essential cases;
+and thus it will drag<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span> out its existence yet a little while. When,
+finally, the time will come to give it its <i>coup-de-gr&acirc;ce</i>, it will be
+found to have already ceased to breathe.</p>
+
+<p>Who then will succeed to the censor? who will be censor when the
+Censorship has been abolished? The public itself; the public represented
+not only by those of its members who are the most refined, but those who
+are strictest and most uncompromising. In other words, the Puritans will
+be on the watch. And after all, why not? Are they not one of the forces of
+the national mind, one of the reasons of England&#8217;s existence? They are the
+natural enemies of the theatre, and will last as long as it. When they
+leave it free, their end or its end will be near at hand, and England&#8217;s
+end will be in sight.</p>
+
+<p>We live, not because we choose but because we must. It is thus with the
+English drama as with everything else. The law that put the dramatic work
+of foreigners upon the same footing in regard to copyright as their own
+has made translation and adaptation almost impossible, by reason of the
+double expense involved. Thenceforward it was necessary for the English
+dramatist to invent plots for himself, to be original, to be himself. It
+was thus the English drama came to life.</p>
+
+<p>The vote of Congress, which in 1890 secured copyright in America for
+English authors, put an end to the old system of keeping plays in
+manuscript. Once publication was no longer attended by risk, how could
+they hold aloof from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span> this new form of success? Accordingly they began to
+print. But in order to be read, a play should be really written. The
+drama, then, had to become literary. As yet it is literary only in a
+moderate degree. I began with the question: Is there a living English
+drama at the present moment? To be living it is necessary that it should
+express the ideas and the passions of the time, and to be English it
+should be a faithful likeness, a complete synthesis of all the elements of
+the national character. The drama, from various causes, was behind the
+times. These causes, which I have pointed out and discussed, were:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>1. The timidity resulting from excessive severity of manners.</p>
+
+<p>2. The dramatist&#8217;s lack of opportunity for the study of social life.</p>
+
+<p>3. The Shakespeare cult, which paralysed the imagination by offering it a
+model that was too big for it, and forms that had become antiquated.</p>
+
+<p>These causes have disappeared one after the other. The moral ideal has
+become enlarged and has given over a wider field to the dramatist. The
+dramatist himself has learned to know life outside the green-room and the
+tavern back-parlour. He has studied from nature instead of copying
+Goldsmith and Sheridan. Shakespeare has never been less imitated, perhaps
+because he has never been better acted or better understood.</p>
+
+<p>But what prevented the drama from being &#8220;English&#8221;? It is we French who
+have prevented it&mdash;it is from our drama that the English<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span> playwrights have
+drawn for so long, at first with an indiscriminate eagerness for which
+there is no parallel, later more modestly and with discernment. At the
+risk of offending my compatriots, I must here express my absolute
+conviction that, except in regard to acting, this French influence has
+been harmful to the English stage. Our dramatists have enriched some
+London managers; but they have lain for thirty years on top of the English
+dramatists, and have stifled their originality&mdash;and without deriving much
+profit from this involuntary tyranny. If only they could have taught their
+pupils the secrets of their trade! But the English were maladroit
+disciples of Scribe and Sardou, whilst the philosophy of Dumas and Augier
+remained to them a closed book.</p>
+
+<p>The French influence has come at last to be what it should be. The two
+theatres, placed upon the same footing, will lend each other from time to
+time,&mdash;now, the idea of a play which, treated differently on either side
+of the channel, will serve to measure the divergence or resemblance of the
+two forms of society; now, a complete play which, translated literally,
+will give to us a perfect representation of London life, or to the
+Londoners a perfect representation of ours. Meanwhile the English drama,
+freed from its leading strings, will find its own way for itself. It is
+capable of doing so unaided, but I think Ibsen&#8217;s plays will help it. In
+this reference to Ibsen my readers may think they see a contradiction in
+my reasoning. &#8220;What!&#8221; they will<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> cry. &#8220;In order to bring back the English
+drama to itself again, you say it must be freed from foreign influence,
+and yet you send it to school to Norway!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But I have answered this objection by anticipation. I have shown that
+Ibsen is not a foreigner to England. He seems to have written for
+Englishmen; he has given them the kind of drama, more or less, that
+Shakespeare, were he living now, would have given them. I write this
+sentence, confident that if I am in the world, or, not being in the world,
+am still read, a score of years hence, no one will be inclined to call me
+to account for it. To the Northern races, at all events, Ibsen means not a
+fashion but an era.</p>
+
+<p>What the English drama is in search of, what it is about to create,&mdash;with
+or without Ibsen&#8217;s assistance,&mdash;is a new form in which to reproduce that
+dualism which has struck and disconcerted every observer, native or
+foreign, Matthew Arnold, Emerson, Taine. For my part, I have sometimes
+endeavoured to trace this dualism to the marriage, tempestuous but
+fruitful, of Saxon and Celt, to the effort, ever vain but never ceasing,
+of these two refractory elements to fuse and unite. The drama of the
+sixteenth century came, in a moving and memorable hour, from one of those
+unions between the young and strong in which there enters something of
+violence and even of madness. The existing drama is the issue of parents
+well on in years in a time of gloom and trouble. It is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span> delicate and calls
+for care. At the same time, it bears resemblances to those who gave it
+life. A race of heroes who are also buccaneers, a race of poets and
+shopkeepers, a race fearless of death and devoted to money, calculating
+but passionate, dreamers yet men of action, capable of the charges of
+Balaclava and the deal in the Suez shares, cannot possibly find its
+literary expression either in pure idealism or in realism undiluted. The
+&#8220;bleeding slice of life&#8221; awakes in it no appetite; &#8220;Art for Art&#8217;s sake&#8221;
+leaves it wonderfully indifferent; of moralising, it is tired for the time
+being: it is passing through a stage of sensuous torpor which is not
+without charm, and it waits open-eyed and, as it were, hesitatingly before
+the labour of creating society afresh, of building up a new civilisation.
+It does not wish, and is not able, to forget those problems&mdash;that terrible
+To-morrow&mdash;by which we are everywhere threatened. Hence its sensuousness
+is tempered, refined, saddened by philosophy. And in this mood, what it
+asks of the drama is not to be amused, or to be excited, but to be made to
+think.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span></p>
+<h2>INDEX</h2>
+
+
+<p class="index">
+Achurch, Miss, and Ibsen, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Actor-manager on circuit, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Adaptations from the French, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">law as to, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">process, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">S. Grundy&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Adelphi, The, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Albany, James, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his <i>Two Roses</i>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Alexander, Mr., in <i>Mrs. Tanqueray</i>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Almaviva <span class="smcaplc">I.</span> and <span class="smcaplc">II.</span>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.<br />
+<br />
+America, Macready in, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Anderson, Mary, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Anstey, Mr., and Ibsen, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Archer, W., on Kean and Macready, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; on Wills, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Tennyson, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; on Tennyson and Montanelli, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_299">299-207</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; and H. A. Jones, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and <i>The Profligate</i>, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and <i>Mrs. Tanqueray</i>, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; and Ibsen, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Arnold, Matthew, in the English Drama, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and H. A. Jones, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Arrah-na-pogue</i>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Art of <i>mise-en-sc&egrave;ne</i>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Arundel Club, The, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Augier, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Authors of 1850-65, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<i>Bab Ballads</i>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Bancroft, Mr., as Captain Hawtree, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his realism, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">revival of <i>School for Scandal</i>, <a href="#Page_50"><ins class="correction" title="original: 105">50</ins></a>, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Bancrofts, the, compared, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Robertson&#8217;s plays, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and the &#8220;cup and saucer&#8221; comedy, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">retirement, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Bancroft, Mrs., <a href="#Page_101">101</a> (see <a href="#wilton">Wilton, Marie</a>).<br />
+<br />
+Barrett, Wilson, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Barrie, J. M., <a href="#Page_301">301</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Batemans, the, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Beauty in the Drama, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Becket</i>, Tennyson&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Bells, The</i>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Belphegor</i>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Beringhiem in <i>Richelieu</i>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Berlioz, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Berne, Treaty of, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Bernhardt, Sarah, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Bj&ouml;rnson, <a href="#Page_206"><ins class="correction" title="original: 406">206</ins></a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; and Ibsen, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Black-eyed Susan</i>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Bohemia, centre of, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in a nutshell, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Boucicault, Dion, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88-92</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; Mrs. Dion, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Brand</i>, Ibsen&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Breaking a Butterfly</i>, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Broken Hearts</i>, Gilbert&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Brooke, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Brough, Lionel, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; Robert, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Browning and Macready, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his dramas, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Buchanan, Robert, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Buckstone, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Bulwer, Lord Lytton, <a href="#Page_64">64-72</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">at Macready&#8217;s banquet, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">portrayal of Riches and Rank, <a href="#Page_116">116</a> (see <a href="#lytton">Lytton</a>).</span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Bunch of Violets, A</i>, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Burdett-Coutts&#8217;, Baroness, present to Irving, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Burlesque, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Burnand&#8217;s <i>Ixion</i>, <a href="#Page_93">93-95</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Byron, H. J., <a href="#Page_96">96-99</a>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Robertson, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; Lord, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Byronian Satanism and Bulwer Lytton, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<i>Cabinet Minister, The</i>, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Campbell, Mrs. Patrick, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; in <i>John o&#8217; Dreams</i>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Cantab, The</i>, Robertson in, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Carlyle and the Sagas, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Ibsen, <a href="#Page_288">288</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Carton, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Caste</i>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Howe in, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Marie Wilton in, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">scene from, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Cavendish, Ada, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Censor&#8217;s Successor, the, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Censorship, official, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; and Sydney Grundy, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; and <i>The First Step</i>, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Chamberlain, Lord, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Chambers, Haddon, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Characters, limited types of, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Charles I.</i>, Wills&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Charley&#8217;s Aunt</i>, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Chatterton, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Chedd, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Chippendale&#8217;s present to Irving, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Cibber, Colley, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Circuit, on, <a href="#Page_46">46-49</a>.<br />
+<br />
+City elocution class, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Clarke, John, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Clary in <i>The Prisoner of War</i>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Classical drama, death of the, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Clerical Error, A</i>, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Coleridge on Kean, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span><br />
+<i>Colleen Bawn</i>, <a href="#Page_90">90-92</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Com&eacute;die Fran&ccedil;aise, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Comedies, Robertson&#8217;s, cause of their <ins class="correction" title="original: succces">success</ins>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Comedy, &#8220;Cup and Saucer,&#8221; <a href="#Page_134">134</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Comedy, the, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Comic opera, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Commission, parliamentary, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Bulwer Lytton, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Compton, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Cook, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Cool as a Cucumber</i>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Copyright in dramatic work, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Coquelin, M., on Mrs. Bancroft, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Coriolanus, Macready as, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Court Theatre, The, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Courtly, Charles, in <i>London Assurance</i>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Covent Garden, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Criticism, dramatic, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Critics, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; old and new, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Sydney Grundy, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Ibsen, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Cromwell and Richelieu, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Crumbs and Toby in <i>The Rent Day</i>, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Crusaders, The</i>, <a href="#Page_244">244-248</a>, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&#8220;Cup and Saucer&#8221; comedy, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Cup</i>, Tennyson&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Cynisca, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<i>Dandy Dick</i>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Dan&#8217;l Druce</i>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Darwin and Ibsen, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Delacour, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Delane, Mr., and John Oxenford, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Delaunay, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Democracy and the drama, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Deschapelles, Madame, in <i>The Lady of Lyons</i>, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Dick, Robert, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Dickens, Charles, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">letter on Marie Wilton, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Diderot&#8217;s rules, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; paradox, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Dillon, Charles, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Diplomacy</i>, origin of, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Dolls&#8217; House, The</i>, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Drama, legitimate, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">a national, and Douglas Jerrold, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; and democracy, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; the Boucicault, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; the classical, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; English and French, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">elements of the, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; German, in England, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; English, cause of its return to life, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">causes of its decay, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Ibsen&#8217;s influence, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">what it is seeking, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Dramatic verse, English, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; criticism, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Dramatists of to-day, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Drury Lane, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Dumas, Alexander, effect of Macready on, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Dundreary, Lord, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&#8220;Dust-Hole,&#8221; The, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Dutton, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<i>Ebbsmith, The Notorious Mrs.</i>, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Eccles, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Eccles, Polly, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Edgeworth, Miss, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Eily in <i>Colleen Bawn</i>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Ellis, Havelock, and Ibsen, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Emery, Winifred, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Emperor and Galilean</i>, Ibsen&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Enemy of the People, An</i>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Engaged</i>, Gilbert&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>.<br />
+<br />
+English dramatic verse, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Ennery, d&#8217;, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Evelyn, Alfred, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Examiner of Plays, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<i>Falcon, The</i>, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Falconer, Edmund, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Farce, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Farren, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Farren, Nellie, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Father Tom in <i>Colleen Bawn</i>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Fatal Card, The</i>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Faucit, Helen, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Favart, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Fechter in Hamlet, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Feuillet, Octave, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Fielding and the Censorship, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Fielding Club, The, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Figaro, London</i>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>First Step, The</i>, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Forster, John, and Macready, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">at Macready&#8217;s banquet, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">letter from Dickens, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+France, Macready in, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Francillon</i>, <i>Hedda Gabler</i>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>.<br />
+<br />
+French actors in London, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; adaptations, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">law as to, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">S. Grundy&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; drama prevented English, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Froude, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Fun</i>, Gilbert a contributor to, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Gaiety, The, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Garneray&#8217;s Memoirs, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Garrick, David, the r&ocirc;le of, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Garrick and Hare, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Garrick school, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Garrick Club, The, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Garrick, the first night at the, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Gautier, Th&eacute;ophile, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Gerridge, Sam, Hare as, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.<br />
+<br />
+German drama in England, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Ghosts</i>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Gilbert, irony of, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; and Robertson, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">literary career, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Bab Ballads</i>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Sweethearts</i>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Broken Hearts</i>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his only woman&#8217;s character, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Engaged</i>, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Palace of Truth</i>, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his philosophy, <a href="#Page_144">144-146</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Wicked World</i>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Pygmalion and Galatea</i>, <a href="#Page_147">147-152</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Trial by Jury</i>, combines with Sullivan, <i>Princess Ida</i>, <i>Patience</i>, <i>Iolanthe</i>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Pirates of Penzance</i>, <i>Pinafore</i>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">a lawyer, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Globe, The, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Goldsmith, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Gosse, Edmund, and Ibsen, <a href="#Page_277">277-280</a>, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Greatest of These, The</i>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Grecian, The, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Grisi, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Grundy, Sydney, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">first appearance, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; <i>The Snowball</i>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>In Honour Bound</i>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>A Pair of Spectacles</i>, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Mammon</i>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>A Bunch of Violets</i>, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of the French, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>The Glass of Fashion</i>, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>A Fool&#8217;s Paradise</i>, <i>The Late Mr. Costello</i>, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his peculiarities, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>;</span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Sowing the Wind</i>, <i>An Old Jew</i>, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>The New Woman</i>, <a href="#Page_230">230</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>The Greatest of These</i>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; and Ibsen, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Grues</i>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Hamlet, Irving&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Hardy, Thomas, and Pinero, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Hare, John, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in <i>Ours</i>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in <i>Caste</i>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Harold</i>, Tennyson&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Harris, Sir Augustus, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Hawtree, Captain, Bancroft as, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Haymarket, The, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; and the Bancrofts, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Hazlitt, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Heinemann&#8217;s, Wm., <i>First Step</i>, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Her Majesty&#8217;s Theatre, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Herman, Mr., and H. A. Jones, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Hippodrama, The, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Hobby Horse, The</i>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Homer, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Hood&#8217;s <i>Model Men and Women</i>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; supper-parties, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Horton, Priscilla, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Hoskyns, David, and Irving, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Hugo, Victor, and Bulwer Lytton, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Humour of a Scholar</i> and <i>Money&#8217;s</i> success, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Hunt, Leigh, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Macready, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Hutchinson, Colonel, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Huxley and Ibsen, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Ibsen, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; England hears of him, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">translations by Edmund Gosse and others, <a href="#Page_278">278-280</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">played by The Independent Theatre, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and the Critics, <a href="#Page_281">281-283</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and theatrical managers, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">performed at The Haymarket, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and the Sagas, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Peer Gynt</i>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">more intelligible than Carlyle, <a href="#Page_288">288</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his methods, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">realism, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his message, <a href="#Page_291">291-292</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his types, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and democracy, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and English dramatists, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">H. A. Jones&#8217;s adaptation of <i>A Dolls&#8217; House</i>, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">divergence from English admirers, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and the Puritans, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence on the English drama, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Icilius and Virginia, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Imagination in the drama, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Independent Theatre, The, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Iolanthe</i>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Irving, Henry, first plays Hamlet, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">early days, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in the provinces and d&eacute;but in London, <a href="#Page_161"><ins class="correction" title="Not in the original.">161</ins></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">as Digby Grant in Albery&#8217;s <i>Two Roses</i>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">secures <i>The Bells</i>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in <i>Charles I.</i>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">as Hamlet, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in <i>Richelieu</i>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on staging masterpieces, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Shakespeare&#8217;s text, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his r&ocirc;les, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his method, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his position as to realism, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">as a writer and lecturer, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&#8220;Sir Henry,&#8221; <a href="#Page_172">172</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">his success, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Tennyson&#8217;s <i>Becket</i>, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Ibsen, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Ixion</i>, Burnand&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_93">93-95</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Jean, Oliver Saint, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Jerrold, Blanchard, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Jerrold, Douglas, <a href="#Page_55">55-62</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Rent Day</i>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Prisoner of War</i>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Black-eyed Susan</i>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and the Censorship, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<i>John-a-Dreams</i>, <a href="#Page_302">302-304</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Jones, H. A., <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; <i>A Clerical Error</i>, <i>An Old Master</i>, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>The Silver King</i>, <i>Saints and Sinners</i>, <a href="#Page_235">235-240</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>The Case of Rebellious Susan</i>, <a href="#Page_236">236-250</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Judah</i>, <a href="#Page_239">239-244</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>The Crusaders</i>, <a href="#Page_244">244-248</a>, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>The Tempter</i>, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Triumph of the Philistines</i>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>The Masqueraders</i>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on realism, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">future work, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; and Ibsen, <a href="#Page_295">295-297</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Jordan, Mrs., <a href="#Page_39">39</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Josephs, Fanny, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Judah</i>, <a href="#Page_239">239-244</a>, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Kean, Charles, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his successor, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Kean, Edmund, <a href="#Page_40">40-45</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">death of, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Keeley, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Keeley, Mrs., <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Kemble, Charles, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Kemble, John, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Kendal as Pygmalion, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in <i>The Falcon</i>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Kendals in <i>The Greatest of These</i>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Knebworth, Squireen of, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Knowles, Sheridan, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+&#8220;La Belle Smidson,&#8221; <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Labiche, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Lacy, the bookseller, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Lady from the Sea, The</i>, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Lady of Lyons</i>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_65">65-67</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Lamb, Charles, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Lancival, Luce de, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Larkin, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Late Mr. Costello, The</i>, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Law as to adaptations and translations, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; as to foreign dramas, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Legitimate drama, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Lemaitre, Jules, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Lemierra, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Lewes on Macready&#8217;s Macbeth, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Macready&#8217;s last performance, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Liberty Hall</i>, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Lind, Jenny, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Little Eyolph</i>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>London Assurance</i>, Boucicault&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>London Figaro</i>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>London, Lights o&#8217;</i>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Lord, Miss H. F., and Ibsen, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Lords and Commons</i>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Love, The Comedy of</i>, Ibsen&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Lyceum, The, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; <i>The Cup</i> at, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Lyceum, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.<br />
+<br /><a name="lytton" id="lytton"></a>
+Lytton, Lord, <a href="#Page_64">64-72</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">at Macready&#8217;s banquet, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Riches and Rank, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Macbeth, Kean as, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Macready as, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Mackayers, Joseph, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Macready, <a href="#Page_40">40-45</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Dumas, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and authors, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and <i>Virginius</i>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; manager of Drury Lane and Covent Garden, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in <i>Richelieu</i>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in Paris, 1846, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; work and farewell performance, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">last days, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; and Marie Wilton, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Fechter&#8217;s Hamlet, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Maeterlink, M., <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Magistrate, The</i>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Man of the world type, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Managers, theatre, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_308">308</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Manning, Cardinal, and Becket, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Martin, Lady, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Master Builder, The</i>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>.<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span><br />
+Mathews, Charles, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Melnotte, Claude, in <i>The Lady of Lyons</i>, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Melodrama, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Memoirs, Marie Wilton&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Merim&eacute;e, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Merivale, Herman, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Merritt, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Michael O&#8217;Dowd</i>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Millard, Evelyn, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Mitchell, the Bond Street bookseller, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Model Men and Women</i>, Hood&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Moli&egrave;re, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Money</i>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70-72</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Marie Wilton in, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Moor of Venice</i>, Kean in, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Moore, George, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Morals of the stage, Byron&#8217;s effect on, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Morris and the Sagas, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Mortimer, James, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Munich, Ibsen at, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Music, a rival to the drama, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Music halls, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Myles-na-Coppaleen in <i>Colleen Bawn</i>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Myrine, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Mystery in the drama, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Neilson, Adelaide, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Nesville, Juliette, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>New Woman, The</i>, <a href="#Page_230">230-233</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Night&#8217;s Adventure, A</i>, Robertson&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Norah</i>, Ibsen&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Norway and England, affinities between, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, The</i>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Oakley, Macready as, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Octoroon</i>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Official Censorship, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Old Jew, An</i>, <a href="#Page_227">227-230</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Old Master, An</i>, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Olympic, The, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Oonagh, The</i>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Operetta, The, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Origin of Official Censorship, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Orleans, Duc d&#8217;, in <i>Richelieu</i>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Our American Cousin</i>, Sothern in, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Our Boys</i>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Ours</i>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Marie Wilton in, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+&#8220;Owls&#8217; Roost,&#8221; <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Oxenford, John, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Irving, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<i>Pair of Spectacles, A</i>, <a href="#Page_217">217-220</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Palace of Truth, The</i>, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Pantomime, the, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Parker, Louis N., <a href="#Page_301">301</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Parliamentary Commission, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Bulwer Lytton, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Passion in the drama, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Patience</i>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Pauline in <i>The Lady of Lyons</i>, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Peep o&#8217; Day</i>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Peer Gynt</i>, Ibsen&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Penley, Mr., <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Pettitt, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Phelps, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Pilgrim, The White</i>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Pillars of Society, The</i>, Ibsen&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Pinafore</i>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Pinero, Arthur W., letter to Mr. Bancroft, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; personal, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">an actor, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>The Squire</i>, <i>Lords and Commons</i>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>The Magistrate</i>, <i>Dandy Dick</i>, <i>The Hobby Horse</i>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>The Times</i>, <i>The Cabinet Minister</i>, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>The Profligate</i>, <a href="#Page_259">259-264</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Lady Bountiful</i>, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>The Second Mrs. Tanqueray</i>, <a href="#Page_264">264-274</a>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith</i>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Ibsen, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Pink Dominoes</i>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Pippo, Marie Wilton as, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Pirates of Penzance</i>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Plautus, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Playgoers&#8217; Club, Mr. Tree at, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Plays, Examiner of, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Plessy, Madame Arnould, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&#8220;Pocket Ibsen,&#8221; A, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Polhill, Captain, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Prices under the Bancrofts, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>.<br />
+<br /><a name="prince" id="prince"></a>
+Prince of Wales&#8217;s Theatre, <a href="#Page_105">105</a> (see <a href="#queen">Queen&#8217;s</a>), <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; Robertson&#8217;s plays at, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; last visit to, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Princess Ida</i>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Princess&#8217;s, The, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Princess&#8217;s translator, The, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Prisoner of War</i>, Jerrold&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&#8220;Privileged&#8221; theatres, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62-64</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Profligate, The</i>, <a href="#Page_259">259-264</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Promise of May, The</i>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Provincial touring, <a href="#Page_46">46-49</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Ptarmigant, Lord and Lady, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Puckler-Muskau, Price, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Puritans and the Stage, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; and the Censorship, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Pygmalion and Galatea</i>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the critics on, <a href="#Page_148">148-152</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<i>Queen Mary</i>, Tennyson&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>.<br />
+<br /><a name="queen" id="queen"></a>
+Queen&#8217;s Theatre, <a href="#Page_104">104</a> (see <a href="#prince">Prince of Wales&#8217;s</a>).<br />
+<br />
+<i>The Promise of May</i>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Raval, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Ray, Katharine, and Ibsen, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Realism, H. A. Jones on, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; English horror of, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Ibsen&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Rebellious Susan, The Case of</i>, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Rehan, Ada, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.<br />
+<br />
+R&eacute;jane, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Rent Day, The</i>, Jerrold&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Reynolds, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Rhythm of English dramatic verse, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Richelieu</i>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_65">65-70</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Richelieu and Cromwell, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Richelieu</i>, Lytton&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Robertson, Forbes, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Robertson, Madge, as Galatea, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in <i>The Falcon</i>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Robertson, T. W., early life, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">quarrel with Farren, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">at journalism, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in Bohemia, <a href="#Page_109">109-111</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">writes a play for Sothern, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Society</i> and Marie Wilton, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">success, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">a wonderful reader, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his insight into Marie Wilton&#8217;s genius, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">cause of the success of his comedies, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">only half a realist, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">characteristics exemplified from <i>School</i>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">method of character-drawing, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his characters, <a href="#Page_127">127-132</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">marriage, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">death, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Byron, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Gilbert, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Robins, Miss, and Ibsen, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Robson, Mr., <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Roche, Madame, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Romanticism in France, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span><br />
+<i>Roses, The Two</i>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Rosmersholm</i>, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Rorke, Kate, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Royalty, The, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Ryder, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Sadler&#8217;s Wells, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Sagas, The, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Saintine, X. B., and <i>Richelieu</i>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Saints and Sinners</i>, <a href="#Page_235">235-240</a>, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Salaries of actors, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Sarcey, Francisque, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Sardou and the Bancrofts, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Savage Club, The, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Scandinavian Society, British, and Ibsen, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>.<br />
+<br />
+School of Common Sense in France, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>School</i>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Marie Wilton in, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">scene from, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Scott, Clement, and <i>The Oonagh</i>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Tom Hood&#8217;s parties, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Robertson&#8217;s reading, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Irving, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Scribe, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Sedaine&#8217;s <i>drame bourgeois</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Shakespeare, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and French actors, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in Irving&#8217;s hand, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">resuscitation, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and melodrama, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+&#8220;Shakespeare made Easy,&#8221; <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Shaugraun</i>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Shaw, G. B., and Ibsen, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Shelley, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Sheridan, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Shylock, Kean as, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Siddons, Mrs., <a href="#Page_40">40</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Silver King, The</i>, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Sims, G. R., <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Smith, Albert, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Smithson, Miss, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Snowball, The</i>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Society</i>, Robertson&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">first performance, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">success, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+&#8220;Song of the Gentleman,&#8221; by Brough, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&#8220;Songs of the Governing Classes,&#8221; by Brough, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Sothern and Robertson, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; and Irving, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Sowing the Wind</i>, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Spanker, Lady Gay, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Spectators, three classes, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Spencer, Herbert, and Ibsen, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Squire of Dames</i>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Squire, The</i>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.<br />
+<br />
+St. James&#8217;s Theatre, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Standard, The, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Strand, The, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Dickens at, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Stirling, Mrs., in <i>Caste</i>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Sullivan and Gilbert, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Surface, Joseph, Macready as, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Surrey, The, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Swanborough, Mrs., <a href="#Page_96">96</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Sweethearts</i>, Gilbert&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Swinburne&#8217;s dramas, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Talma on the actor&#8217;s emotions, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Tanqueray, The Second Mrs.</i>, <a href="#Page_264">264-274</a>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Taylor, Tom, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; <i>Our American Cousin</i>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Taylor, Tom, on Marie Wilton and Robertson, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Tempter, The</i>, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Tennyson and Macready, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Gilbert&#8217;s <i>Princess Ida</i>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; as a dramatist, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and the critics, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>The Falcon</i>, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>The Promise of May</i>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>The Cup</i>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; <i>Queen Mary</i>, <i>Harold</i>, <i>Becket</i>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his sense of history, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Terence, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Terry, Miss Ellen, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Theatre-goers of 1850, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Theatres, number of, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Theatre, commercial decadence of the, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Theatres, &#8220;Privileged,&#8221; <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62-64</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Theatre managers, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Thomas, Henry, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Thomas, Moy, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Ticket of Leave Man</i>, origin of, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Times, The</i>, Pinero&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Toby and Crumbs in <i>The Rent Day</i>, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Toole, John, first appearance, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Tour, on, <a href="#Page_46">46-49</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Translations of foreign plays, law as to, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Travelling companies, <a href="#Page_46">46-49</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Treaty of Berne, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Tree, Mr., and <i>The Tempter</i>, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; and Ibsen, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;&mdash; in <i>John-a-Dreams</i>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his staying, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Trial by Jury</i>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Triumph of the Philistines</i>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Tussaud&#8217;s, Madame, Kean and Macready at, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Van Ambrugh, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Vaudeville, The, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Victoria, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Victoria, The, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Virginia and Icilius, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Virginius</i>, Knowles&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_50">50-55</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Virginius&#8217;s character, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Walkley, A. B., and Ibsen, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Wallington, Nehemiah, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Wallis, Miss, as Cleopatra, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Walpole and the Censorship, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Waring, Mr., and Ibsen, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Watson, Malcolm, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Wells and the classical drama, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Wicked World, The</i>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Willard, Mr., <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Wills&#8217;s <i>Charles I.</i>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Claudian</i>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his conceptions, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Wilton and Kean, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.<br />
+<br /><a name="wilton" id="wilton"></a>
+Wilton, Marie, and Macready, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">at the Lyceum, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">at the Haymarket, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Coquelin on, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Dickens on, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">partnership with Byron, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">her first company, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">secures <i>Society</i>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Robertson, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">her parts in Robertson&#8217;s plays, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">early days in Liverpool, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Wilton, the Sisters, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Wingfield, Hon. Lewis W., <a href="#Page_95">95</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Woman, the English, and Ibsen, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Wyndham, Charles, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Yates, Edmund, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Yates, Frederick, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>.<br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center">PRINTED BY<br />
+MORRISON AND GIBB LIMITED<br />
+EDINBURGH</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><strong>Footnotes:</strong></p>
+
+<p><a name='f_1' id='f_1' href='#fna_1'>[1]</a> Berlioz did so literally, and married her.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_2' id='f_2' href='#fna_2'>[2]</a> William Archer, <i>Life of Macready</i>.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_3' id='f_3' href='#fna_3'>[3]</a> &#8220;Write me a drama,&#8221; said Macready to young Browning, &#8220;and save me
+having to go off to America.&#8221; The drama was written, but attained only a
+fourth performance, and did not save the actor from his impending
+expedition.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_4' id='f_4' href='#fna_4'>[4]</a> As a matter of fact, Bulwer had not even the merit of inventing this
+arrangement for himself. His play was founded on the novel by X.-B.
+Saintine.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_5' id='f_5' href='#fna_5'>[5]</a> Charles Mathews played at the <i>Vari&eacute;t&eacute;s</i>, in French, in <i>L&#8217;anglais
+timide</i>, an adaptation of <i>Cool as a Cucumber</i>, by Blanchard Jerrold.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_6' id='f_6' href='#fna_6'>[6]</a> 10 George <span class="smcaplc">II.</span> cap. 19.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_7' id='f_7' href='#fna_7'>[7]</a> In <i>Thirty Years at the Play</i>, Clement Scott gives an account of the
+first night of <i>The Oonagh</i>, which has come down to us as a tradition. At
+two o&#8217;clock in the morning the play was still in progress. The house was
+empty save for a few critics slumbering in their stalls. The actors were
+on the stage all in a line facing the public, as was then the custom, and
+there was no sign of the ending, when suddenly the machinists pulled back
+the carpet on which the chief characters were standing. They collapsed
+simply!&mdash;with the piece, which was never brought to its real conclusion.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_8' id='f_8' href='#fna_8'>[8]</a> T. W. Robertson in <i>The Illustrated Times</i>.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_9' id='f_9' href='#fna_9'>[9]</a> Founded on the famous French play <i>Paillasse</i>.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_10' id='f_10' href='#fna_10'>[10]</a> To the fourth line he added a footnote to the effect that the name
+was <i>not</i> Johnson really.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_11' id='f_11' href='#fna_11'>[11]</a> Henry Morley, <i>Journal of a Playgoer</i>.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_12' id='f_12' href='#fna_12'>[12]</a> These lines appeared in the <i>Revue des Deux Mondes</i>, on September 15,
+1895. Less than three months later the Kendals produced, for the first
+time in the provinces, a new drama by Mr. Grundy, <i>The Greatest of These</i>.
+This play, which was performed later in London, is a work of real value.
+In it Mr. Grundy has forgotten his French models, and has painted English
+life and English characters with a freedom, a fidelity, a power, worthy of
+that Ibsen to whom he will not have it that he owes anything. He has put
+aside his wit in order to be more moving. There is not a weak spot or a
+trace of bad taste in the whole piece. The scene which takes up most of
+the third act is equally beautiful, whether regarded from a psychological,
+a literary, or a purely dramatic standpoint.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_13' id='f_13' href='#fna_13'>[13]</a> His d&eacute;but was in 1874, when he was nineteen. He has given an account
+of some of his Edinburgh experiences about this time in a pleasant Preface
+to Mr. William Archer&#8217;s <i>Theatrical World in 1895</i>.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_14' id='f_14' href='#fna_14'>[14]</a> When this episode was reached on the night of the first performance
+of <i>The Master Builder</i>, a critic turned to Mr. Archer and said, &#8220;Will you
+explain <i>that</i> symbol to us?&#8221; &#8220;I am not sure,&#8221; Mr. Archer replied quietly,
+&#8220;that it <i>is</i> a symbol.&#8221; Upon which, a lady sitting near them interposed:
+&#8220;Excuse my breaking in upon your conversation,&#8221; she said, &#8220;but you may be
+interested to know that many women are like Mrs. Solness in this. I myself
+have all the dolls of my childhood safely preserved at home, and I look
+after them tenderly.&#8221; It is well known, too, that the Queen&#8217;s collection
+of her dolls is preserved at Windsor Castle.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_15' id='f_15' href='#fna_15'>[15]</a> I should have wished to determine the influence exerted by the
+contemporary German drama upon the dramatic movement in England, but I can
+find no trace of any such influence at all. Only a single work of
+Sudermann&#8217;s has so far been translated, and this came from America. An
+attempt was made in 1895 to found a permanent <i>Deutsches Theater</i> in
+London, and works by Freytag, Sudermann, Hauptmann, Otto Hartleber, Max
+Halbe, and Blumenthal were produced there. I do not know whether the
+attempt, made under modest, and indeed almost mean, conditions, will be
+renewed. The critics attended the performance, but the general public paid
+but little attention to them.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><strong>Transcriber&#8217;s Notes:</strong></p>
+
+<p>Punctuation has been corrected without note.</p>
+
+<p>Other than the corrections noted by hover information, inconsistencies in
+spelling and hyphenation have been retained from the original.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The English Stage, by Augustin Filon
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The English Stage, by Augustin Filon
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The English Stage
+       Being an Account of the Victorian Drama
+
+Author: Augustin Filon
+
+Translator: Frederic Whyte
+
+Release Date: July 3, 2011 [EBook #36590]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ENGLISH STAGE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
+generously made available by The Internet Archive.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE ENGLISH STAGE
+
+
+
+
+_WORKS BY THE AUTHOR._
+
+  PROFILS ANGLAIS.
+  MERIMEE ET SES AMIS.
+  VIOLETTE MERIAN.
+  AMOURS ANGLAIS.
+  LES CONTES DU CENTENAIRE.
+  ETC. ETC.
+
+
+
+
+  THE ENGLISH STAGE
+
+  _Being an Account of the Victorian Drama by Augustin Filon_
+
+  Translated from the French by Frederic Whyte with
+  an Introduction by Henry Arthur Jones
+
+
+  JOHN MILNE
+  12 NORFOLK STREET, STRAND, LONDON
+
+  NEW YORK
+  DODD, MEAD, & COMPANY
+  MDCCCXCVII
+
+
+
+
+_All Rights Reserved_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+  Introduction by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones                               9
+
+  Author's Preface                                                    31
+
+
+  CHAPTER I
+
+  A Glance back--From 1820 to 1830--Kean and Macready--The
+  Strolling Player--The Critics--Sheridan Knowles and
+  _Virginius_--Douglas Jerrold--His Comedies--_The Rent
+  Day_--_The Prisoner of War_--_Black-Eyed Susan_--Collapse of
+  the Privileged Theatres--Men of Letters come to the Rescue of
+  the Drama--Bulwer Lytton--_The Lady of Lyons_--_Richelieu_--
+  _Money_                                                             39
+
+
+  CHAPTER II
+
+  Macready's Withdrawal from the Stage--The Enemies of the
+  Drama in 1850: Puritanism; the Opera; the Pantomime; the
+  "Hippodrama"--French Plays and French Players in England--
+  Actors of the Period--The Censorship--The Critics--The
+  Historical Plays of Tom Taylor and the Irish Plays of Dion
+  Boucicault                                                          73
+
+
+  CHAPTER III
+
+  The Vogue of Burlesque--Burnand's _Ixion_--H. J. Byron--The
+  Influence of Burlesque upon the Moral Tone of the Stage--Marie
+  Wilton's Debut--A Letter from Dickens--Founding of the Prince
+  of Wales's--Tom Robertson, his Life as Actor and Author--His
+  Journalistic Career--London Bohemia in 1865--Sothern                93
+
+
+  CHAPTER IV
+
+  First Performance of _Society_--Success of _Ours_, _Caste_,
+  and _School_--How Robertson turned to account the Talent of
+  his Actors, John Hare, Bancroft, and Mrs. Bancroft--Progress
+  in the Matter of Scenery--Dialogue and Character-drawing--
+  Robertson as a Humorist: a Scene from _School_--As a Realist:
+  a Scene from _Caste_--The Comedian of the Upper Middle
+  Classes--Robertson's Marriage, Illness, and Death--The "Cup
+  and Saucer" Comedy--The Improvement in Actors' Salaries--The
+  Bancrofts at the Haymarket--Farewell Performance--My
+  Pilgrimage to Tottenham Street                                     114
+
+
+  CHAPTER V
+
+  Gilbert: compared with Robertson--His First Literary Efforts--
+  The _Bab Ballads_--_Sweethearts_--A Series of Experiments--
+  Gilbert's Psychology and Methods of Work--_Dan'l Druce_,
+  _Engaged_, _The Palace of Truth_, _The Wicked World_,
+  _Pygmalion and Galatea_--The Gilbert and Sullivan Operas           138
+
+
+  CHAPTER VI
+
+  Shakespeare again--From Macready to Irving; Phelps, Fechter,
+  Ryder, Adelaide Neilson--Irving's Debut--His Career in the
+  Provinces, and Visit to Paris--The role of Digby Grand--The
+  role of Matthias--The Production of _Hamlet_--Successive
+  Triumphs--Irving as Stage Manager--as an Editor of
+  Shakespeare--His Defects as an Actor--Too great for some of
+  his Parts--As a Writer and Lecturer; his Theory of Art--Sir
+  Henry Irving, Head of his Profession                               156
+
+
+  CHAPTER VII
+
+  Is it well to imitate Shakespeare?--The Death of the Classical
+  Drama--Herman Merivale and the _White Pilgrim_--Wills and his
+  Plays: _Charles the First_, _Claudian_--Tennyson as a
+  Dramatist; he comes too soon and too late--Tennyson and the
+  Critics--_The Falcon_, _The Promise of May_, _The Cup_,
+  _Becket_, _Queen Mary_, _Harold_                                   174
+
+
+  CHAPTER VIII
+
+  The Three Publics--The Disappearance of Burlesque and Decadence
+  of Pantomime--Increasing Vogue of Farce and Melodrama--
+  Improvement in Acting--The Influence of our French Actors--The
+  "Old" Critics and the "New"--James Mortimer and his Two
+  "Almavivas"--Mr. William Archer's Ideas and Role--The
+  Vicissitudes of Adaptation                                         193
+
+
+  CHAPTER IX
+
+  The Three Principal Dramatists of To-day--Sydney Grundy; his
+  First Efforts--Adaptations: _The Snowball_, _In Honour Bound_,
+  _A Pair of Spectacles_, _The Bunch of Violets_--His Original
+  Plays--His Style--His Humour--His Ethical Ideal--_An Old
+  Jew_--_The New Woman_--A Talent which has not done growing         212
+
+
+  CHAPTER X
+
+  Henry Arthur Jones; his First Works--His Melodramas--_Saints
+  and Sinners_--The Puritans and the Theatre--The Two Deacons:
+  the Character of Fletcher--_Judah_--_The Crusaders_: Character
+  of Palsam; the Conclusion of the Piece--_The Case of Rebellious
+  Susan_--_The Masqueraders_--Return to Melodrama--Theories
+  expounded by Mr. Jones in his Book: _The Renascence of the
+  Drama_                                                             234
+
+
+  CHAPTER XI
+
+  Two Portraits--Mr. Pinero's Career as an Actor--His Early
+  Works--_The Squire, Lords and Commons_--The Pieces which
+  followed, Half-Comedy, Half-Farce--_The Profligate_; its
+  Success and Defects: _Lady Bountiful_--_The Second Mrs.
+  Tanqueray_: Character of Paula--Mrs. Patrick Campbell--_The
+  Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith_                                           254
+
+
+  CHAPTER XII
+
+  Ibsen made known to the English Public by Mr. Edmund Gosse--
+  The First Translations--Ibsen acted in London--The Performers
+  and the Public--Encounters between the Critics--Mr. Archer
+  once more--Affinity between the Norwegian Character and the
+  English--Ibsen's Realism suited to English Taste, his
+  Characters adaptable to English Life--The Women in his Plays--
+  Ibsen and Mr. Jones--Present and Future Influence of Ibsen--
+  Objections and Obstacles                                           277
+
+
+  CHAPTER XIII
+
+  G. R. Sims--R. C. Carton--Haddon Chambers--The Independent
+  Theatre and Matinee Performance--The Drama of To-morrow--A
+  "Report of Progress"--The Public and the Actors--
+  Actor-Managers--The Forces that have given Birth to the
+  Contemporary English Drama--Disappearance of the Obstacles to
+  its becoming Modern and National--Conclusion                       300
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+BY HENRY ARTHUR JONES
+
+
+I have rarely had a more welcome task than that of saying a few words of
+introduction to the following essays, and of heartily commending them to
+the English reading public. I am not called upon, nor would it become me,
+to recriticise the criticism of the English drama they contain, to reargue
+any of the issues raised, or to vent my own opinions of the persons and
+plays hereafter dealt with. My business is to thank M. Filon for bringing
+us before the notice of the French public, to speak of his work as a whole
+rather than to discuss it in detail, and to define his position in
+relation to the recent dramatic movement in our country.
+
+But before addressing myself to these main ends, I may perhaps be allowed
+to call attention to one or two striking passages and individual
+judgments. The picture in the first chapter of the old actor's life on
+circuit is capitally done. I do not know where to look for so animated and
+succinct a rendering of that phase of past theatrical life. And the
+pilgrimage to the deserted Prince of Wales's Theatre also left a vivid
+impression on me, perhaps quickened by my own early memories. In all that
+relates to the early Victorian drama M. Filon seems to me a sure and
+penetrating guide. All lovers of the English drama, as distinguished from
+that totally different and in many ways antagonistic institution, the
+English theatre, must be pleased to see M. Filon stripping the spangles
+from Bulwer Lytton. To this day Lytton remains an idol of English
+playgoers and actors, a lasting proof of their inability to distinguish
+what is dramatic truth. _The Lady of Lyons_ and _Richelieu_ still rank in
+many theatrical circles with _Hamlet_ as masterpieces of the "legitimate,"
+and _Money_ is still bracketed with _The School for Scandal_. It is
+benevolent of M. Filon to write dramatic criticism about a nation where
+such notions have prevailed for half a century.
+
+The criticism on Tennyson as a playwright seems to me equally admirable
+with the criticism on Bulwer Lytton, and all the more admirable when the
+two are read in conjunction. Doubtless Tennyson will never be so
+successful on the boards as Lytton has been. _Becket_ is a loose and
+ill-made play in many respects, and succeeded with the public only because
+Irving was able to pull it into some kind of unity by buckling it round
+his great impersonation of the archbishop. But _Becket_ contains great
+things, and is a real addition to our dramatic literature. It would have
+been a thousand pities if it had failed. On the other hand, the success of
+Lytton's plays has been a real misfortune to our drama. You cannot have
+two standards of taste in dramatic poetry. Just as surely as the
+circulation of bad money in a country drives out all the good, so surely
+does a base and counterfeit currency in art drive out all finer and higher
+things that contend with it. In his measurement of those two ancient
+enemies, Tennyson and Lytton, M. Filon has shown a rare power of
+understanding us and of entering into the spirit of our nineteenth-century
+poetic drama.
+
+If I may be allowed a word of partial dissent from M. Filon, I would say
+that he assigns too much space and influence to Robertson. Robertson did
+one great thing: he drew the great and vital tragi-comic figure of Eccles.
+He drew many other pleasing characters and scenes, most of them as
+essentially false as the falsities and theatricalities he supposed himself
+to be superseding. I shall be reminded that in the volume before us M.
+Filon says that all reforms of the drama pretend to be a return to nature
+and to truth. I have elsewhere shown that there is no such thing as being
+consistently and realistically "true to nature" on the stage. _Hamlet_ in
+many respects is farther away from real life than the shallowest and
+emptiest farce. It is in the seizure and presentation of the essential and
+distinguishing marks of a character, of a scene, of a passion, of a
+society, of a phase of life, of a movement of national thought--it is in
+the seizure and vivid treatment of some of these, to the exclusion or
+falsification of non-essentials, that the dramatist must lay his claim to
+sincerity and being "true to nature." And it seems to me that one has
+only to compare _Caste_, the typical comedy of an English _mesalliance_,
+with _Le Gendre de M. Poirier_, the typical comedy of a French
+_mesalliance_, to come to the conclusion that in the foundation and
+conduct of his story Robertson was false and theatrical--theatrical, that
+is, in the employment of a social contrast that was effective on the
+stage, but well-nigh, if not quite, impossible in life.
+
+It is of the smallest moment to be "true to nature" in such mint and
+cummin of the stage as the shutting of a door with a real lock, in the
+observation of niceties of expression and behaviour, in the careful
+copying of little fleeting modes and gestures, in the introduction of
+certain realistic bits of business--it is, I say, of the smallest moment
+to be "true to nature" in these, if the playwright is false to nature in
+all the great verities of the heart and spirit of man, if his work as a
+whole leaves the final impression that the vast, unimaginable drama of
+human life is as petty and meaningless and empty as our own English
+theatre. A fair way to measure any dramatist is to ask this question of
+his work: "Does he make human life as small as his own theatre, so that
+there is nothing more to be said about either; or does he hint that human
+life so far transcends any theatre that all attempts to deal with it on
+the boards, even the highest, even Hamlet, even OEdipus, even Faust, are
+but shadows and guesses and perishable toys of the stage?"
+
+Robertson has nothing to say to us in 1896. He drew one great character
+and many pleasing ones in puerile, impossible schemes, without relation to
+any larger world than the very narrow English theatrical world of 1865-70.
+
+In his analysis of the influence of Ibsen in England and France, M. Filon
+seems to touch the right note. I may perhaps be permitted a word of
+personal explanation in this connection. When I came up to London sixteen
+years ago, to try for a place among English playwrights, a rough
+translation from the German version of _The Dolls' House_ was put into my
+hands, and I was told that if it could be turned into a sympathetic play,
+a ready opening would be found for it on the London boards. I knew nothing
+of Ibsen, but I knew a great deal of Robertson and H. J. Byron. From these
+circumstances came the adaptation called _Breaking a Butterfly_. I pray it
+may be forgotten from this time, or remembered only with leniency amongst
+other transgressions of my dramatic youth and ignorance.
+
+I pass on to speak of M. Filon's work as a whole. For a generation or two
+past France has held the lead, and rightly held the lead, in the European
+theatre. She has done this by virtue of a peculiar innate dramatic
+instinct in her people; by virtue of great traditions and thorough methods
+of training; by virtue of national recognition of her dramatists and
+actors, and national pride in them; and by virtue of the freedom she has
+allowed to her playwrights. So far as they have abused that freedom, so
+far as they have become the mere purveyors of sexual eccentricity and
+perversity, so far the French drama has declined. So cunningly economic is
+Nature, she will slip in her moral by hook or by crook. There cannot be an
+intellectual effort in any province of art without a moral implication.
+
+But France, though her great band of playwrights is broken up, still lords
+it over the European drama, or rather, over the European theatre. There is
+still a feeling among our upper-class English audiences that a play, an
+author, an actor and actress, are good _because_ they are French. There
+is, or has been, a sound reason for that feeling. And there is still, as
+M. Filon says in his Preface, a corresponding feeling in France that
+"there is no such thing as an English drama." There has been an equally
+sound reason for that feeling. M. Filon has done us the great kindness of
+trying to remove it. We still feel very shy in coming before our French
+neighbours, like humble, honest, poor relations who are getting on a
+little in the world, and would like to have a nod from our aristocratic
+kinsfolk. We are uneasy about the reception we shall meet, and nervous and
+diffident in making our bow to the French public. A nod from our
+aristocratic relations, a recognition from France, might be of so much use
+in our parish here at home. For in all matters of the modern drama England
+is no better than a parish, with "porochial" judgments, "porochial"
+instincts, and "porochial" ways of looking at things. There is not a
+breath of national sentiment, a breath of national feeling, of width of
+view, in the way English playgoers regard their drama.
+
+M. Filon has sketched in the following pages the history of the recent
+dramatic movement in England. If I were asked what was the distinguishing
+mark of that movement, I should say that during the years when it was in
+progress there was a steadfast and growing attempt to treat the great
+realities of our modern life upon our stage, to bring our drama into
+relation with our literature, our religion, our art, and our science, and
+to make it reflect the main movements of our national thought and
+character. That anything great or permanent was accomplished I am the last
+to claim; all was crude, confused, tentative, aspiring. But there was
+_life_ in it. Again I shall be reminded that dramatic reformers always
+pretend that they return to nature and truth, and are generally found out
+by the next generation to be stale and theatrical impostors. But if anyone
+will take the trouble to examine the leading English plays of the last ten
+years, and will compare them with the _serious_ plays of our country
+during the last three centuries, I shall be mistaken if he will not find
+evidence of the beginnings, the first shoots of an English drama of
+greater import and vitality and of wider aim than any school of drama the
+English theatre has known since the Elizabethans. The brilliant
+Restoration comedy makes no pretence to be a national drama: neither do
+the comedies of Sheridan and Goldsmith. There was no possibility of a
+great national English drama between Milton and the French Revolution, any
+more than there was the possibility of a great school of English poetry.
+And the feelings that were let loose after the convulsions of 1793 did not
+in England run in the direction of the drama. It is only within the
+present generation that great masses of Englishmen have begun to frequent
+the theatre. And as our vast city population began to get into a habit of
+playgoing, and our theatres became more crowded, it seemed not too much to
+hope that a school of English drama might be developed amongst us, and
+that we might induce more and more of our theatre-goers to find their
+pleasure in seeing their lives portrayed at the theatre, rather than in
+running to the theatre to escape from their lives.
+
+After considerable advances had been made in this direction, the movement
+became obscured and burlesqued, and finally the British public fell into
+what Macaulay calls one of its periodical panics of morality. In that
+panic the English drama disappeared for the time, and at the moment of
+writing it does not exist. There are many excellent entertainments at our
+different theatres, and most of them are deservedly successful. But in the
+very height of this theatrical season there is not a single London theatre
+that is giving a play that so much as pretends to picture our modern
+English life,--I might almost say that pretends to picture human life at
+all. I have not a word to say against these various entertainments. I
+have been delighted with some of them, and heartily welcome their success.
+But what has become of the English drama that M. Filon has given so many
+of the following pages to discuss and dissect? I wish M. Filon would
+devote another article in the _Revue des deux Mondes_ to explain to his
+countrymen what has taken place in the English theatre since his articles
+were written. It needs a Frenchman to explain, and a French audience to
+understand, the full comedy of the situation.
+
+For ten years the English theatre-going public had been led to take an
+increasing interest in their national drama,--I mean the drama as a
+picture of life in opposition to a funny theatrical entertainment,--and
+during those ten years that drama had grown in strength of purpose, in
+largeness of aim, in vividness of character-painting, in every quality
+that promised England a living school of drama. It began to deal with the
+great realities of modern English life. It was pressing on to be a real
+force in the spiritual and intellectual life of the nation. It began to
+attract the attention of Europe. But it became entangled with another
+movement, got caught in the skirts of the sexual-pessimistic blizzard
+sweeping over North Europe, was confounded with it, and was execrated and
+condemned without examination. I say without examination. Let anyone turn
+to the _Times_ of November 1894, and read the correspondence which began
+the assault on the modern school of English drama. Let him discover, if
+he can, in the letters of those who attacked it, what notions they had as
+to the relations of morality to the drama. It will interest M. Filon's
+countrymen to know that British playwrights were condemned in the
+interests of British morality. And when one tried to find out what
+particular sort of morality the English public was trying to teach its
+dramatists, one discovered at last that it was precisely that system of
+morality which is practised amongst wax dolls. Not the broad, genial,
+worldly morality of Shakespeare; not the deep, devious, confused, but most
+human morality of the Bible; not a high, severe, ascetic morality; not
+even a sour, grim, puritanic morality. No! let any candid inquirer search
+into this matter and try to get at the truth of it, and ask what has been
+the recent demand of the English public in this matter, and he will find
+it is for a wax-doll morality.
+
+Now, there is much to be said for the establishment of a system of
+wax-doll morality, not only on the English stage, but also in the world at
+large. And all of us who have properly-regulated minds must regret that,
+through some unaccountable oversight, it did not occur to Providence to
+carry on the due progress and succession of the human species by means of
+some such system.
+
+I say it must have been an oversight. For can we doubt that, had this
+excellent method suggested itself, it would have been instantly adopted?
+Can we suppose that Providence would have deliberately rejected so sweetly
+pretty and simple an expedient for putting a stop to immorality, not only
+on the English stage to-day, but everywhere and always?
+
+I know there is a real dilemma. But surely those of us who are truly
+reverent will suspect Providence of a little nodding and negligence in
+this matter, rather than of virtual complicity with immorality--for that
+is what the alternate hypothesis amounts to.
+
+But seeing that, by reason of this lamentable oversight of Providence,
+English life is not sustained and renewed by means of wax-doll morality,
+what is a poor playwright to do? I am quite aware that what is going on in
+English life has nothing whatever to do with what is going on at the
+English theatres in the autumn of 1896. Still, like Caleb Plummer, in a
+matter of this kind one would like to get "as near natur' as possible,"
+or, at least, not to falsify and improve her beyond all chance of
+recognition. I hope I shall not be accused of any feeling of enmity
+against wax-doll morality in the abstract. I think it a most excellent,
+nay, a perfect theory of morals. The more I consider it, the more eloquent
+I could grow in its favour. I do not mean to practise it myself, but I do
+most cordially recommend it to all my neighbours.
+
+To return. The correspondence in the _Times_ showed scarcely a suspicion
+that morality on the stage meant anything else than shutting one's eyes
+alike to facts and to truth, and making one's characters behave like wax
+dolls. As to the bent and purpose of the dramatist, there was so little
+of the dramatic sense abroad, that an act of a play which was written to
+ridicule the detestable, cheap, paradoxical affectations of vice and
+immorality current among a certain section of society was censured as
+being an attempt to _copy_ the thing it was _satirising_! So impossible is
+it to get the average Englishman to distinguish for a moment between the
+dramatist and his characters. The one notion that the public got into its
+head was that we were a set of gloomy corrupters of youth, and it hooted
+accordingly. Now, I do not deny that many undesirable things, many things
+to regret, many extreme things, and some few unclean things, fastened upon
+the recent dramatic movement. And so far as it had morbid issues, so far
+as it tended merely to distress and confuse, so far as it painted vice and
+ugliness for their own sakes, so far it was rightly and inevitably
+condemned, nay, so far it condemned and destroyed itself. But these, I
+maintain, were side-tendencies. They were not the essence of the movement.
+They were the extravagances and confusions that always attend a revival,
+whether in art or religion. And by the general public, who can never get
+but one idea, and never more than one side of that idea, into its head at
+a time, these extravagances and side-shoots are taken for the very heart
+of the movement.
+
+Take the Oxford movement. Did the great British public get a glimmer of
+Newman's lofty idea of the continual indwelling miraculous spiritual
+force of the Church? No. It got a notion into its head that a set of
+rabid, dishonest bigots were trying to violate the purity of its
+Protestant religion, so it hooted and howled, stamped upon the movement,
+and went back to hug the sallow corpse of Evangelicalism for another
+quarter of a century. The movement was thought to be killed. But it was
+only scotched, and it is the one living force in the English Church
+to-day.
+
+Take, again, the aesthetic movement. Did the great British public get a
+glimmer of William Morris's lofty idea of making every home in England
+beautiful? No. It got a notion into its head that a set of idiotic fops
+had gone crazy in worship of sunflowers; so it giggled and derided, and
+went back to its geometric-patterned Brussels carpets, its flock
+wall-papers, and all the damnable trumpery of Tottenham Court Road. The
+movement was thought to be killed, but it was only scotched; and whatever
+beauty there is in English interiors, whatever advance has been made in
+decorating our homes, is due to that movement. Again, to compare small
+things with great, in the recent attempt to give England a living national
+drama, we have been judged not upon the essence of the matter, but upon
+certain extravagances and side-tendencies. The great public got a notion
+into its head that a set of gloomy, vicious persons had conspired to
+corrupt the youth of our nation by writing immoral plays. And the untimely
+accident of a notorious prosecution giving some colour to the opinion, no
+further examination was made of the matter. A clean sweep was made of the
+whole business, and a rigid system of wax-doll morality established
+forthwith, so far, that is, as the modern prose drama is concerned. But
+this wax-doll morality is only enforced against the serious drama of
+modern life. It is not enforced against farce, or musical comedy. It is
+only the serious dramatist who has been gagged and handcuffed. Adultery is
+still an excellent joke in a farce, provided it is conveyed by winks and
+nods. The whole body of a musical entertainment may reek with cockney
+indecency and witlessness, and yet no English mother will sniff offence,
+provided it is covered up with dances and songs. I repeat that if a
+thorough examination is made of the matter, it will be found that the
+recent movement has been judged upon a small side-issue.
+
+We may hope that the English translation of M. Filon's work will do
+something to reinstate us in the good opinion of our countrymen. I think,
+if his readers will take his cue that during the last few years there has
+been an earnest attempt on the part of a few writers to establish a living
+English drama, that is, a drama which within necessary limitations and
+conventions sets out with a determination to see English life as it really
+is and to paint English men and women as they really are--I think if
+playgoers will take that cue from M. Filon, they will get a better notion
+of the truth of the case than if they still regard us as gloomy and
+perverse corrupters of English youth.
+
+A passage from George Meredith may perhaps serve to indicate the position
+of the English drama at the present moment, and to point in what direction
+its energies should lie when the gags and handcuffs are removed, and the
+stiffness gets out of its joints. At the opening of _Diana of the
+Crossways_ these memorable words occur:--
+
+"Then, ah! then, moreover, will the novelist's art (and the dramatist's),
+now neither blushless infant nor executive man, have attained its
+majority. We can then be veraciously historical, honestly transcriptive.
+Rose-pink and dirty drab will alike have passed away. Philosophy is the
+foe of both, and their silly cancelling contest, perpetually renewed in a
+shuffle of extremes, as it always is where a phantasm falseness reigns,
+will no longer baffle the contemplation of natural flesh, smother no
+longer the soul issuing out of our incessant strife. Philosophy bids us to
+see that we are not so pretty as rose-pink, not so repulsive as dirty
+drab; and that, instead of everlastingly shifting those barren aspects,
+the sight of ourselves is wholesome, bearable, fructifying, finally a
+delight. Do but perceive that we are coming to philosophy, the stride
+toward it will be a giant's--a century a day. And imagine the celestial
+refreshment of having a pure decency in the place of sham; real flesh; a
+soul born active, wind-beaten, but ascending. Honourable will fiction (and
+the drama) then appear; honourable, a fount of life, an aid to life, quick
+with our blood. Why, when you behold it you love it,--and you will not
+encourage it?--or only when presented by dead hands? Worse than that
+alternative dirty drab, your recurring rose-pink is rebuked by hideous
+revelations of the filthy foul; for nature will force her way, and if you
+try to stifle her by drowning she comes up, not the fairest part of her
+uppermost! Peruse your Realists--really your castigators, for not having
+yet embraced philosophy. As she grows in the flesh when discreetly tended,
+nature is unimpeachable, flower-like, yet not too decoratively a flower;
+you must have her with the stem, the thorns, the roots, and the fat
+bedding of roses. In this fashion she grew, says historical fiction; thus
+does she flourish now, would say the modern transcript, reading the inner
+as well as exhibiting the outer.
+
+"And how may you know that you have reached to philosophy? You touch her
+skirts when you share her hatred of the sham decent, her derision of
+sentimentalism. You are one with her when--but I would not have you a
+thousand years older! Get to her, if in no other way, by the sentimental
+route:--that very winding path, which again and again brings you round to
+the point of original impetus, where you have to be unwound for another
+whirl; your point of original impetus being the grossly material, not at
+all the spiritual. It is most true that sentimentalism springs from the
+former, merely and badly aping the latter;--fine flower, or pinnacle
+flame-spire, of sensualism that it is, could it do other?--and
+accompanying the former it traverses tracks of desert, here and there
+couching in a garden, catching with one hand at fruits, with another at
+colours; imagining a secret ahead, and goaded by an appetite sustained by
+sheer gratifications. Fiddle in harmonics as it may, it will have these
+gratifications at all costs. Should none be discoverable, at once you are
+at the Cave of Despair, beneath the funeral orb of Glaucoma, in the thick
+midst of poinarded, slit-throat, rope-dependent figures, placarded across
+the bosom Disillusioned, Infidel, Agnostic, Miserrimus. That is the
+sentimental route to advancement. Spirituality does not light it;
+evanescent dreams are its oil-lamps, often with wick askant in the socket.
+
+"A thousand years! You may count full many a thousand by this route before
+you are one with divine philosophy. Whereas a single flight of brains will
+reach and embrace her; give you the savour of Truth, the right use of the
+senses, REALITY'S INFINITE SWEETNESS; for these things are in philosophy;
+and the fiction (and drama) which is the summary of actual Life, the
+within and without of us, is, prose or verse, plodding or soaring,
+philosophy's elect handmaiden."
+
+"Dirty drab and rose-pink, with their silly cancelling contest"--does not
+that sum up the English drama of the last few years? There was certainly a
+shade too much dirty drab outside a while back, but within there was
+_life_. What life is there in the drama that has followed? Where does it
+paint one living English character? Where does it touch one single
+interest of our present life, one single concern of man's body, soul, or
+spirit? What have these rose-pink revels of wax dolls to do with the
+immense, tragic, incoherent Babel around us, with all its multifold
+interests, passions, beliefs, and aspirations? When will philosophy come
+to our aid and depose this silly rose-pink wax-doll morality?
+
+"But," says the British mother, "I must have plays that I can take my
+daughters to see."
+
+"Quite so, my dear ma'am, and so you shall. But do you let your daughters
+read the Bible? The great realities of life are there handled in a far
+plainer and more outrageous way than they are ever handled on the English
+stage, and yet I cannot bring myself to think that the Bible has had a
+corrupt influence on the youth of our nation. Do you let them read
+Shakespeare? Again there is the freest handling of all these subjects, and
+again I cannot think that Shakespeare is a corrupter of English youth."
+
+The question of verbal indecency or grossness has really very little to do
+with the matter. A few centuries ago English gentlewomen habitually used
+words and spoke of matters in a way that would be considered disgusting in
+a smoking-room to-day. We may be very glad to have outgrown the verbal
+coarseness of former generations. But we are not on that account to plume
+ourselves on being the more moral. It is a matter of taste and custom, not
+of morality.
+
+The real knot of the question is in the method of treating the great
+passions of humanity. If the English public sticks to its present decision
+that these passions are not to be handled at all, then no drama is
+possible. We shall continue our revels of wax dolls, and our theatres will
+provide entertainments, not drama. I do not shut my eyes to the fact that
+many of the greatest concerns of human life lie, to a great extent,
+outside the sexual question; and many great plays have been, and can be,
+written without touching upon these matters at all. But the general public
+will have none of them. The general public demands a love-story, and
+insists that it shall be the main interest of the play. And every English
+playwright knows that to offer the public a pure love-story is the surest
+way of winning a popular success. He knows that if he treats of unlawful
+love he imperils his chances and tends to drive away whole classes--one
+may say, the great majority of playgoers.
+
+"Then why be so foolish as to do it?" is the obvious reply.
+
+The dramatist has no choice. He is as helpless as Balaam, and can as
+little tune his prophesying to a foregone pleasing issue. A certain story
+presents itself to him, forces itself upon him, takes shape and coherence
+in his mind, becomes organic. The story comes automatically, grows
+naturally and spontaneously from what he has observed and experienced in
+the world around him, and he cannot alter its drift or reverse its
+significance without murdering his artistic instincts and impulses, and
+making his play a dead, mechanical thing. There are many stories which
+treat of pure love thwarted and baffled and at last rewarded. I do not say
+that these stories may not be quite as worth telling as the others. But
+from the nature of the case, the course of a lawful love, though it may
+not run altogether smooth, does not offer the same tremendous
+opportunities to the dramatist. In affairs of love, as in those of war,
+happy are they who have no history! Almost all the great love-stories of
+the world have been stories of unlawful love, and almost all the great
+plays of the world are built round stories of unlawful love. David and
+Bathsheba, "the tale of Troy divine," Agamemnon, OEdipus, Phaedra,
+Tristram and Iseult, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Abelard and Heloise,
+Paolo and Francesca, Faust and Margaret, Burns and his Scotch lassies,
+Nelson and Lady Hamilton--what have they to do with wax-doll morality?
+What has wax-doll morality to do with them?
+
+I know the question is a difficult one. Much may be said for the French
+custom of keeping young girls altogether away from the theatre. I believe
+Dumas _fils_ did not allow his daughter to see any of his plays before she
+was married--a fact that reminds one of Mr. Brooke's delightful suggestion
+to Casaubon--"Get Dorothea to read you light things--Smollett--_Roderick
+Random_, _Humphrey Clinker_. They're a little broad, but _she may read
+anything now she's married_, you know."
+
+But whatever liberty may for the future be allowed to the dramatist or to
+his hearers, I am sure that no play which came from any English author of
+repute during the years included in M. Filon's survey could work in any
+girl's mind so much mischief as must be done by the constant trickle of
+little cheap cockney indecencies and suggestions which make the staple of
+entertainment at some of our theatres. But, as I have said, it is only the
+serious dramatist who in the present state of public feeling can be called
+to account for immoral teaching.
+
+I have strayed far from my immediate subject. But if I have written
+anything that cannot be considered appropriate as a preface to M. Filon's
+book, I hope it may be accepted as a supplement. At the time M. Filon
+wrote, the English drama was a force in the land, and had the promise of a
+long and vigorous future. Now those who were leading it stand, for the
+moment, defeated and discredited before their countrymen. But the movement
+is not killed. It is only scotched. The English drama will always have
+immortal longings and aspirations, though we may not be chosen to satisfy
+them.
+
+Meantime, one cannot help casting wishful eyes to France, and thinking in
+how different a manner we should have been received by the countrymen of
+M. Filon, with their alert dramatic instinct, their cultivated dramatic
+intelligence, their responsiveness to the best that the drama has to offer
+them. France would not have misunderstood us. France would not have
+treated us in the spirit of Bumble. France would not have mistaken the
+men who were sweating to put a little life into her national drama, for a
+set of gloomy corrupters of youth. France would not have bound and gagged
+us and handed us over to the Philistines.
+
+M. Filon has done us a kindness in bringing us for a moment before the
+eyes of Europe. He will have done us a far greater kindness if the English
+edition of his book helps our own countrymen to form a juster opinion of
+those who, in the face of recent discouragement and misrepresentation,
+who, with many faults and blunders and deficiencies, have yet struggled to
+make the English drama a real living art, an intellectual product worthy
+of a great nation.
+
+HENRY ARTHUR JONES.
+
+
+
+
+AUTHOR'S PREFACE
+
+
+The French public has heard a great deal about modern English poets,
+novelists, statesmen, and philosophers. What is the reason that it hears
+nothing, or next to nothing, about the English drama? Your first impulse
+is, perhaps, to make answer--"Because there is no such thing!" A
+conclusive reason, and one dispensing with the need of any other, were it
+true. But is it true? As it seems to me, it was true some thirty years
+ago, but is true no longer.
+
+And, indeed, were there no English drama at the moment at which I write,
+this in itself would be a phenomenon well worth studying, a problem that
+it would be interesting to solve. The understanding of the miscarriages of
+the mind, of the ineffectual but not wholly vain endeavours, the
+frustrated efforts of Life, contains for the critic, just as it does for
+the follower of any other science, the most fruitful of lessons, the most
+strangely suggestive of all spectacles. Were there no English drama, we
+should have to seek for the reasons--psychological, social, aesthetic--why
+the Anglo-Saxon race, which produced a Shakespeare at a time when it
+counted a bare three millions and covered a mere patch of ground, should
+now be able to produce but clowns and dancers, when it is forty times as
+numerous, and has spread itself throughout the world.
+
+But, as a matter of fact, these premises would be false. There _is_ an
+English drama. The demand for it has been felt, and the supply is
+forthcoming. Or, rather, it has come. It is a strenuous youngster,
+determined to keep alive, bearing up pluckily, if with trouble, against
+all the maladies of childhood, against the dangers of evil influences--the
+brutal roughness of some, and the undue tenderness of others. Its growth
+is slow and laborious; it recalls in no way that marvellous development of
+the early drama, which, towards the end of the sixteenth century, passed
+almost in a breath from the hesitating and halting speech of youth into
+the rich utterance of full maturity. Here we still see doubt, uncertainty,
+confusion. The struggle slackens at times. Improvement is followed by
+lamentable relapse. But there the drama is; it is alive, and it is
+growing.
+
+Ten or a dozen years ago, it was hard to say whether the drama was in
+process of decline or of renascence, whether there was to be an end of it,
+or a new beginning. There were many even among the critics who raised
+their eyes in sorrow to heaven, and spoke of the drama as one speaks of
+the dear departed. And they talked of the past as of a golden age--"the
+palmy days, the halcyon days."
+
+To-day, these pessimists are non-existent. Their place has been taken, it
+is true, by those intolerable carpers who, in every generation, would
+prevent youth from daring, regardless of the fact that youth's chief
+business is to dare. But these good people remain unheeded. Everyone is
+agreed that to-day is better than yesterday; and almost everyone, that
+to-morrow will be better than to-day. Twenty or thirty years ago, the
+dozen theatres of London were almost always empty; there are now three
+times as many, almost always full. The actors, then, were for the most
+part mere clowns; they are artists now. Then, some of the best of them had
+little more than a bare sustenance; now, there are some of the second rank
+who have their house in town and their house in the country. About 1835, a
+well-known author was glad to sell a drama to Frederick Yates, manager of
+the Adelphi, for the sum of L70, _plus_ L10 for provincial rights. In
+1884, a successful play (that had not yet exhausted its popularity)
+brought its author L10,000 within a few months, of which L3000 came from
+the provinces, and to which America and Australia had also contributed.
+This is a very sordid aspect of the case, but a very important one.
+L10,000 to an author must prove as effectual an incentive to the modern
+English author, as did a _coup d'oeil de Louis_ to the French dramatist
+in the reign of the Grand Monarque. Such profits should serve to encourage
+talent, if it be beyond them to generate genius.
+
+It is not difficult to find the real reason why the French public is kept
+so little and so ill informed as to the present prospects of the English
+drama. To read Lord Salisbury's latest speech, all one has to do is to buy
+a paper. One need but go to a bookseller to procure for oneself a volume
+of Swinburne's poems, or a novel by Stevenson, or a work by Lecky or
+Herbert Spencer. It is different with plays. From motives commercial
+rather than literary, it has been the custom not to print these until long
+after their production, and I could instance really popular dramas of
+twenty or forty years ago which have never yet been published. It is
+necessary, therefore, in order to study the drama, to become a regular
+frequenter of the theatre; or rather, it is necessary to have followed its
+course for a number of years in order to note, season by season, the
+changes it has been undergoing, the tendencies which have been developing,
+the growth or disappearance of foreign influences, and, finally, the
+course of each individual talent and of the taste of the public. This
+study, direct from nature--from the life--is not without difficulty, even
+to Englishmen; how much less easy must it be to a Frenchman? Ever since it
+has become the business of an actor, not merely to recite and declaim, but
+to reproduce faithfully life itself, how many small points must escape the
+ear of a foreigner?
+
+And if it be hard to say where the drama now stands, to foresee whither it
+is going, it is still harder to ascertain whence it has come. You expect
+from a critic, and quite properly, not merely a snapshot of a literary
+movement at a certain specified moment, but some record also of its
+process of formation. Affairs in England, even more than elsewhere,
+require to be thus approached by the historical method. There is no
+understanding what they are until you have learned what they have been. In
+the present instance, before examining the resuscitated drama, it is
+necessary to see of what it died, and how long it remained entombed. All
+this has to be found out for oneself. The critics of the preceding
+generations wasted their energies upon inessential details. Theatrical
+"Reminiscences" are crowded with fictitious anecdotes. This department of
+history is like a garden that has been neglected and grown wild; the
+pathways are lost to sight.
+
+I have believed--fondly, perhaps--that, by my special opportunities, I
+should escape some of these difficulties. I have resided long in England.
+I know something of its people and its customs. I know how much value to
+attach to individual testimonies, aided as I am by the thousand opinions
+and feelings which are in the air, so to speak, but which find their way
+never into print. I get the impressions of the public from the public
+itself. Lastly, I love the theatre, and have been an enthusiastic
+playgoer. During the last three or four years more especially I have seen
+all the new pieces; and I may perhaps take this opportunity of expressing
+my appreciation of the courtesy so kindly extended to me in this
+connection by the principal managers. I may mention, among those to whom I
+am most indebted, Mr. Tree, Mr. Hare, Mr. Wyndham, Mr. Alexander, and Mr.
+Comyns Carr, the talented dramatist who, in his _King Arthur_, provided
+Sir Henry Irving with the opportunity of rendering a last homage to the
+genius of Tennyson. Indeed, I have met with wide-open doors and
+outstretched hands wherever I have sought assistance in theatrical
+circles. Many authors have been good enough to place at my disposal copies
+of their works which had been printed only for their own use, or for that
+of their interpreters upon the stage.
+
+But my greatest debt, of course, is to contemporary critics. After having
+first assisted me in my studies, they have done me the further kindness of
+encouraging me with their sympathy upon the publication of the successive
+instalments of my work in the pages of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. Their
+mere attention had been a reward; their kindly approval was more than I
+had hoped for. I trust they will be able to accord the same indulgent
+reception to my book, now that it is complete, and that the spirit and
+feelings which have actuated me in my work will be more fully apparent.
+
+I owe a special acknowledgment to Mr. William Archer. You will see in the
+course of my book the part which he has played and is still playing, the
+excellent seeds which he has sown broadcast, not all of which have yet
+borne fruit. Here, I shall say only that, had I not had his books as a
+guiding thread, I should have hardly ventured to risk myself in the
+labyrinth of theatrical history.
+
+There are, in the England of to-day, two schools of dramatic criticism,
+whose divergence of opinion is clearly marked. They are called "New
+Critics" and "Old Critics," though accidents of date or age are hardly at
+all accountable for their antagonisms; it is possible that during the next
+few years the old criticism may become rejuvenated and that the new
+criticism may age. For my part, I have sided with neither the one nor the
+other, because the role of neutral is best suited to a foreigner. I have
+supplemented my own personal impressions by quotations, taken impartially
+from both camps, of what has struck me in their criticisms as noteworthy,
+or happy, or true. I think that the new school is right in wishing to free
+the English theatre from foreign influences, and in its efforts to give
+the drama a moral value and an ideal. But I think the old school is not
+far wrong when it defends, to a certain extent, the more popular forms of
+dramatic art, and when it would have the drama follow the indications of
+success, and not isolate itself from that public of whose feelings it
+should be the living expression.
+
+One word in conclusion. Among the French critics who have done me the
+honour of discussing my work during its serial publication, more than one
+has come to the conclusion that, after all, these new English dramas were
+not such great affairs, and that it was hardly worth while to make so
+much fuss about them. They forget, these good people, that I promised them
+no marvels; I did not invite them to a display of masterpieces. If there
+are to be masterpieces at all, they will be of to-morrow, not to-day. What
+I have set out to do is to ascertain at what temperature the drama comes
+to flower, to see how a great section of the human race sets about making
+to itself a new vehicle of enjoyment, of emotion, of thought, and, I may
+even add, of moral education. It is an essay in literary history, but also
+in social history. The two things go together,--are, indeed, henceforth
+inseparable.
+
+I do not merely follow, step by step, the gradual transformation of the
+theatrical world; I have endeavoured to make clear the attitude taken up
+by the drama in presence of the crisis through which society has been
+passing during the last score or so of years. In this strange conflict
+between laws and manners, upon which side will the drama definitively take
+up its stand? What part will it play, and what place will it assume, in
+the renovation of England by the democracy? Will it help democracy with
+earnest homilies? Or check it with satire and ridicule? Or will it turn
+aside from such things altogether, and aspire to those serene heights of
+art, to which the noises of the plain can never reach? The secret of its
+downfall or glory lies perhaps in the answering of these questions. It was
+time to submit them, pending the hour of their solution.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+A Glance back--From 1820 to 1830--Kean and Macready--The Strolling
+Player--The Critics--Sheridan Knowles and _Virginius_--Douglas
+Jerrold--His Comedies--_The Rent Day_--_The Prisoner of War_--_Black-eyed
+Susan_--Collapse of the Privileged Theatres--Men of Letters come to the
+Rescue of the Drama--Bulwer Lytton--_The Lady of Lyons_--_Richelieu_--
+_Money_.
+
+
+From 1820 to 1830 the Theatre, or, to be precise, the theatres, prospered
+to all appearances exceedingly. We shall see just now the real
+significance of this prosperity; it may be compared to the great ball
+given by Mercadet on the eve of his bankruptcy. But no one foresaw the
+collapse that was impending. It was the reign of the Adonis of sixty, who
+had spent his life inventing pomades and breaking oaths. It would have
+been droll, indeed, had the man who washed his dirty linen in the House of
+Lords pretended to be scandalised by the licence of the stage. And his
+heir, also a worn-out man of pleasure, had lived for a time with an
+actress, Mrs. Jordan, who, before his accession to the throne, died of
+grief, and forsaken, at St. Cloud. The small girl named Victoria, who
+roamed at this time amongst the lonely avenues of the old park at
+Broadstairs, and who was destined presently to bring marital love and the
+domestic virtues back into fashion, was still engrossed in the minding of
+her dolls.
+
+The "privileged" theatres were frequented, or patronised,--to use the
+recognised English expression, with its savour of old-time
+condescension,--by Society. By the term "privileged," subventioned must
+not be understood. To Drury Lane and Covent Garden alone belonged the
+right of producing the legitimate drama, the plays of Shakespeare, that is
+to say, and of his successors. This was their "privilege," a privilege
+which might soon have become but a doubtful benefit had not great actors
+arisen to keep alive the classical drama by their command on the suffrages
+of the masses. The generation of actors who had studied in the school of
+Garrick, and had maintained its traditions, was taking its farewell of the
+stage in the person of John Kemble and Mrs. Siddons--Siddons, "whose
+voice," one of her contemporaries tells us, "was more delicious than the
+most delicious music." Edmund Kean had already come forward, and after
+him, Macready.
+
+I try to picture to myself these two men as they appeared upon the stage,
+to produce for myself from all the accounts of them that I have read the
+illusion of their living presence. The first thing that comes home to one
+is Kean's Bohemianism, Macready's respectability and good-breeding.
+Macready was the friend of the leading men of letters of his time, and had
+the advantage of their advice and support. Kean's only intimate was the
+brandy-bottle that killed him. Writing to Frederick Yates, the manager of
+the Adelphi, to ask him for a box, he says, "I don't want to herd with the
+mob. I like the money of the public, but the public itself I scorn." He in
+his turn might be looked upon with scorn, were it not for the sufferings
+of his childhood and youth. If ever man had the right to hate life, it was
+he.
+
+At Madame Tussaud's the two rivals may now be seen standing side by side,
+Kean wearing the kilt of Macbeth and Macready the chlamys of Coriolanus.
+Save for his small size, the former seems the better endowed by nature;
+his countenance is sombre and bears the stamp of the tragedian. The
+angular and wrinkled face of Macready, on the other hand,--his slitlike
+mouth, his close-compressed lips and projecting jaws,--might have made the
+fortune of a clown. He had only to emphasise or modify its effects,
+indeed, for his tragic qualities to become comic. It was thus that he
+rendered so admirably the officiousness and fussiness of Oakley, the sly
+sensuality of Joseph Surface, the English Tartufe. Alas! he evoked a smile
+sometimes as Othello; when the Moorish _condottiere_, this personification
+of a passionate, noble, and high-strung race, was lost in an insensate
+negro or, if Theophile Gautier were to be believed, something lower still,
+"an anthropoid ape."
+
+Contemporaries seem agreed in attributing to Kean more genius, more
+talent to Macready. But there are many occasions when talent serves better
+than genius. To see Kean, said Coleridge, was to read Shakespeare by
+flashes of lightning. It is a method which has its merits, but by it one
+misses a good deal. Kean had some wonderful moments, then relapsed into
+dulness and insignificance. He would stumble, like a schoolboy reciting a
+lesson which had no meaning for him, through the whole of the speech of
+the Moor of Venice before the Senate, "letting himself go" only in the
+last verse, in which his emotion on seeing Desdemona brought down the
+house. He concentrated a whole passion into these final words. It was
+always thus with him.
+
+I may say of them, following Mr. Archer: of the two, Kean was the greater
+actor and Macready the greater artist. Everything that pertained to
+instinct was stronger in the one, and everything that pertained to
+intellect was stronger in the other. Macready bore himself best in moods
+of calm, rendered with most effect the more virtuous emotions,--_moral_
+passions one may call them. All that was greatest in Shakespeare, the very
+soul of his poetry, was revealed through Kean. On one point only had
+Macready the advantage: he had a way of gazing into space when his lined
+and haggard countenance seemed to tell of the seeing of things invisible.
+There was no one like Macready for the suggestion of the supernatural. In
+all the other provinces of terror Kean was the real master.
+
+Mr. Wilton, the father of an actress of whom I shall have much to say in
+these pages, used to tell how in his youth, when he was still a young and
+unknown actor, he had had the honour of playing with Edmund Kean. They
+were rehearsing the scene in which Shylock, baulked of his coveted gain,
+rushes frantically upon the stage crying out for his prey.
+
+"Have you ever seen me in this before?" inquired the great actor of his
+humble colleague.
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Well, we must rehearse it then, otherwise you would be too much startled
+this evening."
+
+They went through it, and yet Wilton tells us that when the evening came,
+Kean terrified him so by the indescribable violence of his performance
+that he was within an ace of losing his head and fleeing from the stage as
+one might flee from the cage of a wild beast.
+
+It may be supposed from all this that Kean was in the habit of abandoning
+himself entirely to the inspiration of the moment. Now, inspiration upon
+the stage is almost a meaningless expression. In the very moments when the
+terrifying actor was crossing the stage like a madman, he was counting his
+steps. As for Macready, immediately before the great scene of Shylock he
+would work himself up into excitement, emitting every imaginable oath, and
+brandishing a heavy ladder until he panted actually for breath. Then he
+would rush down the stage, pallid, breathless, the sweat coursing down his
+face, the very picture of a man bursting with rage. The audience would
+have laughed rather than have shuddered had they seen the ladder!
+
+Macready's voice was so rich and so beautiful that it delighted even those
+who could not follow the meaning of the words which it gave forth. But he
+was too intelligent an actor to make use of it as a mere instrument of
+music. Until his time verses were chanted on the stage. He himself was
+content to declaim them. English dramatic verse consists of a succession
+of five iambics, which, by the alternation of short feet and long, results
+in a regular and cadenced rhythm. From time to time an imperfection, the
+deliberate introduction for instance of a trochee, or perhaps a redundant
+syllable added at the end of the verse, has the effect of breaking this
+monotony, but it recommences at once, and the mind relapses under its
+sway, just as a child is sent to sleep again by a lullaby. My foreign ear
+was long in taking to it, but at last I began to derive from its melody
+the same delight that the music of Greek and Latin verse had given me long
+before. This verse, so interesting and curious in its structure, seems to
+bear a certain secret affinity with the genius of the English race; the
+rhythm would seem to have been suggested by the clattering of a horse's
+hoofs, or by the murmuring of waves.
+
+It is, then, no easy matter to deal with it. Macready approached it
+reverentially, as was but fitting in a scholar and a devotee of
+Shakespeare. He wished to leave to it all its melody, its poetic beauty,
+but he wished at the same time to emphasise the most important words and
+to bring out the full force of their meaning. He wished to blend the pure
+classicism of John Kemble with the passion of Kean, and to add that
+tendency to realism which marked his own temperament, and which sometimes
+carried him too far; when as Macbeth he came back from Duncan's room, he
+looked, according to Lewes, like an Old Bailey ruffian.
+
+It is enough for me to have shown that Macready, like many others in
+different parts of Europe in 1825, was prepared for a drama that should be
+in closer touch with life. In France, Romanticism came to turn aside and
+check the movement. In England, there came absolutely nothing.
+
+But the bankruptcy of the new school was still far off, and the literary
+atmosphere was charged with warlike sounds at the time when Macready made
+his appearance in France, with an English company, in the course of the
+year 1827. He was received as a missionary. He had come to preach
+Shakespeare to a tribe of poor "ignoramuses," whom their fathers had
+taught to worship the idols of Lemierre and Luce de Lancival, but who were
+now anxious to be converted. The young "leading lady" was a Miss Smithson,
+whose Irish accent clashed somewhat with the verse of Shakespeare. The
+Parisians thought she had talent, and lost their hearts to "la belle
+Smidson."[1] In London she was a joke. It is certain, however, that these
+performances revealed to him who was to be the only true dramatist of the
+romantic school--to Alexandre Dumas--the secret of a new art; that they
+made an epoch, therefore, in our literary history, and that they affixed
+the seal to the reputation of the English tragedian.
+
+Over and above the privileged theatres, there were a number of others,
+such as the Haymarket and the Adelphi, at which farces and melodramas were
+chiefly given. In the provinces there prevailed a curious system, without
+any analogue, so far as I know, in France, that of going on circuit,--a
+term borrowed, like the system itself, from the language and customs of
+the law. Just as the English judges make the round at certain dates of all
+the important towns within a certain district, holding assizes at each,
+and accompanied by an army of barristers, solicitors, and legal officials
+of all kinds, so the travelling companies of actors would cater for a
+whole county, or group of counties, giving a series of performances in the
+theatre of every town at certain fixed dates, in addition to fete-days and
+market-days. Communication was slow and costly in those days, and trips to
+London infinitely rarer than they are now. The country folk had to look to
+their travelling company to keep them in touch with the successes of the
+moment.
+
+On arriving in a new town, the manager's wife would go about soliciting
+respectfully the patronage of the ladies of the place. The manager busied
+himself over everything, played minor roles, presided over the box-office,
+undertook the scene painting, and would even take off his coat and turn up
+his sleeves and lend a hand to the machinist. His life, and the life of
+all his company, was half _bourgeois_, half Bohemian; always _en route_,
+but always on the same beat, always coming upon familiar and friendly
+faces,--a beat on which his father and grandfather before him had followed
+the same career. He had friends living in every city, dead friends in
+every churchyard. Children were born to him on his travels, and when four
+or five years old made their appearance upon the stage. These comings and
+goings, the journeyings over green fields, the stoppages and ample
+breakfastings at little hillside inns, while the horses browsed at large
+along the hedges,--the freshness and peaceful rusticity of all these
+things, alternating with the tinsel of the theatre and the applause of the
+audiences, with the artificiality and feverishness of theatrical
+life,--must have been a constant entertainment to the little actors and
+actresses of eight or nine. For the adults, however, the life was a hard
+one, and only too often their _roman comique_ was a _roman tragique_ in
+reality.
+
+The public of these small towns wanted, on their part, to know something
+of what went on behind the scenes. Sides were taken on the subject of the
+actor's life, and hot discussions were called forth. Idle pens took to
+writing pamphlets for or against individual actors, and these had to
+defend themselves as best they might against their malignant inquisitors,
+using their booths as pulpits for the purpose. Here, for instance, is an
+incident that occurred one evening in a Northern town after the curtain
+had been raised for _Antony and Cleopatra_. The _jeune premier_ comes
+forward to the footlights, and takes the hand of one of the leading
+actresses with the stiff, staid courtliness of former days, and the
+following dialogue is exchanged between them:--
+
+"Have I ever been guilty of any injustice of any kind to you since you
+have been in the theatre?"
+
+"No, sir" (she replies).
+
+"Have I ever behaved to you in an ungentlemanlike manner?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Have I ever kicked you?"
+
+"Oh, no! sir!"
+
+The audience applauds. Antony and Cleopatra assume their correct attitudes
+and (this prologue to Shakespeare successfully performed) proceed with
+their roles.[2]
+
+From time to time a great artist came forth, after three or four
+generations of mediocrities, from one of these theatrical nurseries. The
+others remained tied to their stake, revolving ceaselessly within the
+orbit of their chain. For them there was no question of glory or fortune.
+They lived simply and happily, if only they came to the end of the year
+without having gone to prison, and if only at the end of their life they
+saw their children growing up and getting educated. Their courage they
+derived in part from the bottle, in part from religion. A correspondence
+which has come to light through an unforeseen chance (a grandson who had
+become famous) revivifies for us the actor-manager on circuit. He is a
+good fellow, but a trifle sententious. He quotes from the works of his
+authors, tragic and comic (he has them at his finger-ends) axioms upon all
+the incidents and experiences of life. He quotes them just as Nehemiah
+Wallington or Colonel Hutchinson used to quote the Bible. He is as easily
+excited and as easily calmed as a child. A storm troubles him as a bad
+omen. A rainbow smiles on him as a promise. Providence may be trusted, he
+believes, to look after the takings of poor players. He is the Vicar of
+Wakefield become _pere noble_.
+
+Neither in this monotonous and easy-going phase of life, nor in the
+theatrical world of London, had anyone any idea of modifying the forms or
+the tendencies of the stage. Those whose duty it should have been to give
+the necessary impulse did not seem even to suspect that there was any such
+work for them to perform. The critics of the time, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt,
+Charles Lamb, have achieved a permanent place in literature. And yet when
+one reads them one is disappointed. Except for a few pages of Lamb, one
+may look to them in vain for the expression of anything like a general
+idea. They are taken up almost altogether in discussing and comparing the
+different actors. It does not occur to them to attempt an appreciation or
+a classification of the plays, for these plays had already been
+definitively classified and pronounced upon. There was no drama, they
+seemed to think, except that of Shakespeare and his satellites; and as for
+comedy, it had said its last word when Goldsmith and Sheridan died. And
+they were quite content that this should be so. They saw no reason why
+they, their successors, and the general public, should not continue until
+the end of time to carp over an entry of Macbeth or an exit of
+Othello!--or why they should not sit out revivals without end of _The
+School for Scandal_ or _She Stoops to Conquer_. There are eras which will
+have novelties at all cost, and eras which cling to antiquity.
+
+Macready, with the instinct of a "realistic" and "modern" actor, kept on
+the lookout for authors. A former Irish schoolmaster, who also had been an
+actor, and whose name was Sheridan Knowles, brought him a tragedy entitled
+_Virginius_ which he had written in three months. He made a good deal of
+this point, never having read, probably, the scene of the sonnet of
+Oronte. The piece was put into rehearsal and played at Covent Garden in
+the spring of 1820. Reynolds introduced the unknown author to the public
+in a carefully-written prologue. In it he ridiculed the drama of the
+period, which he described as "stories"--
+
+  "... piled with dark and cumbrous fate,
+  And words that stagger under their own weight."
+
+He promised to return to Truth and Nature, the invariable programme of all
+attempts at reforming the drama. And as a matter of fact, _Virginius_
+might be accepted in a certain sense as a return to Truth and Nature. It
+belonged to what we were going to call in France, twenty-five years later,
+the School of Common Sense. Or if one prefers to look back instead of
+forward, one might say that in it the rules of Diderot and Sedaine's
+_Drame Bourgeois_ seem to have been transferred to Roman tragedy. The
+piece, like the plays of Shakespeare, was partly in verse and partly in
+prose, but the verse was little more, really, than metrical prose. The
+plot developed clearly and logically with a scrupulous observance of the
+probable and natural. The heroine (one smiles at having to describe her by
+so grand a name) is for all the world a little _pensionnaire_ who might
+have got her ideas on rectitude from Miss Edgeworth. She occupies herself
+with her needle in working together her initials and those of the young
+man of her choice, who is no other than the tribune Icilius. It is this
+piece of embroidery which reveals her secret. "My father is incensed with
+you," she says to Icilius, and, her lover becoming impassioned, she covers
+her face with her hands, saying (as is correct at such a juncture), "Leave
+me, leave me!" He does not obey, and the author, not knowing how else to
+prolong the scene, has recourse to high-sounding language.... "Thou dost
+but beggar me, Icilius," exclaims Virginia, "when thou makest thyself a
+bankrupt." And Icilius replies, ... "My sweet Virginia, we do but lose and
+lose, and win and win, playing for nothing but to lose and win. Then let
+us drop the game--and thus I stop it," and he stops it by seizing her in
+his arms.
+
+In the scene in which the client of Appius attempts to possess himself of
+her, Virginia remains absolutely mute. She is mute also in the great scene
+of the judgment, and she seems, moreover, to have understood nothing of
+what has been happening, for she asks her father if he is going to take
+her home. From the angels and furies of Shakespeare and Corneille we have
+come down to a virtuous idiot, and are told that this is a return to
+Nature.
+
+Virginius is an excellent father, a liberal-minded member of the middle
+class, interesting himself in politics. He knows his rights and does not
+stand in awe of the ministers. He reminds one of the city man who returns
+home to his comfortable residence in Chiswick or Hampstead after his day's
+work in his Leadenhall Street office. He is a widower, but his house is
+looked after by a very respectable elderly person, in whose excellent
+sentiments and weak intelligence we recognise a housekeeper of the
+superior type. The whole household is tranquil, well behaved,
+Christian,--I might even say, Puritan.
+
+Doubtless the Romans of the republic were men like ourselves, but a true
+picture of their humanity should reveal characteristics different from
+ours. The author should either have sought out these characteristics, or
+else have restricted himself to that sphere of great passions and heroic
+madnesses in which all the centuries meet on common ground. One is
+obliged, however unwillingly, to admit the impossibility of retrospective
+realism.
+
+When Virginius returns from the camp to defend his child, he gazes on her
+long, and tells her he had never seen her look so like her mother--
+
+  "... It was her soul, ... her soul that played just then
+  About the features of her child, and lit them
+  Into the likeness of her own. When first
+  She placed thee in my arms--I recollect it
+  As a thing of yesterday!--she wished, she said,
+  That it had been a man. I answered her,
+  It was the mother of a race of men;
+  And paid her for thee with a kiss."...
+
+There is something at once virile and moving in this passage, but how many
+such cases are to be found in this tragedy? The paternal emotion of
+Virginius prepares us but ill for the heroic crime which he is to commit.
+There is the same contrast between the antiquity of the events and the
+modernness of the characters.
+
+But the ruin of the piece was the fifth act. Virginia dead, it remains
+only to punish Appius according to the good old laws of tragic justice.
+For that, a single moment and a single gesture had been enough. Sheridan
+Knowles was in the position of being obliged to write his fifth act and
+having nothing to put into it. He had recourse to a mad scene. Merimee has
+written that "_il faut laisser aux debutants les foux et les chiens_."
+This doctrine has Homer and Shakespeare against it. On the other hand, the
+example of Sheridan Knowles proves that the recourse to madness will not
+always get the beginner out of his difficulty.
+
+Virginius has succeeded in making his way into Appius's prison--
+
+  "How if I thrust my hand into your breast,
+  And tore your heart out, and confronted it
+  With your tongue. I'd like it. Shall we try it?"
+
+When the old centurion plunged his hands into the robes of the _decemvir_,
+as though he expected to find Virginia in his pocket, and when Appius,
+horrified at finding himself "caged with a madman," appealed for help with
+all the strength of his lungs whilst calling out to his assailant, "Keep
+down your hands! Help! Help!"--I cannot imagine how the spectators of 1820
+can have refrained from laughter. The two men quitted the scene fighting,
+and turned up again in another room,--for the prison was a veritable suite
+of rooms. Having killed Appius, the old man grew calm, and Icilius had
+but to call him by his name to bring back to him his reason. He slipped a
+small urn into his hands. "What is this?" asks Virginius. "That is
+Virginia." And the curtain fell.
+
+Contemporary critics admitted that the last act was somewhat weak. It was
+curtailed, but delete it as one would, it was still too long. Had it been
+reduced to ten lines, these ten lines had been ten lines too much.
+
+In spite of everything, however, _Virginius_, by Macready's help, remained
+a masterpiece for twenty-five years! Knowles made haste to produce some
+more. He tells in one of his naive prefaces, how he went to stop with his
+friend, Mr. Robert Dick, near an Irish lough known for its scenery and its
+fish, how he would spend the morning at his composition and the afternoon
+angling, and how his host would snatch his fishing line from his hands
+whenever he caught him using it before midday.... If only Mr. Dick had let
+him fish in peace! The trout he might have hooked had been at least as
+valuable as his verse and prose.
+
+If there was any sort of foreshadowing of a national drama in the years
+1830 to 1840, it must be sought for in the works of Douglas Jerrold.
+France knows little of Jerrold, who knew France so well. His was a valiant
+little soul; his life was one long battle--a battle against obscurity,
+against ill luck, against the enemies of his country, against the
+oppressors of the poor, last but not least, against all those whom he
+disliked. He belonged to that theatrical world at which I have glanced. He
+was the son of a provincial manager who had met with failure. In his early
+youth, while yet a child, one may say, he served as midshipman in the wars
+against Napoleon. He became a journalist later, and threw himself into the
+midst of politics. Whatever may be said of his caustic and aggressive
+temperament, he belonged, every inch of him, to that noble generation
+which aspired so fervently after better things, which strove so
+strenuously for what was right, which believed it could help humanity
+forward on the way to a progress without bounds. For forty years he
+vibrated with generous passions, and grew calm only in the presence of
+death, which he met like a stoic but with a simplicity not all the stoics
+knew. I have been brought into intimate relations with his son, who has
+repeated to me his last words--"This is as it should be." To fight for
+justice and to accept the inevitable without fear,--this was the life of a
+man.
+
+_The Rent Day_ was played on January 25, 1832, that is to say, at the
+commencement of the memorable year which was to see the passing of the
+Reform Bill. It is the day upon which the rents have become due. The
+tenants have brought their money. There is drinking and laughing and
+singing, the while the heaps of crowns are exchanged for receipts,--for
+nothing was accomplished in England in those days without drinking, and
+on rent day it had been almost a disgrace not to be at least "well on."
+The middleman is presiding over the function. This morning he has received
+a letter from the young squire, thus expressed--"Master Crumbs, use all
+despatch, and send me, on receipt of this, five hundred pounds. Cards have
+tricked me and the devil cogged the dice. Get the money at all costs, and
+quickly.--ROBERT GRANTLEY." The middleman therefore must have no pity.
+There is one farmer who cannot pay; his brother the schoolmaster comes to
+plead for him. He himself is too poor to lend--
+
+    _Toby_ (the schoolmaster): "My goods and chattels are a volume of
+    _Robinson Crusoe_, ditto _Pilgrim's Progress_, with Plutarch's
+    _Morals_, much like the morals of many other people--a good deal dog's
+    eared."...
+
+    _Crumbs_: "Has your brother no one to speak for him?"
+
+    _Toby_: "Now, I think on't, yes. There are two."
+
+    _Crumbs_: "Where shall I find them?"
+
+    _Toby_: "In the churchyard. Go to the graves of the old men, and there
+    are the words the dead will say to you:--'We lived sixty years in
+    Holly Farm; in all that time we never begged an hour of the squire; we
+    paid rent, tax, and tithe; we earned our bread with our own hands, and
+    owed no man a penny when laid down here. Well, then, will you be hard
+    on young Heywood; will ye press upon our child, our poor Martin, when
+    murrain has come upon his cattle and blight fallen upon his corn?'
+    This is what they will say."
+
+The middleman is not one to be moved by the supplications of the
+schoolmaster. He replies monotonously, inexorably--"My accounts; I must
+settle my accounts!" Grouped round him, farther back, are the instruments
+of his lowly tyrant, the beadle (for whom a young writer now hidden from
+the public eye in the gallery of the House of Commons, Charles Dickens,
+has in store so terrible a cudgelling) and the appraiser. In those days it
+was the beadle's function to execute evictions for the benefit of young
+squires who had lost at cards. The first act of _The Rent Day_ concludes
+with a spectacle of this kind. We witness the seizing of the peasant's bed
+and of all his furniture, down to a bird-cage and the children's toys. The
+scene follows its course; entreaties, curses, threats, then silence and
+desolation. It was thus that the social question was submitted. Had we
+been there, and in our twentieth year,--you and I who have to contest
+against the grandsons of the victims, become in their turn
+slave-drivers,--we should have joined with the rest of the pit in cheering
+Jerrold.
+
+The first act gives promise of a vigorous comedy of manners, but we sink
+gradually into a dense melodrama crowded with absurd incidents and
+extravagant surprises. Was this Jerrold's fault, or that of a public which
+insisted upon monster jokes and monster crimes? I am inclined to adopt
+the latter explanation, for supply is regulated by demand; a mercantile
+axiom which resolves itself in a great natural and highly scientific law.
+
+Jerrold could achieve a light and realistic touch at need, and he has
+given proof of it in _A Prisoner of War_. The scene is laid in France
+shortly after the rupture of the Treaty of Amiens. Quite impartially, and
+with consummate wit, Jerrold holds up to ridicule the _chauvinisme_ of the
+two nations. He does not confound bombast with valour. "Soldiers," says
+one character, "should die and civilians lie for their country." We are
+shown--and this has some historical value--the English prisoners living
+comfortably in a French town, frequenting the Cafe Imperial, regaling
+themselves on the bulletins of the "Grande Armee," with no other
+obligation than that of answering the roll-call morning and evening. They
+have money, for the lodging-house keepers compete for their favour; and
+they pay little French boys to sing "Rule Britannia." As it seems to me,
+if Garneray's Memoirs are to be believed, our compatriots were hardly so
+well off on the English hulks.
+
+But what strikes me most in _A Prisoner of War_ is one really ingenious
+and moving scene. It is the evening. An old officer, a prisoner, has
+remained late over a game of cards with a comrade. Meantime his daughter
+Clary has a man in her bedroom. Don't be alarmed--the man is her husband.
+A secret marriage is always introduced in English plays wherever a
+seduction is to be found in ours. Suddenly Clary is called out to, loudly,
+by her father. She imagines herself found out, and arrives quite pallid.
+What had she been doing? her father asks. How was it she had a light still
+in her window? So she had been reading, eh? Still reading--always reading.
+And what had she been reading? Novels! As though there weren't enough real
+tears in the world--real, scalding, bitter tears from breaking hearts--but
+we must have a parcel of lying books to make people cry double! And what
+was this silly novel of hers? Clary doesn't know what to answer, and
+begins telling her own story--the youth of no family and fortune, the
+moment of recklessness, the giving of her heart to him and then her hand.
+"Well, and how did it end?" asks the old officer. Clary had "not come to
+the end"! Ah, then (he resumes), she had turned down the page when he had
+interrupted her? But he could tell her how it ended. The young couple went
+upon their knees, and the father swore a little, then took out his pocket
+handkerchief, wiped his eyes, and forgave them.
+
+At this Clary's face lights up with hope. So that would be the ending,
+according to him! He could assure her of it? Yes, he replies, he could
+assure her of it. She is on the point of falling upon her knees. Behind
+the half-open door, behind which there glimmers the light of a candle, her
+lover waits, ready to rush forward upon a word from her. "Of course, in
+real life it would be quite another thing," goes on her father. "If it
+were I, what would you do?" "I'd kill him like a dog. And as for you--But
+there, it's too horrible to think of! Let's talk of something else." And
+he tells her he has found a husband for her. Naturally she protests. The
+old man goes off again into a fury. "These cursed novels are turning your
+head. I shall go and burn them this instant." And he steps towards the
+door, behind which Clary's lover stands trembling.
+
+All this is old-fashioned enough; it dates from the time when the drama
+was made out of the materials of a vaudeville. And yet I think that even
+nowadays this scene would tell.
+
+But once again Jerrold had to follow the public taste which led him so
+terribly astray. His greatest success was his worst production,
+_Black-eyed Susan_, the popularity of which does not appear to have been
+even yet exhausted. The hero is a sailor, who translates the simplest
+ideas into nautical phraseology; the heroine a woman of humble birth, who
+expresses the loftiest sentiments in the finest language. The prolonged
+success of such a piece shows the delight which the lower sections of the
+public derive from the extravagant and the absurd,--the gross idealism, as
+one may call it, of the masses.
+
+It is more difficult to understand how Jerrold, who had some regard for
+realism, and who had himself served on the sea, could have brought himself
+to write a drama which had in it not a semblance of truth, not a touch of
+nature. In spite of all, however, even in _Black-eyed Susan_, one may find
+that unrestrained violence, that _diable au corps_, which our fathers
+accepted willingly as passion.
+
+It was not the public taste alone that was at fault; from the year 1830
+the commercial decadence of the English theatre became more and more
+marked. As often happens, contemporaries failed to appreciate the real
+meaning of this, and attributed it to accidental causes; amongst others,
+to the rivalry between Drury Lane and Covent Garden, a rivalry which was
+carried to absurd extremes under some of the managers, who bid against
+each other, both for plays and players, to an extent that ruined them.
+Then came the notion of ending this dangerous competition by uniting the
+two houses under the same management, but the enterprise proved too big
+for one man and for a single company. The separate existence had to come
+into force again. A certain Captain Polhill, who aspired to the role of a
+Maecenas, lost fifty thousand pounds in two years over the management of
+Drury Lane. Then Macready in his turn had a try, and managed the two
+theatres successively from 1838 to 1843.
+
+The privileged theatres were no longer living on their privilege; they
+were dying of it. Theatres were springing up all round them, which
+succeeded sometimes in drawing the public by strange means. Edmund Yates,
+whose father was then manager of the Adelphi, has given us in his memoirs
+some idea of the attractions then in vogue: a Chinese giant, Indian
+dancers, a legless acrobat who got himself up with spreading wings as a
+monstrous fly, and who sprang about, tied on to a thread, from floor to
+ceiling. The privileged theatres had no other course than to emulate the
+unprivileged ones. They produced Shakespeare in the form of
+curtain-raisers, or to wind up the evening before half-empty benches. They
+sliced him, carved him limb from limb, and served him up in bits, or
+floating in a dish of music, with a garnishment of loud and vulgar _mise
+en scene_, of which the contemporaries of Elizabeth would have been
+ashamed. And, in spite of all, in spite even of Macready's talent (Kean
+had died in 1833), they could not get the public to accept him. The new
+public which filled the theatres was gluttonous rather than _gourmet_, and
+wanted not quality but quantity--at least six acts every evening, and
+sometimes even seven or eight. Masterful, clamorous, ill-bred, uncouth in
+its expression both of enjoyment and of dissatisfaction, its attitude
+astounded Price Puckler-Muskau, a very careful observer who visited
+England about the time. Macready acknowledges that there were some corners
+in Drury Lane where a respectable woman might not venture. The barbarians
+had begun to arrive; it was the first wave of democracy before which the
+_habitue_, the playgoer of the old school, was forced to flee.
+
+In 1832 a Commission was instituted by Parliament for the purpose of
+going into the question of liberty for the theatre. The members could not
+agree upon the subject, and the question was not settled until after
+eleven years of discussion. Before this ultimate surrender of Privilege
+and Tradition to the new spirit, one last effort had been made by men of
+letters to save the theatre. This was when the great tragedian undertook
+the management of Covent Garden. There was only one feeling in the world
+of literature: "We must back up Macready!" Everyone helped. John Forster
+applied himself to the stage management. Leigh Hunt left aside his
+criticisms to undertake a tragedy (based on a legend in which Shelley had
+already found inspiration), and those who could not do so much penned
+prologues and epilogues and brought them to Covent Garden, just as in
+former days, at moments of national peril, the patriotic rich brought
+their valuables to the Mint.[3]
+
+From this abortive renaissance there remain one reputation and three
+plays. The three plays are _The Lady of Lyons_, _Richelieu_, and _Money_;
+the reputation is that of Bulwer, the first Lord Lytton. Bulwer passed
+himself off as a _grand seigneur_ and a genius; he was really but a clever
+man and a dandy, who exploited literature for his social advancement. He
+affected a lofty originality, but his talents were mostly imitative. His
+chief gift, almost entirely wanting in his books, but very notable in his
+life, was what we call _finesse_. He took from the Byronian Satanism as
+much as England would put up with in 1840. He copied Victor Hugo secretly
+and discreetly. A sort of Gothic democrat, he managed at the same time to
+charm romantic youths and flatter the proletariat by pretending to hurl
+down that society in whose front rank he aspired to take his place. His
+novels were terribly long-winded, but there are generations which find
+such a quality to their taste. When at last it was discovered that his
+sublimity was a spurious sublimity, that his history was false history,
+his "middle-ages" bric-a-brac, his poetry mere rhetoric, his democracy a
+farce, his human heart a heart that had never beat in a man's breast, his
+books mere windy bladders,--why, it was too late! The game had been played
+successfully and was over--the squireen of Knebworth, the self-styled
+descendant of the Vikings, had founded a family and hooked a peerage.
+
+He had an eye for all the popular causes which were to be served--and were
+likely to be of service. When there was talk of reforming the drama, he at
+once came to the front and took the lead. He was the heart and soul of the
+Commission of 1832. He was one of those who came to the support of
+Macready in 1838. It was to this end he wrote _The Lady of Lyons_ (without
+putting his name to it at first).
+
+This is a literary melodrama; a detestable combination, for melodrama,
+considered either as a variation from drama proper or as a separate type,
+is not to be raised to the dignity of literature by the veneering of it
+with a thin layer of poetry. This operation does but produce wild and
+violent incongruities. In the first act of _The Lady of Lyons_, Madame
+Deschappelles is a Palais Royal _Maman_. Only a Palais Royal _Maman_, and
+only one of the most pronounced of them at that, could imagine she would
+become a dowager princess by marrying her daughter to a prince. Pauline
+belongs to the same repertory. What are one's feelings, then, on hearing
+tragic verses from her lips in the third act and seeing her compete with
+Imogene and Griselda in the sublimity (and absurdity) of her
+self-sacrifice! In the fourth act she has resumed something of her natural
+temperament--the temperament of a prim and tedious governess.
+
+But I suppose I must put up with Pauline Deschappelles willy-nilly! It is
+one of the accepted doctrines of the old dramatic psychology that a
+character can pass from good to evil at critical moments, and pass out
+again even when all egress is barred. It is an absurd notion, but if
+Bulwer conforms to it, at least he is in the same boat with many others.
+Where he is himself at fault--that which indicates the obliquity of his
+moral outlook--is his having presented to us in Claude Melnotte a hero who
+is a double-dyed cheat. A mere peasant by birth, he passes himself off as
+a prince and marries under his false name the daughter of a rich
+bourgeois; a soldier by profession, he becomes a general within two years,
+and in these two years amasses a fortune. How? By what methods of
+brigandage we are not told, but we are left to accept it as a matter of
+course. As regards the first point, love may perhaps be held to excuse the
+crime; as regards the second, no one seems ever to have raised any
+objection, and it has been left for me to state my difficulty. In a
+sufficiently disingenuous preface, Bulwer accounts for the incoherences
+and extravagances of his hero by the state of extraordinary excitement
+into which men's minds had been thrown by the French Revolution. This
+explanation has sufficed for the author's fellow-countrymen, and the
+Revolution has a broad back. But I am afraid that Bulwer was not clear in
+his mind as to the kind of madness to which Frenchmen were impelled by
+it,--and still more, that he has confounded our generals with our
+contractors. Our Desaix and our Ouvrards are not made of the same clay nor
+moulded in the same form; a fact as to which, unfortunately, he remained
+unenlightened.
+
+After having made his anonymity serve the purpose of an advertisement, the
+author consented to reveal his identity whilst announcing at the same time
+that _The Lady of Lyons_ would be a sole experiment. The very next year he
+appeared before the public with the tragedy of _Richelieu_, in which
+Macready played the principal role. This piece may be compared with the
+Cromwell of Victor Hugo. It was marked by the same mixture of tragedy and
+melodrama; the same display of historical documents and the same ignorance
+of what is essential in history; the same use of the lowest and the most
+eccentric expedients to raise a laugh or cause a shudder; the same
+superficial and crude psychology which in each character, male or female,
+great or small, reveals the personality of the author. Even when this
+author is a Victor Hugo it is bad enough! But when it is a Bulwer--!
+
+When he blended into one plot the _journee des Dupes_ and the conspiracy
+of the Duc de Bouillon, together with some features borrowed from the
+adventure of Cinq-Mars and De Thou, the author mingled together two
+periods which could not and should not be thus confounded, the beginning
+and the end of Richelieu's career.[4] He managed, too, to falsify English
+history as well, incidentally, by making Richelieu refer in Council to
+Cromwell, at that time a still obscure member of the House of Commons.
+Richelieu speaks of the antagonism between Charles and Oliver at a period
+when the latter is not even a captain of cavalry. But what is an
+anachronism of this kind compared to that which involves the principal
+character in one continued topsy-turveydom? It is the drawback both of the
+historical play and the historical novel, that they put the great figures
+of history before us in a form and in an attitude that their
+contemporaries could have never witnessed; confessing, describing,
+revealing themselves just to illustrate their character by their
+conversation, always dilating on their deeds instead of doing them. But of
+all the braggarts in theatrical history, Bulwer's Richelieu is the most
+vainglorious and the most intolerable. It is all very well for the author
+to say in his preface that the cardinal was the father of French
+civilisation and the architect of the monarchy; he may say what he likes:
+but we cannot stand Richelieu when he talks of himself in the same strain
+and in the third person, just as Michelet and Carlyle might in a fit of
+raving; nor when he counterfeits death in order to play the ghost, nor
+when he weeps theatrically, and addresses declamatory love messages to "La
+France."--"France, I love thee,--Richelieu and France are one!" Nor can we
+believe in him when he sees modern France come to life again from out the
+cinders of feudalism. After such nonsensical dicta, indeed, one would be
+hardly surprised to hear him exclaim, "I am the precursor of 1789; what I
+cannot consummate, Bonaparte shall achieve in the Sessions of the Conseil
+d'Etat!"
+
+The secondary characters are one idea'd. Beringhen can say nothing but
+"Let's discuss the pate!" and the Duc d'Orleans is limited to "Marion
+dotes on me." To the tragi-comedy there is tacked on a melodrama made
+after the approved methods of the Boulevard--a succession of events and
+surprises which cancel out. You feel you are expected to shout, Bravo
+Richelieu! bravo Baradas! Just as at the Porte Saint Martin or at the
+Ambigu you cry out, Bravo d'Artagnan! bravo Mordaunt! It is the system of
+Dumas without his art.
+
+Lord Lytton lacked both imagination and ingenuity. His effects are poor,
+and he overdoes them. The first resuscitation of Richelieu comes near to
+impressing one, the second is simply silly. The kernel of the play
+consists of a document which passes through every pocket but never reaches
+its address. At the moment, the owner of this treasure is a prisoner at
+the Bastille. Instead of searching him, the Government sends a courtier to
+seize him by the throat and rob him of it. The scene is witnessed through
+a key-hole and described to us by a little page of Richelieu's--the role
+being played by a woman. The page throws himself on the courtier the
+moment he comes out in order to snatch from him the fateful paper, and the
+conclusion of the drama results from these two encounters. One might sum
+up _Richelieu_ as a mixture of bad Hugo with worse Dumas!
+
+_Money_ is by way of depicting English Society as it was in 1840. It
+recognised itself, or rather its enemies recognised it, in this
+caricature! Are we to believe that the gambling scene in the third act
+takes place in an aristocratic club? It is more in keeping with the back
+parlour of a public-house. A very well-known critic, who represents the
+ideas of a whole class and of a whole school, in alluding to the success
+which the piece met with in the first instance, and which it meets with
+still on every revival, declares that the spectators wished to show their
+appreciation of the "humour of a scholar." I must confess that I can
+recognise neither the scholar nor the humour. On the contrary, what I see
+in it is a spurious sensibility and that moral obliquity to which I have
+referred. Alfred Evelyn, who has been enriched by the will of an eccentric
+cousin, and who now sees the world at his feet after having experienced
+its disdain, decides to share his fortune with an unknown girl who has
+sent L10 to his old nurse at a time when he himself was too poor to come
+to her aid. It is in this silly intention that he is throwing away his
+happiness, and that the plot finds its motive. He is engaged to a young
+girl whom he doesn't love, and in order to get rid of her, this mirror of
+refinement, this Alcestes with all his fine scorn of average humanity,
+pretends to ruin himself at play in the presence of his destined
+father-in-law. The girl whom he loves has refused (in Act I.) to marry
+him, not because he is poor, but because, poor herself, she was afraid of
+being a drag on him in his career. But someone had entered during her
+explanation and she had not been able to finish her sentence. She finishes
+it in the last act, and it transpiring also that it was she who had really
+sent the L10, the two lovers fall into each other's arms. That is really
+all there is in _Money_ over and above the social satire, which to my
+thinking is terribly far-fetched, and that wonderful "humour" which I have
+been unable personally to discover.
+
+Bulwer was not the man to save the erring Drama. Stronger men than he
+might have tried in vain to do so. It was not to the men of letters, the
+scholars, that it was to owe its salvation. The democracy had to come to
+the use of reason and to educate itself. Instead of the artificial drama
+which was offered to them, they held out for a drama sprung from its own
+loins, born of its own passions, made after its own image, palpitating
+with its own life; literary it might become later, if it could. And to
+this end, in the words of Olivier Saint-Jean, "It was necessary that
+things should go worse still before they could go better."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+Macready's Withdrawal from the Stage--The Enemies of the Drama in 1850:
+Puritanism; the Opera; the Pantomime; the "Hippodrama"--French Plays and
+French Players in England--Actors of the Period--The Censorship--The
+Critics--The Historical Plays of Tom Taylor and the Irish Plays of Dion
+Boucicault.
+
+
+Macready played once more in Paris in 1846, but the times were changed,
+and he achieved only a _succes d'estime_. He then visited America, where
+his presence evoked professional jealousies and bad blood, resulting in
+serious riots in which lives were lost. On February 26, 1851, the great
+actor gave his farewell performance. A brilliant page of Lewes has kept
+alive until our own day the emotion of this memorable occasion, which
+marks an era in the history of English art. Macready was in deep mourning;
+he had just lost a daughter of twenty years of age. He did not declaim his
+speech, but gave it forth with dignified sadness. In it he laid claim only
+to two merits--that of having brought back the text of Shakespeare in its
+purity, and that of having made of the theatre a place in which decent
+folks need not hesitate to be seen. He foresaw that if his glory as an
+artist should fade with the gradual disappearance of those who had
+witnessed it, his work as a literary restorer and a moral reformer would
+survive. And he was right.
+
+The farewell performance was followed by a banquet, at which the
+inevitable Bulwer took the chair. John Forster read aloud at it some
+verses by Tennyson. The Laureate had graven on the tomb of the tragedian's
+career the three words, "Moral, Grave, Sublime."
+
+Then all was over. The voice that had thrilled so many souls was to be
+heard only at charitable entertainments and provincial gatherings. And
+when he died in 1873 England had forgotten him.
+
+There is a story of his last days which I cannot refrain from repeating,
+though it has no bearing really upon the subject of this book. When the
+old man, confined by paralysis to his armchair, was cut off from the world
+by the loss of several of his senses, he would be seen acting to himself
+(barely so much as moving his lips the while) the masterpieces he had
+loved. There was nothing to reveal the progress of the play save the light
+that would illumine his ever-mobile countenance, to which new lines had
+been given by conscious use and solitary thought.
+
+How fine they must have been, these impersonations--Lear, Hamlet,
+Macbeth--in the mysterious half-shades of his life's evening and in the
+silent theatre of his mind, where there was nothing to shackle the artist
+in his struggle after perfection, where every aspiration was an
+achievement!
+
+If I have spoken at some length of Macready, it is because I cannot bring
+myself to regard him as the representative of a dead art, the last High
+Priest of a shattered idol. On the stage and off the stage, Macready was a
+pioneer. He was the first to see the coming of Realism, and he was the
+first actor of good breeding. But a long time was to ensue ere his example
+would be followed and understood. The stage, when he left it, was in a
+state of confusion and of squalor difficult to describe.
+
+Strive as Macready would to cleanse the theatre, the prejudice which kept
+certain classes apart from it seemed to grow and spread. The accession of
+the young Queen heralded one of those moods of puritanism which are
+chronic with English society. Young Men's and Young Women's Christian
+Associations multiplied, and, in providing innocent and free amusements
+for the artizan, they competed with the theatre at the same time as with
+the public-house. With the higher classes it was music that was injuring
+the drama by its rivalry. For a long time--as Lady Gay Spanker put it in a
+comedy of the time--the English had known no music but the barking of the
+hounds; now it was that Society began to scramble for boxes at extravagant
+prices to hear Grisi sing. A quarrel between the singer and her manager
+having led to a severance, the now "star"-less company, by a marvellous
+stroke of luck, was enabled to shine afresh with Jenny Lind. This rivalry
+continued, and together with the burning of Her Majesty's Theatre it led
+to the invasion of the two great London theatres by foreign musicians. The
+opera held sway from the end of March to the end of July. The Pantomime,
+at first humble and modest, but growing stronger every year, began now at
+Christmas and lasted throughout a considerable portion of the winter. A
+short autumn season was all that remained for the drama, or rather
+melodrama, and for what was worse than the others, the "Hippodrama." Thus
+was entitled a new kind of production in which horses had the principal
+roles. More than one popular author was glad to invent plots for these
+singular protagonists. Shakespeare, who had had to go turns hitherto with
+the lions of the tamer Van Ambrugh,--he and they roaring on alternate
+evenings,--had to give in completely before the Hippodrama. He took refuge
+in a suburban theatre, Sadler's Wells, with the actor Phelps, and there he
+was able eventually to boast, like that survivor of the Reign of
+Terror--_J'ai vecu_. To arouse any interest in him amongst the English
+public, it was necessary that he should be stumbled through by foreigners
+or lisped by babes.
+
+According to an old brochure of the time which groans over the depth of
+the humiliation of the theatre, people stood still to look a second time
+at the madman who could attempt to run Covent Garden or Drury Lane. To the
+reckless amateur succeeded the shameless adventurer, the shy contractor
+with empty pockets that called for filling. About 1850 one of these great
+theatres was managed by an ex-policeman who had started a restaurant;
+later it passed into the hands of a theatre attendant. One manager was
+arrested for theft in the wings of his own theatre. It is easy to imagine
+how dramatic art would develop in the hands of such men. They dispensed
+with scenery and stage properties, and made shift with an empty stage;
+they squandered their substance and lavished their genius upon the art of
+advertising; their puffs and prospectuses were the only masterpieces of
+the times. There were some who sought to excite English chauvinism,
+pre-jingoism as one may call it, by such performances as that of the
+national acrobat who turned head over heels ninety-one times while his
+American rival was achieving but eighty-one, thus conquering the New World
+by ten somersaults.
+
+These things succeeded in attracting the public, but _what_ public?
+Theatre-goers were but a small section really of the public--a group apart
+on whom lay a certain suspicion of immorality connected with an evil
+reputation of being un-English. There was some ground for this last
+reproach. Foreigners were gaining ground. It would seem that there was no
+getting along without us French between 1850 and 1865. We were translated
+and adapted in every form. Our melodramas were transplanted bodily; our
+comedies were coarsened and exaggerated into farces; sometimes even, that
+nothing might be lost, our operas were ground down into plays. Second-rate
+pieces were honoured with two or three successive adaptations; and dramas
+which had lived a brief hour at the Boulevard du Crime, in England became
+classics. There is a tradition that the director of The Princess's had a
+tame translator under lock and key who turned French into English without
+respite, his chain never loosened nor his hunger satisfied until his task,
+for the time being, should be complete.
+
+Our actors had at this time a permanent home in London, kept for them by
+Mitchell, the Bond Street bookseller, at the St. James's Theatre. Thence
+they made incursions upon all the others. Some years previously Madame
+Arnould Plessy, having taken into her head to act in the tongue of
+Shakespeare, Theophile Gautier had complimented her on the grace with
+which she had succeeded in "extracting English from her mouth." Others now
+attempted to emulate her accomplishment and to turn it to account. Fechter
+resolved not merely to play Hamlet, but to play as it had never been
+played before, and he did so to rounds of applause for seventy nights. An
+_ingenue_, escaped from the Comedie Francaise, made a similar effort in
+the role of Juliet, and despite her bad accent, and intolerable
+pretension, she was able to keep it up, thanks to powerful supporters, in
+the teeth of the quite excusable hostility of the pit. Things did not
+always pass off so harmlessly, and in more than one instance the brutal
+anger of the public, as under Charles I., drove intruders from the stage,
+which it wished to see occupied by native actors alone.
+
+As a matter of fact, there were some notable English actors and actresses
+at this time. Helen Faucit (now Lady Martin) preserved the pure diction of
+John and Charles Kemble. Charles Kean, despite his inadequate physique,
+won for himself gradually an honourable place on the stage over which his
+father had held sway. Ryder had a presence, and a sonorous voice, deep and
+hollow and tragic, like that of Beauvallet or of Maubant. Keeley was a
+massive man, who could act with subtlety; his wife, incisive, keen,
+_amere_, had a leaning towards the serious drama--towards the realistic
+even. Robson, a queer and wonderful little figure, made a mark in _le
+drame noir_ and in outrageous caricature. Farren had made his _debut_ in
+old men's parts at eighteen, and played them for fifty years without
+advancing in his art a step, without introducing a shade of emotion or a
+touch of humanity into his effects. Charles Mathews impersonated impudent
+youth, just as Farren impersonated unpleasant and ridiculous old age.
+Elegant, lissome, light, mobile, Mathews skipped and fluttered and
+chirruped like a bird. In his old age he reminded me of Ravel, his
+contemporary, whose method and roles offered some analogy with his.[5]
+Buckstone made the Haymarket prosper for twenty years, where I saw him,
+secure in the favour of the public, with his colleague, Compton, whose
+speciality was a certain dryness of humour. Buckstone at this time had
+lost both his hearing and his memory. But what a sly look there was in his
+eye! How his mouth would twist and turn! What irony lurked in the
+expressive ugliness of that wrinkled old mask of his!
+
+These good actors injured rather than served their art. They revelled in,
+and limited themselves to, their own speciality, exaggerated their
+idiosyncrasies day by day, and left them as a legacy to their imitators.
+The authors were too insignificant, did they see the danger, to oppose
+their will to that of Charles Mathews and Farren. They took their measures
+to order and tried to satisfy their patrons. Thus became gradually
+narrowed at once the field for invention and for observation. As
+substitutes for the infinity of living human types and characters, seven
+or eight _emplois_, as one may say, came into existence--_emplois_ often
+further specified and characterised by the name of an actor. There was the
+low comedian and the light comedian, the villain and the heavy man. All
+diversities of womenkind were grouped into one of these four ticketed
+sections: the _ingenue_, the flirt, the chaperon, and the wicked woman.
+The valet of Comedy had become a rascally steward whose rogueries took on
+a certain aspect of Drama. There were two or three types of old men. There
+was the surly old curmudgeon in whom the author vents his spleen, and who
+draws up eccentric wills. There is the old beau, cowardly and cynical, who
+in the last act marries his fiancee to his own son and swears to reform.
+And there is the old peasant who is descended in a straight line from the
+father of Pamela, always talking of his white hairs and his contempt for
+gold, and always greeting the traveller, who has been overtaken by a storm
+and has lost his way, with "Be welcome to my humble roof." The peasant,
+one need hardly remark, never existed. On the stage he has lived more than
+a hundred years. Hardly less indispensable to the comedy or the drama was
+the captain, the "man about town," addicted to drink, with a diamond pin
+resplendent in his tie, wearing salmon-coloured trousers, and top boots
+that he is always dusting with the end of his riding-whip. He represents
+the selfishness, the folly, and the insolence of the higher classes, as
+imagined by a man who has never been inside a drawing-room. Did he know
+Society at his finger-ends, the man would never think of painting it. He
+never paints from nature. He copies for the thousandth time from the old
+models, Sheridan and Goldsmith, or his new masters, Scribe and d'Ennery.
+
+It was for the critics, one is inclined to say, to instruct the public,
+the actors, and the author. I am almost ashamed to tell of the pass to
+which dramatic criticism had come. A paragraph in an obscure corner, a
+quarter of a column on the more important works,--that was about all the
+space the great newspapers accorded to the theatre. Dramatic criticism was
+a nocturnal calling that enjoyed a not too good repute, and was frowned on
+by respectable people and fathers of families. It was entrusted to tyros,
+who hoped by their good conduct to earn their advancement presently to the
+reporting staff in the police courts. The one writer undertook both drama
+and opera. Dramatic criticism and musical criticism, owing to the natural
+gifts which they require, are two absolutely different callings. What
+mattered it, however, to the writer, who was expected only to praise the
+pieces and the performers, without being too much of a bore?
+
+John Oxenford, the critic of the _Times_, was sent for one morning to the
+office of the editor. In analysing a new piece he had criticised freely
+the performance of a certain actor, and the latter had addressed a letter
+of remonstrance to Mr. Delane. "These things," said the editor
+majestically to the writer,--"these things don't interest the general
+public, and I don't want the _Times_ to become an arena for the discussion
+of the merits of Mr. This and Mr. That. So look here, my dear fellow,
+understand this well, and write me accounts of plays henceforth that won't
+bring me any more such letters. Do you see?" "I see," said Oxenford. And
+thus it was, continues the teller of the story, that English literature
+lost pages which might have recalled the subtlety of Hazlitt in
+conjunction with the winning humour of Charles Lamb. Henceforth Oxenford,
+a scholar who had translated the "Hellas" of Jacobi and the
+"Conversations" of Goethe with Eckermann, passed for a blighted and
+discouraged genius; though of this he gave no stronger proofs than an
+English version of the operetta, _Bon soir, Monsieur Pantalon_, a farce
+which I saw fall quite flat, and some articles on Moliere. But you should
+have heard him in a bar-parlour with his pipe between his teeth, a bottle
+of port on the table, and facing him some interlocutor who was not Mr.
+Delane!
+
+While the press critic neglected his duty, or was prevented from
+fulfilling it, the official censorship added one more to the troubles and
+obstacles which already hampered the progress of the stage. I may perhaps
+make some reference in this place to the origin of the Censorship, and to
+its scope and powers.
+
+Some writers will have it that this institution, as it now exists, is but
+a survival of the office of Master of the Revels, which flourished under
+the Tudors and the first Stuarts. As a matter of fact, the censorship owes
+its existence to a law passed in the reign of George II.[6] It was
+instituted nominally for the protection of good behaviour, decency, and
+public order; in reality, to protect Walpole from the stings of
+Aristophanic comedy and to silence Fielding. A century and a half have
+elapsed since the fall of Walpole, and the censorship still exists, like
+that sentinel who was stationed in an alley of Trarskoe Selo to guard a
+rose, and who was still being relieved every two hours twenty-five years
+later. The law of 1843, which was by way of according liberty to the
+theatre, did not free it from the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain,
+whose powers were delimited, so to say, geographically, in the most
+curious manner, for it is impossible to understand why certain quarters of
+the Metropolis were placed outside the reach of his authority and
+submitted to the jurisdiction of the Justices of the Peace.
+
+To all intents and purposes the powers of the Chamberlain are exercised by
+a gentleman who is styled the Examiner of Plays. Plays have to be
+submitted to him seven days before their production, and when he returns
+them with his signature he receives from the submitters of them fees of
+from L1 to L2, according to the number of acts. The author may not enter
+his presence. The manager alone has the privilege of contemplating his
+features, and of giving, or getting from him, verbal explanations. And
+even those communications are under the seal of secrecy. Above the
+examiner stands a kind of head of department, and above him the
+Chamberlain himself. When you have exhausted these three jurisdictions you
+can go no higher. Above the Lord Chamberlain, as above the Czar of All the
+Russias, there remains only Divine Justice, and to Divine Justice authors
+of vaudevilles and musical comedies cannot very well appeal. The
+censorship indeed is an absurd anomaly, the sole irresponsible and secret
+authority which remains in English legislation.
+
+If you seek to discover how it has acted during this century, you will
+find that according as the censor was indolent or zealous his office has
+been a nullity or a nuisance. In theatrical circles that censor will not
+soon be forgotten who suppressed the word "thigh" as dangerous to public
+morals, and who exorcised from a play by Douglas Jerrold, as disrespectful
+to religion, the following phrase:--"He plays the violin like an angel!"
+The same censor found these words in a tragedy:--"_I_ do homage to pride,
+debauchery, avarice!... Never!" He hastened to delete this, admitting thus
+by implication that English society, which it was his mission to protect,
+was compact of these three heinous characteristics.
+
+It was forbidden to make fun of Holloway's ointment, for Mr. Holloway was
+"an estimable manufacturer who employs thousands of workmen." It was
+forbidden to put a comic bishop on the stage--unless it were a colonial
+bishop, in which case the censor would give his sanction. A play founded
+on Oliver Twist was forbidden because it was calculated to incite to
+crime, but it was allowed for a benefit performance; whence it would
+appear that it is allowable to incite the audience to crime on such
+special occasions. This poor censorship, which has to read everything,
+which has to supervise everything,--from the rages of Othello to the
+grimaces of the clown and the tights of the ballet girls,--which has to
+uphold at once the constitution and propriety, to defend at once the
+Divinity and Mr. Holloway, loses its head over it all at last, and reminds
+one of the _bourgeois_ broken loose who is being launched at carnival time
+into some dizzying Saraband.
+
+Its most absorbing task is that of barring the way against French
+immorality. Its vigilance is eluded, however, by a kind of conventional
+terminology. Where our authors have had the effrontery to write the word
+"cocotte" in black and white, they replace it by the word "actress." Where
+we have unblushingly written "adultery," they have inserted "flirtation."
+The censor gives his sanction and pockets his fees, and on the performance
+of the piece the by-play of the actor and actresses completes the
+translation, re-establishing if not reinforcing the original sense.
+
+In the midst of all these difficulties the growth of the theatre-going
+public had made necessary long series of performances, long runs as we
+call them now, unknown up till then and inaugurated by the new theatres.
+There were a dozen in 1847, twenty in 1860. The calling of dramatic author
+began to grow lucrative and to tempt many writers. It was an easy calling,
+too, as the public was young and ignorant, ready to accept anything, and
+as, in addition, the French drama offered an almost inexhaustible amount
+of raw material. They had recourse to it unceasingly, just as Robinson
+Crusoe after his shipwreck used to return to his ship in order to look for
+some tool! I shall not give a long list of names because, unless
+accompanied by a short personal sketch and a few words of criticism, these
+names, obscure or even unknown, would mean nothing to French readers, and
+would be almost as wearisome as the long lists of warriors in the epics of
+olden times. Amongst the more notable, I may mention Tom Taylor and Dion
+Boucicault. Tom Taylor belonged to both the world of law and the world of
+letters. Briefs gave him his dinner, the drama gave him his supper; his
+supper got to be the more substantial of the two. From 1850 to 1875 he
+seems to have achieved ubiquity. His name was on every poster. He was
+facile, had a certain method in his work, a certain skill in putting his
+plays together, a certain discretion which passed for taste--in fine, all
+the qualities that go to form a painstaking and prolific mediocrity. He
+would probably have wished to be judged on the merits of the historical
+dramas which absorbed his whole activity during the concluding years of
+his life, and in which he thought he was achieving "literature." But are
+they really historical dramas? They contain at once too much history and
+too little. The historical document is all-pervasive, enters into every
+scene, interrupts the action; but anything like historical psychology, any
+attempt to get at the real character of the personages presented, is
+wholly unattempted. It was characteristic of him that, when desiring to
+depict Queen Elizabeth, he relied upon some romantic stories by a German
+lady instead of going to the work of Froude (far more dramatic than his
+own drama), where he could have learned all he required to know.
+
+Dion Boucicault, the other writer whom I have singled out as
+representative of the lot, had more character and was more interesting. He
+was an actor, and an actor of some talent. He knew no other world than
+that of the theatre--the world which from eight o'clock till midnight
+laughs and cries, curses and makes love, dies and murders, under the
+gaslight, behind three sets of painted canvas. Without any real culture,
+and without having the least critical faculty, Boucicault had read
+everything about the theatre--read everything and remembered everything,
+good, bad, and indifferent, from _Phormio_ to the _Auberge des Adrets_. He
+knew by heart all the _croix de ma mere_ of modern melodrama, and from his
+mass of reminiscences he concocted his crazy-quilt-like plays, imitating
+involuntarily, unconsciously. He was plagiarism incarnate. In his first
+great success, _London Assurance_, you may find not only Goldsmith and
+Sheridan, but Terence and Plautus, who had reached him by way of Moliere.
+You will meet in it a father who speaks to his son without recognising
+him, or who at least is persuaded not to recognise him; a young lady who
+boxes her husband's ears and calls him her doll; a master who makes a
+confidant of his valet, a valet as untruthful as Dave or Scapin; a lawyer
+who is anxious to get himself thrashed like _L'Intime_; a young drunkard
+and debauchee who falls in love with a country lass; and a young girl
+brought up in the wilds, who replies to the first compliment she has paid
+her--"It strikes me, sir, that you are a stray bee from the hive of
+fashion. If so, reserve your honey for its proper cell. A truce to
+compliments." The piece goes from vulgarity to vulgarity, from absurdity
+to absurdity. Within a few minutes there is a ridiculous abduction, a
+comic duel and a hardly less comic marriage, all brought about by a will
+which is surely the most absurd of all the absurd wills known to the
+drama. The piece had its central figure in a clever humbug whom no one
+knows. "Will you allow me to ask you," says Charles Courtly in the last
+scene, "an impertinent question?"
+
+"With the greatest pleasure."
+
+"Who the devil are you?"
+
+"On my faith, I don't know. But I must be a gentleman." Upon which another
+character concludes the play with a pedantic definition of the word
+"gentleman," and morality is satisfied.
+
+One fine day--it was in 1860--this playwright, who lived by borrowing, and
+who was in debt to every literature, had the singular good fortune to
+create a _genre_ of his own. Perhaps it is too much to say create. A
+compatriot of his, Edmund Falconer, like himself an actor as well as an
+author, had opened the way for him. But Falconer never again met with the
+success which greeted _Peep o' Day_, and he wound up with the memorable
+failure of _The Oonagh_.[7] Boucicault, on the contrary, was able to
+exploit for twenty years the fruitful vein upon which he had happened in
+the _Colleen Bawn_.
+
+The _Colleen Bawn_ is a tissue of improbabilities and extravagances. What
+is the mysterious reason why we can put up with these absurdities and take
+an interest in them? It is, I think, that there is in this crack-brained
+drama a kind of ethnographic seed which enters into the mind and takes
+root there. The sad, patient, uncomplaining struggle of this poor peasant
+girl to become worthy of the man she loves,--her discouragement, which yet
+cannot exhaust her devotion,--all this is depicted by touches so
+suggestive and so strong that an elaborate analysis could not do more. But
+there is something beyond this. A sort of primitive poetry seemed to play
+round the whole character of the Colleen Bawn as she appeared thirty-five
+years ago in the person of Mrs. Dion Boucicault, with her little red
+cloak, her long black hair, and her expression half sad, half
+seductive--smiling through her tears like an angel in disgrace.
+
+Until Boucicault's time it had been the fashion to laugh over Ireland,
+never to weep over her. He brought about this change without depicting his
+country otherwise than as she really existed. He knew the strange feeling
+of England towards Ireland, the feeling of a man for a woman, devoid of
+the refinements of philosophy and civilisation. Passionate, violent, hard,
+England begins by crushing Ireland; then stops, conquered by the weakness
+of the victim, subjugated by a charm which no mere words can describe.
+Boucicault sought out this sentiment in the depths of the hearts of his
+English audiences, and ministered to it; and was instrumental thereby in
+preparing the way for an age of justice and generosity. Under the
+commonness of the means which he employed, and often also of the
+sentiments and ideas which he expressed, Boucicault hid a sort of subtlety
+which was born of instinct. His Irish psychology is true to life, and
+although he added many touches in the _Shaugraun_, in _Arrah-na-pogue_, in
+_The Octoroon_, in _Michael O'Dowd_, and in other works, it may be said to
+be already complete in _The Colleen Bawn_. When Myles-na-Coppaleen tells
+us, "I was full of sudden death that minute," and when Eily speaks of the
+little bird that sings in her heart, the passion does not strike us as
+exaggerated nor the poetry as out of place. Father Tom, too, who smokes
+his pipe and drinks his potheen with the smugglers, but who can assume at
+will his authority as an apostle and a leader, is the personification of
+the Irish priest of old, and indeed of our own day too--at once the man
+of the people and the man of God.
+
+Altogether, one cannot but exclaim, as one looks at this crude but
+striking piece--this is Ireland! The Ireland of zealots and traitors, of
+rebels and the meek, of madmen and martyrs, of heroes and assassins.
+Ireland the irrational and illogical, who disconcerts our sympathies after
+winning them, and who has doubtless still further surprises in store for
+History, already at a loss how to record her actions, how to explain her
+character, what verdict to pronounce upon her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+The Vogue of Burlesque--Burnand's _Ixion_--H. J. Byron--The Influence of
+Burlesque upon the Moral Tone of the Stage--Marie Wilton's _debut_--A
+Letter from Dickens--Founding of the "Prince of Wales's"--Tom Robertson,
+his Life as Actor and Author--His Journalistic Career--London Bohemia in
+1865--Sothern.
+
+
+The taste, the rage for Burlesque, dates from almost the same moment as
+the introduction of the Boucicault drama. The two things have, however,
+nothing else in common, unless it be that neither one nor the other
+pertains to literature. Burlesque is the English form, under an un-English
+name, of that kind of musical parody in which we French used at that time
+to delight, and of which the operetta was born. In London this exotic
+_genre_ became quickly acclimatised by success.
+
+I shall take Burnand's _Ixion_ as a type, for by reason of its
+never-ending popularity it may be regarded as a masterpiece of its kind.
+It is in verse. What kind of verse may be imagined when I add that almost
+every line contains at least one pun. The subject is a matter of no
+consequence; the whole point of the piece consists in putting modern
+sentiments and expressions into the mouths of characters taken from
+antiquity. The people rebel and burn Ixion's palace. Jupiter appears in
+answer to his invocation. "Are you insured?" he inquires. "Yes," replies
+Ixion, "with all the best Insurance Agencies. But you see, when it comes
+to paying you the money, they let you whistle for it." Jupiter invites him
+to come to Olympus. "We lunch at half-past one. Don't forget." Mercury,
+charged to conduct Ixion thither, hails an aerial omnibus. "Come on for
+Olympus! Room for one outside!" We are shown Olympus. The meal is nearly
+over. Juno asks Venus the name of her dressmaker, and sends a servant to
+tell "the Master" that "coffee is served." Neptune talks nautical lingo
+like the hero of _Black-eyed Susan_, and goes nowhere unaccompanied by a
+French sailor and an English Jack-Tar, who are themselves bosom friends.
+The Frenchman executes a hornpipe out of good-fellowship towards his mate,
+whilst the Englishman expresses his regard for "La France" by performing
+the cancan. Apollo plays an English sun to the life--he never shows
+himself. He remains shut up in his office with his secretary, the Clerk of
+the Weather, who, like all his kind, scribbles verses and newspaper
+articles on paper bearing the Government stamp.
+
+Add to all this a bit of music here and there, a number of pretty girls
+scantily attired, notably nine Muses and three Graces, whose dress and
+dancing would have brought the author of the Histriomastrix in sorrow to
+the grave, and allusions to all the topics of the day--to the victory of
+the horse "Gladiator," to _Lady Audley's Secret_ (then all the rage), to
+vivisection, to the novels of Charles Kingsley, to the fountain in
+Trafalgar Square, to Mudie's Circulating Library,--and a thousand other
+things which to-day have ceased not merely to be amusing, but to be
+intelligible.
+
+To read _Ixion_, as I read it thirty-five years after its first
+production, to read it sitting by the fire on a foggy afternoon, making
+one's way as best one might through the thicket of allusions which had
+become enigmas, and through all the _debris_ of these used-up fireworks,
+was a singularly dismal undertaking. To form any just impression of the
+piece, you must try to picture to yourself the little theatre (The
+Royalty) on the occasion of the First Night, the thousand or so of
+spectators, who have dined well and who incline to an optimistic view of
+things in general, the pervading odour of the _poudre de riz_, the
+_flonflons_ of the orchestra, the quivering of the gasaliers and of the
+dazzling electric light, the diamonds, the gleaming white shoulders and
+the soft silk tights, the superabundance of animal life and high spirits
+which seem almost to glow like kindling firewood. A debutante destined to
+a higher kind of success, Ada Cavendish, regaled the opera-glasses with
+the sight of her beauty as Venus. Another attraction was to be found later
+in the appearance on the stage of a member of a great family, the Hon.
+Lewis W. Wingfield, who impersonated (with the contortions of a madman)
+the Goddess of Wisdom.
+
+But the real home of Burlesque was the Strand, then under the management
+of Mrs. Swanborough, famous for her incessant conflicts with English
+grammar. Her wants were provided for by Henry James Byron, a good-looking
+fellow who appeared in his own pieces, but not to great advantage. It used
+to be said that he was a descendant of Lord Byron. How is this
+genealogical mystery to be solved? I have been unable to find a clue to
+it. Theatrical folk are no great scholars, they take but little note of
+dates, and they are apt to treat history in a somewhat offhand fashion.
+For them Lord Byron was lost in the mists of antiquity, and it was easy
+for them to believe that their colleague, born about 1830, might have had
+him for an ancestor. Whatever his origin, H. J. Byron was an actor, and
+had begun on the lowest steps of the profession, with engagements at ten
+shillings a week, and even less. Suddenly he struck a vein of success in
+the writing of burlesques, and thenceforth he wrote as much as ever one
+could wish, and even more,--so much so that the list of his works, were I
+to print it here, would fill many pages. He did not worry himself about a
+subject. A subject was a nuisance, he held; you had to keep to it, and
+work it up,--you have to give it a beginning and an ending. Hang the
+subject! He thought only of the witticisms with which his burlesque should
+be stocked. He collected them together in notebooks which in time must
+have come to rival the volume of Larousse's Dictionary. In the street he
+would follow up some comic notion, jot it down on an envelope or on his
+sleeve, or on the margin of a newspaper, using his hat as a writing-desk,
+or else making shift with a wall. One day he was writing up against a hall
+door. The door opened, and in rolled Byron on top of an old lady who had
+been making her way out. He got up again smiling just as he would from his
+mishaps in the theatre. He was possessed with the demon of punning, which
+never left him an instant's peace. Having failed as a manager in the
+provinces, he made puns upon his bankruptcy. He punned in the last moments
+before his death. Is it not one of the rules of his profession to bring
+down the curtain on a witticism?
+
+Byron used to boast that he had never given offence to delicate ears. And,
+as a matter of fact, he said a million of nonsensical things but not a
+single indecent thing. Yet he helped to depreciate the moral tone of the
+theatre by lowering the standard of decency in regard to female costume
+upon the stage, and by bringing on to it those pseudo-actresses whom, in
+the slang of the green-room, we call _grues_.
+
+In this connection I ought to point out that the social ostracism under
+which the stage then suffered was due less to the bad morals of the
+actresses than to the bad manners and vulgarity of the actors. The former
+were much nearer to being ladies than the latter were to being gentlemen.
+Watched and warded, first by a father, then by a husband connected with
+the theatre, obliged to give their first thoughts to their professional
+and domestic duties, they had neither the power, nor the leisure, nor the
+inclination to think of evil. Tom Hood, in his _Model Men and Women_,
+paints a picture of the theatrical woman which reminds one of the
+biographies of the _Prix Montyon_. She goes late to bed, rises early,
+learns her roles while washing her children's linen, rehearses in the
+afternoon, performs in the evening, and has no time to eat or to attend to
+her _toilette_, still less to think, or make merry, or make love. "School
+mistresses and governesses, shop-girls, dressmakers, cooks,
+housemaids,--what are your fatigues to those of an actress?" So spoke a
+writer[8] who was well acquainted with theatrical life.
+
+These habits were now to be changed. Burlesque, pantomime, comic opera,
+were throwing open the stage to actresses of a new type who posed but did
+not perform, and who were called upon to fill not roles but tights. The
+respectable woman would not suffer herself to be vanquished on her own
+ground; she competed with the newcomers by the same means: sometimes she
+won--and lost. This was the transformation which Byron abetted. But it was
+the public, of course, as always, that was most to blame.
+
+Poor Byron was not without the ambition of an artist: he aspired to
+raising himself above the level of the _genre_ to which he owed his first
+success,--to writing a comedy. And it so happened that by his side on the
+stage of the Strand there was a quaint little body whose hopes ran
+parallel with his. This was Marie Wilton. I do not know how old she was
+then. In her pleasant Memoirs, written in collaboration with her husband,
+she has quite forgotten to give us the date of her birth. So much we know,
+however, that she was the child of somewhat obscure actors, and that she
+herself made her _debut_ when she was five years old. At Manchester she
+had the honour of playing some small role with Macready, who was then
+making his last rounds before finally quitting the stage. The great
+tragedian sent for her to his dressing-room, lifted her on to his knee and
+questioned her.
+
+"I suppose," he said, "that you want to become a great actress?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"And what role are you most anxious to play?"
+
+"Juliet."
+
+Macready burst out laughing. "Then," said he, "you'll have to change those
+eyes of yours!"
+
+Marie Wilton did not change her eyes, but she changed her ideas, which was
+an easier matter. At fifteen she was acting fearlessly in every kind of
+role. One evening she (who was too young, they thought, to assume the role
+of any of Shakespeare's heroines) impersonated the old mother of Claude
+Melnotte in _The Lady of Lyons_.
+
+It was in Bristol that they began to realise that there was something in
+her. An actor on tour, then very well known, Charles Dillon, was playing
+_Belphegor_, a monstrous emotional drama,[9] the hero of which was an
+acrobat. Marie Wilton, in the role of a little boy, had to give him the
+cue in one of the great scenes. She hit on a little piece of business, and
+risked it at the rehearsal. The London actor lost his temper at first,
+then reflected, questioned the little actress, listened to her
+explanations, and finally gave in. The public was carried away. Dillon
+remembered this, and when he returned to London he engaged Marie Wilton at
+the Lyceum. Here she made her real _debut_ towards the end of 1858.
+_Belphegor_ was followed by a farce in which Marie Wilton had also a role.
+On the same evening, at the same theatre, in the same piece, there
+appeared for the first time in London, John Toole, the king of English low
+comedians. With these two names we come to the living generation, and have
+to deal at last with the contemporary stage.
+
+But let us first follow Marie Wilton, for her little barque, though none
+had any inkling of it, not even she herself, carries with it the destinies
+of the English Comedy still to be born.
+
+From the Lyceum she passed to the Haymarket, where she was treated as a
+spoiled child by the three old men who there held sway. She played Cupid
+here with so much verve, point, impudence and sprightliness, that other
+Cupids were created for her. This is the public all over; naively selfish,
+it condemns the actor to maintain for a quarter of a century the posture
+which has taken its fancy, to repeat unceasingly the gesture or the tone
+which has amused or touched it. Marie Wilton had played the Haymarket
+Cupid for ever had she not betaken herself to the Strand. Here she was the
+inevitable principal boy of the burlesques.
+
+For some time past Mrs. Bancroft has played only when in the mood and at
+long intervals, and has not felt inclined for the exertion of carrying a
+whole piece on her shoulders a whole evening as of yore. I have seen her
+only in two subsidiary roles, and for an estimate of her talents I must
+rely upon other judgments than my own. M. Coquelin thinks that she reminds
+one at once of Alphonsine and of Chaumont, and that she holds a middle
+place between the two. But M. Coquelin had in his mind, when he was
+writing, an actress of more than forty, appearing in the role of eccentric
+ladies of fashion. There is a gulf between this and the imp of 1860 who
+rattled across the boards of the Strand. All that I know of her at the
+time of her _debut_ is that she had still those twinkling merry eyes which
+forbade her to attempt tragedy, and the figure of a child of twelve,--a
+figure so slight that when the man who was to marry her first saw her, he
+declared she was the thinnest actress in London. But here is a letter
+which will place Marie Wilton before our eyes as she was when the
+barristers of the Inns of Court made verses in her honour and half
+Aldershot came to town every second night to applaud her. It is from
+Charles Dickens to John Forster:--
+
+    "I escaped at half-past seven and went to the Strand Theatre; having
+    taken a stall beforehand, for it is always crammed. I really wish you
+    would go, between this and next Thursday, to see the _Maid and the
+    Magpie_ burlesque there. There is the strangest thing in it that ever
+    I have seen on the stage. The boy, Pippo, by Miss Wilton. While it is
+    astonishingly impudent (must be, or it couldn't be done at all), it is
+    so stupendously like a boy, and unlike a woman, that it is perfectly
+    free from offence. I never have seen such a thing. Priscilla Horton as
+    a boy, not to be thought of beside it. She does an imitation of the
+    dancing of the Christy Minstrels--wonderfully clever--which in the
+    audacity of its thorough-going is surprising. A thing that you _can
+    not_ imagine a woman's doing at all; and yet the manner, the
+    appearance, the levity, impulse and spirits of it, are so exactly like
+    a boy, that you cannot think of anything like her sex in association
+    with it. It begins at eight, and is over by a quarter-past nine. I
+    never have seen such a curious thing, and the girl's talent is
+    unchallengeable. I call her the cleverest girl I have ever seen on the
+    stage in my time, and the most singularly original."
+
+But Miss Wilton was sick and tired of Pippo no less than of the Cupids.
+She begged of all the managers to let her play the role of a heroine in
+long dresses. They turned a deaf ear to her. Buckstone said to her, "I
+shall never see you otherwise than in the part of this wicked little
+scamp."
+
+Every evening she set her audiences in roars and every afternoon she spent
+in tears over her lot. When one day her married sister said to her--
+
+"As the managers won't have you, take a theatre yourself."
+
+"But I have no money."
+
+"I'll lend you money," said her brother-in-law.
+
+A partnership between Byron and Miss Wilton was the immediate result. _He_
+brought his reputation and his puns. _She_ the L1000 which was not hers.
+
+A theatre had now to be found. Near Tottenham Court Road, one of the
+noisiest and commonest quarters of the town, there was a squalid,
+miserable-looking street where ill-fed and ill-famed Frenchmen were at
+this time beginning to congregate; and in it there was a place of
+entertainment where all sorts of things had been achieved, but bankruptcy
+oftenest of all. Frederic Lemaitre had played Napoleon there in French,
+and had in this capacity passed in review some half-dozen supers who stood
+for the "Grande Armee" and who cried "Viv' l'Emprou!" The house bore the
+high-sounding name of the "Queen's Theatre," but the people of the
+neighbourhood called it the "Dust-Hole," and in doing so proved their
+acquaintance with it. The aristocratic seats were a shilling, and when the
+Stalls had dined well they were given to bombarding the Boxes with orange
+peel.
+
+It was now cleaned, restored, freshened up at an outlay more of pains than
+of money. The "Dust-Hole" was transformed into a blue and white
+_bonbonniere_. The little manageress did not spare herself, and on the
+evening of the first night, whilst the _queue_ was already forming outside
+the door of the theatre, she was busy hammering in a last nail. What would
+have been said by the devotees of fashion, wandering in the muddy
+Tottenham Street, and astonished at finding themselves in such a locality,
+had they seen their favourite squatting on a stool, hammer in hand?
+
+The company she had gathered round her consisted of Byron, John Clarke,
+transplanted from the Strand, Fanny Josephs--an actress of delicate and
+agreeable talent, the excellent _duegne_ Larkin, and two other sisters
+Wilton. It included also a tall young man of twenty-four who had not
+previously acted in London, and who was not therefore of any interest to
+the public, though to his manageress he was; his name was Bancroft.
+
+He was a gentleman by birth, breeding, and bearing. But, his family being
+ruined, he had followed the vocation which led him to the stage. In four
+and a half years he had played four hundred and forty-six roles. In one
+engagement of thirty-six days in Dublin he had played forty. This hard
+life as a provincial comedian had broken him into his business. Tall and
+slender, he owed a sort of air of distinction combined with stiffness to
+his short sight and to his stature. The rendering of cool, well-bred
+nonchalance came naturally to him, but in the depth of his eye there
+lurked a gleam of irrepressible humour. He had spent much time in
+observing and reflecting, he knew much more of things than did his
+colleagues, and he felt vaguely conscious of possessing qualities which
+had only to be drawn out. And now fortune, in the guise of a young girl,
+had come to him and taken him by the hand.
+
+Thus there was both ambition and love in the air that April evening in
+1865 when the little "Prince of Wales's" opened its door as wide as it
+could. In order not to startle the public or disturb its habits, a
+burlesque and a comedy were offered it pending the preparation of the new
+repertory. Marie Wilton's friends supported her in their hundreds, but
+their sympathies were soon to be lost. The pieces themselves were almost
+worthless; Byron would seem to have lost his _verve_ during the removal.
+Something new had to be found for the autumn. It was then that Robertson
+was thought of.
+
+Thomas William, or more familiarly, Tom Robertson, was at this time next
+door to a failure. He was thirty-six, and was fighting an uphill fight
+against ill-fortune with a desperation that was growing into rancour. The
+son, grandson, and great-grandson of actors, he had passed the first years
+of his life in a touring company in the midst of those _bourgeois_
+vagabonds whose joys and sorrows I have endeavoured to depict. His father
+had been manager of the company which worked on the Lincoln circuit, and
+had ended by giving it up. Tom himself had appeared upon the boards whilst
+still a child, but, as it would seem, without giving evidence of any
+remarkable talents. Later, his speciality was the taking off of
+foreigners--a sorry means of inciting to laughter for a man of intellect.
+In fine, though there are some who would fain mislead us in the matter, it
+is clear that Robertson was but a second-rate actor.
+
+At the age of nineteen, on the strength of a newspaper advertisement,
+Robertson set out for Holland to secure a place as usher or junior master
+in a boarding school. After unspeakable misadventures, of which he talked
+afterwards quite merrily, and curious experiences which must have been
+useful to him in his capacity of dramatist, he was despatched home by a
+good-natured consul, and took up his actor's life again with its three
+roles and one meal a day. In 1851 we find him in London trying to earn a
+livelihood. He has written one piece, _A Night's Adventure_, which by a
+lucky chance has been accepted and performed. But it fails. He has a
+quarrel with Farren, the manager, who has produced it, his only employer;
+and behold! he is again at sea. Now he comes to the assistance of his
+father, who is making desperate efforts to keep open a suburban theatre.
+Anon he is fulfilling insignificant engagements here and there. He goes to
+Paris with a company which gets paid on the first Saturday and never
+again. He becomes prompter at the Olympic. He translates French plays,
+writes farces, produces a heap of wretched stuff for which he cannot
+always find a market. When hunger drives him to it, he sells his "copy"
+for a few shillings to a bookseller, of whom it is difficult to say
+whether he was merely a shrewd man of business or a friend in need. For,
+after all, to the recipient these shillings meant his daily bread, and the
+bookseller was not always sure of reimbursing himself.
+
+He has introduced into one of his comedies a bitter memory of his
+beginnings as a dramatist of the objections which met him everywhere. The
+speaker is a composer of music. "In England, yesterday is always
+considered so much better than to-day--last week so superior to this--and
+this week so superior to the week after next--and thirty years ago so much
+more brilliant an era than the present.... I shall explain myself better
+if I give my own personal reasons for making a crusade against age. In
+this country I find age so respected, so run after, so courted, so
+worshipped, that it becomes intolerable. I compose music; I wish to sell
+it. I go to a publisher and tell him so; he looks at me and says, 'You
+look so young,' in the same tone that he would say, You look like an
+impostor or a pickpocket. I apologise as humbly as I can for not having
+been born fifty years earlier, and the publisher, struck by my contrition,
+thinks to himself, Poor young man, after all, he cannot help being so
+young, and addressing me as if I were a baby, says, 'My dear sir, very
+likely your compositions may have merit--I don't dispute it--but, you see,
+Mr. So-and-So, aged sixty, and Mr. Such-an-one, aged seventy, and Mr.
+T'other, aged eighty, and Mr. Somebody, aged ninety, write for us; and the
+public are accustomed to their productions, and we make it a rule never to
+give the world anything written by a man under fifty-five years old. Go
+away now, and keep to your work for the next thirty years; during that
+time exert yourself to get older--you will succeed if you try hard; turn
+grey, be bald--it's not a bad substitute--lose your teeth, your health,
+your vigour, your fire, your freshness, your genius,--in one short word,
+your terrible, abominable youth, and some day or other, if you don't die
+in the interim, you may have the chance of being a great man.'"
+
+As though in obedience to this ironical advice, Tom was already almost old
+after fifteen years of so dreadful an existence. His handsome face had
+assumed a melancholy cast which it was never to lose. Once in the depth
+of his misery he took it into his head to enlist. The army would have
+nothing to say to him. Then, recklessly, he married a beautiful girl who
+imagined she had a vocation for the stage. Children came, but neither
+success nor money. She died, and Robertson then tried his hand at
+journalism. He tried to "place" work of every kind wherever he could, from
+riddles and comic anecdotes of a dozen lines up to serial stories. He got
+connected with a score of London and provincial papers--the _Porcupine_,
+of Liverpool; the _Comic News_; the _Wag_, which his friend Byron had
+started; _Fun_, just started by Tom Hood, and the _Illustrated Times_, on
+which he succeeded Edmund Yates as dramatic critic, and in whose columns,
+under the title of "The Theatrical Lounger," he sketched the features of
+the whole stage-world from leading actor to fireman and call-boy. It is
+all written with easy, familiar humour, with a spice of impudence thrown
+in, not unlike the style of our old weekly _Figaro_; at the same time, it
+is observant, natural, alive, with here and there a gust of passion and a
+vent of spleen.
+
+Robertson lived in the very centre of Bohemia--that vaguely-defined
+district in which "men of the world" whom the "world" bored, among them
+officers who found the military clubs too solemn, came to drink and make
+merry with the night-birds of the law, the theatre, and the press. They
+would meet at the Garrick, the Arundel, the Savage, the Fielding, of which
+last Albert Smith has left us a description in mock-heroic verse. Tom
+Hood, a clerk in the War Office, and editor of _Fun_, used to give Friday
+supper-parties--frugal meals, just cold meat and boiled potatoes. But
+those who met there, Clement Scott tells us, were the best fellows in the
+world.
+
+Conversation flowed until daybreak in a kind of torrent. It still flowed
+as the guests made their way homewards at the hours when the carts of the
+market gardeners began to rumble through Knightsbridge and the rising sun
+to gild the treetops of Hyde Park.
+
+Were they all such very "good fellows"?--I have my doubts. This Bohemia
+was not a country where everyone was young and kindly and gay. It was just
+a backwater, or a little world apart where one talked instead of working,
+and where night took the place of day; it was the antechamber to the real
+world of literature, a place of impatient waitings, of feverish suspense.
+I am sure there were half a dozen malcontents and failures there for one
+man who could claim success.
+
+These lines[10] of Robert Brough (one of the most characterised members of
+the body, one of the first to disappear from it), written by him on his
+birthday, give an instructive glimpse at the life--
+
+  "I'm twenty-nine! I'm twenty-nine!
+  I've drank too much of beer and wine;
+  I've had too much of toil and strife,
+  I've given a kiss to Johnson's wife,
+  And sent a lying note to mine,--
+  I'm twenty-nine! I'm twenty-nine!"
+
+After having written a few newspaper articles and two or three plays,
+Brough grew embittered at not having attained wealth and fame. That he
+should have failed to do so seemed a sufficient indication of the infamy
+of society. He wrote and published the "Songs of the Governing Classes,"
+the satire of which is as corrosive as vitriol, as scalding as molten
+lead. The "Song of the Gentleman" in particular might well be given a
+place in the anarchist anthologies of the future.
+
+Something of this bitterness was to find its way into the impassioned
+outbursts of Robertson and the philosophic irony of Gilbert. But at these
+nocturnal repasts of Hood's, at which Robertson was one of the most
+brilliant, fearless, and enthralling of talkers, there was question not so
+much of reconstituting society as of renewing art and reforming the
+theatre. They ridiculed the wretched stage management of the day, the
+fatuity of the comedians of the old school, the tyranny of conventional
+routine,--everything connected with the stage. And what was it they had to
+offer in place of the old order? Truth more carefully observed, nature
+more closely followed. It is always the same ideals, or the same
+pretensions: the generation which holds them up against its senior never
+seems to suspect that its junior may invoke them against itself.
+
+Pending the consummation of these great projects, Robertson had acted at
+the Strand in 1861 a little play called _The Cantab_, which achieved a
+sort of success. He offered another burlesque to Mrs. Swanborough but she
+refused it. Then came a stroke of luck. Sothern, who was at this time
+attracting all London in a piece by Tom Taylor entitled, _Our American
+Cousin_, heard tell of a piece which Robertson had written. Sothern, who
+was getting sick of the inexhaustible popularity of Lord Dundreary, was
+anxious to appear before the public in the role of David Garrick. He was
+anxious to get completely away from the field of caricature, to play a
+really serious part which should bring out all his gifts. Unluckily the
+piece had not much success, nor did it merit much. It was an adaptation
+from the French with Garrick substituted for the original French hero.
+Strange beginning for one who aimed at a "Return to Truth," this sticking
+of a historic head upon the shoulders of "a gentleman unknown"!
+
+It was after this that he wrote his comedy _Society_. He took it to
+Buckstone, who refused it flatly. "My dear fellow," he said, "your piece
+wouldn't reach a fourth performance." The author went off, fingers
+twitching, beyond himself with rage, and wandered into the Strand, where
+one of his friends met him. "Look here," said Robertson to him, "here is a
+capital play and these asses won't have it." A provincial manager took it
+up. It succeeded in Liverpool. Marie Wilton secured it and produced it on
+November 14, 1861, at her little theatre. From that evening dates not only
+the success of the Prince of Wales's Theatre, but a new era for English
+Comedy--the era of Robertson.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+First Performance of _Society_--Success of _Ours_, _Caste_, and
+_School_--How Robertson turned to account the Talent of his Actors, John
+Hare, Bancroft, and Mrs. Bancroft--Progress in the Matter of
+Scenery--Dialogue and Character-drawing--Robertson as a Humorist: a scene
+from _School_--As a Realist: a scene from _Caste_--The Comedian of the
+Upper Middle Classes--Robertson's Marriage, Illness, and Death--The "Cup
+and Saucer" Comedy--The Improvement in Actors' Salaries--The Bancrofts at
+the Haymarket--Farewell Performance--My Pilgrimage to Tottenham Street.
+
+
+That evening of the 14th of November has been described to us by several
+eye-witnesses, so that we are able to realise the feelings that prevailed
+both on the stage and amongst the audience. The first act seemed gay and
+lively, with a sort of mordant raillery in it with which the audience was
+unfamiliar. Then came an idyll, evolving amidst the trees of a London
+square. What! love--youthful, tender, tremulous love--in the very heart of
+this city of mud, fog, and smoke! Love, so near that you might touch his
+wings! This was the kind of impression it evoked--an impression that
+pleased and moved the more, that the public, always over-curious
+concerning the private life of its favourites, was acquainted with the
+tender relations of actor and actress. It was a real "honeymoon"--the
+full moon which shone on this love duet from over the shrubbery of
+coloured canvas. The hearts of the audience went out to them, and all was
+well.
+
+But no one could say what sort of reception was in store for "The Owls'
+Roost." This "roost" was a picture from the life of the clubs which I have
+already described as the principal resorts of Bohemia. Now, the
+"Savages"--the members, that is, of the Savage Club--as well as the
+frequenters of the Garrick, the Fielding, and the Arundel, were all there
+in force. How would they take this caricature of themselves? The laughter
+which broke out in uninterrupted peals soon reassured the anxious ears
+behind the scenes.
+
+There is a point at which one of the chief characters is at a loss for
+half a crown wherewith to pay for the hansom in which he is going off to a
+ball. Having no money in his pocket he asks a friend for the sum. "I
+haven't got it," the friend replies, "but I'll see if I can't get it for
+you." He asks a third, who makes a similar reply; and so the appeal makes
+the whole round of the club, until at last a half-crown is found in the
+depths of a pocket, and is passed on from hand to hand, borrowed and lent
+a dozen times, to the man who had asked for it in the first instance. The
+incident was taken from actual life. Thus reproduced upon the stage, it
+seemed indescribably comic, and proved the turning-point in the fortune of
+the play--the happy crisis after which everything was greeted with
+applause. It was a trivial illustration, but it was thoroughly
+characteristic. It was Bohemia in a nutshell--to have nothing and give
+everything.
+
+As the "owls" were so much diverted by the faithful portrayal of their
+resorts and of their customs, thus presented for the first time upon the
+stage, there was no reason to expect that Society would take offence over
+the extraordinary and incongruous proceedings at the establishment of Lord
+and Lady Ptarmigant. This kind of comic libel was not unknown;--Bulwer,
+for instance, had set himself to depict the union of the old aristocracy
+with the new, the naive veneration displayed by Riches for Rank, and on
+the other hand, the prostration of Rank before Riches. No one showed
+astonishment at seeing Lady Ptarmigant smilingly take the arm of old
+Chodd, though his language and his manners were those of a costermonger,
+and though his lordship's valet would probably have hesitated about
+letting himself be seen with him in a public-house. As for Lord Ptarmigant
+himself, he was just what we call a _panne_. The whole character resolved
+itself into a mere eccentricity, as monotonous as it was far-fetched and
+extravagant,--a habit of dragging about his chair with him wherever he
+went, and of falling asleep in it the moment he sat down, with the result
+that everyone who came in or went out could not fail to tumble over his
+stretched-out old legs. Who would have imagined that such a role as this
+would be one of the causes of the success of the piece, and would be the
+means of revealing to London an admirable actor? His name was John Hare.
+He was still quite young, and he had wished for this strange role in which
+to make his _debut_. Profiting by the example of Garrick, Hare had
+realised that an actor does not make his name by giving out a witticism or
+telling phrase with effect, but by putting before us a live human figure,
+if only a silent figure, in all its eccentricity of brain. His facial
+expression was wonderful, and his mimicry excellent;--he had in him the
+genius of metamorphosis; he has it still, and gives evidence of it in a
+hundred different roles. By a sort of intuition not easy to explain, there
+was hardly a spectator who did not divine the future great actor from this
+one performance.
+
+The success of _Society_--it lasted for one hundred and fifty nights--was
+followed almost at once by the success of _Ours_, which lasted still
+longer, and filled the theatrical season 1866-67. Then came _Caste_ in
+1867 and 1868. _School_ in 1869 surpassed its predecessors in popularity,
+being played nearly four hundred times. In the intervals between these
+four great triumphs there were two pieces which, without achieving so long
+a run, still maintained in the fortunate little theatre the same joyous
+atmosphere of success.
+
+When the "Prince of Wales's," however, had recourse to any other than its
+regular caterer, a check in its fortunes was sure to come, and there was
+no alternative to falling back on Robertson. And when Robertson tried his
+fortune elsewhere, even when supported by a popularity so well established
+as that of Sothern, the result was invariably but a _succes d'estime_,
+when not a disastrous failure. From these circumstances a certain
+superstition grew up. Superstitions are rife in the theatrical world.
+Marie Wilton, it was felt, had her lucky star, and Robertson had his, but
+the two had to be in conjunction for their benign influence to be exerted.
+Perhaps the coincidence may be explained without having recourse to the
+stars. Tom Taylor, on the day after a new triumph, wrote to the young
+manageress: "The author and the theatre, the actors and the roles, all
+seem made for one another." This was quite true, and it may be added, that
+the public and the time were in harmony with the spirit of the pieces and
+the talent of the performers. Everything had come about as it should; so
+it was called chance!
+
+Robertson was not much of an actor, but he was a wonderful reader. When
+you heard Robertson read one of his comedies, Clement Scott tells us, you
+understood it in all its details. Under the sway of his moving elocution
+the actors laughed and cried. The author knew their weaknesses and their
+gifts better than they themselves; he knew, therefore, how to make the
+most of the peculiar constitution of this small company which formed a
+kind of family, closely united by common interests, ambitions, and
+affections. Until then a piece was often nothing more than a star actor
+planted well in the front of the stage, taking his time and prolonging his
+effects, and behind him a dozen or so nonentities mumbling mere odds and
+ends of dialogue and addressing themselves to the back of their more
+famous colleague. For the first time there was now at the "Prince of
+Wales's," an _ensemble_ moulded by assiduous rehearsals and perfected by
+the practice of every night.
+
+In _Ours_, John Hare, who played the role of Prince Perofsky, had only to
+utter a dozen sentences--hackneyed and affected compliments--yet he made
+out of it a really striking portrait of a Slavonic Grand Seigneur, with a
+smouldering passion in his heart veiled under the most perfect manners.
+Besides his impressiveness there was something enigmatic about him that
+set one speculating as to the part he was to play in the plot,--an enigma
+to which there was to be no solution.
+
+At length, in _Caste_, Robertson gave him a real role, that of Sam
+Gerridge. I imagine, indeed, that author and actor contributed equally to
+the creation of this character. The same might be said, perhaps, of that
+of Captain Hawtree, created by Bancroft in the same play. Seldom, surely,
+has the use of this big word "created" (so often applied in the papers to
+the most insignificant performances) been warranted so fully as in these
+cases.
+
+Before Sothern's time the man of the world used to be represented on the
+English stage as an absurd figure treading on tiptoe while in ladies'
+society and ogling them _a bout portant_.
+
+The type had been changed as regards costume, but not as regards language,
+from that of the Macaroni of 1770. The dandy of 1840 does not seem to have
+found his way on to the stage until 1865.
+
+It was a complete change from this type to the character presented by
+Bancroft as Captain Hawtree, humorous but not ridiculous; not in the least
+essential to the play, yet attracting a large share of interest and
+sympathy. An elegantly languid air, which yet spoke of weakness neither of
+muscles nor of character; a blind acceptance of the social code, which was
+not incompatible with generous feelings and a sense of humour; a mixture
+of soldier-like cordiality and worldly cynicism, which amounted to an
+_etat d'ame_ if not to a philosophy: these were some of the features that
+went to make up the character.
+
+When circumstances--quite simple and natural--lead to Hawtree's taking tea
+in humble East End lodgings, between a little dancing-girl and an old
+plumber, nearly all the fun of the scene comes from his mute expression of
+continual astonishment. Hawtree presents a curious combination of
+awkwardness and goodwill in the scene in which he brings the plates to
+Polly Eccles in the pantry to be washed. At bottom it is the attitude of
+the English gentleman towards the social question,--somewhat scornful,
+somewhat amused, but ready to turn up his sleeves and put a shoulder to
+the wheel at need.
+
+As for Marie Wilton, with what wonderful insight Robertson had made out
+the real genius of this little woman, whose talents were so real, if all
+her ambitions were not attainable! She looked back with horror at her
+successes at the Strand; she wanted never again to play a _gamin's_ part
+(as we should call it) or to appear in burlesque. Robertson wrote her a
+succession of _gamin's_ parts and burlesque scenes. But the _gamin_ was
+petticoated and the burlesque scenes set in a comedy. I am not referring
+to _Society_, which was not written for the "Prince of Wales's." But what
+is it she has to do in the three other pieces? In _School_ she climbs a
+wall. In _Ours_ she takes part in a game of bowls, mimics the affectations
+of the swells of '65, plays at being a soldier, bastes a leg of mutton
+from a watering pot, and as a climax makes a roley-poley pudding, adapting
+military implements to culinary uses for the purpose. In _Caste_ her
+operations are still more varied--she sings, dances, boxes people's ears,
+plays the piano, pretends to blow a trumpet, puts on a forage cap, and
+imitates a squadron of cavalry. If this is not burlesque, what is it?
+
+Some months ago I saw her in a revival of _Money_, in which she plays the
+role of a woman of the world, and in one scene of which--a scene which
+owed much more to her than to Bulwer--she shows the steps of a dance. At
+this moment I seemed to see the legs of Pippo moving under the skirts of
+Lady Franklin,--those legs which five and thirty years before had made so
+lively an impression on the brain of Charles Dickens.
+
+Whether he was conscious of it or not, Robertson made her play Pippo all
+her life. These fantastic roles, sketched on to the margin of domestic
+dramas, were to have a remarkable and twofold success; they were largely
+responsible for the good fortune of Robertson's comedies, and in the
+reading of these they constitute, as it were, appetising _hors
+d'oeuvres_. If I say to the admirers of _Caste_ that Polly Eccles is an
+excrescence spoiling the artistic merit of the piece, they reply at once
+that, on the contrary, she is its life and soul; and from the point of
+view of stage effect, they are quite right.
+
+The Bancrofts--they married shortly after the opening of the theatre--were
+the complements of each other. She was all fun and fancy, harum-scarum,
+irresponsible, indescribable. He was chiefly notable for thought, taste,
+careful observation, and truthful representation of real life. One of his
+first acts, as soon as there was some money in the exchequer of the
+"Prince of Wales's," was to introduce a certain amount of intelligent
+realism into the scenery. He felt the need of doors with locks instead of
+the wretched folding-sashes, which shook before the draughts from the
+wings. In _Caste_ he gave ceilings to the rooms. The last Act of _Ours_
+takes place in Crimean barracks during the winter of 1855; every time the
+door was opened a gust of snow came into the room with a whirl and
+whistle, which produced so strong an illusion that the audience shivered.
+In the gardens, real flowers were introduced, and living birds. Charles
+Mathews was thought very enterprising because he had ventured to have some
+chairs placed in a drawing-room upon the stage. Bancroft went so far as to
+assign a different character to different suites of furniture. Thus in a
+revival of the _School for Scandal_, Joseph Surface's furniture was
+different from that of Sir Peter Teazle; his furniture, hypocritical as
+himself, seemed to make a pretence of being plain and simple, lied for him
+and bore out his lies. As for the actresses, instead of being made guys of
+by the theatrical costumiers, they had real dresses made for them by real
+dressmakers.
+
+Robertson approved of these innovations, but he was never more than half a
+realist, and this from several causes. Like all Englishmen, he delighted
+in the warfare of words; he shared with them all, big and little, ancient
+and modern, that liking for brilliancy which is perhaps evolved from the
+liking of savages for brilliants. Once he began concocting repartees he
+forgot all else and gave his pen its head. He made his characters play a
+game of verbal battledore and shuttlecock. He dragged in by the nape of
+the neck, as it were, tirades whose proper place had been in a leading
+article. When he went too far, however, in these directions, he was often
+the first to make fun of the result. "What has that got to do with what we
+are talking about?" asks a character in _Ours_. "It has nothing to do
+with it, that's why I said it." And in the same piece another character
+remarks of something that has happened, "If an author put that into a
+play, everyone would say that it was impossible and untrue to life."
+
+Thus it was he would forestall gaily, with a sort of impudent frankness,
+the objections of the critics. The public enjoys this kind of thing. What
+it enjoys most of all, in England at anyrate, is the _grain de folie_, the
+lurking, unlooked-for quaintness, which characterises some of their
+humorists, Dickens, for instance, and Ben Jonson. It is this quality which
+is responsible for their creation of strange types whose ideas and
+conversations are all topsy-turvy.
+
+It was in _School_ that Robertson poured it out most plentifully. It was
+the most frivolous of his plays, and in this perhaps may be found the
+explanation of its success. The heroines are boarding-school girls; they
+are just at the age and in the situation in which no absurdity would seem
+too great or out of place. By a convention which the spectator agrees to
+willingly, they are girls in Act I. and women three weeks later in Act
+III. In these three weeks they have learned the meaning of life.
+
+"What is love?" asks one of the youngest in the first scene. "Why,
+everyone knows what love is," Naomi tells her. "Well, what is it then?"
+asks another, and the first speaker insists that no one seems to know.
+
+Then comes the time for them to pass from vague theory to real experience.
+It is the evening, in the orchard. There are two flirtation scenes, one
+following the other, full of childishness, but full of _naivete_,
+freshness, and charm. There is question of the distance from the earth to
+the moon, of the play of light and shade, of a little milk-jug which it
+takes two to carry, of the Crimean War, and of Othello. Of love there is
+no word, but it underlies their every feeling, hides behind every word,
+peeps out through every glance, mingles with the very air they breathe.
+
+    _Naomi_: ... "I like to hear you talk."
+
+    _Jack_ (_bows_): "The fibs or the truth?"
+
+    _Naomi_: "Both. Have you ever been married?"
+
+    _Jack_: "Never."
+
+    _Naomi_: "What are you?"
+
+    _Jack_: "Nothing. It's the occupation I am most fitted for."
+
+    _Naomi_: "Oh, you must be something?"
+
+    _Jack_: "No."
+
+    _Naomi_: "What were you before you were what you are now?"
+
+    _Jack_: "A little boy."...
+
+    _Naomi_: "Mr. Farintosh was saying at table that you had been in the
+    army. Were you a horse-soldier or a foot-soldier?"
+
+    _Jack_: "A foot-soldier,--a very foot-soldier."
+
+    _Naomi_: "And that you were in the Crimea?"
+
+    _Jack_: "Ya-as, I was there."
+
+    _Naomi_: "At the battle of Inkermann?"
+
+    _Jack_: "Ya-as."
+
+    _Naomi_: "Then why didn't you mention it?"
+
+    _Jack_: "Not worth while, there were so many other fellows there."
+
+    _Naomi_: "Did you fight?"
+
+    _Jack_: "Ya-as, I fought."
+
+    _Naomi_: "Weren't you frightened?"
+
+    _Jack_: "Immensely."
+
+    _Naomi_: "Then why did you stay?"
+
+    _Jack_: "Because I hadn't the pluck to run away."
+
+    _Naomi_: "Did they pay you much for fighting?"
+
+    _Jack_: "No, but then I didn't do much fighting, so that I was even
+    with them in that respect!"
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    _Naomi_: ... "Are you fond of reading?"
+
+    _Jack_: "Ya-as. Middling."
+
+    _Naomi_: "Did you ever read Othello?"
+
+    _Jack_: "Ya-as. But I don't think it nice reading for young ladies."
+
+    _Naomi_: "Othello told Desdemona of the dangers he had passed and the
+    battles he had won."
+
+    _Jack_: "Ya-as. Othello was a nigger, and didn't mind bragging."...
+
+It would be but an ill service to Robertson to give an outline of his
+plays. A mere outline would give the impression that they were childish
+and absurd, and they were neither the one nor the other. He never invented
+a striking situation, so far as I am aware. He never settled (or even
+raised) a moral or social problem in any of his productions. He gave all
+his attention to the characters and the dialogue. A scribbled synopsis
+found amongst his papers reveals his method of character-drawing. He stuck
+down three words, one after another--a name, a profession, a ruling
+passion, such as love, ambition, cupidity, pride. With these words he
+thought he had summed up the ordinary conventional man, as nature had
+formed him, and society had reformed or deformed him: a very elementary
+but very sane psychology, which he enriched, embellished, elaborated, with
+the flowers of his fancy and the fruits of his observation. I have given
+some specimens of the former. I may now give some specimens of the second,
+to justify the title of half-realist which I have given him.
+
+He wanted nothing better than to be a realist and to reproduce what he had
+actually seen. He knew nothing of great ladies, as one may well
+understand. When he had to portray them he was obliged to copy from bad
+models. His Lady Ptarmigant is a regular _bourgeoise_; his Marquise de
+Saint Maur, who learns bits of Froissart by heart and gives lessons in
+history to her son, is either a myth or an anachronism. His Hawtree, on
+the other hand, is as real as can be; Robertson had met him probably in
+the clubs which he frequented. In _School_ he introduced a foolish yet
+ferocious usher, who was, it seems, a reminiscence of his youthful
+expedition to Holland. His rancour had not become extinguished in the
+twenty years that had intervened, and he could not resist the somewhat
+brutal satisfaction of inflicting a physical punishment in the last act
+upon his old enemy. He used to ask his small boy, whilst walking with him
+in Belsize Park, what he would answer to such and such a question? How
+would he set about enraging his master? And the boy would receive sixpence
+or a florin according to the nature of his reply.
+
+Soldiers, theatrical folk, artistic and literary Bohemians, are painted as
+they live, slightly idealised. In _Caste_ we have two specimens of the
+people--bad and good--in the persons of Eccles and Sam Gerridge. "Work, my
+boy," says Eccles to his future son-in-law; "there's nothing like
+work--when you're young." As for him,--well, it was some years since he
+worked (as a matter of fact he had lived on his daughters, and not touched
+a tool for twenty years), but he loved to see young folk at work. That did
+him good,--did them good too. He declaims against the upper classes; but
+when a marchioness passes his threshold, he bows down before her, and
+conducts her back to her carriage, only to return to his real self,
+insolent and venomous, the moment she has gone. When he makes his way to
+the public-house to drink, he gives a "business appointment" as his
+pretext--"a friend who is waiting for him round the corner." Always posing
+and aiming at effect, he uses big words for the smallest matters, and can
+produce a tear in his eye at will. He has a few garbled bits of literature
+at his command, and makes use of mangled quotations from _King Lear_.
+And, wretched actor though he be, he is able, with the aid of filial
+affection, to produce an illusion in the mind of one of his daughters.
+"Poor dad," says Polly, "he is so good at heart--and _so_ cute."
+
+No money in the house! He has been left at home by himself to mind the
+child of his eldest daughter, married to an officer who was well-born and
+rich, but who, it is supposed, has perished in the Indian Mutiny. The old
+drunkard rocks the cradle, angrily puffing his tobacco smoke in the baby's
+face.
+
+    _Eccles_: ... "Mind the baby, indeed! (_Smokes and puffs angrily short
+    cloud._) That fool of a ge'l to go and throw away her chances
+    (_rises_) for the sake of being an Honourable-ess. (_Goes up centre._)
+    To think of her father not having the price of an early pint, or a
+    quartern of cool refreshing gin! Rock the young Honourable! (_Kicks
+    the cradle._) Cuss him! Are we slaves, we working-men? (_Sings._)
+    'Britons never, never, never'--(_Snatches pipe from his mouth, throws
+    it over the fireplace, takes chair front of table._) However, I shan't
+    stand this much longer! I've writ the old cat!--the Marquizzy, I mean;
+    I told her her daughter-in-law and her grandson were starving! That
+    fool Esther is too proud to do it herself. I 'ate pride--it's beastly.
+    (_Rises._) There's no beastly pride about me! (_Goes up centre, clacks
+    his tongue against the roof of mouth._) I'm as dry as a limekiln! Of
+    course, there's nothing in the house fit for a Christian to drink!
+    (_Looks into the jug on dresser._) Empty! (_Lifts teapot on mantel._)
+    Tea! (_Turns up his nose. Turns to table, looks into jug on it._)
+    Milk! (_Contempt._) Milk for this aristocratic young pauper! Everybody
+    in the 'ouse is saggrefized for him! To think of me, Member of the
+    Committee of Banded Brothers, organised for the Regeneration of Human
+    Kind by an Equal Diffusion of Labour and an Equal Division of
+    Property!--to think of me, without the price of a pot of beer, while
+    this aristocratic pauper wears round his neck--a coral of gold--real
+    gold. Oh, Society! Oh, Governments! Oh, Class-degradation! Is _this_
+    right? Shall this mindless wretch enjoy in his sleep a jewelled gaud
+    while his poor old grandfather is _thirsty_? It shall not be! I will
+    resent the outrage on the Rights of Man! In this holy crusade of class
+    against class, of (_very meekly_) the weak and lowly against the
+    (_loudly, pointing to cradle_) powerful and strong! I will strike one
+    blow for freedom. (_Stoops over cradle._) He's asleep! This coral will
+    fetch ten "bob" around the corner! If the Marquizzy gives anythink, it
+    can be easy got out again! (_Takes coral._) Lie still, darling--lie
+    still, darling! It's grandfather a-watching you! (_Sings._) 'Who ran
+    to catch me when I fell? who _kicked_ the spot to make it well?--My
+    grandfather!' (_Goes R._) Lie still, my darling!--lie still, my
+    darling!"
+
+These comedies reveal the date of their composition in every line.
+Everybody cries out in them against money, but as against a master. Love
+cuts but a poor figure in comparison, though for form's sake it may
+triumph for five minutes before the curtain fails. Sam Gerridge, the
+virtuous plumber, who acts as counterpoise to the old wretch Eccles, has
+concocted a philosophy for himself out of the notices which he has seen on
+public conveyances--"First Class," "Second Class," "Third Class," "Holders
+of Third-Class Tickets must not enter Second-Class Carriages." As for him,
+he proposes to establish himself, and, from being a workman, to become an
+employer. John Burns will tell you that this kind of democracy is a
+negation of true democracy; in 1868 the formula seemed wide and generous
+enough.
+
+In such a manner was it that Robertson, who had wished that the world were
+a football which he could send into space with one kick, that the same
+Robertson, who, as he quitted those nocturnal symposia at Tom Hood's,
+would bring down his stick upon the pavement with a noise that made the
+silent streets resound, as he held forth indignantly against
+society,--grew in time and unconsciously, though in a manner easy to
+under-stand, to be the interpreter of the feelings and ideas of this very
+same society. The former assailant now defended the social rank which he
+had attained against both the enemies above and the enemies below. The new
+strata which came into being in 1832 were now half-way through their
+evolution. In 1850 they had been content with melodramas, vulgar farces,
+and Hippodramas. In 1865 they asked already for wit, sentiment, satire,
+poetic feeling, all flavoured, it might be, with Cockneyism, but this
+demand was an indication of progress, and Robertson satisfied it by
+writing the middle-class comedy.
+
+The change which took place just then in the life of the dramatist
+convinces me that I am right. He hastened to take leave of his irregular
+life, and to feel after _bourgeois_ comforts. He worked out for himself a
+happiness which made him, like the poor vagabond in the fable, weep for
+very joy. The Eve of this new-opened Paradise was a fair German whom he
+had met at the house of the editor of the _Daily Telegraph_, whose niece
+she was. Robertson did not long enjoy the sweets of this happy land. His
+mental and physical powers seemed to die away together. Mrs. Bancroft, who
+accompanied him to the first night of _The Nightingale_, saw him, livid
+with rage, shake his fist at the hissing members of the audience,
+muttering, "I shall never forgive them for this!"
+
+The doctors ordered him to Torquay, where, however, he grew worse. I have
+read a letter which he wrote thence to his young wife,--a pitiful letter,
+all in little jerky sentences, set in rhythm by the sick man's pants for
+breath. Pitiful, yet gay, for he could not give up being facetious. On his
+return to London he experienced a literary misfortune of which it was the
+lot of little Tommy, then thirteen or fourteen years old, to bring the
+news. Father and son looked upon each other with tearful eyes, and
+grasped each other's hands. "If they had seen me thus," said the writer
+sadly, "they would have had pity." Robertson was wrong. The public should
+know nothing of these things. There are no extenuating circumstances for
+literary mistakes.
+
+He died some days later. He was only forty-four. A friend who attended the
+funeral remarked, lying in the death chamber, its limbs dangling and
+disjointed, a doll whose injured stomach gave out sawdust through a wide
+opening. It was a doll with which he used to amuse his little girl to the
+very end. As for the puppets with which he had so long amused the world,
+they were to have a longer life. His comedies were destined to be
+continually revived, applauded, and imitated. Out of the six thousand
+performances given by the Bancrofts in a period of twenty years which
+formed one long success, three thousand belonged to Robertson. He alone
+furnished half their repertoire, and that the better half. From the depths
+of the out-of-the-way district which it had brought into fashion, the
+Prince of Wales's company sent colonies into the heart of the metropolis.
+It was by actors who had been brought out in it, as in a _conservatoire_,
+that the Vaudeville, the Globe, and the Court Theatres were founded. The
+inexhaustible success of _The Two Roses_--of which there will be question
+further on--placed the name of James Albery almost as high.
+
+Byron, in his turn, took a leaf out of the book of his old comrade, and
+succeeded, in _Our Boys_, in producing a comedy without (or almost
+without) puns. _Our Boys_ resembles Robertson's comedies just as a cook
+resembles her mistress when she is decked out in her mistress's hat and
+gown, or as Cathos and Madelon resemble the Marquise de Rambouillet and
+Julie d'Angennes. Even in this unintentionally caricature-like form the
+Robertsonian comedy continued to please, and it looked as though _Our
+Boys_ would never leave the bills.
+
+The exacting, the fastidious, those who had begun to dream of a purer and
+more penetrating art, dubbed Robertsonian comedy "Cup and Saucer" comedy.
+The school accepted the nickname, and gloried in it. For the tea-table,
+fifteen or twenty years ago, was still the centre of the home, the symbol
+of the family, the core of English life, such as it had been formed by the
+combination of the spirit of Puritanism with that of middle-class
+Utilitarianism.
+
+The name of the Bancrofts remained associated with the "Cup and Saucer"
+comedy as long as the movement lasted. As soon as they became sensible of
+their favourite author's decline in the eyes of the public they called
+Sardou to their assistance. By 1880 the Prince of Wales's had become too
+small for them and they emigrated to the Haymarket, which Mr. Bancroft had
+reconstructed as it is now, after a new plan, without the conventional
+proscenium, with the orchestra out of sight, the stage encased in a gilt
+frame like a picture, and no pit.
+
+This last innovation is characteristic. The pit from having composed the
+whole arena of the hall, had been moved back bit by bit, until at last it
+was confined to a few back benches behind the dress circle. To suppress it
+altogether was not so much an act of authority as of emancipation. It has
+been said that Mr. Bancroft thought too much of his gentility, and that he
+seemed anxious to reserve his theatre for the _elite: Satis est equitem
+mihi plaudere_. But even then? After all, it was only a case of an
+extremely able man keeping pace with the democratic generation to which he
+belonged, in his rise towards fortune and its accompanying enjoyments. He
+raised the price of stalls from six to seven shillings, and then to
+ten-and-sixpence. The public was evidently able to pay, for the stalls
+were always full.
+
+It should be added that, under the management of the Bancrofts, the rise
+in salaries was out of all proportion to the rise in the price of seats.
+The weekly salary of one actor, continuing to play in the same role, went
+from L18 to L60, and that of another from L9 to L50. Mrs. Stirling had
+created the role of the Marchioness in Caste at the "Prince of Wales's,"
+and received seven times as much for appearing in it at the Haymarket.
+Douglas Jerrold said to Charles Mathews: "I don't despair of seeing you
+yet with a good cotton umbrella under your arm, carrying your savings to
+the bank." Many years afterwards Mathews, presiding over the Theatrical
+Fund, recalled this remark, and added, "The first part of Jerrold's wish
+has been fulfilled. I have bought an umbrella." Thanks to the Bancrofts
+and the managers who came after them, the bank has been in receipt of the
+savings of many actors who previously would have been content if only they
+might earn their daily bread.
+
+Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft saw the time approaching when the monopoly they had
+secured of the works of Robertson would cease to exist; they felt at once
+that the vein was being exhausted, and that the new generation would have
+new needs. Able and far-sighted, they determined to retire at the zenith
+of their success, and if not in their youth, at least in their prime and
+in the full activity of their intellect. Neither of them was forty-five
+when in 1885 they gave their farewell performance at the Haymarket.
+
+Amongst the innumerable tokens of esteem which conduced to the triumph of
+this withdrawal, I shall cite only one. It is a letter from Arthur W.
+Pinero, who had belonged as an actor to the Bancroft Company, and who has
+taken since then a foremost place amongst English dramatists. He wrote to
+his former manager:--
+
+    "It is my opinion, expressed here as it is elsewhere, that the present
+    advanced condition of the English stage--throwing as it does a clear,
+    natural light upon the manner and life of the people, where a few
+    years ago there was nothing but moulding and tinsel--is due to the
+    crusade begun by Mrs. Bancroft and yourself in your little Prince of
+    Wales's Theatre. When the history of the stage and its progress is
+    adequately and faithfully written, Mrs. Bancroft's name and your own
+    must be recorded with honour and gratitude."
+
+I took it into my head not long ago to pay a visit to the little theatre
+in which Frederic Lemaitre appeared, in which Napoleon and Count d'Orsay
+rubbed shoulders with Dickens and Thackeray, in which there was difficulty
+once in finding a seat for Gladstone, and in which Beaconsfield received a
+memorable ovation. The Salvationists have succeeded to the comedians, and,
+whether or not it be that their trumpets have the virtue of those of
+Jericho, these historic walls are crumbling to ruin. The place is empty,
+cold, and desolate. It was on an evening of last winter that I stood
+pensively under the porch--the porch through which had flowed like a
+stream all the elegance and talent of a whole generation. The light of a
+gas jet shone mournfully on the notice, mouldy already, "To be let or
+sold"; and the rain trickled down on me from a gaping hole whence the
+electric light used once to glare upon pretty women issuing in all their
+finery from their carriages. My curiosity was not satisfied. In order to
+obtain admission inside, I gave myself out as a lecturer in search of a
+hall, but the ruse failed. I was told that I should have to pay L4500 or
+L6000, and was asked whether this trifling outlay would interfere with me.
+I did not pursue the negotiations, and the door remained closed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+Gilbert: compared with Robertson--His first Literary Efforts--The _Bab
+Ballads_--_Sweethearts_--A Series of Experiments--Gilbert's Psychology and
+Methods of Work--_Dan'l Druce_, _Engaged_, _The Palace of Truth_, _The
+Wicked World_--_Pygmalion and Galatea_--The Gilbert and Sullivan Operas.
+
+
+When Marie Wilton's company, during their first holiday, went on tour to
+Liverpool, they happened upon the autumn assizes. The young London
+barristers who followed the circuit made haste to fraternise with the
+theatrical folk, and a sort of little colony came into being in which
+everyone rejoiced and made merry. Grotesque trials were represented in
+which Marie Wilton, got up as the Lord Chief Justice in wig and gown, gave
+forth admirable verdicts; she tells of these frolics in her Memoirs,
+adding pleasantly: "We were all young then, and the fun perhaps appeared
+greater than it would now, but it was a very happy time."
+
+Among these young barristers there was one named Gilbert. He was soon to
+throw aside his gown in order to devote himself to the calling in which he
+was to achieve a reputation as great as Robertson's,--a reputation which
+still lives. The contrast between the two dramatists is striking.
+Robertson is a craftsman, brought up in the theatre, amenable to outside
+influences; he collaborates with his actors, with the public,--one may
+say, with his entire generation. The ideas of his time, good, bad and
+indifferent, exude from him at every pore. He becomes, therefore,
+unconsciously, a representative man and the leader of a school. Where
+Robertson is a natural product, a symptom, Gilbert is a freak, an
+accident. He might have "occurred" at any time in the century, or indeed
+in any century. One can neither trace his ancestry nor imagine his
+posterity. Born and bred a gentleman, he loved the theatrical world
+without being of it. Actors have accused him of being cold in his manner
+to them, high and mighty, even disdainful. So much for his personal
+character;--in discussing a living writer, more than this would be
+improper. As to his bent of mind, its originality was evident from the
+first, but that originality was at all times somewhat shallow and liable
+to run dry; and instead of widening it, he scooped it out.
+
+He exploited his talent by a kind of mathematical system, to its utmost
+limit, to the point of absurdity, in fact, and even further. His literary
+career may be described as containing three periods: in the first he felt
+his way; in the second he achieved brilliant and legitimate successes; in
+the third he met with even more fruitful triumphs, but of a kind which
+arouse little sympathy in a critic, and of which, I think, even he
+himself grew a bit tired. But he is so true an artist, and at the same
+time so typically English, that a French critic may well study him, even
+in his errors, without feeling that it is waste of time.
+
+It was some verses which he contributed from week to week to _Fun_ that
+first attracted attention to him. He reprinted them under the title, _Bab
+Ballads_, and as the public seemed to want them he followed these up with
+_More Bab Ballads_. Some of them were set to music and are still popular
+as songs, but these are not the ones which have the most flavour. It is
+difficult to describe this flavour; it consisted in a kind of naive irony,
+expressed in a form that was sometimes extravagant, sometimes studiously
+careless,--a blend of the deliberately prosaic with amazing fantasy. Some
+of these ballads finished up with a surprise, the others did not finish up
+at all,--which was a surprise too.
+
+Gilbert offered to his friends at the Prince of Wales's a pleasant little
+comedy entitled _Sweethearts_. A young man is about to start for India,
+where he is to make a career for himself, but he is in love with a young
+girl who lives near his country home. She has but to say a word and he
+will not go, or will not go alone. She does not say this word. What
+prevents her? Is it timidity, bashfulness, pride, or that strange spirit
+of contradiction or of coquetry which sometimes keeps the tongue from
+obeying the dictates of the heart? However that may be, she lets him go.
+Thirty years ensue. The lover returns, grey haired now,--a lover, indeed,
+no longer.
+
+Distance in time, as in space, makes things look small. His "grande
+passion" seems to him now a boyish fancy. He merely wishes to see the spot
+again; that is all. She, too, is there, seated under the shade of the tree
+which they planted together, retaining still the flower which he had given
+her, faithful to the memory of the love she had seemed to scorn. The old
+boy's scepticism gives way to tenderness. They marry. But will they ever
+find the thirty years that they have lost?
+
+Here is one of those pleasingly fanciful ideas that a man like Octave
+Feuillet may work out delightfully. Sadness and gladness should alternate
+in it like mist and sunshine on an autumn day. Now, Gilbert is a cynic,
+though a refined cynic, and he could deal only with half of his subject.
+In his little comedy, one or other of its two characters is always carping
+at love. In the first act it is the woman, in the second the man. Gilbert
+speaks, and very cleverly, through the mouth of this railer, but, alas!
+there seems nothing to be said on the other side. From the moment of this
+first attempt of his, the young author had to face the fact that he had a
+great disqualification for the writing of dramas; he could neither depict
+love nor reproduce its language. Is it out of a kind of revenge that he
+has continued to rail at love ever since?
+
+Nevertheless, he made some further efforts during the years which
+followed. He wrote _Broken Hearts_, a fantastic drama in verse, and made
+it clear even to himself that he was unequal to such high flights. He
+aimed at freeing Goethe's Margaret from all that philosophy which
+surrounds and obscures her, and he discovered that the idyll thus
+disencumbered, and naturally told, became flat and commonplace. He was
+then inspired by history, and the idea entered his head--probably after
+some reading that had moved him and awakened in him some dormant atavistic
+instinct--that his misanthropy would have a new force in the mouth of a
+puritanical peasant of the seventeenth century. But how difficult it is
+for a university man, a Garrick Club man, to feel and speak like such a
+character! As far as mere language is concerned, the author was fairly
+successful; _Dan'l Druce_ is a pleasing mosaic of archaic phrases, an
+ingenious transcription of the speech of those days. (But was the public
+which applauded _School_ and _Society_ sufficiently advanced in its
+artistic education to enjoy these things?) Can one say the same, however,
+of the ideas? Had one submitted, for instance, to a contemporary of John
+Fox or of Bunyan the moral question on which Mr. Gilbert's drama turns,
+would he really have solved it after the fashion of _Dan'l Druce_? Surely
+not.
+
+It is an interesting problem, though, of course, not new. To which of the
+two does the child belong--to him who begat but abandoned it, or to him
+who took pity on it and brought it up? It is the modern conscience that
+decides in favour of the second; the Puritan conscience of former days
+would have feared to interfere with that natural order of things in which
+it saw the guiding hand of God. As all things in this world and the next
+were pre-ordained, the father must remain the father in spite of
+everything, just as the chosen remained chosen, and the evil evil; the
+heart might bleed, but Divine Providence must have its way. This, it seems
+to me, had been the Puritan solution. But while we are reflecting upon
+these things, this problem, by a characteristic Gilbertian stroke, is
+turned upside down through a series of utterly incredible complications,
+the real father becomes the adoptive, and the adoptive father the real.
+Thenceforth we tumble from psychology into melodrama, and there remains no
+problem to solve.
+
+A love-scene was required in the play, as there were a young man and a
+girl amongst its characters. Their conversation--apart from certain pretty
+archaic touches which continue to delight me--is a sort of subtle
+intellectual game. Each seizes upon some one word in the last phrase of
+the other, works it up into a new phrase and darts it back. Thus the
+dialogue is bandied about to and fro, the great thing being to keep it up.
+Sometimes, however, it falls to the ground. "I don't know what to say,"
+Dorothy's answer to her lover's proposal, seems to suggest that the author
+himself is in a difficulty. This Dorothy is a thoroughly ingenuous young
+person, naively outspoken to the point of silliness. She is not sure of
+being in love, and discusses the subject like a question of conscience
+with him whose interest in it is most at stake. "These are my feelings,"
+she tells him. "Is this love or is it not?" This self-analysing _ingenue_
+is the only woman's character in the whole of Gilbert's dramatic work.
+
+Before writing _Engaged_, some such thoughts as these must have passed
+through his mind. "I shall turn out the human soul like a bag and show its
+lining instead of its cover. It will be very ugly, but all the more
+amusing. What does a man want when he puts aside all hypocrisy and all
+regard for social conventions, and gives the rein to his appetites and
+instincts?--To eat, to drink, to sleep, to be at his ease; to see all
+those die off from whom legacies are to be expected; to win, honourably or
+otherwise, every pretty woman who comes across his path. And what does a
+woman want?--To shine in society, to have fine dresses, to be admired, to
+marry a man who may give her a good position in the world. What is the
+meeting-point of the feelings of both man and woman?--The greed for money
+wherewith to buy the rest.
+
+"My _dramatis personae_ shall be neither good nor bad, they shall be
+naively and absolutely selfish,--their selfishness shown clearly, but in
+the thousand shades which civilisation has imparted to characters; it
+shall be expressed not bluntly but in the thousand shades which well-bred
+people bring into the utterance of fine sentiments and correct
+commonplaces. They shall lack only the moral sense; of this organ I shall
+deprive them as neatly and gently as possible. _Fiance_ and _fiancee_,
+father and daughter, friend and friend, shall become enemies the moment
+their interests clash; the moment their interests agree they shall clasp
+hands and kiss again as before. Three couples will perform these
+evolutions and manoeuvres before the audience, and the young girls will
+change their lovers as complacently as they would their partners in a
+quadrille. In a few minutes Cheviot Hill will propose to three different
+women; within the same space of time Simperson will throw his daughter at
+the head of Cheviot Hill, and drive his intending son-in-law to suicide.
+Belvonny will expend all his energies in the first half of a scene in
+denying a certain fact, and during the second half of it will make no less
+desperate efforts to establish this fact. Thus will the changeableness of
+men be demonstrated at the same time as their egoism. These puppets are
+monsters and these monsters puppets: my audience will not need to be told
+that '_Il faut se hater d'en rire de peur d'etre oblige d'en pleurer_.'"
+
+So cruel a farce had never been seen. The public was accustomed in farces
+to two or three comic characters, to satire at the expense of two or three
+ridiculous types. Here was a caricature of all mankind. The spectators
+laughed, but the jest was too bitter for their palate. It was at once too
+unreal and too true. Such cynical outspokenness might mark the
+conversation of the inhabitants of some dreamland. But it was incongruous
+where people travelled by railway and read the daily paper. Gilbert had
+but to transfer his puppets to the enchanted region where he located his
+_Palace of Truth_ for the big children who composed the public to accept
+them with glee.
+
+The _Palace of Truth_ is a pleasant piece based on the same notions of
+psychology as _Engaged_, but the satire is less bitter and less obvious.
+Here there is no mistake possible. Before seeing the characters as they
+really are, we have seen them playing every role in the human comedy. In
+the second act the faithful husband flirts indiscriminately to every side
+of him; the devoted girl-friend is a machiavelian coquette; the ardent
+lover, so generous of madrigals and sighs, is a vain and selfish coxcomb;
+the _ingenue_, chaste and correct almost to the point of coldness, is
+beyond herself with love; the honey-lipped courtier becomes candid and
+insolent to all the world; finally, the most amusing metamorphosis of all,
+the professional boor, who has achieved notoriety by his merciless
+criticisms, is the only person sincerely content with his life. Alceste
+has changed skins with Philinthe.
+
+In this world of fantasy, Gilbert was at last thoroughly at home. He
+experimented without restraint, like those physiologists who practise upon
+animals, depriving this one of viscera, that one of a cerebral lobe, a
+third of some nerve essential to motion. His _Creatures of Impulse_ do
+everything that comes into their heads, obeying every dictate of their
+instincts. In the case of the inhabitants of the _Palace of Truth_, their
+language is sincere enough, it is their manner that is hypocritical. The
+denizens of fairyland in _The Wicked World_ are unacquainted with love;
+they form a kind of puritanical society up in the clouds. Once they are
+made to know the sentiment which they have lacked, every evil springs from
+the Pandora's box. Selene passes through every stage of the malady. Joy,
+ecstasy, absolute security,--the celestial period; then vague disquietude,
+anxiety, with fierce jealousy on their heels; then anger, quarrels,
+threats of vengeance, finally, profound humiliation. The mocker had it all
+his own way, hitting to right and to left. On the one side, at the
+colourlessness, the shabbiness, the squalid monotony of virtue; on the
+other, at the enervating and degrading effects of vice.
+
+But Gilbert never soared so high either in his philosophy or in his art as
+in _Pygmalion and Galatea_. This was one of the great successes of the
+Haymarket in 1871 and 1872. Galatea was impersonated by Madge Robertson,
+the young sister of the dramatist, then in the flower of her twenty-second
+year; and Kendal, whose wife she was soon to be, was Pygmalion. Miss
+Robertson's grace of person, her pure and noble diction, were aids to
+success, though it was not to them that success was due. Even had the
+piece fallen quite flat, however, I should still give it a place above all
+the other productions of the author.
+
+I know, of course, what captious critics have had to say on the subject.
+Nothing is easier, indeed, than to pull to pieces the figure of Galatea;
+to show how far it is from plausibility; how inconsistent Gilbert was in
+his composition of it; to show how, almost in the same breath, she asks
+the most childish, almost imbecile, questions, and indulges in an analysis
+of her emotions as subtle as Joubert's or Amiel's; how this absolutely
+ignorant creature, who asks whether the room in which she comes to life is
+the world, has yet the faculty of explaining the stages of consciousness
+through which she has passed on her way to full existence; how she can
+distinguish between an original and a copy, and be jealous at another's
+having sat as a model for her features, although she does not know the
+difference between a man and a woman.
+
+Then, again, there is her characterisation of a soldier, when she has the
+meaning of the word explained to her, as a "hired assassin." Her
+comprehension of these two words "assassin" and "hired" presuppose some
+rudimentary knowledge of the principal social institutions which affect
+the preservation of life, as well as of penalties, and salaries, and of
+the circulation of money and of the economic laws which it obeys. The
+soldier, she is told, attacks only the strong. That may be so; still war,
+she insists, is cruel. As for hunting, it is cowardly. All these
+reflections and comparisons, all this reasoning in a brain of marble which
+could not think, which did not exist, a few hours before!
+
+These examples might be multiplied, but to no end. All such criticisms are
+vain, because they assume our acceptance of a general thesis more
+improbable than all the minor ones which it involves. No statue ever did
+come to life, but if one were to, it would find itself in the position of
+a newborn child. Before learning to moralise, it would first have to learn
+how to walk and how to talk; its first movement would be a tumble, its
+first utterance inarticulate: whoever submits such myths to this kind of
+critical examination is to be sincerely pitied, for whether he realise it
+or no he thus deprives himself of whatever of poetry or of suggestiveness,
+of charm, or of profundity, they may contain.
+
+For Gilbert the fable of Galatea, of the statue come to life, was
+something more than it had ever been either for artist or man of thought:
+it offered a form to that dream by which he was haunted, a frame for that
+favourite picture he had so often sketched out already--the woman whose
+heart is a _tabula rasa_, whose mind is an instrument that has never been
+used, but is perfected and ready for use, who for the expression of her
+unsophisticated feelings has all the resources of intelligence and
+language at her command. What _we_ learn during the toilsome schooling of
+twenty or thirty years _she_ apprehends at a glance, and it would seem
+that she is the better able to judge of life in that she sees it
+reflected, as it were, in a single picture suddenly unveiled.
+
+Mr. Gilbert's Pygmalion is married to a woman whom he loves, and who sits
+to him as a model. He is not in love with the statue at the outset. He is
+jealous, however,--and in this conception the author is more Greek than
+the Greeks themselves,--of the gods, in that they alone have the power of
+giving life. _He_ is capable only of producing this inanimate figure. As
+for death, any common murderer can achieve that better than he. It is not
+Venus who gives life to Galatea to satisfy mere lust; it is Diana, whose
+priestess Cynisca he had taken from her, and who avenges herself by this
+cruel gift, whilst humbling at the same time the pride of the sons of
+Prometheus. Thus it comes that Pygmalion's feeling upon first noting the
+aspect of the living statue is not rapture but wonder, a sort of religious
+awe, the exaltation of a lofty and intellectual paternity. It is the
+gradual passage from this feeling to that of love which constitutes the
+life and, I may add, the beauty of this scene. You can guess what is the
+first question of Galatea, "Who am I?"--"A woman." "And you, are you also
+a woman?"--"No, I am a man." "What, then, is a man?" Upon this the pit
+would burst out in a roar of laughter which must have hurt the ears of the
+author. How few of those who laughed were qualified to appreciate
+Pygmalion's reply--
+
+          "A being strongly framed,
+  To wait on woman, and protect her from
+  All ills that strength and courage can avert;
+  To work and toil for her, that she may rest;
+  To weep and mourn for her, that she may laugh;
+  To fight and die for her, that she may live!"
+
+Galatea learns the right which another woman possesses to Pygmalion, the
+thousand shackles by which men are content to limit their slender liberty
+and to diminish their fugitive enjoyments. The evening comes, and with it
+sleep. She thinks she is turning again to stone, then she dreams, and then
+she sees the light once more. But is life the dream or is the dream life?
+She asks Myrine, Pygmalion's sister, for an explanation of all these
+things. Myrine replies--
+
+  _Myrine_: "Once every day this death occurs to us,
+  Till thou and I and all who dwell on earth
+  Shall sleep to wake no more!"
+
+  _Galatea_: (_Horrified, takes Myrine's hand_) "To wake no more?"
+
+  _Pygmalion_: "That time must come, may be, not yet awhile,
+  Still it must come, and we shall all return
+  To the cold earth from which we quarried thee."
+
+  _Galatea_: "See how the promises of newborn life
+  Fade from the bright life-picture one by one!
+  Love for Pygmalion--a blighting sin,
+  _His_ love a shame that he must hide away.
+  Sleep, stone-like, senseless sleep, our natural state,
+  And life a passing vision born thereof,
+  From which we wake to native senselessness!
+  How the bright promises fade one by one!"
+
+At this point the idea reaches its full expression. The scenes written for
+old Buckstone, as an Athenian dilettante who judges statues by their
+weight; his dialogue with Galatea, in which the piece returns to the old
+groove of fun and folly and sinks almost to the level of burlesque, and
+finally, the domestic drama in which Pygmalion and Cynisca are concerned,
+and then the renunciation of self which moves Galatea to become once again
+the lifeless statue, that she may thus bring back peace and happiness to
+those upon whom she had entailed trouble and disunion: all this adds but
+little to the value of the piece, though it cannot be said to spoil it. It
+remains one of the most delicate, graceful, and ingenious of modern
+English plays.
+
+Gilbert had felt the need more than once of providing some sort of musical
+accompaniment for his paradoxical fantasies, for is not music the natural
+background to the land of dreams? This accompaniment seemed to soften the
+outlines of his thought and to temper the bitterness of his satire. The
+writer had experimented first with the music of his own verses, but this
+was not a success. Why then should he not secure the aid of real music by
+a musician? He did so in _Trial by Jury_, a very amusing one-act piece,
+suggested in part by his joyous reminiscences of Liverpool. It was a
+little piece, but it had a big success. Then came the long series of comic
+operas which have rendered the Gilbert and Sullivan combination as popular
+in England as that of Meilhac and Halevy with Offenbach was with us during
+the last ten years of the Empire. The English owe a debt of gratitude to
+their compatriots for having dethroned burlesque and operetta, two imports
+from France which competed with the national manufacture. So far so well,
+but I doubt whether the native comic opera will survive its originators.
+Already they are out of fashion.
+
+For my part, I never yawned so much as I did at _Princess Ida_, unless it
+was at _Patience_. The first is a parody of the unsuccessful work of
+Tennyson, which bears the similar title _The Princess_, and is a satire
+upon the higher education of women; the second is a parody of the
+aesthetic movement. In _Iolanthe_ I saw a Lord Chancellor who has been
+married to a fairy come at midnight to a spot in Westminster, with his
+colleagues of the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords, all dressed in
+their scarlet and ermine, and to sing (and dance) a judicial sentence
+(expressed in the correct legal phraseology), whilst the shining face of
+Big Ben lit up the background and a grenadier on guard paced up and down
+before Whitehall.
+
+In _The Pirates of Penzance_, and in _Pinafore_, mankind seems to be
+walking on its head. Everything happens contrariwise. The fun consists in
+making everyone say and do exactly the opposite of what might be expected
+from them, considering their character and profession. Here, briefly, is
+the plot of the _Pirates_. Frederic's nurse was charged by his parents to
+make him an apprentice to a pilot, but, being deaf, she had misunderstood
+and had handed him over to a pirate. The young man fulfilled his contract
+of apprenticeship, which provided for a certain number of years. This duty
+accomplished, it remains for him only to accomplish his duty as a citizen
+of proceeding to the extermination of his ex-companions. He has set
+himself ardently to this when the pirate chief points out to him that by
+the terms of his indenture he is not to be free until his birthday shall
+have come round a certain specified number of times. Now Frederic was born
+on the 29th of February in leap year! He has therefore many long years
+still to serve with the pirates. An outlaw's devotion to strict
+legality--this may be said to be the idea, which is worked out in the
+production with a methodical determination to overlook no single aspect of
+the question, the characters being dealt with like so many briefs. Would
+you have supposed that there would be material enough in this to furnish
+forth three hours' entertainment? But the author was justified by the
+result.
+
+Gilbert never quite succeeded in shaking off the dust of Chancery Lane and
+Lincoln's Inn. In many respects he may be said to have remained a lawyer
+all his life: by his professional scepticism, by the variety of his
+dialectical resources, by his proneness to subtle distinctions and
+interpretations, by his cleverness in setting up appearances against
+realities, and words against ideas, but above all, by his curious faculty
+for losing good cases and winning bad ones.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+Shakespeare again--From Macready to Irving; Phelps, Fechter, Ryder,
+Adelaide Neilson--Irving's _Debut_--His Career in the Provinces, and Visit
+to Paris--The Role of Digby Grant--The Role of Matthias--The Production of
+_Hamlet_--Successive Triumphs--Irving as Stage Manager--As an Editor of
+Shakespeare--His Defects as an Actor--Too great for some of his Parts--As
+a Writer and Lecturer; his Theory of Art--Sir Henry Irving, Head of his
+Profession.
+
+
+What became of the "legitimate" drama the while Robertson busied himself
+with his attempts to bring comedy into the domain of reality, and Gilbert
+worked away at the exploiting of his fancy? In a preceding chapter I have
+shown to what a depth of degradation it had fallen towards 1850. The old
+privileged theatres which had possessed the monopoly of it had abandoned
+it, and when it became public property the new theatres scorned to take it
+up. The two little Batemans, aged six and eight, piqued in _Richard III._
+the curiosity of an unsophisticated, uneducated public, which was the
+readier to enjoy these childish exhibitions in that it was itself childish
+in its literary tastes. These little girls were symbols of a "Shakespeare
+Made Easy." An actor named Brooke made things still worse; with him it
+was a case of Shakespeare made ridiculous. He was laughed at up till the
+day which brought the news of his "Hero"-like end on a ship which was
+taking him to America, and which was wrecked; the poor tragedian had come
+upon real tragedy for the first time, in the hour of his death. From 1850
+to 1860 the permanent home of Shakespeare was the theatre of Sadler's
+Wells at Islington. Imagine Corneille exiled to the _Bouffes du Nord_, or,
+further still, to the _Theatre de Belleville_!
+
+Phelps, whose undertaking it was, was not a great actor, but he was a good
+actor. He had, besides, the sacred fire, the key to certain roles which up
+till then had been left to inferior performers, but which suited his
+personality, as he had the discrimination to perceive. They say his Bottom
+was a masterpiece of innocuous fatuity and conscientious blundering,--that
+crazy preoccupation of a workman, one sometimes encounters, with matters
+beyond the scope of his intelligence. In _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, the
+fantastic parts were represented behind a curtain of gauze, which threw
+between the spectator and the scene a faint mist producing the illusion of
+the vagueness and indistinctness of a dream.[11] Kean and Macready had
+"popularised" Shakespeare, as had Garrick and Kemble before them, to the
+best of their ability; they tried to extract from all his plays every bit
+of the melodrama therein contained. Phelps, as it seems to me, brought out
+another and nobler distinctive quality--that of _poemes en action_. This
+does no small credit to the intelligence of a Shakespearian actor.
+
+The Frenchman, Fechter, came next. The same Fechter who, with Madame Roche
+in _La Dame aux Camelias_, set our mothers weeping, brought back
+Shakespeare in triumph to the Princess's and to the Lyceum. In _Macbeth_,
+he was only middling; but while they say his _Othello_ was the worst
+imaginable, his _Hamlet_, according to the same critics, could not be
+surpassed. He brought to light, indeed, an aspect of this great role which
+had been ignored. On the evening of his last performance of it, Macready,
+taking from him Hamlet's velvet coat, addressed to him, in tones of some
+emotion, Horatio's words--"Adieu, dear Prince!" and added, "It seems to me
+that I understand now for the first time all that there is of tenderness,
+humanity, and poetry in the character." Fechter found out traits which had
+escaped his predecessors. He imparted grace and elegance to the tranquil
+and pleasing parts of the action--a refined intellectual elegance proper
+to a prince who had passed through the University of Wittemberg. The
+advice of Hamlet to the players--the actor's Ten Commandments--he rendered
+with much art and spirit.
+
+After Fechter there came a new, but only a partial eclipse. Beginners
+became old stagers and appeared in principal roles. Between 1870 and 1875
+I saw Ryder, whose voice varied in tone from that of an organ to that of a
+hunting-horn, on several occasions, notably in _Anthony and Cleopatra_,
+with Miss Wallis, who had not the beauty, and could not suggest the charm,
+one ascribes to a woman for whom an empire were well lost. I recall, too,
+the countenance, with its delicately tragic aspect, of Adelaide Neilson,
+who shook with passion from top to toe, and shrieked and writhed, and yet
+kept her good looks. She met with a sudden death at Pre-Catelan,--it was a
+glass of milk that killed her within two hours; and in London they say
+that the proprietor of the hotel in which she was stopping was inhuman
+enough to threaten to thrust her out in her agony upon the streets.
+
+He who was to bring back Shakespeare, and to make of him the most
+flourishing and most warmly applauded of dramatic writers, had already
+been long upon the stage,--he was already an actor of repute even; but the
+Shakespearian revival to which I allude dates from October 31, 1874. It
+was then that Henry Irving played Hamlet for the first time at the Lyceum.
+
+There was an institution in the City, at one time frequented by amateurs
+of the drama, which was known as the City Elocution Class. A certain Mr.
+Henry Thomas conducted it according to the principle of mutual instruction
+associated with the name of Pestalozzi. As soon as each student had
+recited his piece, his colleagues had their say upon his delivery of it,
+pointing out any faults they discovered in his manner of giving it out, in
+his pronunciation, accent, or emphasis; the master summed up these
+criticisms and pronounced his own judgment upon the subject. From time to
+time they gave public performances.
+
+It was at one of these that there appeared one evening--in 1853--a
+strange-looking and attractive youth. His eyes, intelligent and full of
+fire, lit up a face whose features were delicate as a woman's. He wore a
+jacket of the old-fashioned cut and a great white collar. His long raven
+locks covered his neck and reached even to his shoulders.
+
+He was then fourteen years old, and was employed in the office of an East
+India merchant. His early childhood had been spent in an out-of-the-way
+corner of Somerset, amongst sailors and miners. The library of the house
+in which he lived consisted of only three books, which he devoured--the
+Bible, _Don Quixote_, and a collection of old ballads. From these Western
+expanses, where the imaginative soul of the Celt has left something of its
+reveries, he had been transported when eleven to a mean little house in
+London, in one of those central districts which swarm and overflow like
+very ant-hills of humanity.
+
+Two years of school-life ensued; then his commercial apprenticeship, the
+stereotyped office-life. How was it that under these conditions Henry
+Irving's vocation for the theatre came out? He will tell us the story some
+day, perhaps, and tell it admirably. This, at least, is known, that his
+vocation, once it had declared itself, was distinct, absolute, not to be
+shaken. We have before us one of those rare careers which are so perfectly
+ordered towards the accomplishment of some end by a resolute and
+inflexible will, that there is to be found in them no single wasted minute
+or ill-directed endeavour.
+
+Young Irving frequented Phelps' theatre, Sadler's Wells; an old actor who
+belonged to it, David Hoskyns, gave him lessons, and on going off to
+Australia left him a letter of recommendation with the address blank.
+Phelps would have given him an engagement, but the young aspirant deemed
+himself too unworthy, and was anxious to commence his novitiate in the
+provinces. Doubtless he had an inkling already of the truth he expressed
+pithily at a later period: "The learning how to do a thing is the doing of
+it,"--one of the most thoroughly English aphorisms ever given out in
+England. Thus it was that the bills of the Lyceum at Manchester, on
+September 26, 1856, contained the name of Henry Irving, who was to play
+the role of the Duke of Orleans in Lord Lytton's _Richelieu_. Thence he
+proceeded to Edinburgh, and in the next three years he played a hundred
+and twenty-eight parts. On September 24, 1859, he made his _debut_ in
+London at the Princess's, in an adaptation of the _Roman d'un Jeune Homme
+Pauvre_. His part was limited to six lines. What was he to do? Repeat
+those lines evening after evening till he got addled? He preferred to
+break off his engagement. But before returning to the provinces he gave
+two lectures at Crosby Hall, which drew from the _Daily Telegraph_ and the
+_Standard_ the prediction that he would have a fine career. Then came
+seven years of study and of growing success in Glasgow, Manchester, and
+Liverpool theatres. And then, the creation of a role in one of
+Boucicault's dramas having brought him into greater prominence, he at last
+set his foot firmly on the stage of the St. James's, whence he passed
+first to the Queen's, later to the Vaudeville, and finally to the Lyceum.
+
+More than one Parisian must remember the posters with which the actor
+Sothern covered all our walls during the Exhibition of 1867, that haunting
+vision of Lord Dundreary with his long frock-coat, his hat slightly tilted
+over his forehead, and his glass fixed in his eye. In the second, perhaps
+it would be more correct to say the third, rank of this company which
+visited us, hid Henry Irving.
+
+There are often two distinct phases of success. The first is that during
+which the conquest of one's professional brethren is achieved. Now, one's
+professional brethren maintain silence, sometimes with singular unanimity,
+upon the talents they have discovered, and thus retard that second period
+during which the greater and ultimate public success is at length
+attained. Irving was still in the first phase when he played Digby Grand
+in James Albery's _Two Roses_. Digby Grand is an impecunious gentleman
+who accepts alms with an air of conferring favours,--a singular blend of
+pride and baseness, brazen-faced, insolent, a liar and a blackguard. The
+opening scene of the piece, in which he induces a landlady who has been
+pressing him for rent to offer him a loan of twenty pounds, is so
+brilliantly carried through, that it compels one to compare it with the
+scene of Don Juan and M. Dimanche. But how far is all the rest of it from
+fulfilling the promise of this beginning! From this out we have nothing
+but a tumult of words, a confusion of _jeux de scenes_, interrupted here
+and there by silly _preciosites_ which are intended to serve as aphorisms.
+However, the vogue of the piece was inexhaustible, and such was the taste
+of the public, that two or three other actors attracted their attention
+more than Irving. On the occasion of the two hundred and ninety-first
+performance of _The Two Roses_, he recited "The Dream of Eugene Aram," and
+his delivery of it was a revelation. In it, indeed, the scope of the
+actor's art was immensely widened--what he actually expressed in his
+recital was nothing to what he was able to suggest. With the whole
+province of life for his subject, what was most impressive was the glimpse
+beyond, into the region of the unseen and the unknown.
+
+Irving was able not only to impart more meaning to his words than they
+expressed in themselves, but he was addicted even to making them
+subservient to his own ideas, and of making the public accept his
+conception in the face of a text which was in flat contradiction with it.
+
+At this critical moment of his career a happy chance brought to him the
+very piece of all others calculated to bring out his gifts--a piece which
+should enable him to depict the wonderful and awful dualism of thought and
+language, of a man's outward aspect and his soul within,--this was _The
+Bells_, an almost literal translation of Erckmann and Chatrian's _Polish
+Jew_. Irving bought the MS. and offered it to his manager, Bateman, who
+tried it as a last chance. Irving acted Matthias, and in one evening the
+actor of talent became the actor of genius. Clement Scott hurried to his
+newspaper, _The Daily Telegraph_, and wrote so enthusiastic an account of
+the performance that next morning the editor chaffed him on the subject,
+and wanted to know who this Irving might be. In an article in the _Times_,
+John Oxenford analysed with much penetration that suggestive power of the
+actor, and that striking dualism of which I have spoken. Matthias, for all
+that idyllic existence in which everything succeeded with him and smiled
+upon him, seemed, said Oxenford, to wear the aspect of one living in a
+world of terrors, where all was torture and impending destruction. The
+horrors of the second and third acts would not have been intelligible, and
+would have missed their effect, if they had not been foreshadowed in the
+first by the glances, the tremors, the lapses into silence, the
+indescribable atmosphere of fatefulness which seemed, under the bright
+morning sunshine, to envelop the murderer as with a shroud. The actor was
+to give proof of many other gifts, to traverse triumphantly every province
+of his art in the course of his splendid career, but it was by his
+psychological suggestiveness, by his engendering of fear, both physical
+and mental, that he won his first great theatrical victory.
+
+_The Bells_ was succeeded by _Charles I._, by Wills. From the Alsatian
+inn-keeper to Charles Stuart was a big jump. Irving managed it without
+apparent effort.
+
+It was as though the portrait by Van Dyck had stepped down from its
+frame--this stately figure with its cold and lofty aspect, the look of
+sadness in the eyes, the lips smiling bitterly under the thin moustache,
+the pale veined forehead that bore the seal of destiny. I seem still to
+see him, now playing with his children on the grass slopes of Hampton
+Court, now crushing Cromwell with his kingly scorn. That phrase of
+his--"Who's this rude gentleman?" still rings in my ears. The picture of
+Charles clasping little Henriette and her younger brother in his arms in
+the heartbreaking farewell scene at the close is still before my eyes....
+Then, in a village graveyard, that more terrible figure takes its place,
+the sombre phantom-form of Aram, long and lank, the assassin reasoning
+with his remorse.
+
+In these fruitful years one creation followed another in quick succession,
+each excellent, all different. Finally, on October 31, 1874, Irving
+appeared as Hamlet.
+
+This was his Marengo; up to the third act, the battle seemed lost. His
+anguish must have been terrible. The audience was mute, frigid, and their
+frigidity seemed to increase. The third act produced a complete change.
+From the scene with the players and the description of the imaginary
+portraits the evening was a continual triumph. The public had before them
+a Hamlet they had never seen or even dreamt of; all the Hamlets that had
+ever appeared upon the stage seemed to have been assimilated by an
+original and powerful temperament, and blended harmoniously into one. _The
+Bells_ had been played a hundred and fifty-one times, _Charles I._ eighty
+times. _Hamlet_ filled the Lyceum for two hundred nights without
+interruption.
+
+Irving took up _Richelieu_ next, and in it strove victoriously against
+memories of Macready. At the close of the performance the house rose at
+him--men waved their hats in their enthusiasm in the midst of the wildest
+cheering. Such a scene had not been witnessed in an English theatre for
+half a century! It proclaimed Irving Kean's successor. As though to
+complete the rites of this coronation, the sword which clanked at his side
+when he played Richard III. was that which Kean had carried in the same
+role, and the ring which shone on his finger was a ring of Garrick's. A
+colleague, old Chippendale of the Haymarket, had given him the one; the
+other was a present from the Baroness Burdett-Coutts. They formed, as it
+were, the insignia of royalty.
+
+He continued to make himself master of all the great Shakespearian roles,
+like a conqueror annexing provinces. Of course, he was not equally good in
+all, though to all he brought his understanding and his inspiration, and
+to all gave the stamp of his individuality. He sighed and sang of love as
+Romeo, railed and mocked at it as Benedick; raged with Othello, trembled
+with Macbeth; laid bare, as Wolsey, the inner working of the soul of the
+statesman-priest; as Lear, went raving over the desolate heath in the
+storm and the darkness of the night. Throughout he has had the
+co-operation of Miss Ellen Terry, an actress of the finest and most
+delicate talent, whose charm has resisted the passing of the years. Around
+them there has grown up a generation of younger actors and actresses, who
+to-day adorn the stages of other theatres.
+
+Irving is to be looked on not merely as an interpreter of Shakespeare.
+Hardly less important has been his work in editing the plays for the
+modern theatre, and in staging them worthily: at the Lyceum he has given
+them a setting than which the great dramatist, had he lived in our days
+(and read Ruskin), could have wished for nothing better. He has told us in
+a few lines, which I regard as the expression of his mature judgment, the
+result of thirty years of theory and practice, what sort of staging is
+required for masterpieces. _The mise en scene_, he tells us, should not
+give the spectator any separate impression, it should be in keeping merely
+with the impression of the piece. It should envelop the performers in an
+atmosphere, provide them with suitable surroundings, afford the special
+kind of lighting that is required for the action. Its role is a negative
+one. It should introduce no incongruity, no discordant note; that is all
+that is required. To attempt more is a mistake, and is apt to do injury to
+the general effect. Whenever I have been to the Lyceum I have found this
+programme strictly adhered to.
+
+The restoration of Shakespeare's text, however, was a still more important
+achievement. Everyone congratulated him on his good sense in freeing us
+from Colley Cibber's version of _Richard III._ He continued the good work
+with all the other dramas he took up; and we have to thank him to-day for
+an "acting edition" of the Shakespearian masterpieces,--an actable
+Shakespeare that is yet a real Shakespeare. The principle which he has
+followed in this task may be summarised, I think, as follows:--Omissions,
+often; transpositions, sometimes; interpolations, never.
+
+I am far from pretending that Irving as an actor is without fault, that he
+is not liable to go wrong like everyone else, that the richness of his
+artistic nature attains to universality. There can be no doubt that he is
+better as Richard III. than as Macbeth, as Benedick than as Romeo. The
+first time you see him, his play of feature seems exaggerated, his motions
+jerky and irregular. A critic has compared his gait in _Hamlet_ to that
+of a man hurrying over a ploughed field; another critic has found in that
+curious gesture, which periodically throws up his shoulders and draws his
+head down into his collar-bone, a resemblance to the motion of a savage
+making ready to spring upon his foe. His elocution is far from being
+perfect,--a fact he has recognised himself, for he has worked hard to
+correct the defects of delivery which have been charged against him. But
+these are slight shortcomings of which a year of technical study at the
+outset of his career would have freed him completely.
+
+A more serious drawback, to my mind, is that he is too great for many of
+his roles, that he is out at elbow in them, so to speak. He himself has
+told us that the first duty of an actor is to fit his part, to _be_ the
+character, to personate; and, it must be admitted, that in following this
+principle he has given proof of a versatility unsurpassed by Garrick
+himself: yet it would seem that the greater he has grown by study and
+thought, (with the growth of his years and of his fame,) it has become
+more and more difficult for him to squeeze himself into the smaller
+personalities he has had to represent upon the stage, to sink in them that
+magnetic individuality of his own which constitutes his power, and to
+which he owes his success. Just as that young actor called out "Burbadge"
+instead of "Richard," we also, in Irving's case, forget the role, and see
+only the actor; and the play assumes for us the character of an admirable
+lesson in the art of recitation.
+
+Although he reverences the great actors who have preceded him, Irving
+takes but little note of tradition. His method is essentially individual
+to himself, and he does not hesitate to recommend this method to all
+members of his profession, even beginners.
+
+It may be said to have three phases, involving three successive processes.
+First, a patient and conscientious study of the text: it is essential to
+understand the author's meaning. When this has been mastered, you may
+trust to your instinct, to inspiration. Then, amongst the ideas thus
+discovered, you make your selection, of the good ones by a species of
+mental process which will enable you to reproduce them artificially at
+will.
+
+Thus it is that Irving passes, smiling, by Diderot's paradox about the
+actor. Diderot is right, of course, when he says that the actor does not
+abandon himself on the stage to the promptings of inspiration; but he is
+wrong in concluding that the whole business of acting is mechanical. As
+Talma well expressed it in speaking of his own case, the emotions
+represented by an actor, and communicated through him to us, are often
+worked up from old experiences really met with and stored by study as
+material. But shall we exact from him that he should have a real craving
+to deceive when he impersonates a hypocrite? or that he should be in love
+with the actress who has to enact a love scene with him? or thirst for
+blood when he accomplishes a stage murder? These violent and often
+contrary emotions--supposing, that is, that any one man should be capable
+of them--would paralyse the actor instead of inspiring him. We expect of
+him not that he should himself experience personally all these passions,
+but that he should understand and be able to portray them. What culture,
+though--what a combination of gifts, does this portrayal require and call
+into play! An actor may be in turn, painter, sculptor, poet, musician,
+psychologist, moralist, historian, and yet be inadequately equipped for
+his calling.
+
+Does one go to the theatre to see life depicted upon the stage, or, on the
+contrary, to escape from life and forget it? Irving takes up a position
+half-way between the realist and that of the ultra-idealist. What one
+should see at the theatre is indeed life, but an intenser life, with
+emotions that are keener, a pulse that beats more quickly,--a life in
+which the potentialities of men and women are at their full, and in which
+there is a standard of good and evil to give a moral conclusion, a lesson
+in the art of living. "Get the working-man to go to the theatre," he
+declares; there is no better way of keeping him out of the public-house.
+The theatre should be really a school, should teach the young how to live,
+and reconcile the weary and the sad to their existence, by setting before
+them the ideal poetic justice which hovers over their heads.
+
+This is the substance of the great actor's teaching, as set forth by him
+on many occasions,--I shall not say in defence of his profession: the
+theatre, he has declared proudly, no longer needs to be defended--but
+rather in glorification of it. Quite recently, in an address to the Royal
+Society, in February 1895, he demonstrated that acting was truly one of
+the Fine Arts. Taking a definition of Taine's as his starting-point, he
+dealt with that great writer's opinions on the same plane of thought, in a
+style that was no less brilliant than clear and concise. Irving has too
+keen an appreciation of beauty of form not to be conscious of the value
+lent to his ideas by his method of expressing them. If he was not a writer
+born, he has made himself a writer; his sentences are marked by a purity,
+a nobility, a lofty and serene simplicity which communicates to the reader
+the same spell his acting has wrought upon the spectator. His first
+lectures were full of good things, happy phrases and observations that set
+one thinking. In his later ones he has taken up the philosophy of his art,
+and has revealed the tireless ambition of an intelligence ever striving
+after higher things. To-day it has reached the summit. The royal decree,
+therefore, which entitled him "Sir Henry" in May 1895, could not have come
+at a more fitting moment. When this favour is bestowed on an official who
+has grown old in service, or on a major-general who can no longer mount a
+horse, the world takes no notice; this everyday distinction dazzles only
+"my lady's" dressmaker and the tradesmen with whom she deals. In Irving's
+case, it is an historical occasion, an epoch-making event. He is the first
+actor to be invested with the emblem of rank. What is for him a reality is
+a possibility for every actor. Thus he has raised them in being raised
+above them.
+
+Irving seems to me--may I venture to say it without seeming unappreciative
+of the excellent and even great actors of whom our own country can
+boast?--to be pre-eminent in his art, the leader of his profession. He
+compels this admission by the beauty and unity of his life, by the
+splendid strength of his vocation, by the magnificent variety of his
+gifts, by his intelligent feeling for all the other arts and for the ideas
+which belong to the spirit of his time. And, on the other hand, by the
+slow growth, the gradual development of his talent, by his spirit of
+independence and initiative, tempered by regard for the past, he is one of
+the incarnations of his race, one of those men in whom to-day we may see
+most clearly the features of the English character. He has failed in
+nothing,--he has not even failed to make a fortune. And in respect to
+this, should anyone charge it against him as a fault, he has given his
+defence in a saying which I shall quote in conclusion as a finishing touch
+to his portrait:--"The drama must succeed as a business, if it is not to
+fail as an art." And in truth, does Shakespeare cease to be Shakespeare
+because in Irving's hand he is also a mine of gold?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+Is it well to imitate Shakespeare?--The Death of the Classical
+Drama--Herman Merivale and the _White Pilgrim_--Wills and his Plays:
+_Charles the First_, _Claudian_--Tennyson as a Dramatist; he comes too
+soon and too late--Tennyson and the Critics--_The Falcon_, _The Promise of
+May_, _The Cup_, _Becket_, _Queen Mary_, _Harold_.
+
+
+Irving's personality has filled the preceding pages so completely that I
+have been unable to find space in which to do justice to those men and
+women who, near at hand, or from afar, have helped to uphold the Colossus
+upon the stage. Ellen Terry, first of all, who has not only been an
+incarnation, delicate, moving, impassioned, of Shakespeare's heroines, but
+who, even more perhaps than her illustrious colleague, has in her pure and
+sweet elocution set the poet's dream to music. From America have come Mary
+Anderson, whose statuesque attitudes are well remembered; and, more
+recently, Ada Rehan, who gave us so modern and so alluring a Rosalind. It
+was possible for a critic to declare,--speaking of the vogue towards which
+everything seems to have worked,--that of all the dramatists of the day,
+Shakespeare was the most successful; adding with truth, that, having been
+brought into fashion in the theatre, Shakespeare in his turn had brought
+the theatre into fashion.
+
+But is the resuscitation of Shakespeare productive of nothing but good?
+Has it not been accompanied by certain drawbacks which are still evident,
+and by certain dangers all of which have not been successfully surmounted?
+One has taken to doubting whether Shakespeare be really the best of guides
+for a new generation of dramatic writers, especially when one has studied
+closely what the imitation of Shakespeare involves in practice. To imitate
+Shakespeare is to copy in the most superficial manner his locutions and
+turns of phrase, his complicated plots, his successions of changing
+scenes; to mingle prose and verse, and to indulge in puns and _coups de
+theatre_; above all, to assume certain mannerisms that are held to bear
+the stamp of the master. To come near him, on the other hand, it is not
+merely prose and verse that must alternate, but the realism and the poetry
+of which these are but the outward signs; it is not puns and _coups de
+theatre_ that are essential, but the power to divert and to move, which is
+quite another matter. Shakespeare's spirit is not to be assimilated; this
+is impossible to a man of our time: one can but dress oneself up in the
+cast-off garment which served as a covering to his genius. This garment
+does not suit us,--it is either too long or too short, or both together.
+One dresses up as Shakespeare for an hour, and resembles the great man
+about as much as a lawyer's clerk, masquerading _en mousquetaire_,
+resembles d'Artagnan, or as the Turk of carnival time resembles the
+genuine Turk smoking his pipe outside his cafe in Stamboul. This
+tremendous model, all whose aspects we cannot see because it goes beyond
+the orbit of our perspective glass, oppresses and paralyses our
+intelligence: did one understand it, one would not be much the better off.
+It would be sheer folly to wish the modern English dramatist not to read
+his Shakespeare, for it is in Shakespeare that he will find the English
+character in all its length and breadth; let him absorb and steep himself
+in Shakespeare by all means: but let him then forget Shakespeare and be of
+his own time, let him not walk our streets of to-day in the doublet and
+hose of 1600. The choice has to be made between Shakespeare and life, for
+in literature, as in morals, it is not possible to serve two masters. It
+is possible that Shakespeare has been, and is still, the great obstacle to
+a free development of a national drama. Nor is there anything to be
+astonished at in this. The Shakespeare whom we know could not have been
+born when he was had there been another Shakespeare two and a half
+centuries before.
+
+These are _a priori_ considerations, but they are confirmed by the
+experience of the last twenty years. These years have seen the apotheosis
+of Shakespeare and the death of the classical drama. Amongst the last who
+tried to galvanise it into life, I hardly know what others to mention
+besides Wills and Herman Merivale. In the drama entitled _The White
+Pilgrim_, Merivale achieved some really beautiful passages: in them may be
+felt the first thrill of those sombre and impalpable reveries, come
+towards us with the cool breath of the North, in which we find a balm for
+our fever. As for Wills, for a moment he gave rise to hopes. There was
+room for false expectations as to the future of his career. He was, says
+Mr. Archer, "so strong and so weak, so manly and so puerile, so poetic and
+so commonplace, so careful and so slovenly." His Bohemian life, his
+impassioned character, his hasty methods of production, added to the
+illusion, and gave him, in the distance, a look of genius. But it was a
+misleading look. I have seen two of his pieces, _Charles the First_ and
+_Claudian_. The first called up on the stage--for the last time
+doubtless--that legend of the martyr king which the historical labours of
+Gardiner have shivered into atoms. And here is the story of Claudian. A
+man who has killed a monk falls for this crime under a curse which,
+instead of attaching itself to him, attaches itself to all those who cross
+his path. He does evil unwittingly, when he would fain do good; he brings
+about the death of those he loves. In the end he is saved. So that this
+horrible waste of human lives, this torrent of tears and blood, these
+sufferings, agonies, despairs, all serve but to gain a seat for a
+white-robed criminal at the banquet of Life Eternal. "In order that the
+world may be Claudian's purgatory, it must first be the hell of an entire
+generation." Thus it is with all the pieces of Wills; they are founded
+upon conceptions which crumble away upon analysis, and the versification
+is too poor to veil or redeem the weakness of the dramatic idea.
+
+Despite the efforts of Henry Arthur Jones and some other living writers,
+tragic verse, blank verse, the impression of which I have tried to
+characterise, is dead. Were there still authors to work in it, there would
+yet lack actors to speak it, and I do not know who would venture to chant
+it after Ellen Terry.
+
+One name, however, comes to mind, a great name which it would be most
+unjust to overlook in this review of the contemporary drama,--the name of
+Tennyson. Mr. Archer has remarked that Tennyson, so fortunate in his life
+as a poet, was inopportune in his career as a dramatist. He wrote his
+plays too late and too early: too early for the public, and too late for
+his talent. As a matter of fact, he was sixty-six when he published _Queen
+Mary_, the first in date of the six pieces which constitute his dramatic
+output. That was twenty years ago, and the education of theatre-goers was
+far from being as advanced as it is now. It was not their fault if they
+brought to the poet a taste somewhat coarsened by the success of _Our
+Boys_ and the _Pink Dominoes_, and a soul closed to the higher enjoyments
+of the imagination.
+
+The actors did their duty, and even more than their duty, to the Laureate;
+it was the critics--and I am borne out in this by the most eminent of
+their number,--it was the critics who decided the fate of Tennyson's
+plays; if they did not exactly condemn him unheard, at least they listened
+to him under the sway of prejudice. I shall borrow the sardonic expression
+of Mr. Archer: the critics were prepared to be disappointed--it was for
+this they came. What business had this old man to start on a new career,
+and a career requiring all the powers of youth? What induced him to
+believe that he had developed faculties at an age at which it is more
+usual to repeat and re-read oneself? Had a man any right to be a success
+in two trades at once? Was there not a law against this kind of pluralism,
+tacitly agreed upon by critics, and applied by them with remorseless
+rigour? For the beauty of these methods of reasoning, it was necessary
+that Tennyson should fail upon the stage; therefore he failed.
+
+But as this check was an unfair one, he recovered from it, and his
+theatrical work, even when it is mediocre, even when it is bad, belongs to
+the living drama.
+
+I myself have fallen into the common error. I spoke of Tennyson in 1885 as
+if the tomb had closed over him already. I may have been right in saying
+that in the garden of the poet, upon which winter had fallen, certain
+flowers would bloom no more. But what I did not perceive then, and what
+to-day is manifest to me and to many others, is the fact that the latter
+days of the poet not only preserved some of his early graces, but brought
+out for us qualities which his youth had not known. He remained in touch
+with the mind of the humble until the very end. Moreover, he revealed
+himself a master in the art of giving expression in verse to the social
+and religious discussions which carry one away. He has displayed in his
+theatrical work an historical sense and a dramatic sense of the highest
+order, and if these two gifts have clashed sometimes to the point of
+cancelling each other, their combination at certain more fortunate moments
+had issue in some precious fragments of masterpieces. The slightest of all
+his pieces is _The Falcon_. The action takes place in some vague region in
+an Italy of romance; neither the scene nor the century is defined. It is
+like a tale by Boccaccio, but by a Boccaccio who is ingenuous and pure.
+Federigo, an impoverished gentleman, is in love, at a distance and without
+hope, with the rich and beautiful widow Monna Giovanna. His greatest
+possession, his pride and his joy, his only means, too, of securing a
+subsistence, is a wonderful falcon which he himself has trained for
+hunting. One morning Monna Giovanna pays him an unexpected visit, and,
+ignorant of the neediness of her neighbour, invites herself
+unceremoniously to lunch. Federigo, whose larder is empty, kills his
+favourite bird, that he may serve it up for the lady. It happens that it
+was this very falcon that the lady had come to beg for, to fall in with
+the fancy of a sick child. Federigo is obliged to acknowledge the
+sacrifice to which hospitality and her love impelled him, and Monna
+Giovanna is so keenly touched by it that she falls, and for ever, into his
+arms.
+
+When _The Falcon_ was put before the public in 1879 at the St. James's
+Theatre, John Hare, who is a manager of cultured taste as well as an
+excellent comedian, had mounted it with the utmost care, and had given it
+a _mise en scene_ that was at once realistic and poetic. Federigo and
+Monna Giovanna were impersonated by the Kendals, and those who saw Madge
+Robertson's performance think of it as one thinks of some painter's
+masterpiece seen in the picture galleries of Italy or Germany. In mere
+outward form, her Giovanna was a pendant to her Galatea. But neither the
+charm of the scenery, nor the perfection of the acting, nor the music of
+the verse, could obtain a long life for the piece. It was not to be
+expected that there would be more than a few hundreds of elect spectators
+to delight in this delicate trifle, the joy of an hour, the enthusiasm of
+an evening. From the morrow, Cockneydom was obliged to recapture the
+house, and call out for its wonted entertainment. The critics made common
+cause with Cockneydom, but from reasons less foreign to art.
+
+They pointed out that if there is any subject at all in _The Falcon_, it
+is apparently Federigo's sacrifices. Now this subject, such as it is, is
+not dealt with. Two words in an aside to his servant, a whispered order,
+that is all that leads up to and justifies the death-sentence on the bird.
+Even more deceptive than the _dejeuner_ offered to Monna Giovanna, the
+_menu_ presented by Lord Tennyson to his spectators was composed but of
+delicate _hors d'oeeuvres_, and there was not enough in them for healthy
+appetites.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_The Promise of May_ had a worse fate than _The Falcon_. It failed
+outright. A certain section of the public pretended to believe that the
+poet spoke through the mouth of his hero when he denounces, with so much
+bitterness and so indiscriminately, the principles and prejudices upon
+which society has its base. These spectators were sadly wanting both in
+patience and in intelligence. Harold's theories are answered in the play.
+When he has been declaiming upon the evil that religions have wrought upon
+man, Dora does her best to show him the good influences they have wielded.
+Whereas he prophesies the imminent and universal abolition of the bonds of
+marriage, Dora sets forth with simplicity, yet not without grace and
+feeling, her ideal of a perfect union of man and wife. "And yet I had once
+a vision of a pure and perfect marriage, where the man and the woman, only
+differing as the stronger and the weaker, should walk hand-in-hand
+together down this valley of tears, as they call it so truly, to the grave
+at the bottom, and lie down there together in the darkness which would
+seem but for a moment, to be wakened again together by the light of the
+resurrection, and no more partings for ever and ever."
+
+In the first part of the play, too, when Harold pulls down for Eve a
+branch of an apple-tree in blossom, this farmer's daughter looks upon it
+sadly. "Next year," she says, "it will bear no fruit,"--a moving piece of
+symbolism; one likes to see a poet condemning in this way the morality of
+the impulse which, in plucking the flower, forbids it to bring forth the
+fruit, and destroys the very seeds of the future.
+
+The comparative success of _The Cup_ at the Lyceum surprises me less than
+it does Mr. Archer. I see no need to seek the secret of this success in
+the grace of Ellen Terry, or in the splendid scenery of Diana's Temple.
+_The Cup_ has certain qualities which were calculated to please the
+general public. The subject is taken from Plutarch's _De Claris
+Mulieribus_, and from a passage which had already suggested a tragedy to a
+Frenchman, a German, and an Italian. It is possible that, without being
+quite conscious of it, Tennyson adopted to a certain point the tone of the
+original author and the manner of his predecessors. He was less English,
+less Shakespearian, less himself, in this piece than in his other dramatic
+works. The dialogue is rapid and effective; the characters do not give
+themselves up to poetical fancies; instead of formulating theories, they
+express sentiments that are in no way complex or strange. One of them,
+Synorix, is interesting. Except for the Don Juanism which seems to impart
+to him too modern a note, this double-faced type, half Roman, half
+barbarian, whose intelligence has been sharpened but whose passions have
+not been extinguished by civilisation, is an exceptional creature, a sort
+of monster, who is conscious of his intellectual superiority and his moral
+decay; he unites these two qualities in a sadness that has about it
+something that seems great.
+
+The attractiveness of this character was what made a failure of Tennyson's
+piece; the English poet avoids the subject which Plutarch puts before him,
+and which Thomas Corneille and Montanelli had seized upon; the latter,
+cleverly and with success, despite the inflation of his style. This
+subject lies in the action of Camma, widow of the Tetrarch of Galatia,
+whom Synorix, with the aid of the Romans, has killed and supplanted.
+Synorix loves her, and is anxious to make her his wife. Camma, seeing no
+escape from this odious marriage, pretends to assent to it. After the
+sacred rites she has to put her lips to the same cup as Synorix before the
+altar of Diana. She gives him death to drink from it, and drinks death
+from it herself. That this _denouement_ should awaken no objections in our
+mind, it would be essential that we should have been brought to hate
+Synorix as Camma hates him. Now, Tennyson seems to have done everything in
+his power to minimise the repulsiveness of the character. He has woven
+round him the fascination of a noble sadness, the palliation of a great
+love; has in some sort constrained him to kill his rival, by importing
+into the action an element of justifiable self-defence. Not content with
+this, he depicts Camma's husband as an unintelligent brute, who ill
+deserves her regrets and her sacrifice.
+
+It may be added, that of the real drama--the conflict of emotion in
+Camma's soul--we know nothing until the last scene. A _coup de theatre_
+does not make a play, and Mr. Archer is doubtless right in placing the
+work of Montanelli above that of Tennyson; but these defects
+notwithstanding, I think _The Cup_ would be accorded the same favourable
+reception from the public again now that it enjoyed in 1881. It bears a
+distinct resemblance to our French tragedies, in its dignity, its
+propriety, in the seriousness, the freedom from any comic element, by
+which it is marked, by the consistency in the characters, its continuity
+of tone and unity of action,--qualities which undoubtedly give more
+pleasure, whatever may be said to the contrary, than the most faithful
+imitation of the contrasts and inconsistencies of life.
+
+Had he written nothing but _The Falcon_, _The Cup_, and _The Promise of
+May_, Tennyson would hold but a very low place among play-writers. If he
+is to live as a dramatist, it must be by his three historical plays,
+_Queen Mary_, _Harold_, and _Becket_.
+
+These dramas, it has been declared, were bound to be inferior, even before
+they ever saw the light, to the historical dramas of the age of Elizabeth,
+whose aspect and character they recalled so completely; for whereas the
+histories of Shakespeare and his contemporaries were hewn out of the old
+Chronicles which, almost equally with reminiscences, preserve the vivacity
+of personal impressions, and something, as it were, of the warmth of life,
+Tennyson's dramas are taken from "History," properly so called, and
+"History" is a serious scientific person who studies life by dissecting
+it, who is addicted to discussion rather than to the telling of tales, and
+who substitutes modern judgments for ancient passions. The objection is
+more plausible than real. First of all, this definition of History, though
+true enough of a Guizot, a Hallam, or a Lecky, is quite inapplicable to a
+Carlyle, a Michelet, or a Taine.
+
+In reading Freeman and Froude, was Tennyson less in touch with the soul of
+the past than Shakespeare was in making his way through the cold and often
+tedious pages of Holinshed? Moreover, even had Froude been as sententious
+and frigid as he was in reality picturesque and impassioned, Tennyson's
+own faculties would have made good these defects.
+
+It may be well at this point to attempt to do justice to the delicacy and
+quite exceptional strength of Tennyson's sense of history. I must explain
+clearly what I mean by sense of history. I do not refer to the critical
+faculty of the historian, but to the gift bestowed upon few, of living
+over again in imagination the emotions of a century long gone to dust. It
+was thus that Michelet was present at the doing to death of Joan of Arc;
+Macaulay at the flight of James II. and at the trial of Warren Hastings;
+Carlyle at the taking of the Bastille, at the return from Varennes, and at
+the battle of Marston Moor. Had the men and the scenes been really painted
+upon their retina, the effect upon the brain could not have been stronger.
+This intellectual vision of theirs is worth a hundred times more than the
+actual physical vision of such men as Holinshed and Ayala.
+
+This rare gift belonged to Tennyson, and took in him that feminine
+acuteness which was in harmony with all his poetical faculties. As
+evidence of this, take the by-play in his historical dramas,--that is to
+say, all that is not essential in them, the mere accessories,
+illustrations of manners, minute traits of character, scraps of history;
+for instance, the account of the marriage of Philip and Mary, and that of
+the execution of Lady Jane Grey by Bagenhall, in _Queen Mary_, and in
+_Becket_ the sarcasm directed against the Church of Rome by Walter Map,
+the witty precursor of the bitter and sombre Langland.
+
+A Bulwer or a Tom Taylor may be able to cut out bits from the Chronicles,
+and introduce historic utterances into their flabby and declamatory prose,
+but beyond and underneath these words, will they be able, like Tennyson,
+to set before us _un etat d'ame_, and plunge us into the depth of the life
+of olden days?
+
+I am fully aware, of course, that this is not everything, or rather that
+it is nothing, unless the poet possesses also the dramatic faculty. Is
+there a dramatic idea underlying _Becket_, _Queen Mary_, and _Harold_? I
+shall reply after the manner of the Gentlemen of the Jury: No, to the
+first question; Yes, to the second and third.
+
+It is true that _Becket_ achieved a startling success in the summer of
+1892. But three-fourths of the success were due to Irving. Those who have
+been long familiar with the great actor, know how episcopical he
+is--hieratical, pontifical. Mediaeval asceticism is one of the forms of
+life which his artistic personality fills most perfectly, and fits into
+most easily; I know of only one other man who could have represented
+Becket nearly as well, and that was Cardinal Manning. It was well worth
+one's while to travel far, and put up with hours of boredom, to be present
+at that symbolical game of chess, in which the struggle between the bishop
+and the king foreshadowed the whole piece; to hear that absorbing dialogue
+in which Becket recounts to his confidential friend his tragic career and
+his prophetic dreams, and that stormy discussion, too, at Northampton,
+when the archbishop puts his signature to the famous constitutions and
+then cancels it; and to witness the scene of the murder. A scene which
+follows history, step by step, and which, by the way, might have been
+carried through by dumb show without words at all.
+
+Those who saw Irving, mitred and crozier in hand, totter under the blow,
+and fall upon the altar steps, whilst the chanting of the monks came in
+gusts from the church above--mingled with the cries of the people beating
+against the door, and the rumbling of the thunder shaking the great
+edifice to its foundation--experienced one of the strongest emotions any
+spectacle ever gave.
+
+And yet there is no drama in the piece, for a drama involves a situation
+which develops and changes, a plot which works out. The duel between the
+king and prelate in the play, no less than in our history books, is merely
+a succession of indecisive encounters. The metamorphosis of the
+courtier-soldier into the bishop-martyr is indicated hardly at all by the
+poet. And what is one to say of the love idyll appended to the historical
+drama, in spite of history, in spite of the drama itself? All Ellen
+Terry's tact did not suffice to save this insipid Rosamund. The
+complications surrounding the mysterious retreat of this young woman
+savour more of farce even than of melodrama, and as for the facetious
+details by which this episode is enlivened, they form so common and flat a
+piece of comic relief, that one listens to them ashamed and ill at ease. I
+may observe silence on this point, in order to avoid the ungrateful
+function of ridiculing a man of genius, but I cannot refrain from
+protesting against the irreparable error Tennyson committed in dragging
+Becket into this shady intrigue, and giving him the king's mistress to
+care for at the very time when he is holding the king in check with so
+much hardihood.
+
+I have not the same objections to make against _Queen Mary_ and _Harold_.
+In the first piece, the human psychological drama, which is half submerged
+in history, but not so as to be out of sight, is the development of the
+character and of the sad destiny of this unfortunate queen; the road,
+strewn first with flowers and then paved with sharp-edged stones and lined
+with thorns, along which she passed, in so brief a period, from a
+protracted youth to a premature old age, from irrepressible joyousness to
+agonising solitude, misfortune, and despair. Here was a life thrice
+bankrupt. As queen, she dreamt of the greatness of her country, and left
+it under the blow of a national humiliation, the loss of Calais. As a
+Catholic, she strove to restore her religion, and, far from succeeding,
+she dug a chasm between Rome and her people which the centuries have not
+sufficed to fill. As a woman, she loved a man of marble, an animated
+stone: her heart was crushed by him, and broke. She was to learn before
+her death the failure of all her projects; she read contempt and disgust
+in the eyes of the man she worshipped, the man to whom she had offered
+human sacrifices to win his favour. This is the drama Tennyson sketched
+out, if he did not quite complete it, in _Queen Mary_.
+
+The subject of Harold stands out more clearly, in stronger relief. It is
+the struggle of religious faith against patriotism and ambition. All the
+feelings that are at variance, are indicated with a power worthy of the
+great master of the drama in the successive scenes which take place at
+the Court of William when Harold is a prisoner. After the political aspect
+of things has been set forth by the old Norman lord, there comes the
+episode in which Wulfuoth, Harold's young brother, describes to him the
+slow tortures of the prison-life, the living death of the prisoner,
+deprived of all that he loves best,--of the sight of the green fields, of
+the blue of sky and sea, as of the society of men; his name gone out of
+memory, eaten away by oblivion, as he, in his dungeon, is being eaten away
+by the loathsome vermin of the earth.
+
+When Harold has yielded, it is moving to see him bow down with Edith in a
+spirit of Christian resignation, and sacrifice, as ransom of his violated
+oath, his personal happiness to his duty as a king. The dilemma changes,
+and its two new aspects are personified by two women, whose rivalry has in
+it nothing of the banality, or of the vulgar outbursts of jealousy, to
+which we are too often treated in the theatre.
+
+Edith gives up the hero to Aldwyth while he lives; dead, she reclaims him,
+with a nobility and pride of tone that thrill one.
+
+These two dramas--I dare not say two masterpieces--set in a framework of
+history, which in itself is infinitely precious, form the legacy left by
+the great lyrist to the theatre of his country.
+
+A pious hand, to extricate these two dramas from the rest, and so let in
+air and light upon their essential lines; a great actor, to understand
+and incarnate Harold; a great actress, to throw herself into the character
+of Mary,--and Tennyson would take his proper place amongst the dramatists.
+
+    NOTE.--I have decided to make no reference here to the dramas of
+    Browning or Mr. Swinburne. These belong rather to the history of
+    poetry than that of the theatre.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+The Three Publics--The Disappearance of Burlesque and Decadence of
+Pantomime--Increasing Vogue of Farce and Melodrama--Improvement in
+Acting--The Influence of our French Actors--The "Old" Critics and the
+"New"--James Mortimer and his Two "Almavivas"--Mr. William Archer's Ideas
+and Role--The Vicissitudes of Adaptation.
+
+
+Is it not a sign of the times that the Lyceum should have been filled
+through two consecutive months, in the midst of the heat of summer, by a
+reverent crowd, come to listen to and to applaud _Becket_?
+
+Attribute it, if you will, partly to Irving, partly to fashion, the fact
+remains, that fifty or sixty thousand persons showed a keen, a passionate
+interest in this struggle between Mind and Power--between the National
+Throne and the Roman Priesthood--resuscitated by a poet. Many other
+symptoms go with this one, and confirm it.
+
+I do not wish to assert that low tastes and vulgarity have gone out of
+London: nothing could be more untrue. Never has the _bete humaine_ been so
+completely at large there; never has sensualism, since the distant days of
+George IV., and those more distant still of Charles II., held its way so
+unblushingly. But these tastes are catered for in certain special
+resorts. Every evening in the year more than thirty music halls spread out
+before the multitude a banquet of indelicacies that are but slightly
+veiled, and of flesh scarcely veiled at all. So much the worse for
+morality. So much the better for art. For, this being so, nothing is
+looked for in the theatres except emotion and ideas. All the ideas may not
+be right, nor all the emotions healthy. No matter. The _bete humaine_ is
+outside the door.
+
+I have told of the initial vogue of burlesque at the Royalty and the
+Strand. This vogue was later to bring fortune to a larger and more
+luxurious theatre, the Gaiety, under Nellie Farren, as the successor to
+Mrs. Bancroft, whose former roles she vulgarised to a remarkable degree.
+If you mention her name before an elderly "man about town," who was young
+and went the pace from 1865 to 1875, you will set his eye aflame. To-day
+you hear no more of Nellie Farren, no more of burlesque.
+
+The operetta, too, is vegetating; the pantomime serves hardly to amuse the
+children. Of inferior dramatic forms, two still survive, and have even
+extended their clientele. Farce has called for elbow-room; it takes three
+acts now, instead of one, to spread itself in. Melodrama, which used to
+inhabit only outlandish regions, chiefly to the East and South,--districts
+of London whose geography was hardly known,--at the Surrey, the Victoria,
+the Grecian, the Standard, returned once again to the charge. It holds
+sway at Drury Lane, the Adelphi, and the Princess's. In that immense
+conglomeration of human beings, of which London boasts, there is a third
+public for these two popular forms of the drama, an uncultured but
+respectable public, which is to be confounded neither with the public of
+the music halls nor with that of the great theatres in which the literary
+drama and the light comedy are produced. The persisting, and even growing,
+popularity of farce and melodrama, is not a disquieting symptom. These
+forms meet mental requirements that are primitive, but quite legitimate.
+It is hardly necessary to prove that it is a good thing to make people
+laugh, and that this laugh is a beginning of their education. Those who
+despise the absurdities of melodrama do not reflect that the very
+acceptance of these absurdities reveals an idealising instinct in the
+masses which people of culture often lack.
+
+When dealing with Irving, I asked the question, so often discussed,
+whether we go to the theatre to see a representation of life, or to forget
+life and seek relief from it. Melodrama solves this question, and shows
+that both theories are right, by giving satisfaction to both desires, in
+that it offers the extreme of realism in scenery and language together
+with the most uncommon sentiments and events. These multitudes who delight
+in the plays of R. Buchanan and G. R. Sims, or even--to descend a degree
+lower--of Merritt and Pettitt, often pass quite naturally to Shakespeare,
+for there is a melodrama in every drama of Shakespeare's; and were it not
+for the archaism of the language, this melodrama would thrill the people
+to-day, in 1895, as it did in 1595.
+
+Melodrama does not lack its moral, but the moral is always incomplete, in
+that it is the issue of an accident. A foot-bridge over a torrent breaks
+under the steps of the villain; a piece of wall comes down and shatters
+him; a boiler bursts, and blows him to atoms. These people should be
+taught that a criminal's punishment ought to be the natural outcome of his
+own misdeeds. Will they ever be brought to understand? If not, at least
+their children will, and will take their seats beside us in the same
+places of entertainment. But in their place, new strata of uncultured
+spectators will appear, who will continue to call out for melodrama.
+
+As for the literary drama and for comedy, whose destinies I am here
+following, they have been cultivated only by the Lyceum, the Haymarket,
+the Garrick, the St. James's, the Court, and the Comedy; I should add,
+perhaps, the Criterion, where, under the management of that excellent
+actor, Charles Wyndham, they have often found a home. The _personnel_ of
+these theatres presents a remarkably distinguished body of actors and
+actresses, ceaselessly recruited and strengthened. We have seen the
+advances that have been made by the profession as regards its material
+well-being, its personal dignity, and social status. It has made a yet
+more notable advance in the matter of intelligence. To what is this due?
+To observation, to study, to that striving after improvement by which
+individuals, and classes, and communities are set in movement and kept
+going. Twenty or twenty-five years ago a manager's first question of a
+girl coming to him for an engagement would be--"Can you sing? Can you
+dance? Have you got good legs?" To-day his first requirement would be that
+she should have intelligence.
+
+English actors and actresses owe much to ours. Sarah Bernhardt especially,
+and now Rejane, have exerted an influence so decided that it might be made
+the subject of a separate study; and the visits of the Comedie Francaise
+are regarded in England as events. Clement Scott, in his _Thirty Years at
+the Play_, tells, as only a genuine playgoer could, of the improvised
+performance given by our comedians at the Crystal Palace, after the
+banquet given to them by the theatrical world of London. That evening
+Favart and Delaunay played _On ne badine pas avec l'Amour_ before the
+keenest and most impressionable of "pits," composed exclusively of actors
+and authors. When, at the _denouement_, there was heard the sound of a
+fall behind the scenes and of a muffled cry, and Favart appeared, pallid
+to the lips, and rushed across the stage, like a whirlwind of despair,
+crying out, "_Elle est morte! Adieu Perdican!_"--so exquisite was the
+sense of anguish, that the audience forgot to applaud, and there was a
+second of strange stupor, of respectful silence, as if in the presence of
+some real catastrophe: the finest tribute ever paid to histrionic talent.
+I should not be surprised if that evening marked a date in the career of
+more than one English actor.
+
+Dramatic criticism had at last emerged from that lowly and precarious
+stage of existence in which I have shown it in the first part of this
+study. It had now the independence and intelligence which were required to
+enable it to aid in the movement which was shaping, and even to take a
+large part in it. When the history of the English stage of the nineteenth
+century comes to be written, place must be reserved in it for men like
+Dutton Cook, Moy Thomas, Clement Scott, and all those who, having made
+their first appearance during the years of drought and famine, have led
+the community of critics, and with it the whole of the people of Israel,
+out of the land of bondage. It is not so long since the critic sold his
+soul for an advertisement; since Chatterton, who, from being a theatrical
+attendant, had become the master of three theatres, and who suffered his
+toadies to call him the "Napoleon of the Theatrical World," would fain
+have had Clement Scott, of the _Weekly Despatch_, dismissed from his post,
+and presumed to deny him the _entree_ to his theatres, and even to refuse
+his money at the ticket-office; since the actor who had been criticised
+appealed to the jury, and the jury, being composed of business men, and
+looking at the case always from a business standpoint, decided invariably
+in the actor's favour;--for the truer the adverse criticism, the more
+injury it did to its object.
+
+Truly, there were some hard years to weather. Perhaps one of the men to
+whom criticism owes its emancipation most is James Mortimer, the founder
+of the _London Figaro_. An American by birth, Mortimer lived for many
+years in Paris; he was known to Napoleon III., and it was in the palace of
+St. Cloud that I made his acquaintance. He possessed a thorough knowledge
+of our drama, no less than of our politics, and when his newspaper, by
+reason of the withdrawal of certain financial support, from being a daily,
+became a weekly or bi-weekly, Mortimer gave plenty of room and plenty of
+freedom to criticism. He not only opened his columns to Clement Scott and
+William Archer, but, far from disclaiming connection with them in cases of
+complaint, he backed them up sturdily, and I have seen him, with his hat
+on the side of his head, staring boldly at a gang who hooted at him as he
+entered the theatre. The gallant and witty little journal has lived its
+life; Mortimer himself, since that time, has fallen upon hard times in his
+career as publisher. It is not the less one's duty to accord him, under
+the eye of French theatre-goers, the tribute due to him, and paid to him
+by his old colleagues; so that, having undertaken the toil, he should now
+carry some of the honour, the victory being won and the barbarian driven
+from the theatre.
+
+The critics have often made mistakes since that time, have erred in their
+judgments, have condemned good pieces and glorified bad ones, have
+pandered to vanity and spite, have backed up speculators and cliques, have
+abused their new power, and fallen back to their old feebleness; but, on
+the whole, dramatic criticism in England is worth more to-day than it was
+yesterday, and this must content us--this is as much as we have any right
+to expect.
+
+_The London Figaro_ was published in a mean little shop near Old Temple
+Bar, facing the site where the Law Courts were to be erected. Two writers
+in succession undertook the theatrical chronicle, and signed it with the
+pseudonym of "Almaviva." The reader is already acquainted with the real
+names of "Almaviva I." and "Almaviva II."; he has encountered them several
+times in these pages. Clement Scott and William Archer had only a
+difference of a few years between them, but they represented in their
+profession two periods, schools, temperaments, that were absolutely
+opposed. Scott was the critic of the Robertsonian era; Archer is the
+critic of the drama of to-day, and to a certain point of the drama of
+to-morrow.
+
+Mr. Archer's passion for the theatre--he has told us in a charming preface
+addressed to his friend, Robert Lowe, how this passion began in him--dates
+from his earliest youth, and it was entirely free from any alloying
+element. He has never written plays; or, at least, has never put them on
+the stage. On principle, he has abstained from frequenting the green-room,
+and from personal intercourse with actors. He has devoted himself entirely
+to his critical mission; and, to carry it through the better, he has
+studied the past of the national drama and every kind of dramatic
+literature, living and dead. Mr. Archer is an encyclopaedia, a library of
+references, but, unlike so many men of learning, his every item of exact
+information goes side by side with some pregnant thought, some suggestive
+idea; not content to instruct, he thinks and sets one thinking. He is at
+once a penetrating critic and a first-rate _petit journaliste_. Humour, of
+which he is full, flows freely through all his writings; an easy, limpid,
+lively, delicate humour, in which I have never detected a lapse of taste
+or a touch of pedantry. I don't believe that in all his life he has
+perpetrated an obscure or insipid line; in fact, he could not become a
+bore, if he would.
+
+The best way of giving French readers an idea of him would be to compare
+him with one of our dramatic critics of this generation, or of that which
+preceded it, and to show in what respects he resembles, for instance, M.
+Francisque Sarcey or M. Jules Lemaitre, and in what respects he differs
+from them. But the comparison is impossible, because their positions and
+circumstances are even further removed than their talents. The excellent
+writers whom I have mentioned are with us the guardians and interpreters
+of a tradition consecrated by masterpieces; they strengthen or refine it,
+now by the vivacity and gaiety, now by the delicacy and grace, of their
+personal impressions. The public to whom they address themselves is more
+_blase_ than ignorant, and has more need to be stirred up than to be
+taught. William Archer, on the contrary, is an initiator; he has had to
+hew a passage for himself through a forest of prejudices; he has had
+always to go back to the elements of his subject, to demonstrate
+principles which, with us, are taken for granted,--to accomplish, in fact,
+a task which bears some resemblance to that of Lessing in the
+_Dramaturgie_ of Hamburg. Were one to extract from the thousands of
+articles which he has published during the last twenty years the questions
+which he has set himself to discuss, one would amass a sufficiently
+complete code upon all the problems, great and small, which touch upon the
+arts and professions of actor, playwright, and critic.
+
+His conception of the theatre is a very wide one. He regards it as a
+meeting-place, a _rendez-vous_, of all the arts. Its province, he holds,
+is co-extensive with life itself. He welcomes all forms and all kinds,
+provided they are not exotic growths, and answer to some need of the soul
+of the people. Thus melodrama is but an illogical tragedy for him. As for
+farce, he cares nothing for its progress; for although a really lively
+farce is worth more than a pretentious and unsuccessful drama, it would be
+folly to judge it by aesthetic laws. One does not take the height of a
+sugar-loaf, he remarks, from barometric observations. The drama can exist
+outside the domain of literature. It was thus with the English drama ten
+or fifteen years ago. The business of criticism, Mr. Archer holds, was to
+raise it to the dignity of a department of literature, to reconcile it
+with literature. What sort of criticism was required to this end?
+Analytical or dogmatic, comparative, anecdotical or facetious? They may
+all be resorted to, each in its own place and time, provided only that
+they are sincere and independent.
+
+Every piece should contain these three elements: a picture, a judgment,
+and an ideal. On the first rests the great question of realism on the
+stage. Mr. Archer has put the objections to realism in the form of a
+dilemma. "Either you show me on the stage," he says, "what I see and go
+through myself every day; in which case, where is the point of it--what do
+I learn from it? Or else you put before me things, ideas, and modes of
+life of which I know nothing; and how am I to determine their degree of
+truth and reality?" To this he replies himself, that the theatre obliges
+us to observe--that is to say, to see and feel more intensely--what we see
+and feel in our daily life, without taking much notice of it and without
+reflecting upon it. As for the sensations we have never experienced, and
+of the depicting of which we are unable, therefore, to judge the truth,
+the English critic pins his faith to an intuitive sense, which accepts or
+refuses the portrayal of an unknown world. When Zola describes the
+financial methods of the Second Empire, when Pierre Loti transports us to
+the side of Rarahu or of Chrysantheme, an infallible instinct tells the
+reader if it be truth or fancy. Why should not the spectator also be
+endowed with the same critical instinct?
+
+Mr. Archer will not allow that the Robertsonian comedy had this realistic
+character; or he maintains, at least, that if it ever had it, it very soon
+lost it. The author kept pouring hot water into the famous tea-pot until
+there was nothing to offer the public but an insipid decoction, whose
+staleness he tried in vain to hide by alternating it with the bitterness
+of French coffee, accompanied by the inevitable cognac. The English drama,
+Matthew Arnold had written, lay between the heavens and the earth--it was
+neither realistic nor idealistic, but just "fantastic." Mr. Archer took up
+Matthew Arnold's idea, and carried it a step further. Over and beyond the
+portrayal of manners and of character, the theatre puts before us a
+succession of events, a phase of life, upon which we are to pronounce
+judgment. It was in this field that the critic had entirely new truths to
+put before his countrymen. The English drama thought itself very moral;
+the critic deprived it of, and set it free from, this illusion. He was
+inclined even to admit the truth of M. Got's declaration, that our drama
+was the more moral of the two; or rather, he held, that whereas the French
+drama was deficient in morality, the English drama had no morality at all.
+Does a play become moral by having for its climax the destruction of the
+villain and the rewarding of virtue, that triumph of good which is lost in
+the general rummaging for overcoats and shuffling of feet? No; a play is
+moral if it works out a psychological situation, a problem of conduct to
+which it suggests or allots a right solution. Now, Mr. Archer could see no
+drama in 1880 written upon this model; nothing but colourless
+sentimentalities, a minute corner of life, and for sole problem the
+antagonism of poverty and riches, ever smoothed over by love.
+
+He wished to see soaring above every dramatic work, an aspiration towards
+better things, towards a life superior to our common life,--the life,
+perhaps, of to-morrow.
+
+He wished the theatre to have an ideal; not a retrospective, and, so to
+speak, reactionary ideal, as so often happens in a country where tradition
+retains its force, and where it is held that there is no reform like that
+of restoration; but an ideal of advance and progress.
+
+His articles were like a series of vigorous shakes to a sleeper. Any kind
+of effort, he maintained, was better than apathy. He cast about in every
+direction, ransacked every hole and corner, raised every imaginable
+question, whether of trade or theory. Up to what point may Shakespeare be
+imitated with profit? Is the censorship more favourable to manners than it
+is oppressive to talent? Is the establishment of a national theatre, which
+should serve at once as a school and a standard, a practicable idea? And
+would such an institution really help to the perfecting of the art? What
+is one to think of Diderot's paradox about the actors' art, and what do
+actors think of it themselves? What was the social position of actors in
+former times, and what will it be in the future? Will they be respected
+because of their profession, like the judge, the clergyman, the officer,
+or only in spite of it? What are the rights and the duties of the critic?
+What are the dangers, and what the advantages, inherent in the system
+which leaves all the great theatres in the hands of actor-managers? Ought
+the English dramatist to accept the collaboration of the actor-manager,
+and to what extent? These are some of the questions he has discussed and
+answered with a variety of information, a freedom of judgment, an
+unfailing argumentative power that command our respect even when our own
+opinions are at variance with his.
+
+This is not all. Perhaps the most important part of Mr. Archer's role has
+consisted in his labours in connection with the dramatic literature of
+foreign countries. He was one of the first to make known the Norwegians
+and the Germans; and better than anyone else he has understood the works
+of our French dramatists, and realised to what account they were to be
+turned in the development of the English stage. Of the influence exerted
+by Ibsen and Bjoernson on the generations of to-day and to-morrow, I shall
+speak later. Here I shall indicate only the new way in which French works
+have come to be adapted since 1875 and 1880; a curious movement of which
+Mr. Archer is by no means the sole author, but of which he has been a very
+attentive and perspicacious observer, and to which his counsels have lent,
+as it were, a character of scientific precision.
+
+The way in which the English used to imitate our pieces half a century ago
+resembled the hasty procedure of a band of thieves plundering a house,
+doing their utmost, but against time and without method, and in
+consequence burdening themselves with worthless nick-nacks and overlooking
+jewels of price. When the London managers came to Paris post haste, vieing
+with each other for our manuscripts, and resorting to every kind of dodge
+to secure the prize, it was sometimes but the potentiality of becoming
+bankrupt that was thus held up, as it were, to auction.
+
+From 1850 to 1880 they took everything indiscriminately, translating
+sometimes a second and a third time the same inept _vaudeville_. A
+melodrama from the Boulevard du Temple, but long forgotten there, became
+the _Ticket of Leave Man_, a play whose success is not yet exhausted; on
+the other hand, a great comedy by Augier or Feuillet, still to be found in
+our repertory, would languish and die after a few weeks before the
+indifference of the English pit, without anybody's attempting to draw a
+moral from the event. But the legal aspect of things began to alter; the
+idea of international literary property had been started, and was making
+way. The successive steps were as follows. The principle was settled by an
+Act of Parliament in 1852; the foreign author retained his copyright for
+five years, but this affected translation only, adaptation not being
+covered by the laws; then it was sufficient to add a character, or to
+invert two scenes, to evade all dues. In 1875 a new law brought adaptation
+into the same category as translation. Finally, in 1887 as the result of
+the Treaty of Berne, and the interesting discussions which led up to it,
+an Order in Council laid it down in black and white, that the literary
+property of foreigners is, in every respect, identical with that of the
+natives of this country, and is protected in the same way.
+
+These are very liberal provisions, and do honour to the statesmen to whom
+we owe them, but I am obliged to say they have greatly reduced the
+importation of French goods into the English theatrical market, and that
+they threaten it with complete extinction in the future. One has to think
+twice before taking up a piece which is burdened with the necessity of
+paying two authors; it seems preferable to study our methods, and learn
+from us, if possible, how to dispense with us. Nothing has contributed so
+efficaciously, for some years past, to the progress of the native English
+drama.
+
+It is here that the teaching of the critic comes in, with the _flair_ of
+the actor-manager.
+
+From the English point of view, there are two kinds of pieces included in
+the domain of our _Haute Comedie_.
+
+The one, including such plays as those of Dumas and Augier, requires
+almost literal translation, and ought to be put before the public as
+finished specimens of Parisian civilisation and art; to alter them would
+be to spoil them--_sint ut sunt aut non sint_. It is different with the
+pieces of M. Sardou. Once you have torn off the outer covering, and
+detached the thousand adventitious details with which the French author
+has ingeniously set out his subject, there remains an idea to be worked
+out, an idea with a strong foundation, capable of supporting an entirely
+new structure. It is possible to make an entirely English thing out of the
+excellent foreign materials from which one has chosen. It is a matter of
+taste, adroitness, and inspiration, and I quite understand this kind of
+work having a certain fascination for the playwright.
+
+To understand thoroughly the process of adaptation, we ought to have been
+in a certain first-class carriage on the way from Paris to Calais one
+spring morning in 1878. It was occupied by three Englishmen, Mr. Bancroft,
+Mr. Clement Scott, and Mr. Stephenson. They had been present at the
+performance of _Dora_ on the previous evening. Bancroft had bought the
+English right from M. Michaelis, who had himself bought them from M.
+Sardou. How were they to make an English play out of it? Someone suggested
+the introduction of the Eastern Question, which at the moment, under the
+sedulous treatment of Disraeli, was stirring British _amour propre_. All
+the music halls were re-echoing the refrain, "But by jingo if we do." The
+idea hit upon was to turn this jingoism to account in the adaptation, by
+making Disraeli collaborate with Sardou. "By the time we got out at Amiens
+to drink our _bouillon_," one of them tells us, "the play was fully
+planned out." And, under the title of _Diplomacy, Dora_ enjoyed an even
+more brilliant success in England than it had had in France.
+
+This, of course, was only a combination of smartness and good luck. The
+new kind of adaptation was in sight, however, which was to have the double
+advantage of evading the law and elevating the art. All that was taken
+from the French author was a social thesis, a dramatic situation, a moral
+problem. Thesis, situation, and problem were carried bodily into the midst
+of English life, provided only that English life allowed of them. Then, in
+complete disregard of the original, a solution was sought for afresh. If a
+new _denouement_ resulted, a solution quite opposed to that in the French
+play, it was felt to be so much the better, for in this case the
+adaptation was seen to be independent, and it had but opened the field to
+a fruitful and suggestive comparison between the two races, the two arts,
+and the two codes of morality.
+
+This is where we stand at present: this form of adaptation is the more
+interesting of the two, and constitutes the last stage previous to the era
+of complete emancipation, of absolute originality.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+The Three Principal Dramatists of To-day--Sydney Grundy; his First
+Efforts--Adaptations: _The Snowball_, _In Honour Bound_, _A Pair of
+Spectacles_, _The Bunch of Violets_--His Original Plays--His Style--His
+Humour--His Ethical Ideal--_An Old Jew_--_The New Woman_--A Talent which
+has not done growing.
+
+
+If you were to ask a London theatre-goer to name the most popular
+dramatists of the present day, to designate the ripened talents which tell
+most clearly of the present and of the future of the English drama, I
+think I may affirm that the names that would come immediately to his lips,
+with scarcely a moment's pause for reflection, are those of Arthur Wing
+Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones, and Sydney Grundy. There would doubtless be
+some demurrings on the part of those contrary or eccentric spirits who
+will never admire except out of opposition and in disagreement, not merely
+with the uncultured many, but with the critical few. The theatre has its
+sects and its chapels, or rather, its crypts and its unknown idols, to
+whom a dozen votaries offer incense with weird rites. But we have no time
+to study the vagaries of individual minds. A _plebiscite_ of West-End
+playgoers would certainly point to the three men whose names I have
+mentioned as the leaders of the dramatic movement of the day.
+
+They all began work about the same time--a score of years ago, as nearly
+as possible. They have encountered the same difficulties. Their progress
+has been slow. The commencement of their career was marked by vain efforts
+and misdirected labour: whether it was that opportunity was lacking, or
+that they could not find their way, certainly no one of them gave evidence
+of his full capacity, or even gave any real promise, in his earliest
+works. They were long mere imitators, without seeming to suspect that they
+were worth more than their models; and they hardly were aware of their
+originality before the public discovered it for them. There is something
+almost depressing in the story of these three theatrical _autodidactes_,
+but it is very human and very instructive. It shows the will dragging
+along the intelligence; the investigation by means of experiment preceding
+science; the effort giving birth to the ability. And even now, they are
+only half-way along their arduous paths.
+
+So much they have in common. But their temperament and their ideas are
+dissimilar, and every day adds to this dissimilarity. With whom should one
+commence? Clearly with him who retains most in him of the past, who
+adheres still--largely through his antecedents, and partly through his
+natural disposition--to the school of Robertson, and to the imitation of
+the French: with Sydney Grundy.
+
+If I am not mistaken, his first appearance dates from 1872. At long
+intervals during the subsequent years he succeeded in getting quite small
+pieces upon the stage, contenting himself very often with provincial
+theatres. Two things served to draw him forth from obscurity--an affray
+with the censorship, and the very thorough success of a farce in three
+acts, entitled _The Snowball_. There was question, in the first case, of
+an adaptation of _La Petite Marquise_, which he wrote in collaboration
+with Joseph Mackayers. To my mind, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius contain
+nothing more frankly moral than _La Petite Marquise_. The story of the
+piece, for all the licence of its treatment, is one calculated to deter a
+virtuously inclined woman from succumbing to temptation. Unfortunately its
+moral is a moral of--shall I say?--fastidious abstention; a moral it is
+difficult to appreciate or put into practice, except at an age when
+passion has lost its fire and its poison.
+
+It serves, therefore, despite its subtle humour and clever observation, no
+more useful purpose than the entertainment of philosophers. The English
+censor did not, or would not, see the lesson it taught; he saw only the
+posturings and the language, and was alarmed. He had "passed" the _Petite
+Marquise_ in French in all her original licence; he refused her his
+sanction when she turned up respectably attired by two of his
+fellow-countrymen. Mr. Sydney Grundy made a great outcry, greater,
+perhaps, than was necessary. He was in the right; but one might have
+wished that he had kept in the right without so much passion and
+indignation. However that may be, he made his name known to many people
+who were destined to keep it in mind.
+
+_The Snowball_ is an English version of _Oscar, ou le mari qui trompe sa
+femme_. Mr. Sydney Grundy's originality consists in his having introduced
+into the English farce qualities which were foreign to this
+species--cleverness and ingenuity, wit, some bits of comedy, and not a
+single pun. The author holds his puppets adroitly suspended from his
+finger-tips, without ever entangling their threads. But if, in listening
+to or reading _The Snowball_, you look out for a single trait of English
+manners or character, you will do so in vain, for there is not one.
+
+The well-merited success of _The Snowball_ retarded Mr. Grundy's dramatic
+career, because it condemned him to the work of adaptation--so ungrateful
+in those days--for long years. But this period of ill-fortune had its good
+side, for he knew how to turn it to account. Just as a good painter,
+obliged to earn his livelihood by painting portraits, looks on the wealthy
+Philistines whose features he has to depict as mere models who pay instead
+of being paid; so Mr. Grundy learned the technique and methods of his
+business from Sardou, Labiche, and Scribe. I shall not follow in detail
+these literary jobs of his, some of which were very humble, though none
+of them useless. I shall draw attention merely to three of these
+adaptations, in which Mr. Grundy seems to me to have put some of his
+personal quality, and to have grafted his own talent on the talent of
+another.
+
+The first in date, _In Honour Bound_, is at once a condensation and a
+critical commentary on Scribe's piece, _Une Chaine_. The heroine is a
+young wife whose husband has neglected her, and who has sought
+distractions. How far has she gone in her search? We are not told; and it
+is better that we should not know, for this doubt adds to the interest of
+a piece which, whilst wearing the outward aspect of comedy, borders
+throughout upon serious drama, and keeps it always within sight. The young
+man who has consoled her, or who has come near to consoling her, and has
+had strength enough to flee to the ends of the earth from his guilty
+happiness, comes back presently with a new love in his heart, a love that
+is to be consummated in a happy and brilliant marriage, if the girl's
+guardian gives his consent. Now--and it is here that Scribe's hand is
+discovered--this guardian and the husband, whose honour has been
+threatened or destroyed, are one and the same, the famous barrister, Sir
+George Carlyon. He it is who bears the burden of the play; and the plot is
+unrolled in a kind of cross-examination of the guilty youth at his hands,
+under the guise of a friendly conversation. How much does Sir George
+know? And whither is he making? Therein lies the interest. You follow
+every move in the clever and perilous game played by the husband whose
+happiness is at stake; and you follow it with the intenser interest that
+he never for a moment loses his _sang-froid_, his grace, or his wit. At
+bottom, his policy consists in counting upon the innate generosity of the
+woman. After devoting a world of skill and patience to the trapping of
+Lady Carlyon, at last, when he has in his hands the written proof of her
+guilt, he throws it into the fire, and, instead of listening to the
+confession which has been offered him, accuses himself.
+
+There results a mutual pardon, discreetly covering over and absolving all
+the past. Thus finishes this little piece, which runs smilingly,
+breathlessly, along the edge of a precipice. It is the Drama in essence,
+cunningly distilled.
+
+_A Pair of Spectacles_ is an imitation (Mr. Grundy modestly calls it a
+translation) of _Les Petits Oiseaux_, by Labiche and Delacour. The subject
+is well known. It is the crisis of distrust which every man goes through,
+sooner or later, who has believed too much in the goodness of mankind. He
+passes from a blind optimism to a ferocious pessimism, then returns to a
+more moderate estimate of average human nature--prepared now and again to
+come across a wretched creature who abuses his charity, and many shallow
+natures who accept it and forget it. This indulgent theory, this
+easy-going attitude, finds expression in a pretty apologue, explanatory
+of the title chosen by Labiche. The old fellow's future daughter-in-law
+congratulates him on the good he effects all round him. "You are so good!"
+she cries; "but people are so ungrateful!" "What does that matter?" she
+makes answer; "I feed the sparrows every morning that come to my
+window-sill. They never say 'Thanks.' Often, indeed, one of them, hungrier
+than the others, pecks at my finger. But that does not stop me from
+feeding them again next day." At the _denouement_, he recalls this lesson
+read to him by the innocent girl, and applies it to his own experience.
+The pecking is the deception of which he has been the victim; and as for
+the ingratitude of people, well, there is nothing to be surprised at in
+that--the sparrows don't say "Thanks!"
+
+It is a symbol, nothing more nor less,--a symbol in a play by Labiche!
+Labiche poaching upon the fields of him who has written _Solness, the
+Master-Builder!--n'est ce pas un comble!_ A second symbol is added to the
+first in order to justify the title which Mr. Grundy has given to the
+English piece. In his ill-temper over the discovery that human nature is
+not perfect, Benjamin Goldfinch has broken his spectacles. From this
+moment he uses those which have been lent to him by his brother Gregory,
+the misanthrope. At the _denouement_, his own come back to him from the
+optician's. He seizes upon them with delight, and there is nothing to
+prevent the spectator, should the superstition be to his taste, from
+believing that all that has happened has resulted from the changing of
+these pairs of spectacles. The author's idea is obvious to all. Our mind
+is the prism by which everything is distorted or refracted. So long as we
+look at things through the glasses of our intellectual vision, it is
+probable that they will always appear to us as they appeared at first. The
+pair of spectacles is in us. Experience breaks them, and illusions mend
+them again.
+
+In France the _Petits Oiseaux_ had a provincial success. In Paris the
+piece produced but little effect when first performed; and when revived at
+the Comedie Francaise some years ago, the critics thought it childish.
+
+In London, on the contrary, in the form given to it by Mr. Grundy, it was
+given a brilliant reception, which was renewed later on its revival, as I
+myself can bear witness. Whence is this difference? From the superiority
+of Parisian taste? Such an explanation would be pleasing to our _amour
+propre_. I shall venture upon another, which will, perhaps, dispense with
+this one. Namely, that _Les Petits Oiseaux_ is a fairy tale, and that
+Labiche has no gift for fairy tales. His big honest hands--I speak
+figuratively, never having seen the author of _Perrichan_ and _La
+Grammaire_--were made to seize and keep hold of the comic aspect of
+realities. But for this gracefully fanciful subject, the touch of a real
+writer, such as Mr. Grundy, was required, and this is why I think the
+copy is better than the original.
+
+The third adaptation which has struck me is that of _Montjoye_. So far
+back as 1877 Mr. Grundy offered a first version of it, under the title of
+_Mammon_, to the English public. He must, while profiting by opinions
+already passed upon it, have made a full and detailed critical study of
+the piece before he touched it at all. The result of his reflections was
+the suppression of a valueless character, that of Montjoye's son, and the
+introduction of an excellent one, that of Parker, the old clerk, whose
+fidelity and modesty everyone admires, and who, having found out all his
+employer's secrets, and treasured up in his dogged and unforgiving heart
+all the grievances he has experienced, follows him step by step, acquires
+his property bit by bit, and becomes eventually his master's master.
+
+_Mammon_ is certainly a better made piece than _Montjoye_, but this was
+not enough for Mr. Grundy. More than sixteen years later he took up the
+same subject again, and subjected it to a new examination, from two points
+of view. How had the type of the company-promoter been modified in the
+course of thirty years? In what particulars does the English speculator
+differ from his French compeer? The scene will be recalled in which
+Montjoye, the positivist, laughs at the enthusiastic Saladin, his old
+schoolfellow, who remained poor through having retained his illusions, his
+belief in mankind. "That is all rubbish," Montjoye declares,--"_Tout
+cela, c'est du bleu!_" Whatever is not practical, whatever cannot be
+expressed clearly in black and white, he calls "Bleu." Poetical illusions,
+childish preconceptions, romantic superstitions, sickly sensibilities,
+sonorous and empty sayings--"_Voila le royaume de bleu!_"
+
+Thus Montjoye, "_ou l'homme fort_," declaimed, in language which now seems
+somewhat out of date. For to-day he has changed roles with Saladin. He is
+the enthusiast who gains the confidence of the simple and the credulous,
+he is the _virtuoso_ of sickly sensibility--the Paganini of the sonorous
+and empty sayings; he has found a mine of gold in the _Royaume du Bleu_.
+His _Tartufferie_ is social rather than religious. He is not content to
+issue shares in the port of Bohemia, and bonds on a railway from Paris to
+the moon; he is anxious that these magnificent enterprises should serve
+the interests of humanity. The modern Montjoye rides upon politics and
+finance, the Bible and Socialism; he succeeds through chauvinism and
+through philanthropy. Transport him to London, and clothe him in that
+hypocrisy of which our neighbours have made an art, and you will have Sir
+Philip Marchant, the hero of _A Bunch of Violets_.
+
+Thus Montjoye, who comes home at seven in the morning after a spree,--like
+a college boy who has been out of bounds,--and who sacrifices his
+financial eminence, his reputation, and his peace of mind to an
+adventuress, escorted and aggravated by a Palais Royal husband, would
+never go down in England, and I think the French public of to-day would
+refuse to stand him.
+
+I had the honour of personal acquaintance with Octave Feuillet. He was a
+man of delicate, nervous, solitary disposition. He depicted these aspects
+of the _vie mondaine_ and _demi-mondaine_ of 1865 from afar and _de chic_.
+Mr. Grundy eliminated this naive and old-fashioned Don Juanism of his. In
+order to bring about the necessary crisis, he has recourse to bigamy. The
+expedient is not new, and is even somewhat repellent, but I admit that it
+gives a solidity to the English piece which the French piece lacks.
+
+Philip Marchant has married twice, Montjoye has not married at all. "What
+would the world say if it knew you had allowed your mistress to invite it
+to dinners and dances under the guise of being your wife?" The objection
+is submitted to Montjoye by his unfortunate accomplice, and by the public
+to the author who is no better able to reply to it than his hero. At all
+events, Sir Philip Marchant has not been guilty of this blunder. His
+second marriage is a crime certainly, but it is not a mistake. And then we
+escape that ultimate conversion, a lamentable concession made by Feuillet
+to the optimistic playgoers of the fair sex of thirty years ago. Sir
+Philip swallows his laudanum (or is it strychnine?) without turning a
+hair--a method of settling one's differences with social morality and the
+criminal code resorted to, as we know, in every country, when no other
+method is available.
+
+On one point Mr. Grundy has shown himself even more fanciful and
+sentimental than Octave Feuillet. I refer to the little bunch of violets
+which gives its name to the piece. Sir Philip, the bigamist, the swindler,
+who has defrauded public societies, defrauded the poor, defrauded even his
+own wife, refuses to give the little penny buttonhole of violets, his
+daughter's present to him that morning, in exchange for a sum of five
+thousand pounds--a sum which would enable him to keep up the fight for
+another twenty-four hours and--who knows?--perhaps escape bankruptcy and
+suicide. "These violets are not for sale," he thunders, and the audience
+is carried away. The men applaud and the women weep. By this single trait
+the criminal is redeemed and absolved.
+
+Even in his original plays, Mr. Grundy has been haunted by the memory of
+his French studies, and no one will think of reproaching him for having,
+now and again, made use of semi-unconscious reminiscences, floating, as it
+were, between the regions of his imagination and his memory. A more
+serious cause for complaint is, that having concerned himself for a great
+portion of his life with the French theatre, he has ended by confounding
+our dramatic types with characters from real life. At the same time, as he
+is gifted with a very lively sense of humorous observation, which he has
+employed in every direction upon things and people, he has managed to
+produce some curious mixtures. Sometimes we have Scribe's marionettes
+moving in an English atmosphere, sometimes we have English characters
+unfolding themselves through the course of sentimental plots very much
+like ours. Thus, in _The Glass of Fashion_, we have depicted for us the
+havoc wrought by society journalism of the worst type. A silly fool who
+has come in for a fortune has allowed himself to be persuaded into buying
+a journal of this class. It traduces his best friends, and even his very
+wife. A little more and he must institute proceedings against it for
+libelling himself. The whole of this amusing picture of manners,
+thoroughly racy of the soil, is framed in a melodramatic affair in which
+women are juggled out of sight, like a thimble-rigger's peas, in
+accordance with our traditional method. Mr. Grundy pins his faith to
+Scribe, whom he looks upon with reason as a marvellous stage-carpenter,
+and he cannot see the need for a divorce between ingenious scenic
+contrivance and sincerity of dramatic emotion. And indeed, it is not
+essential that a theatrical piece should be badly constructed that it may
+contain human feeling and truth to life. But how to get nature and art to
+combine together in the same work? That is the enigma, and there are many
+still who have to search for the secret of this mysterious collaboration.
+
+In every play of Mr. Grundy's there is to be found an element which is
+very old in the initial situation, and also an element which is very new
+and very personal in the treatment, the working out,--the individual
+note, in short, which relieves even the smallest points, and stamps them
+with a special character that cannot be counterfeited. It is to Mr. Grundy
+the writer that Mr. Grundy the dramatist owes his greatest success, and it
+is the writer, too, who has covered the retreat when the dramatist has
+entered the fray too rashly, and been threatened with disaster.
+
+This gift of writing is not displayed in rhetorical tirades, or in
+brilliant discourses and philosophisings upon social problems, as with our
+writers of the Second Empire; it is concentrated chiefly upon quick
+rejoinders that are rapped out short and sharp. Humour flows in such
+abundance through Mr. Grundy's theatrical work that it floods even his
+serious dramas. _A Fool's Paradise_, that sombre story of poisoning, is so
+saturated with gaiety that one laughs throughout, from start to finish;
+and the murderess is so conscious of it that she betakes herself
+considerately behind the scenes to die, in order not to dissipate our good
+humour by the sight of her agonies. In _The Late Mr. Castello_ there is
+nothing at all of tragedy--nothing but the whims of a pretty woman, whose
+amusement it is to woo the lovers of all the rest of her sex; thus causing
+general indignation.
+
+The author's wit follows her with rare agility through these dangerous
+gymnastics, which the less nimble would attempt at the risk of a broken
+neck. Coynesses, childishnesses, contrarinesses, moods of jealousy,
+endearing terms used in earnest and in jest, outbursts of passion
+artificial as well as real, shades and half shades and quarter shades of
+expression, fibs, feint upon feint, nothing disconcerts the writer,
+nothing finds this light, subtle, railing, emotional tongue at a loss--the
+tongue which recalls Marivaux sometimes, and sometimes Musset. You can
+understand, then, why Mr. Grundy's plays are popular with the public,
+without satisfying the critics. The public is carried away by the charm of
+his dialogue; the critics stop to discuss the age of his subject and the
+truth of his thesis.
+
+One of Mr. Grundy's peculiarities--and, together with his fancy and his
+originality as a writer, it is my chief reason for delighting in
+him--consists in the strange contrast presented in his theatrical work
+between the passions called into play and the impression produced. Severe
+judges accuse him of being over-indulgent to the weaknesses of unlawful
+love, and perhaps they are right. But of this I am sure, that you go from
+one of his plays in an excellent frame of mind, with a genuine wish to
+lead a good life, and to attain happiness through the giving of happiness
+to others. How does he set about the management of this? He does not set
+about managing it at all. There is something in the depth of his nature
+that gushes out in good-will, a source of generous emotions which
+strengthen and refresh and reanimate us. In place of the thousand little
+rules and regulations by which conventional and machine-made morality hems
+us in, a broader, if less clearly defined, morality is to be found, one
+which contrives the avoidance of evil, not by the observance of laws, but
+by the sparing of pain and suffering to our fellows.
+
+In _Sowing the Wind_, Mr. Grundy has pleaded the cause of illegitimate
+children with a warmth and eloquence Dumas would not have been ashamed to
+acknowledge. I am told that the third act, when a good actress has taken
+part in it, has never failed to produce its effect, and I am not
+surprised. The piece is well conceived and is touching; and there is a
+suggestion of history in it, tactful and pleasing. You would say it had
+really been written over sixty years ago, in this England of 1830, in
+which the scene is laid.
+
+But I shall cite _An Old Jew_ as the best example of those plays of his
+which do not satisfy ordinary morality, and which yet leave a man better
+and more strong. It is a curious play. It would be easy to point out its
+faults; it is very difficult to explain its charm. A man who has been
+deceived by his wife, instead of showing her up, punishing her, driving
+her from his house, condemns himself to exile, and allows himself to be
+suspected at once of hardness and infidelity. Why? Because a father can do
+without his children, a woman cannot. Left all alone, she would lapse into
+despair or into shame; her children will be her safeguard, her redemption,
+her virtue. This conduct of Julius Stern is magnanimous; but if he is
+ready to ignore himself, should he not think rather of his innocent
+children than of his guilty wife? Has he not run too great a risk in
+confiding the education of a pure-minded girl to an adulteress? The
+dangerous experiment succeeds, and if you ask me why, I can only say,
+because Mr. Grundy so decided it. Julius has been mistaken only on one
+point,--on the powers of endurance of a father deprived of his daughter's
+caresses, and the companionship of his son.
+
+He returns therefore, and draws near to his deserted family; he remains in
+concealment, but close beside them, ready to guard and help them.
+
+His daughter plays _ingenue_ parts in a London theatre, and although the
+morality of the wings is a little better on the other side of the channel
+than on ours, the girl is exposed to such proposals as that of a certain
+Burnside, who asks her calmly and coolly, without any pretence of love or
+any beating about the bush, to come and live with him. It is time for the
+father to show himself. But Julius has a method all his own for watching
+over his daughter. Every evening he goes to see her act, and, the piece
+over, returns to bed. As for the young man, his dream is of literary
+glory, and it is now that the second subject is introduced, a satire upon
+the ways of contemporary English journalism, which is made to go side by
+side with the domestic drama of the Sterns. How do we find Julius
+intervening in the interests of his son? First he buys him a rare edition
+of "The Dramatists of the Sixteenth Century," which he seems to recommend
+to him as a model (a mistaken and ill-timed recommendation, as I think,
+for the reasons I have indicated already in a previous chapter). The young
+man has written a comedy. Without having read it, and, in consequence,
+without knowing whether he is encouraging a real or only an imagined
+vocation, Julius buys a theatre in which the piece may be performed, and
+he buys also two or three newspapers wherewith to secure its success. Here
+he assumes proportions that are almost fantastic. His sadness, his
+wandering and mysterious life, his authority of voice and bearing, that
+fatal gift of his for turning everything he touches into gold, point to
+some symbolical intention in the author's mind, and to a _third_ subject.
+
+It is no longer _A Jew_; it is _The Jew_--the Jew rehabilitated, and
+becoming now, in his turn, a dispenser of social justice. But how does he
+set about it, this reformer? By loading rascals with gold. Not a good way,
+truly, of closing the _marche aux consciences_. And then the whole
+structure falls to pieces before a very simple reflection. The newspapers
+that give success are not to be bought. Those that are to be bought don't
+give success.
+
+I could proceed with these criticisms, but I am almost ashamed really, as
+it is, of having gone so far, for they make me look ungrateful. If the
+play be theoretically bad, how is it that we listen to it, moved or
+amused, without a moment of fatigue? It is a play without love, for one
+cannot regard the incident of Burnside's base proposal as a love scene. A
+whole act passes in the smoking room of a club, in which we do not catch
+sight of even the shadow of a petticoat. But one would not miss a line of
+this frank, direct, live dialogue; one is thrilled by certain sentences,
+strangely deep or bitterly eloquent, as by lightning flashes; one feels
+that there are real souls behind these unreal incidents. And then,--shall
+I acknowledge it?--one is keenly interested in the absurd but affecting
+spectacle of this father, who thirsts for his daughter's forehead, as a
+lover thirsts for the lips of his mistress. Why should not such love as
+this have its drama and its romance, as it has its anguishes, its
+sacrifices, and its joys?
+
+_The New Woman_, played in the autumn of 1894, gives us the same emotions,
+without suggesting to the mind the same doubts and objections. It had a
+well-merited success. It is, of course, open to criticism. It is a wholly
+modern picture of manners, the _dernier cri_ of social satire, serving as
+a background to the working out of a very old dramatic subject. Does the
+play bear out the promises of its title? I see in it three episodical
+types, of which two, at least, are caricatures; an impudent lady-doctor,
+who takes herself very seriously; a sort of _garcon manque_, who smokes
+and wears her hair short; and a sort of half-faded flirt, who is much more
+taken up with angling for a husband in troubled waters than with the
+reformation of society.
+
+I see also a married woman, who bores herself at home, and who tries to
+appropriate another woman's husband, by collaborating, or pretending to
+collaborate, with him on a book. But I have no difficulty in recognising
+in her the everlasting would-be adulteress, of whom our drama has made
+such abuse. Her case is complicated with literature; she is the old
+Blue-Stocking darned anew. Thus escapes us once more the New Woman, this
+obsessing phantom of which everyone speaks and which so few have seen.
+
+The real theme of the play is the folly of a man of the world in marrying
+a little farmer's daughter, who has been brought up at home in the
+country. I have said that it is an old subject, but it is well to remark
+that it is generally approached from another side. The authors of a
+certain epoch were fond of describing the origin of one of these passions
+which level the differences of rank and education. They led the hero and
+heroine up to the point of marriage, but it is the morrow of their
+marriage, and the day after that still more, that one would like to hear
+of. This is precisely what Mr. Grundy sets out to show us, but is his
+representation of it accurate, lifelike, credible?
+
+In reality, were this marriage to come off, it is very likely that the
+newly-wedded wife, made giddy by the sudden plunge, would surpass in
+frivolity those who belong to the gay world into which she has been
+introduced, and who have lived in it. But this idea would be too true and
+too simple for the theatre. Or else this little country girl would show
+herself inferior to the people amongst whom she has to mix, as much by the
+vulgarity of her ideas as that of her manners. It is not the world who
+would repulse her, it is she who would be unable to suit herself to the
+world; whence it would come, that her husband must either cast her off or
+become a pariah with her. This version, also, would fail to please the
+pit. Mr. Grundy, therefore, has preferred to devote all his _savoir
+faire_, his wit and his emotional power, to the task of making us accept,
+as a compromise between realism and idealism, a solution as pleasing as it
+is illogical and essentially theatrical. In the second act, Marjery
+commits blunder upon blunder. Everybody makes fun of her, and her husband
+declares she is "hopeless." In the third act she is the admired of all,
+for her eloquence and dignity, her virtue and tact; those who made fun of
+her have prostrated themselves at her feet. Is it possible that she has
+learnt all this during the entr'acte, whilst the orchestra got through a
+waltz? She takes refuge with her father, whose country dialect is just
+strong enough to raise a smile. She milks the cows and plucks the apples,
+the only occupations permissible on the stage to a pretty farmer's lass.
+The youthful husband comes in search of her to this retreat, and obtains
+her pardon. She will never be a lady, but she will be a "woman" _par
+excellence_. The public seemed to me to be delighted with this conclusion.
+An assembly of two thousand snobs will never stint its applause to an
+author who chastises snobbery.
+
+To sum up, Mr. Sydney Grundy has never yet had the good fortune to utilise
+all his gifts at once--to put his whole strength into one important work.
+But he has not said his last word: he may give us to-morrow a vigorous
+comedy, taken whole and entire from actual life, a drama palpitating with
+living passion. Has he not everything required for the purpose?
+Sensibility, humour, individuality, the knowledge of the theatre, and the
+favour of the public.[12]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+Henry Arthur Jones; his First Works--His Melodramas--_Saints and
+Sinners_--The Puritans and the Theatre--The Two Deacons; The Character of
+Fletcher--_Judah_--_The Crusaders_; Character of Palsam; the Conclusion of
+the Piece--_The Case of Rebellious Susan_--_The Masqueraders_--Return to
+Melodrama. Theories expounded by Mr. Jones in his book: _The Renascence of
+the Drama_.
+
+
+The start of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones was not less difficult than that of
+Mr. Sydney Grundy. He could get only short and light pieces accepted at
+first. The earliest play of his within the memory of London play-goers was
+performed at the Court Theatre, and was entitled, _A Clerical Error_. The
+second was an idyll in two short acts, called _An Old Master_.
+
+The young author found it necessary to seek refuge in provincial theatres.
+The world remained unwilling to learn his name--a somewhat undistinguished
+name, and easily forgotten. When, in 1882, Mr. Archer included him in his
+_Dramatists of To-day_, there were many who asked, "_Who_ is this Mr.
+Jones?"
+
+It was then he worked at melodrama. He served seven years with Laban, and
+married Leah, upheld by the hope of one day obtaining Rachel. This was
+his apprenticeship. As Mr. Grundy had learnt his craft by adapting our
+French authors, Mr. Jones learnt his by writing great popular dramas. It
+was in this _genre_, one which gives full scope to the imagination, that
+he came to know his own individual temperament, and developed those
+poetical faculties which were to be put to better uses; it was by this
+unlikely pathway that he found the road to Shakespearian emotions. His
+qualities and his defects date from this time.
+
+The great success of _The Silver King_ set Mr. Jones at liberty. I have
+neither seen nor read the piece, which has not been printed. It is a good
+melodrama, I understand. People found in it, together with some new types
+and _coups de theatre_, observation, gaiety, a rare freedom of handling,
+some really moving touches, and, here and there, flashes of imagination
+and poetry.
+
+Mr. Jones thought he could now take a step further, and please himself,
+having succeeded in pleasing the public. He wrote _Saints and Sinners_.
+The little Margate Theatre was the scene of the first performance of the
+new play in September 1884, this first performance having for object only
+the perfecting of the actors in their parts, and the testing of the
+public. The piece passed thence to the Vaudeville, where it held the bills
+until the middle of the following year, much talked about and applauded.
+
+It marks an important date, not merely in the career of Mr. Jones, but in
+the history of the English drama. It denotes the revival of active
+hostility, in that ancient conflict between the Puritans and the stage,
+which began in 1580, and will last as long as English literature and
+English civilisation. This conflict had assumed a sluggish and inactive
+character in the nineteenth century. Shattered by the scorn of the
+Puritans, the stage had not dared to raise its arm for a blow. Suddenly it
+took the offensive, and carried the war into the enemy's camp. _Saints and
+Sinners_ is only the first of a series of dramas and comedies, in which
+Mr. Jones has fearlessly attacked the hypocrisies of religion, in their
+most characteristic form. He has let fly some darts, indeed, which have
+sped even further, and which he has not shot at random. Has he not
+declared, in his high-spirited and witty preface to _The Case of
+Rebellious Susan_, that the theatre was perhaps destined to succeed to the
+tottering pulpit, and to teach morality to the professional moralists?
+
+Already, in 1885, he had claimed energetically for the drama the right to
+deal with any subject, even with religious subjects. Elsewhere, he
+declared that the theatre was one of the organs of the national life, and
+one of its essential organs; that one could no more imagine England
+without the theatre, than England without the press and the platform.
+
+He seems to say--and this boldness does not displease in a man of
+talent--"We want liberty. Free our hands; give us permission to produce
+masterpieces, and the masterpieces will not be delayed."
+
+What Mr. Jones satirised in _Saints and Sinners_, was the money-making
+spirit that went hand in hand with bigotry. This combination is incarnated
+by Hoggard and Prabble, the two deacons of the dissenting congregation of
+Steepleford. Hoggard is a business man on a small scale, and in a small
+town; Prabble is an easy-going grocer. The one is repulsive, the other
+merely comic; but, at bottom, they represent the same spirit, in different
+degrees, and after different fashions. Hoggard is fully aware of his
+rascality, and there is nothing sincere about him except his pride. He is
+convinced that there is a special moral code for clever men of his own
+stamp.
+
+Prabble, on the other hand, is of opinion that the minister would be doing
+no more than his duty were he to denounce from the pulpit the co-operative
+stores by which his shop is being ruined. "I keep up his chapel. He ought
+to keep up my custom." Even in the last scene, in the midst of the tragic
+emotions of the _denouement_, when he wishes to express to the minister
+they have driven away the remorse of his ungrateful congregation, his one
+fixed idea comes out again. If only Mr. Fletcher could manage, without
+inconvenience, to slip in a word on Sunday--just one word about the
+co-operative stores!
+
+Does this grocer, who would prop up his shop against his chapel, reason
+and act otherwise at bottom, than did the great king when he allied his
+throne with the pulpit of Bossuet? In both cases the policy proved
+successful--at least, for a time.
+
+"You know, my dear Prabble," Hoggard says to his friend, "it is we who are
+the greatness of England; it is we who have made her what she is." And
+what is so terrible about it is, that he is not wholly wrong. Hoggard and
+Prabble represent one of the various types of that Puritan democracy,
+which accomplished great things in former days, but which has learnt
+nothing for two centuries, except to make money. They belong to what is
+called the middle class, and the middle class, so different from our
+_Classe Moyenne_, is regarded with real contempt by superior
+intelligences. Matthew Arnold congratulated Mr. Jones ten years ago on
+having given it, in his admirable picture of these two deacons, one of the
+hardest blows it had yet received. What neither Mr. Arnold nor Mr. Jones
+took the trouble to point out is, that in ordinary life the minister
+cannot belong to a different race of men from those who of their own
+accord have placed him at their head. Like flock, like pastor, and--I
+shall venture to add--like creed.
+
+In default of prudence, an artistic consideration (which I can understand)
+would have strongly impelled Mr. Jones to offer us a pastor differing from
+his flock, as the suave tenderness of the New Testament differs from the
+harshness of the Old. This minister, who allows himself to be robbed by a
+poulterer, and who says such sublime things, has not been taken from real
+life, but from _The Vicar of Wakefield_,--Goldsmith's irrational,
+delightful work. At times he rises to the height of Myriel, the bishop in
+_Les Miserables_, and it is not at these times I like him best. I
+acknowledge that he has tried my temper by his blindness, that I have been
+aggravated by his meekness, have lost all patience with his patience. He
+is very human, very virile, when before his assembled congregation he
+makes the confession which is so cruel to him, of his daughter's sin, and
+relinquishes the spiritual functions which have been his livelihood. There
+is real grandeur in this self-abasement--a dignity full of impressiveness
+in this confession of shame. The words are at once plain and delicate,
+they come from the depths of his nature, and go straight to the soul of
+his hearers. But when he hides his mortal enemy, in order to shield him
+from the vengeance he has earned, and shares with him his last piece of
+bread, I feel that he is going too far, and that pity, as sometimes
+happens, is clashing with justice. Then, when he cries out, "Christians,
+will you never learn to forgive?"--the words thrill me, and I change my
+mind again--I tell myself that one must sometimes exaggerate beyond the
+bounds of reason to bring even a little goodness into the souls of the
+pitiless.
+
+Mr. Jones's talent achieved a fresh advance in _Judah_, produced on May
+21, 1890. There is no longer any trace of melodrama, either in the
+situations or in the characters. The nobility of mind, and the need of
+spontaneous confession, which mark the finest scene in _Saints and
+Sinners_, are used as motives again in _Judah_, with great power, and
+form, so to speak, the mainspring of the play. A young girl named Vashti
+Dethic, has been brought up by her father to the role of _clairvoyante_
+and miracle-worker. Extreme poverty, extreme youth, moral force carried
+perhaps to the point of terrorising,--she has abundant excuses for
+adopting this horrible career. Now, her interests, her pride, the
+enthusiam of her stupid devotees, constrain her to persevere in an
+imposture which she loathes.
+
+We pity her, and are grateful to the author for diverting our scorn to the
+wretched Dethic. We are even willing to believe that a high-strung,
+nervous girl may imagine herself to be the subject of miraculous
+influences. When Vashti is subjected to a fast of three weeks, and when,
+by the merciless vigilance of her watchers, this fast threatens to become
+too real, the young girl's heroism touches us, in spite of ourselves, as
+much as though it were devoted to a better cause. We form the absurd wish
+that her father may succeed in smuggling some food to her--we are all for
+the miracle against science, for charlatanism against the truth; which is
+going as far as can be gone! Or rather, we have developed an interest in a
+poor human creature in serious peril, and, without reflecting upon her
+character, we hope she may escape. How would it be if we were
+passionately in love with her? Thus it is with Judah Llewellyn.
+
+These two names are noteworthy; the author calls our attention by them to
+the dual origin of his hero, Celtic and Jewish. This mixed ancestry
+explains, doubtless, both the fanatic and the impulsive side of his
+nature, and the mastery of the religious instinct in its conflict with the
+ardours and passions of the imagination. Judah is endowed with a burning
+eloquence, the secret of which he gives in the simple statement, "I
+believe what I say." This faith, which carries away the uncultured,
+inspires the respect of men of the world. One listens to him without a
+smile, when he talks of the voices which have called upon him in the
+night; some may not believe that the voices did so call upon him, but all
+believe that he heard them calling. Thus his church becomes too small for
+the multitudes who come to seek nourishment, or rather intoxication, in
+his words.
+
+This man has to pass through various phases of mind before our eyes. At
+first, he loves Vashti with a humble, ecstatic love, in which religious
+enthusiasm seems to enter more than human passion. In his eyes she is a
+superior being--privileged, the elect of God. He dares not defile her with
+a carnal thought; it is enough for him to kiss the hem of her robe. But it
+chances one evening that he is an involuntary witness of the desperate
+efforts of Vashti's father to get some food to her during her fast. At
+once, almost without transition, by the force of circumstances that permit
+no time for deliberation, he becomes her accomplice, he saves her by a
+lie, and a lie which carries the more weight in that his veracity has
+never been called in question. A vulgar writer would not have failed to
+show us Judah raising himself to his full height, and invoking curses upon
+the woman he had protected, and fleeing afterwards to a solitude where he
+would be tortured by the visions of lost happiness. Mr. Jones has done
+just the opposite. Judah's first sensation is a burst of wholly human joy.
+Vashti is not an angel or a saint, but a woman, a frail creature, like to
+himself, whom he may love without thought of sacrilege! It is not until
+later that remorse makes itself felt in his soul, and that his conscience,
+terrible and tempestuous like passion, asserts its rights.
+
+To all appearances Judah and Vashti are triumphant: they are to be united;
+Lord Asgarby's daughter, the subject of the imposture, is cured because
+she believes herself cured; the world pays its homage at once to Vashti's
+miraculous powers, and to the virtue and eloquence of the man she is to
+marry. What is lacking? Peace of mind, self-respect. In what poignant
+terms Judah recounts to Vashti his mental agony! With what imagination of
+poet, or of the lost, does he give voice and form to all the terrors of
+the Puritan mind,--those terrors which, for some mere trifle, some shadow
+of a sin, so tortured Bunyan, and prostrated Cromwell, pallid, gasping,
+on the bare boards of his chamber! Yet love has not gone from Judah's
+heart. Better Hell with her than Heaven without!
+
+The champion of science, Dr. Jopp, for his part, has instituted an inquiry
+into the whole thing; he is inclined to bracket Dethic and his daughter
+together. Judah becomes aware of what is in preparation, is free to
+separate his lot from that of Vashti; but he does not do so. Then when
+Jopp, on the entreaty of his old friend Lord Asgarby, has consented to
+spare Vashti, it would be easy for Judah to maintain silence, and to
+accept, together with his wife, the favours with which they are being
+overwhelmed. But no, he must speak; he must confess himself! The
+confession issues with the explosive violence born of long compression, in
+a strange frenzy of humiliation and of repentance, impetuous, vibrating,
+almost triumphant, like a blare of trumpets. Beyond the awful but not
+impassable ordeal, the guilty man and woman see the divine horizon of
+paradise regained.
+
+"You won't? Then hear me, hear me, all of you! I lied! I lied! Take back
+my false oath; let the truth return to my lips! Let my heart find peace
+and my eyelids sleep again! You all know me now for what I am; let all who
+honoured me and followed me know me too. Hide nothing! Let it be blazed
+about the city. (_Pause. To_ LORD A.) Take back your gift. (_Gives deed
+to_ LORD A.) We will take nothing from you! Nothing! Nothing! (_Goes to_
+VASHTI.) It's done. (_Takes her hand._) Our path is straight; now we can
+walk safely all our lives."
+
+It is the pride of penitence, and this expression of feeling has never
+been given a prouder tone. In the previous play, _Saints and Sinners_, old
+Fletcher, on learning of his daughter's shame, had cried out, "How shall I
+ever hold up my head again?" To hold up his head, that is an Englishman's
+first need. And when Letty Fletcher had effaced her transgression by dint
+of heroism and devotion, she said, not, "I have expiated my sin," but, "I
+have conquered." By such expressions it is that I can see that the
+artificial psychology of the drama is yielding place to a truer and more
+real psychology. Hitherto, almost everything that has been written in
+England, would seem to have had for object, to conceal and not to make
+clear the English mind. A new generation of writers has come forth, whose
+work it will be to depict this mind as it really is, and to make its
+confession with the fierce sincerity of Judah.
+
+_The Crusaders_, produced on November 2, 1891, is a piece of quite another
+stamp. It is not the unfolding of a character contending with
+circumstances: it is a satirical representation of a _coterie_, a group, a
+social movement. This kind of piece has but a first act, in which the
+theme is expounded and a brilliant array of characters presented to the
+audience. The plot of _The Crusaders_ is a mere imbroglio, fastened on
+somewhat artificially to a satirical and ethical homily; it turns upon an
+open window and shut door, which endanger the reputation of a young widow.
+Unfortunately, we do not take much interest in this young widow, or in the
+two men who love her; one of them is a faded copy of Judah, the other is
+nothing at all.
+
+But what is a mere accessory in the view of the ordinary playgoer,
+constitutes the essential part of the play for the critic, for the
+historian of the drama and of life.
+
+When the time comes for depicting the state of English society during the
+last years of the nineteenth century, this curious first act of _The
+Crusaders_ will certainly be drawn upon for material. There will be found
+in it the confusion of elements that stir and mingle, without uniting, in
+the vague social movement of this period: enthusiasm lacking a clear end
+in view, devotion lacking a definite object, a pilgrimage which leads no
+one knows whither, and on which no single pilgrim will reach his
+destination. It deals with the reformation of London; a programme so vast
+and complex as to be none at all. This association counts amongst its
+members a number of pretty women who play at charity; young idlers for
+whom the reformation of London is merely an opportunity for flirting, just
+like private theatricals, _tableaux vivants_, and garden parties; pushing
+women who turn the occasion to their own profit by bringing about
+relations with this "dear Duchess of Launceston," and who raise
+themselves thus in the world, step by step. One of these good ladies, Mrs.
+Campion Blake, invites an old statesman to dinner, to meet a kind of
+apostle whom she defines as a "new variety of inspired idiot--something
+between an angel, a fool, and a poet! And atrociously in earnest! a sort
+of Shelley from Peckham Rye. He's rather good fun, if you take him in
+small doses." After dinner, an American lady gymnast will give a
+performance in the dining-room. "She's adorable. She gives drawing-room
+gymnastics after dinner. It isn't the least indelicate--after the first
+shock." Be sure the Minister will accept the invitation. He is quite ready
+to reform London, provided only that no one calls upon him to alter his
+own mode of life. He acknowledges that he has no ideals. No ideals! his
+hearers exclaim horrified. Alas! no; had he not become a member of the
+House of Commons in his twenty-second year! Which of the two is Mr. Jones
+turning into ridicule? Idealism, or the House of Commons? Both, I fancy.
+Why should there not be a double irony for the clever, just as there is a
+_galimatias double_ for the dull?
+
+In this movement there are many who are in earnest. First of all we have
+the credulous, ingenuous Ingarfield, dragging in his train Una, the
+petticoated apostle of the prison and the house of ill-fame, the young
+virgin whose joy it is to attempt the conversion of rogues and
+prostitutes. But the most real type is that of Palsam. This individual is
+wholly repulsive. A voluntary spy, a detective by his own choice, he is
+the incarnation of that spirit of sneaking, which rages so cruelly in
+certain sections of English society. Basile, in comparison with him, is a
+"good sort," an amiable companion. He stoops to expedients to which an
+_agent de moeurs_ would blush to have recourse against an _habituee_ of
+Saint Lazare; and it is against women of the world, too, that he resorts
+to them! He is so insensible to indignity that a box on the ear has no
+effect upon him. How do people put up with him? How is it they let him
+into their houses? In France we would throw him out without troubling
+about his calumnies, which would be welcomed only by the lowest kind of
+newspaper; or rather, a complete Palsam, a perfect Palsam could not be
+found in France. In England he is a reality and a power. But is he so vile
+as he seems, as at first we are inclined to regard him? No; his conduct
+seems mean to the utmost degree; but consider, please, two things: first,
+that he acts thus, quite disinterestedly; secondly, that he deprives
+himself of those incorrect enjoyments of which he is so bent upon
+depriving others. Give him the benefit of these two admissions, and,
+little by little, the man will begin to wear for you a different aspect.
+The ascetic will rehabilitate the spy, you will be forced to find a kind
+of heroism in his meanness, and to admire, while you hate, his hideous
+virtue, which is perhaps one of the hundred ways of doing good to men in
+their own despite.
+
+Perhaps it was not Mr. Jones's intention to suggest so many reflections by
+his Palsam, but whether he wishes it or no, his work is thus suggestive,
+and it is the special note of this very straightforward, very masculine,
+very generous satire, that it never ridicules the enemy without letting us
+see the redeeming traits in his character, and the good motives which he
+might plead in self-defence, thus putting the real man before us whole and
+entire.
+
+Mr. Jones ridicules the would-be reformers of London, and represents their
+efforts as resulting in a pitiable fiasco. But he has not contended, of
+course, that London is all right as it is, and that the bringing of the
+great city into a state of moral health has ceased to be one of the dark
+problems which demand, and baffle, the good intentions of honest folk. He
+himself has indicated a solution, and the true solution; "To reform
+London, it is necessary, first of all, that each of us should reform
+himself." Such is the moral of the piece; and this sermon is worth more
+than many others.
+
+Through alternate successes and failures, Mr. Jones's popularity has gone
+on increasing during the last four years. _The Tempter_, it is true, gave
+the public something of a shock. Despite the intelligently devised
+splendours of the _mise en scene_, and the admirable resources of his own
+talent, Mr. Tree, who had a special liking for the piece, and was not
+wholly unconnected, they say, with its conception, did not succeed in
+bringing his audience round to his way of thinking. In the _Triumph of
+the Philistines_, Mr. Jones resumed his campaign against Puritanism, but
+after a pettier, less vigorous fashion than in his preceding works. The
+hero and heroine of this comedy were empty, formless shadows, and the
+public would not have known _a quoi se prendre_, had not the piece been
+given a fillip quite unexpectedly by the appearance of an inessential
+character, that of a whimsical little Frenchwoman, acted to perfection by
+Miss Juliette Nesville. The study is a brilliant one, and at moments
+really profound. It is the first time, if I mistake not, that an English
+dramatist, in introducing a Frenchwoman into his work, has turned out
+anything more than a collection of mere external peculiarities, tricks of
+facial expression, mistakes in pronunciation and in language, and that he
+has penetrated into the very soul, or at least into the _etat d'ame_, of
+another nation, differentiating it from his own.
+
+_The Case of Rebellious Susan_ is a very amusing comedy. I know of none
+with so lively a beginning. In his ironical dedication to Mrs. Grundy, Mr.
+Jones begs of that good lady to find out a moral in his play. There should
+be one in it, he tells her--indeed, there should be several; they have but
+to be looked for.
+
+I don't know what will be the outcome of Mrs. Grundy's researches. I, for
+my part, have searched also, but from a different standpoint, and have
+found nothing, unless it be that Susan is Francillon with certain
+differences, which transform both the character and the dramatic
+situation. The idea of revenging herself against an unfaithful husband, by
+paying him back in his own coin, must have taken shape, one thinks, first
+of all in the mind of an Englishwoman, for the Englishwoman has in her
+nature much more of pride than of love. Susan's grief is not a tearful
+grief. She is violent, bitter, vindictive; she carries through her little
+exploit with much self-possession and without a sob. How far has her
+vengeance carried her? Has she been guilty or merely imprudent? No one
+knows, and, lacking information upon the subject, neither Mrs. Grundy nor
+I can solve the problem put before us. Her husband has been unfaithful to
+her, her lover forgets her, and the last crime is worse than the first.
+She returns, but dispassionately, to the domestic hearth. Oh! cries the
+repentant husband, how I am going to love you! Yes, love me, she replies;
+I need to be loved. But to judge by his hungry glances at her whilst he
+helps her off with her opera-cloak, I am afraid we are witnesses of a
+fresh misunderstanding. The love that she is offered and the love she
+wants are not the same love. An omen full of menace for the future. It is
+to the President of the Divorce Court, I fear, that it will fall in the
+end to lay down the moral of the whole business.
+
+Very different is the heroine of _The Masqueraders_, who, as impersonated
+by Mrs. Patrick Campbell, fascinated London during the season of 1894.
+Dulcie Larondie is a coquette, at first ambitious, giddy, keen on
+enjoyment, anxious to shine; become a mother, she adores her child; then
+love takes possession of her; and then duty reasserts its claims. She is
+the plaything of her own feelings, and of the passions she raises up all
+round her. She obeys every voice that calls to her, abandons herself with
+a kind of gracious pitiful passiveness to these unknown forces and these
+mysterious fatalities, within her and without, which break her strength
+and oppress her will.
+
+Mr. Jones had taken leave of melodrama in order to write _Judah_; he
+returned to it in _The Masqueraders_, not from listlessness or
+unwittingly, but deliberately and systematically. A husband staking his
+wife at a game of ecarte--is not this melodrama? But what cares the author
+of _The Masqueraders_, whether the incidents be improbable and his
+situations artificial? Mr. Jones will not hear of the "well-made" piece;
+he seems to have recognised that the architecture of a play does not count
+for much, and that the science of Scribe and Sardou is a snare. Nor will
+he hear of realism or of logic. He defends himself against the charge of
+being a realist as though it were a disgrace, and ridicules those who pay
+for admission to a theatre to see paper lamp-posts and canvas houses, when
+they can see real lamp-posts and real houses in the streets for nothing.
+Realism, he contends, is only a vast field of preliminary studies and a
+store-room of materials. As for logic, it may be left to the professors
+who teach it, and thus make a comfortable living. Why should the drama be
+logical when life is not? A drama should contain four principal elements,
+amongst which neither logic nor realism finds a place; and these elements
+are--Beauty, Mystery, Passion, and Imagination. The drama, he is
+convinced, is returning now to the mysterious and imaginative side of
+human life.
+
+And if the critic press too hard upon the author of _The Masqueraders_, he
+has recourse for his defence--and quite rightly--to the great name which
+is worth ten thousand arguments. For it must be again asserted,
+Shakespeare's plays, with the exception of four or five, are melodramas,
+traversed and fertilised by streams of poetry, lit up by flashes of
+thought, and here and there softened, brightened, animated, by some
+passing glimpses of real life.
+
+To the lessons of Shakespeare, Mr. Jones has added those of Ibsen. They
+are great masters, but there comes a time of life when no one can have any
+master, save himself. I do not know whether the theories developed of late
+by Mr. Jones will lead him on to works which shall throw _Judah_ and _The
+Crusaders_ in the shade. But he is certainly passing through a crisis in
+his career, and I cannot refrain from remarking that the structure of his
+later plays has been less solid, and that their meaning has been apt to be
+obscure and vexing to the mind. Whether or no he issue from behind this
+cloud, he has already played a great part in the resuscitation of the
+drama, and he is the most English of all the living English dramatists;
+the one who expresses most sincerely and most brilliantly the mind of his
+generation and of his race.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+Two Portraits--Mr. Pinero's Career as an Actor--His Early Works--_The
+Squire_, _Lords and Commons_--The Pieces which followed, half Comedy, half
+Farce--_The Profligate_; its Success and Defects--_Lady Bountiful_--_The
+Second Mrs. Tanqueray_--Character of Paula--Mrs. Patrick Campbell--_The
+Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith_.
+
+
+Meanwhile, it was to Mr. Pinero that fell the lot of writing the most
+human work yet known to modern English dramatic literature,--the work,
+too, approaching most nearly to perfection.
+
+I have never gazed on Mr. Pinero in the flesh, but I have seen two
+portraits of him which have struck me. In one I seem to discover the
+pensive _bonhomie_ of a philosopher, who looks on at the world from afar;
+the other suggests rather the frequenter of drawing-rooms--the look in the
+eyes is more alive, the smile more knowing, less calculated to leave one
+at one's ease. Which of these portraits tells the truth? Both of them
+perhaps. There are aspects of Mr. Pinero's work which respond to these
+different moods of a single mind. Then, the two physiognomies, which I try
+to reconcile with each other, have this trait in common: they both show us
+a man who observes and who reflects.
+
+And, in truth, a man must look about him and within him a good deal in
+order to be able to pass, like Mr. Pinero, from the formless efforts of
+his youth, or even from such pieces as _The Squire_ and _Lord and
+Commons_, to a work like _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_. His career as an
+author has been a long-continued ascent, delayed by many incidents and
+accidents, but from which the horizon of art has seemed larger at every
+stage. To-day he is in the heights, almost at the summit.
+
+In his early youth he had felt his vocation and had written a play, but he
+knew nothing of the theatre. He learnt his art, as Dion Boucicault and H.
+J. Byron and Tom Robertson before him, by acting in the plays of
+others.[13] He maintained a good position upon the Edinburgh stage, and
+then came to London, where he became connected first with Irving's company
+and then with the Bancrofts'.
+
+After getting some small pieces produced, he tried his hand at the kind of
+plays then in vogue,--farces, melodramas, and sentimental comedies. He
+adapted some French pieces also; and it was then he realised what was
+lacking in his first models, in Robertson and his emulators. A play is a
+living organism. Under the flesh one should find organs, muscles, an
+articulated skeleton. It was this frame-work that Mr. Pinero wished to
+give to his dramatic works; and his ambition did not, perhaps, aspire
+beyond sustaining Robertson by means of Scribe. What he himself possessed,
+and what was already recognised in his work, was a gift for the writing of
+bright and natural dialogues, free from those tricks and artificialities
+which until then had served as wit upon the stage. This dialogue was the
+language really called for by the plot; but it was the plot, precisely,
+that was weak in Mr. Pinero's earliest efforts.
+
+_The Squire_ was an unlifelike story of a case of bigamy, annulled by an
+unexpected death. The piece pleased, by reason of its idealised
+representation of rural life. There was a breath of the woods in it, and a
+smell of hay. But even this attraction the author had borrowed from a
+pretty novel, by Thomas Hardy, _Far from the Madding Crowd_.
+
+_Lords and Commons_ carries a degree further the romantic strangeness of
+the Swedish drama, by which it is inspired. A great nobleman has married a
+young girl of illegitimate birth, in ignorance of her history. He
+discovers the fact, and drives her ignominiously from the house. After
+some years, she comes across his path again, without his recognising her.
+She has a double end in view--to win back her husband's love in her new
+guise, and to awaken his remorse in regard to _that other_, thus torturing
+him with conflicting emotions. Finally, she sends him, his heart torn in
+twain, to a _rendez-vous_ with his former victim to obtain her pardon.
+When Mr. Pinero was content to write a _denouement_ of this kind, who
+could have divined in him the future creator of _Mrs. Tanqueray_?
+
+But at this very moment he had discovered another vein, which he worked
+for a number of years with increasing success. This was a kind of hybrid
+production, which partook of farce in regard to plot, and of the comedy of
+manners in regard to ideas and to dialogue. In short, it belonged to the
+same province of the drama as _Divorcons_, sometimes on a higher plane,
+sometimes on a lower. You would say that characters from Dumas and
+D'Augier had fallen by accident into a scenario of Labiche. _The
+Magistrate_ is thoroughly French in character. A London Magistrate, who
+finds it necessary to hide himself under a table in a restaurant of
+doubtful reputation, and who, under this table, knocks up against his own
+wife, and who, in the following act, having escaped by a miracle from this
+fearsome situation, finds himself called upon to pronounce judgment upon
+this guilty spouse of his (who, needless to say, is guilty only in
+appearance),--this kind of thing does not belong to English life or even
+to English humour. In _Dandy Dick_ and in _The Hobby-Horse_, I find, in
+the midst of fanciful incidents, a number of delicate and noteworthy
+sketches of provincial life, of clerical society, of the racing world, and
+those who belong to it, including a queer kind of female centaur,--a
+woman jockey,--whom Mr. Pinero has certainly not borrowed from our
+_repertoire_. There are many brilliant features really, much ingenuity of
+invention, as well as a real sense of fun and fertility of resource in
+_The Times_ and _The Cabinet Minister_. I have read these two pieces a
+number of times, and found them amusing in their deliberate exaggeration.
+But when I look into them closely, I ask myself whether the phase of
+social evolution through which we are passing is really like that which
+the author holds up to ridicule, and whether his caricatures are not a
+generation or two behind the time. And it is always thus. In the matter of
+satire, it is the newspaper always that opens the way; the novel comes
+after it, and then, after a long interval, the theatre. The manners it
+describes have often ceased to exist; the types it portrays have
+disappeared, or have become changed. We laugh over Egerton Bompas, the
+rich shopkeeper, who wants to marry his daughter to a peer of the realm;
+and over Joseph Lebanon, the vulgar little stockbroker, who dreams of
+getting invited, through the influence of his sister, the fashionable
+modiste, to a shooting-party at a castle in the Highlands. But we know
+quite well that nowadays it is the other way about. It is the peers of the
+realm who seek to ally themselves with Bompas; and, instead of trembling
+before them in Parliament, he imposes his social and political programme
+upon them, turning against land, which is in extremity already, the storm
+which has been threatening capital. Mr. Joseph Lebanon's part is not to
+accept invitations, but to give them. It is he who gives shooting-parties,
+and invites the peers; he allows his house to be used for aristocratic
+dances, and if he does not appear at them himself, it is from disdain, not
+from discretion. If he be distinguishable from his new companions, it is
+through his carefulness in aspirating his h's, his punctiliousness in the
+matter of etiquette, of his dress, of his servants' livery, of his stud,
+and of his table. And then if he does make solecisms, they are thought
+delightful. The only failing for which he could not be forgiven would
+be--failure. And he is on his guard.
+
+I am afraid, therefore, that Mr. Pinero's comedies, although very
+pleasant, are already somewhat aged at their birth. It is in vain to get
+them up in the latest fashions; their age is evident, especially when they
+are looked at side by side with that first act of _The Crusaders_, in
+which the satire is so modern and so full of life.
+
+Mr. Pinero had not renounced the serious drama, and all his theatrical
+friends, watching his progress in light comedy, yet expected to see him in
+this field in which, so far, he had achieved but half-successes. On April
+24, 1889, the Garrick opened its doors with a drama of his, entitled _The
+Profligate_. Marvels were expected from the new theatre which John Hare
+had erected for himself and his company. As had been the case with the
+opening of the Prince of Wales's, it was felt that the first night at the
+Garrick ought to mark a date in the history of the drama. The critics,
+"old" and "new," were enthusiastic. "At last," exclaimed Mr. Archer, "we
+have a real play; a play which has faults, with a third act which has
+none!" Those triumphant assertions, made in the heat of the moment, must
+unfortunately be taken with a considerable discount. _The Profligate_ is a
+melodrama, treated with delicacy and distinction, but incontestably a
+melodrama in every aspect and in every part, that wonderful third act
+included; it is even one of the most fanciful, most romantic melodramas
+that have been written in England for fifteen years.
+
+Whom shall I recognise as an English character, or even as a human type?
+Hugh Murray, the sentimental lawyer, who loses his heart at first sight to
+a schoolgirl, and who buries this beautiful passion in the depths of his
+heart, to disinter it just at the wrong moment? Janet?--who has given
+herself, without the temptation of love, to a seducer in the forties, and
+who, during the remainder of the piece perseveres in the accomplishment of
+acts of delicacy, of renunciation and of self-abnegation without number,
+veritable _tours de force_--_morale_. Leslie?--the heroine of the play, a
+schoolgirl who giddily exclaims, a quarter of an hour before her wedding,
+that she wonders whether the world will seem of the same colour when she
+is the wife of Duncan Renshaw; and who, after a month spent _tete-a-tete_
+with her husband in a villa near Florence, where a fresco of Michael
+Angelo is to be seen, seems to know life better than we do ourselves. I
+know, of course, the explanation that is forthcoming: only a single moment
+was required to alter this character, to bring light to that one. It is
+precisely in this explanation that I find the mark of melodrama. In
+serious psychology, it is not so easy to believe in these "moments"--in
+these sudden revelations, these flash-like crises, which transform an
+individuality completely, annulling nature and education.
+
+And what is one to say of the "Profligate" himself? He is just the
+traditional libertine of all the innumerable English novels published
+during the last fifty years, nor is he unknown to our own old Boulevard du
+Crime. We see him coldly and deliberately cynical up to the moment when
+love touches him with its magic ring. That is a kind of conception that
+has passed its prime. Nowadays we are inclined to regard Don Juan as a
+kind of dupe, the plaything of woman from puberty to decrepitude. We
+picture him to ourselves more engaging when he first begins to sin, and
+less easy to convert when he has become hardened to it. We find it
+difficult to believe that thirty days of wedded bliss suffice to awake a
+conscience which has lain dormant for forty years. If the sense of
+morality were innate, it must have shown itself earlier; to have been
+acquired and to have reached such a degree of perfection and
+sensitiveness, it would have needed more time than the average duration
+of a honeymoon.
+
+The situation which delighted so the English critics may be thus
+described. The seducer's wife has, without knowing it, given shelter to
+his victim. She wishes to help her to confront the man who has wronged
+her, and her heart breaks when she sees upon whom the penalty has to fall.
+I admit that the scenes leading up to this discovery, contrived with great
+ability, produce a veritable anguish in the spectator's mind, and that the
+scene between the husband and the wife, which follows after it, is on the
+same plane of emotion. But by what a number of improbable coincidences had
+this precious moment to be bought! Chance had to take Janet to Paddington
+station at the same moment as Leslie and her brother; Chance had to give
+this same Janet as "companion" to Miss Stonehay, Leslie's school friend;
+to send the Stonehays travelling towards the environs of Florence and the
+villa of the Renshaws; to synchronise Janet's illness and Dunstan's
+departure so that the two women may interest themselves in each other. And
+it is Chance again that makes Janet see Dunstan in Lord Dangars' company
+in order that the confusion may arise regarding the two men, and that this
+Lord Dangars, who is Dunstan's friend, may become engaged to Irene
+Stonehay, the friend of Leslie. And even after Chance has made all these
+thoughtful arrangements, Renshaw's happiness might yet be saved, and this
+terrible danger by which it is threatened be avoided (and this great scene
+of Mr. Pinero's never come to pass), if only Janet were allowed to go as
+she desires, and as good sense and modesty make it right that she should.
+What is it that makes her stay? Who is it that advises her to bring about
+this scandal? No one but Leslie, and I cannot but think her ideas on the
+subject singularly gross for so refined a person. This advice she gives is
+grounded on the slenderest and most irrational of arguments; a score of
+conclusive replies could be given to the pitiful considerations she puts
+forward. But Janet has to be convinced. Otherwise, what would become of
+the crisis of this "Faultless Third Act"?
+
+What surprises me most of all is the number of useless excrescences with
+which the author has encumbered his piece. What is the point of this
+solicitor who bores us, and who gives himself such important airs
+throughout the play without having the slightest influence upon the
+development of the plot? When, by a final stroke of chance, Leslie has
+come to know of the absurd love of which he is the victim, why should she
+let him see that she has heard? All she can find to say to him is,
+"Good-night." And "Good-night" is all he has to say in reply. This scene
+in four words could only be sublime or grotesque: I am inclined towards
+the latter view of it.
+
+Had I been present at one of the first performances of _The Profligate_, I
+should have imagined myself in the presence of a talent that had lost its
+way, turning its back on the goal to which it should direct its steps,
+seeking beyond the confines of reality for some imaginative source of
+tears. I should have been wrong. Mr. Pinero is of a reflective turn of
+mind; he learns from his mistakes, and is not blinded by his successes.
+Before the echoes of the applause which greeted _The Profligate_ in London
+had yet died out in the provinces and abroad, Mr. Pinero was at work upon
+another drama, conceived after a fashion quite different--quite contrary,
+in fact--a drama in half tints, with realistic touches; a sort of novel in
+dialogue. This was _Lady Bountiful_, produced on March 7, 1891.
+
+In _Lady Bountiful_ there is no question of any great fundamental truth,
+no great human interest. It is a very unequal piece of work, in turn very
+moving and very irritating, for of the two women in whom its interest
+centres, it happens unfortunately that one has the sympathy of the author
+and the other that of the public. But it showed, at least, that its author
+had found its way into the domain of psychological observation.
+
+It was on May 27, 1893, that _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_ was performed for
+the first time at the St. James's Theatre. It must be said, to the credit
+of the public, that its success was immediate, universal, and continued.
+The critic whom I have quoted so often exclaimed in a burst of joy, that
+here was a piece "which Dumas might sign without a blush." No one is
+entitled to speak in the name of our greatest dramatist; but quite
+recently, when I re-read _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, I said to myself
+that if the greatest gift of M. Alexandre Dumas was that of embodying deep
+psychological and social observation in splendid eloquence or dazzling
+wit, this rare faculty is to be found almost in an equal degree in
+Pinero's masterpiece.
+
+"The limitations of _Mrs. Tanqueray_," Mr. Archer goes on to say, "are
+really the limitations of the dramatic form." I would go further still,
+and say that such a piece enlarges the province of the theatre. Minute
+details are to be found in it, brought out by intelligent and carefully
+thought-out acting, which one would have regarded as too small to attract
+attention on the stage, shades that the theatre had left to the novel up
+till then. _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_ is, like _Lady Bountiful_, an acted
+novel, but a novel excellently constructed. Its four acts are its four
+chief chapters, and it should be noticed that the first two of these
+chapters are purely analytical; but emotion is introduced imperceptibly
+into the play, and we step from psychology into drama without being
+conscious of the passage.
+
+It is not the old, old subject of the courtesan in love, but that of the
+mistress raised to the dignity of wife. One of Mr. Pinero's clever notions
+is that of having in a sense left passion out of the question. It is
+clear, of course, that Tanqueray is very sensible of Paula's personal
+attractions. Who would not be, in the presence of so charming a woman?
+But there is another feeling mingled with this. He is neither a satyr nor
+a stoic, he assures his friend Cayley; he has a quite rational affection
+for "Mrs. Jarman"; hitherto she has never met a man who has been good to
+her; he, Tanqueray, will be good to her, that is all. Is he absolutely
+sincere? Is his affection quite so rational as he asserts? Cayley has his
+own ideas upon the subject, and so have we. Mr. Pinero has been charged
+with not having told us to what extent philanthropy--the craze for
+redeeming--entered into Tanqueray's marriage, to what extent the desire to
+have a pretty woman all to himself. But after all, was it incumbent on the
+author to give us Tanqueray's psychology? Was it not rather an indication
+of his aesthetic sense to keep the husband in the background, to leave him
+in half-tints so as not to mar the effect of the principal figure? That
+excellent actor, Mr. Alexander, seems to have felt this, for he effaced
+himself in the presence of Mrs. Campbell, though quite capable of filling
+the stage unassisted, as he showed in _The Masqueraders_ and many other
+pieces. In regard to Tanqueray's character, this, however, should be
+noted, that, being rich and young enough to keep a mistress without
+looking ridiculous, he might, if he chose, have become Paula's lover. If
+he decided to make her his wife, it was first of all to give her pleasure,
+but also to satisfy a sense of devotion and of virtue in himself. This I
+believe to be quite true to life. He was born to believe in women--not to
+be deceived by them, but to deceive himself in their regard: which is a
+different thing, and perhaps more serious. His first wife was like a nun.
+He ends with a courtesan. The law of moral oscillation requires that he
+should go from the iceberg (it is thus the first Mrs. Tanqueray is
+described to us) to a volcano. Like all weak men, he would play the part
+of _un homme fort_. With Paula's arm passed through his, he is ready to
+look the world in the face; but when on the eve of their wedding she comes
+to see him at eleven o'clock at night, his first remark is, "What will
+your coachman say?" This remark lights up his whole character, and for my
+part I require nothing more.
+
+But Paula! What a complex character is hers, and how true in all its
+aspects! How important to the delineation of this character, and how
+suggestive, is everything she says--even her most trifling remarks; with
+what tact and cleverness are her very silences contrived! And with what an
+infinity of deft and delicate touches has the masterpiece been brought to
+perfection! She is a courtesan, but with an elegance of manners which
+imparts to her an air of poetry, and which makes her more akin to a Gladys
+Harvey than to a Marguerite Gautier. There are women who traverse muddy
+ways with so light a step that they do not sink in them, and that one but
+guesses where they have passed from little stains upon the tips of their
+shoes. One or two traits reveal to us the irregularity of Paula's life;
+the mobility of her impressions, the manner at once fanciful and passive
+in which she allows chance to regulate her actions. She has forgotten to
+order her dinner; her cook, a "beast" who "detests" her, has pretended to
+believe that she was not dining at home, and has given himself an evening
+out. So she has got herself up in _grande toilette_ and has taken up her
+position in her dining-room, her feet on the fender. Here she has fallen
+asleep and dreamt. She tells us her dream later, the while she sups off
+the dessert of the farewell dinner Tanqueray had given to three old
+bachelor friends. To sup instead of dining, does not this in itself
+suggest a whole conception of life? Whoever gets into the way of it will
+never be able to reconcile himself to the respectable regularity of the
+family joint.
+
+Thus it is with her in everything. She has acquired a certain _ton_, now
+brusque, now bewitching, an air of Bohemianism, and a whole host of
+opinions which could never tally with the role of married woman; and these
+characteristics have become embedded in her nature. Her irregularity of
+word and deed goes with a like incoherence of thought and feeling. Sombre
+moods succeed suddenly to extreme gaiety and vanish as suddenly again. The
+idea of suicide comes to her; next moment she bursts into laughter at the
+sight of the mournful expression she has evoked on Aubrey's countenance.
+She has so serious a way of saying the wildest things, and says the most
+serious things so frivolously, that you don't know what to believe; her
+every word leaves you under her spell, and this effect is intensified more
+and more. She is a really "good" woman, Tanqueray will declare just now to
+his friend. It is neither an illusion on his part nor even an
+exaggeration. Paula is "good" and loyal; she has kept back from Aubrey
+nothing of her past. Better still, she has spent this last day writing out
+a general confession, with a precision and scrupulousness in which there
+is a touch of childishness, a touch of cynicism, and a touch, I think, of
+heroism. She weighs the letter with a smile. It is heavy! She wonders if
+the post would take all that for a penny! She says to Aubrey, quite
+simply, without affectation of any kind, without any airs of tragedy about
+her, that she wants him to read this letter and to think over it; and
+then, on the morrow, at the last moment, if he changes his mind, let him
+send her a line before eleven o'clock, and--"I--I'll take the blow!"
+Aubrey puts the letter into the fire and she throws her arms round his
+neck; she tells him quite frankly she had counted upon his doing so, an
+admission which would quite spoil her "effect," had she sought one.
+
+Has the question ever been better set? Think of the _Mariage d'Olympe_.
+The insolent and hypocritical _gueuse_ stood revealed before she had
+uttered half a dozen words. We knew she could never become acclimatised to
+that family of honest folk, amongst whom fortune had thrown her. Where,
+then, was the problem? All Augier's wonderful cleverness hardly sufficed
+to make us await during two hours the punishment of the wretched woman.
+Paula is sincere; she is a woman of heart and brain; she is as good as the
+women of that world in which she hopes to take her place. In the absence
+of a _grande passion_, she feels a grateful tenderness for the gallant
+fellow who would lift her up; she is fully resolved to be faithful to him
+and to make him happy. We desire ardently her success. Why should she not
+succeed?
+
+We learn in the second act. First of all, because, once she is married,
+Paula gets bored. The world will not visit her, and custom does not permit
+of her taking the initiative. She is a kind of prisoner in the beautiful
+country-house in Surrey. The monotonous tranquillity of "home" oppresses
+her after the feverish, exciting existence she has led; the quiet wearies
+her to death. Here is her account of her day's occupations from hour to
+hour.
+
+"In the morning, a drive down to the village, with the groom, to give my
+orders to the tradespeople. At lunch, you and Ellean. In the afternoon, a
+novel, the newspapers; if fine, another drive--_if_ fine! Tea--you and
+Ellean. Then two hours of dusk; then dinner--you and Ellean. Then a game
+of Besique, you and I, while Ellean reads a religious book in a dull
+corner. Then a yawn from me, another from you, a sigh from Ellean, three
+figures suddenly rise--'Good-night! good-night! good-night!' (_Imitating
+a kiss._) 'God bless you!' Ah!"
+
+With Cayley she speaks out more strongly. He asks her how she is.
+
+_Paula_ (_walking away to the window_): "Oh, a dog's life, my dear Cayley,
+mine."
+
+_Drummle_: "Eh?"
+
+_Paula_: "Doesn't that define a happy marriage? I'm sleek, well-kept,
+well-fed, never without a bone to gnaw and fresh straw to lie upon.
+(_Gazing out of the window._) Oh, dear me!"
+
+_Drummle_: "H'm, well, I heartily congratulate you on your kennel. The
+view from the terrace is superb."
+
+_Paula_: "Yes, I can see London."
+
+_Drummle_: "London! Not quite so far, surely?"
+
+_Paula_: "I can. Also the Mediterranean on a fine day. I wonder what
+Algiers looks like this morning from the sea? (_Impulsively_) Oh, Cayley!
+do you remember those jolly times on board Peter Jarman's yacht, when we
+lay off"--(_Stopping suddenly, seeing Drummle staring at her_).
+
+Has she ceased to love her husband and to appreciate the sacrifice he has
+made for her? By no means. When he asks her tenderly what he can do for
+her, she tells him he can do nothing more. He has done all he could do. He
+has married her. She accuses herself. Fool that she was, why did she ever
+want to be married? Because the other women of her world were _not_. The
+title of married woman looked so fine, seen from afar. Instead of trying
+to make her way into a circle of people who would have nothing to say to
+her, why not have lived happily with Aubrey in her own sphere, in which
+she would have experienced neither the cold insolences of well-bred people
+nor the inexorable uniformity of well-to-do, respectable life?
+
+But these are Paula's least serious trials. There is another woman in the
+house--the daughter by the first marriage. She has shut herself up in a
+convent, but just when her father is marrying again she decides to resume
+her place in his household. This young girl inspires in Paula a double
+jealousy. Paula envies her the tenderness shown her by Tanqueray; she
+feels that this tenderness is very different from the love she herself
+inspires. Then she would fain win the love of this child, who, warned by
+some instinct, draws away from her and shrinks from her caresses. It is a
+shame, she cries, for after all the girl knows nothing--she ought to love
+her. Then, forgetting that love does not come to order, that advice cannot
+produce it, that it is begged for in vain, she exclaims to Tanqueray, that
+he should command Ellean to love her. This love would do her so much good.
+It would expel from her nature that mischievous feeling which carries her
+into deeds of rashness and folly.
+
+A neighbour, a lady who has for long been a family friend of the
+Tanquerays, comes to call on her at last, but it is only to take her
+step-daughter to some extent from under her care. What is it intended to
+do? To find some distractions for Ellean and get her married if possible
+(it being obvious that Paula cannot take her into society), and thus to
+bring about a freer and quieter time for Paula and her husband. But Paula
+can see in all this nothing but a conspiracy formed behind her back, and
+in which her husband is mixed up. Then ensues a passionate scene in which
+bursts out all the terrible violence of this spoilt-child-like character,
+embittered by a false position. Now there remains nothing more for us to
+learn about her.
+
+When we see Ellean again in the third act, a great change has come over
+her. On her travels she has come across a man whom she loves and who wants
+her to marry him. Paula is overwhelmed with delight. She sees an
+opportunity of playing the part of a mother. She will help on this
+love-affair, and Ellean will love her out of gratitude. Already the ice in
+which the young girl's heart has been locked is beginning to melt. She is
+to be found acknowledging to Paula the feeling of repulsion she at first
+had entertained for her, and trying to explain away, and express her
+sorrow for, her conduct. But the man who has gained the love of the girl
+is one of the former lovers of the woman!
+
+This is the situation which forms the subject of the last two acts, and
+which leads Paula in the end to suicide. The circumstance which brings her
+face to face with a man whom she had known before her marriage is likely
+enough; that which makes of him a suitor for the hand of Ellean is less
+natural, but not impossible, and it would be ungracious--after the author
+has so richly catered for our psychological curiosity by his rare gifts of
+analysis--to carp at the means he has employed of stirring our
+sensibility. He has made it clear to us from out the close of the second
+act that the domestication of the courtesan is an impossible dream; and
+the appearance of Captain Ardale, bringing things to a crisis, does but
+render the antagonism between Past and Present, visible, palpable,
+crushing. And the Future, what of it? We are to be shown it; for nothing
+has been overlooked by the stern logic which informs this play, underlying
+and disguising itself, but not altogether hidden, under the aspect of
+humour and emotion. Paula, her mind already full of those thoughts of
+death she had, as it were, flirted with in the first act, replies to her
+husband, who has suggested as a remedy their migration to some distant
+land:--She sees her beauty, she tells him, fading little by little, her
+beauty that was her one strength, her one unfailing excuse; she sees
+herself _tete-a-tete_ with this cruel and insoluble problem, with the
+bitter memory of her misdeeds, with the consciousness of the harm she had
+suffered and had wrought.... I shall never forget this scene. How her
+hoarse voice vibrated, and its accents of despair! How her every word went
+to the heart and sank in it! The actress had her share in this great
+triumph, and it was one of the strokes of luck attending this fortunate
+play that it was the means of revealing a great artist.
+
+Mrs. Patrick Campbell is a woman of Society who was led by circumstances
+and an unusually strong vocation to embrace the stage. She is said to have
+Italian blood in her veins; hence, no doubt, that nervous delicacy of
+hers, that _morbidezza_ which shades, veils, tempers, refines her talent
+no less than her beauty. She has neither the originality, nor the
+knowledge, nor the voice of Sarah Bernhardt, but she possesses that
+magnetic personality of which I have spoken with reference to Irving, and
+with which there is no such thing as a bad part. If this personality must
+be described, I would say that Mrs. Campbell's province as an actress is
+more particularly that of dangerous love. That voice of hers, though it
+has but little sonorousness, power, or richness, produces in one a sense
+of disquiet and distress, straitens the heart with a kind of fascinating
+delicious fear that I would describe as the _curiosite de souffrir_. You
+feel that if you love her you are lost, but once you have seen her it is
+too late to attempt resistance. The generations which believed in the
+human will, which asked for simple tenderness, pert coquetry or imperious
+passion in a heroine, would never have understood her. She has come just
+in time to lull our dolorous philosophy, to show incarnate in woman the
+victim and the instrument of destiny.
+
+It was with the same ally that Mr. Pinero risked his next battle, in
+January 1895, at the Garrick. I shall not analyse _The Notorious Mrs.
+Ebbsmith_. I acknowledge that the piece is full of charming traits, and
+that the melodramatic element has been carefully eliminated from it. But I
+am obliged also to say that the author has seized one of the serious
+questions of the time, the emancipation of woman, and her revolt,
+justified in some respects, against marriage, and that this great subject
+has been allowed to slip through his fingers. Agnes Ebbsmith is on the
+point of seeking consolation in free love for the troubles and
+humiliations of her married life. She has rejected a copy of the Bible
+which a friend has offered as a last resource. She has thrown it into the
+fire, then in a sudden reaction she rushes to the fireplace, plunges her
+arm into the flame, rescues the sacred book, and falls upon her knees. The
+scene is a very fine one, and Mrs. Patrick Campbell never failed in it to
+bring down the house. But the conversion of Agnes is a _denouement_,--not
+a solution, unless Mr. Pinero would have us believe that the modern woman
+will find in the Bible a response to all her anxieties, a remedy to all
+her ills. It is a delicate thesis, and not wishing to discuss it I shall
+remain silent. I prefer to bring my account of his talent to a stop,
+provisionally, with this admirable _Mrs. Tanqueray_, which submits and
+solves a moral problem at the same time that it sets forth and brings to
+its natural close a drama of domestic life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+Ibsen made known to the English Public by Mr. Edmund Gosse--The First
+Translations--Ibsen acted in London--The Performers and the
+Public--Encounters between the Critics--Mr. Archer once more--Affinity
+between the Norwegian Character and the English--Ibsen's Realism suited to
+English Taste; his Characters adaptable to English Life--The Women in his
+Plays--Ibsen and Mr. Jones--Present and Future Influence of
+Ibsen--Objections and Obstacles.
+
+
+"There is now living at Munich a middle-aged Norwegian gentleman, who
+walks in and out among the inhabitants of that gay city, observing all
+things, observed of few, retired, contemplative, unaggressive.
+Occasionally he sends a roll of MS. off to Copenhagen, and the Danish
+papers announce that a new poem of Ibsen's is about to appear."
+
+It was by these characteristic lines that England learnt of the existence
+of the singular man who exerts to-day so great an influence over the art
+and the thought and the moral life of the whole of Europe. He was shut up
+at that time in his meagre Dano-Norwegian glory, like that genie whom the
+Eastern tale shows us imprisoned in a bottle. As for the author of the
+article which brought him before the English public, he was a quite young
+man, a subtle poet and delicate critic, Mr. Edmund Gosse. Nowadays he
+occupies in the literary world one of the foremost places amongst those
+who create and who criticise, but the best pieces of good fortune fall to
+one's youth. In his distinguished career as a critic, he has had no more
+precious stroke of luck than that of the finding of Ibsen, at an age at
+which as a rule one has been hardly able to find oneself.
+
+Mr. Gosse made known Ibsen's published works, his historical and
+historico-legendary dramas, his first efforts towards taking up his
+position in the domain of modern realism. He showed an indulgent
+partiality towards _The Comedy of Love_, and justified it by ingenious
+translations into verse of his own. He condemned _Emperor and Galilean_ as
+only a half-success, although his faithful and penetrating analysis of it
+did no wrong to any of the beauties of the piece. He rendered full justice
+to the sombre grandeur of _Brand_ and the dazzling fancy of _Peer Gynt_.
+In short, he heralded a poet and a satirist. Ibsen has long ago renounced
+the first of these titles, and as for the second, Mr. Gosse must find him
+somewhat _grele_ for the part. He could not, in 1873, foresee the
+realistic dramatist, the reformer, the psychologist, and the symbolist,
+who in turn have appeared before us. But he touched the right note, I
+think, when he paid his homage to Ibsen as "a vast and sinister
+genius"--"a soul full of doubt and sorrow and unfulfilled desire."
+
+Ibsen entered into correspondence with his young critic, as Goethe before
+him had done under analogous circumstances with Carlyle. Mr. Gosse was one
+of the first to be informed of the internal crisis which was transforming
+the poet's talent, and which was to be a starting-point for the series of
+social and psychological dramas. "The play upon which I am now at work, he
+wrote,"--it was _The Pillars of Society_,--"will give the spectator
+exactly the same impression as he would have watching events of real life
+running their course before his eyes." The stage was to be merely a room,
+one of whose walls had been taken down that two thousand people might look
+on at what was happening inside it. Mr. Gosse entreated the author of
+_Brand_ and _Peer Gynt_ not to abandon poetry, but Ibsen followed his
+destiny.
+
+In England they began now to translate him. In 1876 Miss K. Ray gave an
+English version of _Emperor and Galilean_; three years later the British
+Scandinavian Society printed at Gloucester a selection of extracts from
+his works. In 1882 Miss H. F. Lord translated _The Dolls' House_ under the
+title of _Norah_, and prefixed to it an introduction in which she
+represented Ibsen as a champion of Woman's Rights. Women like to form some
+concrete picture of their friends, and Miss Henrietta Lord was careful to
+inform her sisters that their defender has a powerful forehead, "a
+delicate mouth which has no lips, but shuts energetically in a fine line,"
+small blue eyes that almost disappear behind his spectacles, and a nose
+quite northern in its irregularity; that he speaks softly, moves slowly,
+and rarely gesticulates, and that his "self-command amounts to coldness,
+but it is the snow which covers a volcano of wild and passionate power."
+In 1886 Mr. Havelock Ellis published in the Camelot Classics three of
+Ibsen's plays, _The Pillars of Society_, _Ghosts_, and _An Enemy of the
+People_, accompanied by a general study in which he passed in review the
+dramas of the social and psychological series, indicative of a strong
+sympathy with the new ideas and marked in an extreme degree by a fine
+literary sense. To this library _Ondine_ was added in 1888, and Mr. Gosse
+returned to the scene to take matters up where he had left them in 1877.
+Arrived now at the full maturity of his talent, he offered in 1889 an
+analysis and appreciation of these prose dramas which may be regarded as
+final in some respects.
+
+It was in the year 1889 that a new period began for Ibsen's fame and
+influence in England. People were no longer content to read him, they
+attempted now to put him on the stage. He was tried at afternoon
+performances, or, as a last resource, as a _fin de saison_, when there was
+nothing any longer to be lost or gained, in some second-rate theatre which
+was about to be closed, or which might be said to be only half open; a
+little later he was played under the auspices of the Independent Theatre,
+which is the _Theatre Libre_ of London, but which might be called even
+more aptly the Nomadic Theatre, for it has no home of its own, and has to
+take refuge, like a tramp, in houses that have no habitant. It may be said
+that from 1889 to 1893 the Ibsenite drama lived in London a thoroughly
+Bohemian life, never knowing whether it would dine nor where it would
+sleep on the morrow. Yet there was a good side to this precarious
+existence, namely, that there was involved in it no thought or care for
+the question of shillings and pence. Business men have summed up an
+undertaking or a man when they have said that it or he "does not pay." Now
+Ibsen has never paid. If I might venture to invert that saying of Irving's
+which I quoted in a previous chapter, I would affirm that artistic success
+is most real when business is worst.
+
+Little by little a group of actors and actresses was got together who gave
+themselves up to the work, and interpreted their author with faith,
+passion, and courage, ready to "confess" him, and to endure for him, and
+with him, not death but hisses: I may mention Mr. Waring and Miss Robins,
+and above all Miss Achurch. An Ibsenite public was coming into existence
+at the same time, having for its nucleus a small group of those who had
+been devotees from the first. In addition, there was a great number of
+hostile critics come to condemn, but behaving themselves on the whole very
+respectably. Again, there were some who were merely curious, genuinely
+curious, who brought to these moving representations minds entirely open
+and unprejudiced. These returned in thoughtful mood and exchanged
+opinions upon the remarkable productions they had witnessed.
+
+It was in the press that the great battles were waged. Many of the critics
+lost their temper and their manners, and passed, without realising it,
+from ridicule to mere rudeness. I do not confound these excesses either
+with the serious discussion to which men of talent submitted Ibsen's
+philosophy in lectures and in the Reviews, or with merry skits such as
+those of Mr. Anstey, who gave us a "Pocket Ibsen" in the pages of _Punch_;
+these parodies suggest, to my mind, a lack neither of comprehension nor of
+respect. I refer to the furious and savage attacks which seemed to have
+for object the driving back of Ibsen to Norway, much as the East-End
+tailors would like to drive back to Hamburg those German immigrants who
+lower the rate of their wages.
+
+Mr. Archer was the target for the fiercest volleys of these battles, in
+which he commanded the courageous little phalanx of Ibsenites; but he
+returned shot for shot, and with usury, for his fire was infinitely more
+destructive than that of his foes. Just as Mr. Gosse had revealed Ibsen to
+the literary world fifteen years before, Mr. Archer introduced him now
+into the world of the theatre.
+
+If he entered into the Ibsen controversy so much later than his colleague,
+it must not be concluded on this account that he was less well equipped
+as regards preliminary study, or that he was upholding convictions that
+were newly born. To him, also, Ibsen was an early love. So far back as
+1873 he knew by heart, in the original, those admirable scenes in _Brand_,
+which touch the soul to its depths. Before the performance of each new
+play he would try to explain the Monster, and to get the public into the
+way of looking it straight in the face; he would translate the symbolism
+into the most intelligible terms, speaking as one speaks to children, with
+an authoritative gentleness, a clearness of expression, and wealth of
+exposition, to which his quick intelligence does not often have resort.
+But the greatest service he has rendered to the cause, is his series of
+translations, which are now in everybody's hands; not only do they convey
+into English the intense realism of Ibsen's dialogues, but young authors
+may learn from them, also, new flexions of familiar speech, and thus get a
+step or two nearer to life.
+
+Mr. Archer has been followed, and perhaps outrun, in his apostolate by
+other writers full of ardour and talent. Amongst these vanguard critics it
+is impossible not to mention Mr. Arthur B. Walkley, known to the readers
+of the _Star_ as "Spectator," and to those of the _Speaker_ by his
+initials, "A. B. W." To his name must be added that of Mr. George Bernard
+Shaw, whose articles in the _Saturday Review_ have attracted much notice
+during the year 1895, and have constituted a veritable campaign in Ibsen's
+honour.
+
+The theatrical managers, as you may suppose, gave Ibsen a wide berth. Mr.
+Tree was the first of them who ventured to tackle him; this actor
+possesses an inquiring mind, and a spirit ever ready to accept--even, at
+need, to initiate--reforms. As long ago as 1891, in a lecture read before
+the Playgoers' Club, he had given a very clever analysis of one of the
+most striking of M. Maeterlinck's plays. In 1893 he produced a play of
+Ibsen's at the Haymarket. The drama which he chose was _The Enemy of the
+People_. He had supposed, not unreasonably, that the geniality, courage,
+and invincible optimism of Stockmann would win the public. I imagine he
+did not regret the experiment, for since then he has made a similar one
+with a piece of Bjoernson's. Therein he has set a good example to a greater
+actor, and in this connection I would venture to ask a question. Is Irving
+to quit the stage without attempting an Ibsen part? However that may be,
+the time is approaching when the Norwegian drama will pay. Not, of course,
+like _Charley's Aunt_! One must not expect too much when one has only
+genius. Ibsen can and should keep alive without robbing or coveting a
+single one of lucky Mr. Penley's spectators.
+
+Now that Ibsen is known in England, what influence does he exert, or will
+he continue to exert in the future, upon English dramatic literature? By
+what racial affinities was the way for this influence prepared? By what
+prejudices--religious, philosophical, aesthetic--has it been impeded? To
+what does it owe its strength? To the dramatist's art, or to the ideas
+which inform his work? This is the last big question I have to face before
+bringing my study to an end.
+
+I do not wish to carry this question on to the moving bog of ethnography;
+I should lose my life. I shall say only that the English turn towards the
+Scandinavian world, much as we turn towards the Greco-Latin, with a vague
+feeling of tenderness and of filial curiosity. If the Teuton is their
+cousin, the Scandinavian is their brother; if not the eldest of the
+family, at least the one who has best kept up his tradition. Thus it is to
+him they have recourse when they would renew or seek inspiration in these
+traditions. Is it not a significant fact that Mr. Gosse and Mr. Archer,
+two of the most brilliant minds of their generation, should be familiar at
+the age of twenty-five with the literary idiom of Denmark and Norway? Is
+it not curious that the Sagas should have been the common source of
+Carlyle's last work, and of the most important poem of William Morris? The
+Sagas are the Commonplace Book, the _livre de raison_, in which this soul
+of the North, free from all taint of the South, and from all antique
+serfdom, has left its mark. For the Englishman, who reflects and ponders,
+it is the real Bible of his race.
+
+Just because the Norseman was the incarnation in the mediaeval world of the
+Teutonic genius in all its purity, a certain number of enthusiasts will
+not allow his descendants to exist in the present, and play their part in
+modern life. To make of this little country a museum of Runic relics, to
+make a mere caretaker of this vigorous little race, is worse than
+pedantry; it is cruelty. Will it be believed that it was from such a
+standpoint that objection was first raised against the acceptance of
+Ibsen? The idea was so curiously retrograde and artificial, that it could
+not long hold up against the force of the current. These archaeologists,
+strayed into the field of criticism, made two mistakes: they misunderstood
+the law which imposes movement and progress upon all living organisms; and
+they were unable to recognise in Ibsen, beneath his modern aspect and
+present-day doubts, that valiant temperament, at once fearless and blunt,
+of the ancient Vikings,--as brave before the enigmas of thought as _they_
+had been of yore before the perils of battle and the tempest.
+
+Thus it was that Ibsen, like Oehlenschlaeger before him and Bjoernson in his
+own day, made the Sagas his starting-point. It is in the Sagas that the
+Norse genius had its root, as in deep and tranquil waters, its stem rising
+towards the light and flowering above the surface. Even to-day, Norway and
+Denmark take more pleasure in Ibsen's historical and semi-legendary dramas
+than in his more recent works; but whatever they themselves and the
+devotees of Runic tradition may think, their national character has
+undergone change since the twelfth century. Many races have contributed to
+the formation of their character, just as they have to that of the
+English, and it is worthy of remark that in both cases the elements are
+almost identical. The vigorous and energetic Finn, the weak and mystical
+Laplander, the blue-eyed, fair-haired Norseman, silent and profound, could
+all find their equivalents, if not their like, amongst the ancestors of
+the British people. Their history has been different, and yet has had
+points in common. Like England, Norway has had religious and political
+individualism for school or rather for model. Absolute independence under
+a nominal monarchy; freedom of the press and religious intolerance; no
+nobility and no class distinctions--Norway has been since 1814 very much
+what England would have been, had the semi-republican establishment of
+Cromwell and Puritan Democracy endured.
+
+In his strange poem, _Peer Gynt_, Ibsen intended to depict the Norwegian
+type; and he has done so after a fashion which is the more intelligible to
+a foreigner in that he has in some cases exaggerated the principal
+features of this model to the point of caricature. The Norwegian mind is
+full of wild dreams, which seem to him as real as actual facts. Leading a
+hard and lonely existence amidst natural surroundings that seem to dwarf
+and threaten them, the people learn to live in themselves and for
+themselves. They have much pride and much ambition, and plenty of
+political wisdom. It is their imagination that sends them into maritime
+commerce, this being one of the ways left open to the spirit of adventure.
+Peer Gynt sells idols to the Chinese and Bibles to the missionaries; this
+second transaction redeeming the first. Twice he makes his fortune and
+twice he loses it; but he is a spirited gambler, and a few oaths suffice
+to comfort him for his most serious mischances. When, at the moment of his
+death, he is enabled to rest his head upon the bosom of the woman he has
+vilely betrayed, he accepts this final stroke of luck like all the
+rest--grateful but unastonished. The most ludicrous scene of all is that
+of a death agony! Peer Gynt's old mother is about to meet her end, and she
+is seized with violent tremors. Her son, however, reminds her how, when he
+was a boy, the two of them used to play together at horse and cart.
+Supposing they had a game now? Where shall we drive to, mother? And off
+they go to where God lives! They come to the gates and call upon St. Peter
+for admission,--he's _got_ to let Peer Gynt's old mammy into Heaven! The
+old woman breaks out into a guffaw, and in the midst of all this frolic,
+cheered now and brightened up, she achieves the dread crossing. To French
+readers this scene may seem a ghoulish farce: English humour accepts it
+from Norwegian humour without demur. In copying from Peer Gynt the
+portrait of one race, I had it in my mind to paint the portrait of a
+second. The picture has two models. That is why Ibsen comes so easy to the
+English mind--less difficult to understand than was Carlyle in his earlier
+works. The Norwegian cosmopolitan is more intelligible than the Scottish
+peasant, Germanized by a too long intimacy with Goethe and Jean Paul.
+
+Everyone knows that Ibsen has his own way of constructing a drama, a way
+which differs sensibly from ours. Is it better or worse? That is a
+question with which I am not concerned. What should be noted, however, is
+that the English, who have proved such wretched pupils in our school, and
+who, after fifty years have been unable to master their Scribe, have
+grasped everything they could turn to their own account in Ibsen's
+methods. To understand this, we must remember that the English have a
+horror of our realism, even when toned down and filtered through America.
+Their compatriot, George Moore, despite his incontestable talent, has been
+unable to get them to accept him. They read his works with curiosity but
+without pleasure. We have seen in the preceding chapters that of their
+three most prominent dramatists, two turn their backs resolutely against
+realism, one by instinct, the other of set purpose; whilst the third
+cannot acclimatise himself to it, his temperament carrying him off towards
+the realm of fancy and humour. On this point they are at one with the
+public. _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_ is an exception. It is a compromise
+between the dramatic system of _Francillon_ and that of _Hedda
+Gabler_--the second, I think, prevailing. Ibsen has brought to the English
+the form, the kind, and the degree of realism they can put up with. Not
+that they accept everything without demur, even in Ibsen's realism. They
+draw the line at the brutality of certain details, and the almost childish
+minuteness of others. Thus it was that Madame Solness's nine dolls
+produced some tittering in the stalls.[14] In _Little Eyolf_, if Alfred
+Allmers be allowed to make the avowal in the midst of his despair at the
+tragic death of his little boy, that he had caught himself wondering what
+he was going to have for dinner, I should not be surprised if there were,
+at this point, a shudder of protest. But these moments in which the
+dramatist and his English spectators are out of sympathy are rare.
+Shakespeare taught them to be surprised in no way at seeing human nature
+sink to the lowest depths after rising to giddy heights. What they want is
+to pass quickly from facts to ideas, and from ideas to fancies, and then
+to return suddenly to facts. The exact reproduction of life will never
+seem to them, as at certain literary epochs it has seemed to us, the
+supreme and final end of Art. It satisfies them only when it leads towards
+the solution of some problem of conduct, towards the explanation of some
+enigma of destiny, or of the fascinating secrets of this psychical world
+in which we live without ever seeing it,--of what is in it, and beside it,
+and beyond it. It must not be forgotten that symbolism is not a mere
+pastime and amusement to the Northern races which are addicted to it, but
+a real need born of their peculiar nature, a need which is not to be
+replaced by that idolatry of forms and colours which prevails in the
+joyous and sensuous South. When it is not satisfied, this need is
+accentuated to the point of a longing, a craving. The fact translates and
+suggests, follows or precedes, the thought; without the thought, it were
+but an empty envelope, a dress without a wearer, a box containing nothing.
+It serves, so to speak, as handmaid to the idea, and I would venture to
+suggest this formula (which I believe truthful, though it seem strange):
+In England, realism will be symbolical or non-existent.
+
+If Ibsen's art, then, is to prove to be to English taste, it is because
+this art is subordinated to the expression of certain moral feelings, and
+secret tendencies of the inner life; and also because all the questions
+with which the dramatist is taken up, are precisely those by which the
+English race is absorbed and divided into opposing camps; because in fine,
+Ibsen's message, to make use of the expression of Carlyle, is addressed to
+this race more than to any other.
+
+With regard to its bearing upon philosophy, let us take for instance that
+theory of Atavism which is developed, first of all, in a lugubrious
+episode in _The Dolls' House_, and which pervades _Ghosts_, and
+_Rosmersholm_, and _The Lady from the Sea_; does it not find a fit and
+well-equipped audience in the readers of Darwin, Huxley, and Herbert
+Spencer? From a social standpoint, the ulcers which Ibsen cauterises are
+the ulcers which eat also into the life of England. That tyranny of the
+majority, that conventional and machine-like morality which stifles all
+initiative, that cavilling, degrading charity which is not Christian, but
+sectarian, are all well known to England. In Pastor Roerland and Pastor
+Manders these things find expression,--in the former violent, impetuous,
+fanatical, in the latter sheeplike and pusillanimous; the one is the
+incarnation of intolerance, the other of human respect; and England is
+well aware that she has both her Roerlands and her Manders. When, too, she
+is shown a Consul Bernick upon the stage, who is full of fine sentiments,
+but whose fortune is founded upon lies, and who sends out gallant fellows
+on a ship destined to be wrecked, she must be reminded of her own
+philanthropic ship-owners, enriched by the insuring of coffin-ships. And
+just as she is capable of a Bernick, so she is not unequal to producing a
+Stockmann, nor, in consequence, to understanding and loving this genial
+_bavard_, this impassioned devotee of truth and virtue, this Don Quixote,
+this Pangloss who would go to the martyr's stake, but prefers to stop on
+the road. His enemies have broken his windows: what does he do? Sends for
+a glazier! He picks up the stones that have been thrown at him, examines
+them and criticises them. "Why, these are mere pebbles. There is hardly a
+decent stone in the lot!" He has returned from a public meeting with his
+trousers torn, and he comments thus philosophically upon the misadventure:
+"When you propose to stand up for justice before men, you should be
+careful not to wear your best pair of breeches." If these traits are not
+English, I don't know what the English character is.
+
+Were I to pass Ibsen's types in review one by one, I should find it easy
+to show with what ease they adapt themselves to English life. Engstrand,
+the man of the people, always a sinner and always lamenting his sin, who
+makes a career and a livelihood out of his repentance; and Loevborg, that
+noble but feeble character whom drunkenness drags into debauchery, and in
+whom the temptations of one night nullify years of virtue and honest
+endeavour;--these would require no modification or commentary upon the
+London stage. But it is English women that Ibsen seems to have divined
+best of all. Nearly all those demands of the Anglo-Saxon woman which evoke
+so much talk to-day are contained in germ in the last scene of _The Dolls'
+House_, which dates from 1879. The woman is tired of being a servant and a
+plaything to the man; she sees herself confronted with responsibilities
+and duties for which she has had no preparation; she wants to live her own
+life as a reasoning and thinking being. This note is being re-echoed
+daily in the Reviews and on the platforms open to women, and thus Norah's
+cry is indefinitely prolonged.
+
+It is more than fifteen years since Ibsen wrote: "In democracy will be
+found the only solution of the social question. But the new state of
+society should contain an aristocratic element, not the aristocracy of
+birth or of the money-chest, not even the aristocracy of intellect, but
+the aristocracy of character, of the will and of the soul. I expect much
+in this direction from woman and from the working-man, and it will be to
+the bringing nearer of their hour that my whole life-work shall be
+devoted." I do not know whether this double promise has been kept. It
+seems to me that the people have found in him but a wayward and
+intermittent champion, and women a friend too pitilessly clear-sighted.
+
+Women, both the good and the bad, are given traits of character, in
+Ibsen's dramas, which are common to the Northern races. That _joie de
+vivre_, which in Norah gushes forth into affectionate sympathy, but which
+in Regina (in _Ghosts_) takes the form of a cold and marble-like
+indifference, which can be touched by nothing save self-interest and
+self-love; the jealousy and pride of Hedda Gabler, who prefers to send a
+man to his death, rather than see him repentant, and brought to happiness
+through the agency of another woman, and who decides to die herself rather
+than submit to the yoke or endure the scorn of the world; the naively
+animal sensualism of Rita Allmers (in _Little Eyolf_), who puts her
+husband before her child, and plays the wanton to rekindle the fire which
+had gone from his heart--to secure the marital attentions which are her
+due: these are all characteristics which are to be met with beyond the
+fiftieth parallel and north of the Pas de Calais, no less than north of
+the Sound.
+
+I shall not go so far as to say that Ibsen has taught the English
+dramatists to understand the women of their race, but, at least, he has
+brought out certain aspects of them which had remained unportrayed,
+whether because the requisite psychological knowledge, or that rare
+quality, pluck, had been lacking in those who had attempted to depict
+them. Not all these dramatists accept Ibsen as their master; Sydney
+Grundy, whilst disapproving most strongly of the insults with which a
+certain section of the critics attack Ibsen and his partisans, has
+declared outright that he himself is no disciple of the author of _The
+Master Builder_. We can easily believe it; even without the declaration,
+his work in itself would have told us as much. Mr. Pinero, also, does not
+seem to me to have accepted any of Ibsen's ideas; but he must have
+reflected upon his methods, and to some purpose, for if the brain which
+conceived _Hedda Gabler_ is a powerful brain, the hand which constructed
+its various parts, and wove them together, is a cunning hand.
+
+As for Mr. Jones, he indeed has followed both the artist and thinker in
+Ibsen. In speaking of his plays, I omitted designedly the adaptation which
+he made of _A Dolls' House_, in collaboration with Mr. Herman, an
+Alsatian, resident in London since 1870, who died three years ago. In
+certain respects the English piece is better constructed than the
+original, in as much as it rids us of Dr. Rank, who is an excrescence, and
+of the love-affair of Krogstad and Madame Linden, which is really wanting
+in common sense. But Mr. Jones, ill advised, I fancy, by a collaborator of
+rather a timid and commonplace order of mind, shrank from that last scene
+which may be repellent to some people, but which is really the whole play.
+For that terrible door which shuts with so inexorable a clang, in the
+midst of the silence of the night, separating husband and wife perhaps for
+ever, and leaving Norah to seek her way in the dark and the cold,--symbols
+of a life of which nothing is known, save that hardships will be met in
+it,--the authors of _Breaking a Butterfly_ substituted a general
+reconciliation. They justified the optimistic _denouement_ by making the
+husband rise to that act of heroic devotion, which, in the original, Norah
+declares she hoped for from him. Ibsen did not intend this, and he was
+right. It is necessary that Norah should look for this sacrifice, and that
+she should look in vain. Thus the man and the woman maintain their
+individual characters: the one remains faithful to his practical logic,
+the other to her romantic conception of life; and if everything does not
+turn out well, at least everything is true in this most disunited of
+_menages_.
+
+Mr. Jones has been much happier when inspired by Ibsen than when he has
+translated him. It is, above all, when he is depicting women that he seems
+to me to be haunted by the memory of the Norwegian's heroines. It may be
+said, speaking generally, that a breath of Ibsen has passed through all
+his works during the last seven or eight years. But his dialogue is too
+lively, he yields too much to the temptation of turning his wit to
+account, he is of too gay a temperament, to be a veritable Ibsenite. It is
+in these respects, indeed, that the divergence begins between the author
+of _Hedda Gabler_ and his admirers on the other side of the Channel. The
+English are ready to rail at life, but not to condemn it root and branch;
+despite an apparent sombreness they know how to enjoy themselves, and they
+consent to travel only as tourists in that world of Ibsen's, in which for
+the few smiling and sunlit spaces, there frown such vast and mournful
+solitudes, where nothing sings and nothing flowers.
+
+It has been said that Ibsen is the Winter of the North and Bjoernson its
+Spring. This Bjoernson is a strange personality. Intellect and temperament
+have made a battlefield of his life. Born to write idylls, he has thrown
+himself heart and soul into the warfare of journalism. He has come under,
+and even sought, a thousand influences, instead of trying to find himself.
+The friendly antagonism with Ibsen has done him more harm than good. This
+connection has made him known to readers in Western Europe, but it has
+drawn him into channels for which his faculties did not fit him, and have
+failed to support him. By his faith in the future, and by his confident
+and combative spirit, he seemed destined to please the English. Long
+before Ibsen's name had been even mentioned in London, his _Arne_ and
+_Synnove Solbakken_ had been read there, two sketches of peasant life
+which will bear comparison with _La Mare au Diable_ and _La Petite
+Fadette_; and the idealist novels he has published during the last ten
+years became popular with his countrymen only after they had first
+achieved success in England. But his plays up to the present have made but
+little show upon the English stage, and he shares only to an infinitesimal
+degree in the sympathies and antipathies of his illustrious rival.
+
+When Ibsen attacks that class of puritans and hypocrites who turn away
+their faces when they pass the entrance to a theatre, there is no
+hesitation about applauding him and imitating him. But when he would shake
+the whole edifice of society, and when he calls in question all the ideas
+and customs upon which the edifice is based, the theatre hesitates to
+follow him, for it feels that a portion of its clientele, and that the
+best,--that which has always been constant in its support,--will be
+startled and alarmed. The theatre is reactionary, and has good reason to
+be: it is to its commercial interest to range itself alongside privilege
+and tradition, against change and progress. It is on the side of those
+who have money in their pockets, and who wish to amuse themselves, for
+these are the people to whom it opens its doors. These people are
+indignant when, having come to weep or to laugh, they are made to think;
+when a man to whom they cannot but listen speaks to them of their rights
+and their duties, of life and of death, of their most secret thoughts, of
+what they would fain ignore or forget, and all this with a freedom, an air
+of authority, a depth the theatre had never known before, the pulpit knows
+no longer. Here is the key to the exclamations of surprise, the gusts of
+anger, the broadsides of satire and ridicule, which Ibsen and his devotees
+have had to face. But one gets used to everything, even to being insulted,
+and gets even to like it. It is one of the amusements of the decadent.
+Perhaps some day we shall see Ibsen's adversaries, fascinated by his
+genius, follow his barque like the rats that followed the ratwife's in
+_Little Eyolf_, and plunge into the deep waters to the music of his
+flute.[15]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+G. R. Sims--R. C. Carton--Haddon Chambers--The Independent Theatre and
+Matinee Performances--The Drama of To-morrow--A "Report of Progress"--The
+Public and the Actors--Actor-Managers--The Forces that have given Birth to
+the Contemporary English Drama--Disappearance of the Obstacles to its
+becoming Modern and National--Conclusion.
+
+
+I have given an account of the beginnings of the contemporary dramatic
+movement, have indicated the various influences from within and from
+without which have affected it, by which it has been stimulated or held
+back; have analysed what seem to me the most characteristic of those
+dramas which have already seen the light. There remains nothing then for
+me to do, except to ascend a tower, as it were, and to scan the horizon,
+and to foretell, if I can do so, what we may expect from the drama of
+to-morrow.
+
+There is a group of writers who keep near the confines of drama and
+melodrama, torn between literary ambition and the very natural wish to
+earn money. What will they do? Will they be artists or artizans? Will they
+stoop to the conditions of the trade, or rise to the requirements of the
+art? There are many of their kind whom Sir Augustus Harris has made away
+with, and whom we shall never get back.
+
+I can remember the hopes given rise to by Mr. Buchanan. But, as Oronte
+says in Moliere's _Misanthrope_--"_Belle Philis, on desespere alors qu'on
+espere toujours_." The case of Mr. G. R. Sims is different. There has been
+no apostasy with him; he has remained what he always was, and has given
+what he was bound to give. Story-teller, journalist, or playwright, he is
+an improviser, who does not aim too high, but who combines with a gift of
+observation, a certain imaginative faculty and a kind of popular humour,
+together with a touch of Zolaism. Above all, he is a Cockney, and nothing
+that belongs to Cockneydom is unknown to him. The only play of the period
+in which you can really smell the East End, as the _maitre_ of Medan would
+say, is _The Lights o' London_, and that perhaps is why all the London
+managers, one after the other, returned it to Mr. Sims, "with thanks."
+_The Lights o' London_ got produced in the end, however, and had an
+immense success, but a success that was not to endure. It is not towards
+realism, as we have seen, that the English stage is making.
+
+Who will take the lead amongst the younger school of dramatists? Who will
+write the _Judahs_, _The Second Mrs. Tanquerays_ of to-morrow? Will it be
+Mr. Louis N. Parker, Mr. Malcolm Watson, or Mr. J. M. Barrie? Or will it
+be Mr. Carton, author of _Liberty Hall_ (one of the successes of 1893)
+and of _The Squire of Dames_, an adaptation, or rather an abridged
+translation, of _L'Ami des femmes_, which has been attracting the public
+to the Criterion? Up to the present, Mr. Carton has shown that he
+possesses wit and talent, but neither observation nor the inventive
+faculty. But in the near future he may give proof of both.
+
+Or will it be Mr. Haddon Chambers, who is already known in Paris, one of
+his works, _The Fatal Card_, having crossed the channel? Since then he has
+written a piece entitled _John-a-Dreams_, played at the Haymarket in 1894,
+in which Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Mr. Tree joined their talents. It is
+not a good play, but it is one in which the tendencies of the new drama
+are clearly shown. I recall one scene of the utmost simplicity, the
+restrained and sober emotion of which contrasts curiously with the fine
+phrases a situation such as it contains would inspire in an author of a
+quarter of a century ago. Kate Cloud loves, and is loved by, Harold Wynn.
+Before consenting to marry him she gets herself introduced to Harold's
+father, a country clergyman.
+
+"You do not know me, sir," she says to him (I quote from memory), "but I
+know you. You came to preach ten years ago at the village of ----. I was
+with Mrs. Withers then."
+
+"Oh, indeed,--an excellent person," he replies; "but it is strange that I
+did not make your acquaintance."
+
+"No, it is not strange, really,--do you remember the kind of work she was
+engaged upon?"
+
+"The redemption of unfortunates, was it not."
+
+"Yes, exactly. And you, doubtless--you helped her?"
+
+"No," Kate replies gravely, sadly, her voice trembling. "No, it was she
+who helped me." She tells him her story, the sad, perennial story, or
+rather, having begun it, she leaves him to divine the rest. "They came to
+my help," she goes on, "but no one came to the help of my mother. She fed
+and clothed me when I was little; I in my turn fed and clothed her later
+on."
+
+Then had come years of endeavour, and the hard apprenticeship by which she
+had made herself an honest woman.
+
+"Now, sir, if a man who had a heart wanted to marry me in full
+consciousness of my past, should I have the right to accept him?"
+
+"Certainly, my child," the old man answers.
+
+"You would still be of the same opinion even though the man were of your
+own rank, ... were a friend of yours, ... were your son?"
+
+Harold's father gives a gesture of anguish and horror, of physical recoil
+and inexpressible confusion. Then he stammers, tries to recover himself,
+seeks to call to his aid the merciful doctrine of the sacred Book which he
+has all his life upon his lips, and which he thought he had within his
+heart. But Kate does not give him time. A gesture has decided her future;
+she holds herself bound by this instinctive display of a social prejudice
+which has become his second nature, his second conscience, even to the
+point of effacing the idea of pardon in him who should be its interpreter
+and messenger. The title of the play is not misleading, the action being
+pervaded and, as it were, impregnated by, steeped in, dreaminess. Mr.
+Haddon Chambers dares to dream in the theatre, and the public seem to me
+to be ready to keep him company. That anyone should go to the theatre to
+dream will seem incredible to many Parisians. But we must remember always
+that the English mind has literary needs, and to a certain point emotional
+propensities, that are different from ours. We should have in our minds,
+too, in the place of these theatres of ours so brightly lit, in which the
+spectacle lies often as much in the boxes and balcony as on the stage,
+those London theatres, plunged in a semi-obscurity which induces to
+forgetfulness of oneself and of the ordinary conditions of life. The stage
+appears like the fabric of a vision. The dull-looking, uninterested faces
+of the musicians are no longer interposed between us and the scenery. The
+jingling of a bracelet, a slight rustling of satin, the faint and delicate
+odour of a rose, the quick breathing of some neighbour who is moved, bring
+home to us only at moments the presence of other human beings. Perhaps it
+is the place of all others where one gets furthest away from the thought
+of reality, where one is readiest to wish for the unlifelike and to love
+the impossible.
+
+After the writers whom I have named, there are others, and yet others
+still, whose names the public hardly knows, and at whose manuscripts the
+managers look askance. The Independent Theatre gave them an opening, but
+this theatre itself has ceased its existence, beset with difficulties, and
+there is nothing to suggest that it will come to life again. There remain
+for them only those matinees in the regular theatres which lend their
+stage, more or less disinterestedly, for these ephemeral performances in
+which young actors are to be found interpreting unknown authors to the
+strangest of publics. The house is full of friends--if it be not empty
+altogether. A certain number of long-suffering play-lovers attend these
+tentative representations, sustained by the hope of being the first to
+discover a talent in process of formation, or a new formula of art: they
+have come across little up to the present except the _gaucherie_ which
+feels its way, and the deliberate exaggeration which aims at exciting
+wonder.
+
+Those who have followed me in this long study of mine, and who have
+watched the evolution of the English drama through its successive stages,
+are in a position to see for themselves what advance it has made already
+during the last thirty years. There is the advance first of all in the
+taste of the public. The democracy has gone through its course of
+education; it has "settled," so to speak, and the dregs have sunk to the
+bottom. Three classes of spectators have gradually been formed by a
+process of natural selection. The music halls provide for the feasting of
+the eye; melodrama and farce have attracted and retain an enormous mass of
+clients; the literary drama and Comedy have secured their own homes, to
+which one looks only for artistic emotions and refined amusements.
+
+In these are to be found that highest rank of actors and actresses whose
+rise in fortune, talent, and esteem I have described. To the names already
+mentioned I would add those of some to whom I have not had occasion to
+refer in these pages, but whom I have often had the pleasure of
+applauding: Mr. Willard, Mr. Wilson Barrett, and Mr. Forbes Robertson; Mr.
+Charles Wyndham, whose confident and brilliant style would do honour to
+the best of our _societaires_ of the Rue Richelieu; Mr. Robson, whose gift
+of humorous naturalness almost made a realistic play out of _Liberty
+Hall_; Lionel Brough, who for thirty years has set the stamp of his
+whimsical originality upon all his roles; Miss Evelyn Millard, who recalls
+Mrs. Patrick Campbell without imitating her; and Miss Kate Rorke, who is,
+on the contrary, her exact opposite, and who incarnates the sweet
+freshness of pure affection, the innocence which weeps and smiles, just as
+Mrs. Campbell personifies the love that is disquieting and dangerous; Miss
+Winifred Emery, an actress of varied and supple talent, capable of
+depicting caprice no less than virtue and devotion. The list is far from
+being complete.
+
+There have always been a number of good actors, but what was constantly
+lacking before the Bancrofts' time was unison. To-day the _ensembles_ are
+far better than they were, and they would be better still were it not for
+that perpetual _va-et-vient_ in the theatrical world which is so injurious
+to the homogeneity of the various companies.
+
+The art of _mise-en-scene_ did not exist. To-day it not merely exists: it
+has reached a certain degree of perfection. I am not referring now to the
+scenic splendours and illusions of Drury Lane, though I have no wish to
+make light of these, but to that appropriate framing, that scrupulous
+accuracy in the matter of historical details, no less than in the matter
+of modern accessories, that living atmosphere, to use Irving's formula,
+with which the intelligent stage-manager should clothe the action of the
+piece. I have already alluded to the Shakspearian revivals at the Lyceum.
+No one knows better than Mr. Tree, of the Haymarket, how to give us a
+glimpse of the real world of fashion, and how to bring home to us the
+poetry underlying the play which he is producing. Mr. Haddon Chambers must
+have been grateful to him for that yacht which sped so swiftly past the
+Needles, bathed in the pale radiance of the moon; and for the scenery in
+the last act which imparted a sense of austere and solemn grandeur to the
+conclusion of the play. In the same piece, when Harold, after a sleepless
+night, threw open his window, and we saw the fields lying under their
+covering of morning mist, and the fresh and joyous sunlight flooded the
+room, and there came to our ears the song of the awakening birds, the
+sensation was full of a rare charm, serving as _andante_ to the loftiest
+feelings.
+
+It would seem that the dramatists have not so much influence in the matter
+of _mise-en-scene_ as they might wish. But may this not be that for one
+reason or another their competency, except in the case of some of them, is
+inferior to their pretensions? It is the custom to abuse the
+actor-managers, and to point to them as one of the obstacles to the
+complete development of the drama. It is a domestic quarrel, and there is
+no good in interfering between husband and wife. It is possible that some
+actor-managers succumb to the temptation of ordering their parts to
+measure, and call for even more docility than talent from the young
+authors whom they employ. It is possible also that the ill-feeling of a
+dramatist who has had his work refused, or of an actor who has been left
+in the background, may have done something to exaggerate the evil. Make a
+study of the author-manager who has to minister to his own personal
+vanity, to his own literary prepossessions, and to the needs of his own
+special circle of admirers and sympathisers; the commercially-minded
+manager for whom questions of art find their answer in the yearly
+balance-sheet; the worldly, pleasure-seeking manager, _amateur de theatre_
+and to an even greater degree _amateur de femmes_: you will find that
+each has his faults, and that these faults are just as bad on the whole as
+the actor-manager's.
+
+Another obstacle is the Censorship. I have shown how absurd it is in
+principle; it is my duty to add that in practice it is not wholly
+unreasonable, though it relapses into prudishness every now and then. I
+have read lately a moving drama, from the pen of Mr. William Heinemann,
+the celebrated publisher whose enterprising spirit is well known in the
+world of literature, and who has it in him to make no less a mark in the
+world of the theatre. The Censorship would not sanction _The First Step_:
+this piece might have made it known to Londoners that there are couples in
+their great city whom the registrar has not united and whom the clergyman
+has not blessed, men of good position who get drunk and beat their
+mistresses, young girls who leave home in the morning and don't return at
+night. The Censorship thought it better to spare them this revelation.
+
+But such instances are rare. The Censorship is changing bit by bit, like
+the beefeaters of the Tower, who replaced their hose by breeches some
+years ago without warning. These breeches do not go, I am aware, with the
+hood, doublet, and halbert, but this is our poor way of imitating nature
+in her transformations. For the Censorship there is only one way of
+adapting itself to modern life, and that is to disappear. Disappear it
+will, but slowly and gradually, confining its action to essential cases;
+and thus it will drag out its existence yet a little while. When,
+finally, the time will come to give it its _coup-de-grace_, it will be
+found to have already ceased to breathe.
+
+Who then will succeed to the censor? who will be censor when the
+Censorship has been abolished? The public itself; the public represented
+not only by those of its members who are the most refined, but those who
+are strictest and most uncompromising. In other words, the Puritans will
+be on the watch. And after all, why not? Are they not one of the forces of
+the national mind, one of the reasons of England's existence? They are the
+natural enemies of the theatre, and will last as long as it. When they
+leave it free, their end or its end will be near at hand, and England's
+end will be in sight.
+
+We live, not because we choose but because we must. It is thus with the
+English drama as with everything else. The law that put the dramatic work
+of foreigners upon the same footing in regard to copyright as their own
+has made translation and adaptation almost impossible, by reason of the
+double expense involved. Thenceforward it was necessary for the English
+dramatist to invent plots for himself, to be original, to be himself. It
+was thus the English drama came to life.
+
+The vote of Congress, which in 1890 secured copyright in America for
+English authors, put an end to the old system of keeping plays in
+manuscript. Once publication was no longer attended by risk, how could
+they hold aloof from this new form of success? Accordingly they began to
+print. But in order to be read, a play should be really written. The
+drama, then, had to become literary. As yet it is literary only in a
+moderate degree. I began with the question: Is there a living English
+drama at the present moment? To be living it is necessary that it should
+express the ideas and the passions of the time, and to be English it
+should be a faithful likeness, a complete synthesis of all the elements of
+the national character. The drama, from various causes, was behind the
+times. These causes, which I have pointed out and discussed, were:--
+
+1. The timidity resulting from excessive severity of manners.
+
+2. The dramatist's lack of opportunity for the study of social life.
+
+3. The Shakespeare cult, which paralysed the imagination by offering it a
+model that was too big for it, and forms that had become antiquated.
+
+These causes have disappeared one after the other. The moral ideal has
+become enlarged and has given over a wider field to the dramatist. The
+dramatist himself has learned to know life outside the green-room and the
+tavern back-parlour. He has studied from nature instead of copying
+Goldsmith and Sheridan. Shakespeare has never been less imitated, perhaps
+because he has never been better acted or better understood.
+
+But what prevented the drama from being "English"? It is we French who
+have prevented it--it is from our drama that the English playwrights have
+drawn for so long, at first with an indiscriminate eagerness for which
+there is no parallel, later more modestly and with discernment. At the
+risk of offending my compatriots, I must here express my absolute
+conviction that, except in regard to acting, this French influence has
+been harmful to the English stage. Our dramatists have enriched some
+London managers; but they have lain for thirty years on top of the English
+dramatists, and have stifled their originality--and without deriving much
+profit from this involuntary tyranny. If only they could have taught their
+pupils the secrets of their trade! But the English were maladroit
+disciples of Scribe and Sardou, whilst the philosophy of Dumas and Augier
+remained to them a closed book.
+
+The French influence has come at last to be what it should be. The two
+theatres, placed upon the same footing, will lend each other from time to
+time,--now, the idea of a play which, treated differently on either side
+of the channel, will serve to measure the divergence or resemblance of the
+two forms of society; now, a complete play which, translated literally,
+will give to us a perfect representation of London life, or to the
+Londoners a perfect representation of ours. Meanwhile the English drama,
+freed from its leading strings, will find its own way for itself. It is
+capable of doing so unaided, but I think Ibsen's plays will help it. In
+this reference to Ibsen my readers may think they see a contradiction in
+my reasoning. "What!" they will cry. "In order to bring back the English
+drama to itself again, you say it must be freed from foreign influence,
+and yet you send it to school to Norway!"
+
+But I have answered this objection by anticipation. I have shown that
+Ibsen is not a foreigner to England. He seems to have written for
+Englishmen; he has given them the kind of drama, more or less, that
+Shakespeare, were he living now, would have given them. I write this
+sentence, confident that if I am in the world, or, not being in the world,
+am still read, a score of years hence, no one will be inclined to call me
+to account for it. To the Northern races, at all events, Ibsen means not a
+fashion but an era.
+
+What the English drama is in search of, what it is about to create,--with
+or without Ibsen's assistance,--is a new form in which to reproduce that
+dualism which has struck and disconcerted every observer, native or
+foreign, Matthew Arnold, Emerson, Taine. For my part, I have sometimes
+endeavoured to trace this dualism to the marriage, tempestuous but
+fruitful, of Saxon and Celt, to the effort, ever vain but never ceasing,
+of these two refractory elements to fuse and unite. The drama of the
+sixteenth century came, in a moving and memorable hour, from one of those
+unions between the young and strong in which there enters something of
+violence and even of madness. The existing drama is the issue of parents
+well on in years in a time of gloom and trouble. It is delicate and calls
+for care. At the same time, it bears resemblances to those who gave it
+life. A race of heroes who are also buccaneers, a race of poets and
+shopkeepers, a race fearless of death and devoted to money, calculating
+but passionate, dreamers yet men of action, capable of the charges of
+Balaclava and the deal in the Suez shares, cannot possibly find its
+literary expression either in pure idealism or in realism undiluted. The
+"bleeding slice of life" awakes in it no appetite; "Art for Art's sake"
+leaves it wonderfully indifferent; of moralising, it is tired for the time
+being: it is passing through a stage of sensuous torpor which is not
+without charm, and it waits open-eyed and, as it were, hesitatingly before
+the labour of creating society afresh, of building up a new civilisation.
+It does not wish, and is not able, to forget those problems--that terrible
+To-morrow--by which we are everywhere threatened. Hence its sensuousness
+is tempered, refined, saddened by philosophy. And in this mood, what it
+asks of the drama is not to be amused, or to be excited, but to be made to
+think.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+  Achurch, Miss, and Ibsen, 281.
+
+  Actor-manager on circuit, 49.
+
+  Adaptations from the French, 77, 207;
+    law as to, 208;
+    process, 209;
+    S. Grundy's, 216.
+
+  Adelphi, The, 41, 46, 63, 195.
+
+  Albany, James, 133;
+    his _Two Roses_, 162.
+
+  Alexander, Mr., in _Mrs. Tanqueray_, 266.
+
+  Almaviva I. and II., 200.
+
+  America, Macready in, 73.
+
+  Anderson, Mary, 174.
+
+  Anstey, Mr., and Ibsen, 282.
+
+  Archer, W., on Kean and Macready, 42.
+
+  ---- on Wills, 177;
+    on Tennyson, 178.
+
+  ---- on Tennyson and Montanelli, 185, 299-207.
+
+  ---- and H. A. Jones, 234;
+    and _The Profligate_, 260;
+    and _Mrs. Tanqueray_, 265.
+
+  ---- and Ibsen, 282, 285, 290.
+
+  Arnold, Matthew, in the English Drama, 204;
+    and H. A. Jones, 239.
+
+  _Arrah-na-pogue_, 91.
+
+  Art of _mise-en-scene_, 307.
+
+  Arundel Club, The, 109, 115.
+
+  Augier, 209, 257, 269, 312.
+
+  Authors of 1850-65, 80.
+
+
+  _Bab Ballads_, 140.
+
+  Bancroft, Mr., as Captain Hawtree, 119, 120;
+    his realism, 122;
+    revival of _School for Scandal_, 50, 123.
+
+  Bancrofts, the, compared, 122;
+    and Robertson's plays, 133;
+    and the "cup and saucer" comedy, 134;
+    retirement, 136.
+
+  Bancroft, Mrs., 101 (see Wilton, Marie).
+
+  Barrett, Wilson, 306.
+
+  Barrie, J. M., 301.
+
+  Batemans, the, 156.
+
+  Beauty in the Drama, 252.
+
+  _Becket_, Tennyson's, 185, 188, 193.
+
+  _Bells, The_, 164, 166.
+
+  _Belphegor_, 100.
+
+  Beringhiem in _Richelieu_, 69.
+
+  Berlioz, 45.
+
+  Berne, Treaty of, 208.
+
+  Bernhardt, Sarah, 197, 275.
+
+  Bjoernson, 406.
+
+  ---- and Ibsen, 297.
+
+  _Black-eyed Susan_, 61, 94.
+
+  Bohemia, centre of, 109, 115;
+    in a nutshell, 116.
+
+  Boucicault, Dion, 87, 88-92, 93.
+
+  ---- Mrs. Dion, 90.
+
+  _Brand_, Ibsen's, 278, 279, 283.
+
+  _Breaking a Butterfly_, 296.
+
+  _Broken Hearts_, Gilbert's, 142.
+
+  Brooke, 156.
+
+  Brough, Lionel, 306.
+
+  ---- Robert, 110.
+
+  Browning and Macready, 64;
+    his dramas, 192.
+
+  Buchanan, Robert, 195, 301.
+
+  Buckstone, 79, 80, 103, 112, 152.
+
+  Bulwer, Lord Lytton, 64-72;
+    at Macready's banquet, 74;
+    portrayal of Riches and Rank, 116 (see Lytton).
+
+  _Bunch of Violets, A_, 221.
+
+  Burdett-Coutts', Baroness, present to Irving, 167.
+
+  Burlesque, 93.
+
+  Burnand's _Ixion_, 93-95.
+
+  Byron, H. J., 96-99, 103, 104;
+    and Robertson, 134.
+
+  ---- Lord, 96.
+
+  Byronian Satanism and Bulwer Lytton, 65.
+
+
+  _Cabinet Minister, The_, 258.
+
+  Campbell, Mrs. Patrick, 250, 266, 275, 276.
+
+  ---- in _John o' Dreams_, 302, 306.
+
+  _Cantab, The_, Robertson in, 112.
+
+  Carlyle and the Sagas, 285;
+    and Ibsen, 288.
+
+  Carton, 301.
+
+  _Caste_, 117;
+    Howe in, 119;
+    Marie Wilton in, 121;
+    scene from, 129.
+
+  Cavendish, Ada, 95.
+
+  Censor's Successor, the, 310.
+
+  Censorship, official, 83.
+
+  ---- and Sydney Grundy, 214.
+
+  ---- and _The First Step_, 309.
+
+  Chamberlain, Lord, 84.
+
+  Chambers, Haddon, 302, 307.
+
+  Characters, limited types of, 80.
+
+  _Charles I._, Wills's, 165, 166, 177.
+
+  _Charley's Aunt_, 284.
+
+  Chatterton, 198.
+
+  Chedd, 116.
+
+  Chippendale's present to Irving, 166.
+
+  Cibber, Colley, 168.
+
+  Circuit, on, 46-49.
+
+  City elocution class, 159.
+
+  Clarke, John, 104.
+
+  Clary in _The Prisoner of War_, 59.
+
+  Classical drama, death of the, 176.
+
+  _Clerical Error, A_, 234.
+
+  Coleridge on Kean, 42.
+
+  _Colleen Bawn_, 90-92.
+
+  Comedie Francaise, 197.
+
+  Comedies, Robertson's, cause of their success, 122.
+
+  Comedy, "Cup and Saucer," 134.
+
+  Comedy, the, 196.
+
+  Comic opera, 98.
+
+  Commission, parliamentary, 64;
+    and Bulwer Lytton, 65.
+
+  Compton, 80.
+
+  Cook, 198.
+
+  _Cool as a Cucumber_, 79.
+
+  Copyright in dramatic work, 310.
+
+  Coquelin, M., on Mrs. Bancroft, 101.
+
+  Coriolanus, Macready as, 41.
+
+  Court Theatre, The, 133, 196.
+
+  Courtly, Charles, in _London Assurance_, 89.
+
+  Covent Garden, 46, 62, 64, 76.
+
+  Criticism, dramatic, 81.
+
+  Critics, 81.
+
+  ---- old and new, 198;
+    and Sydney Grundy, 226;
+    and Ibsen, 282.
+
+  Cromwell and Richelieu, 68.
+
+  Crumbs and Toby in _The Rent Day_, 57.
+
+  _Crusaders, The_, 244-248, 259.
+
+  "Cup and Saucer" comedy, 134.
+
+  _Cup_, Tennyson's, 183.
+
+  Cynisca, 150, 152.
+
+
+  _Dandy Dick_, 257.
+
+  _Dan'l Druce_, 142.
+
+  Darwin and Ibsen, 292.
+
+  Delacour, 217.
+
+  Delane, Mr., and John Oxenford, 82.
+
+  Delaunay, 197.
+
+  Democracy and the drama, 72.
+
+  Deschapelles, Madame, in _The Lady of Lyons_, 66.
+
+  Dick, Robert, 55.
+
+  Dickens, Charles, 58;
+    letter on Marie Wilton, 102.
+
+  Diderot's rules, 51.
+
+  ---- paradox, 170, 206.
+
+  Dillon, Charles, 100.
+
+  _Diplomacy_, origin of, 210.
+
+  _Dolls' House, The_, 279, 292, 293, 296.
+
+  Drama, legitimate, 40;
+    a national, and Douglas Jerrold, 55, 156.
+
+  ---- and democracy, 72.
+
+  ---- the Boucicault, 93.
+
+  ---- the classical, 176.
+
+  ---- English and French, 204;
+    elements of the, 252.
+
+  ---- German, in England, 299.
+
+  ---- English, cause of its return to life, 310;
+    causes of its decay, 311;
+    Ibsen's influence, 313;
+    what it is seeking, 314.
+
+  Dramatic verse, English, 44.
+
+  ---- criticism, 81, 198.
+
+  Dramatists of to-day, 212.
+
+  Drury Lane, 40, 62, 76, 195.
+
+  Dumas, Alexander, effect of Macready on, 46, 70, 209, 227, 257, 264, 312.
+
+  Dundreary, Lord, 112.
+
+  "Dust-Hole," The, 104.
+
+  Dutton, 198.
+
+
+  _Ebbsmith, The Notorious Mrs._, 275.
+
+  Eccles, 128, 129.
+
+  Eccles, Polly, 120, 122, 129.
+
+  Edgeworth, Miss, 51.
+
+  Eily in _Colleen Bawn_, 91.
+
+  Ellis, Havelock, and Ibsen, 280.
+
+  Emery, Winifred, 306.
+
+  _Emperor and Galilean_, Ibsen's, 278, 279.
+
+  _Enemy of the People, An_, 280, 284.
+
+  _Engaged_, Gilbert's, 144.
+
+  English dramatic verse, 44.
+
+  Ennery, d', 81.
+
+  Evelyn, Alfred, 71.
+
+  Examiner of Plays, 84.
+
+
+  _Falcon, The_, 180.
+
+  Falconer, Edmund, 89.
+
+  Farce, 194.
+
+  Farren, 79, 80, 107.
+
+  Farren, Nellie, 194.
+
+  Father Tom in _Colleen Bawn_, 91.
+
+  _Fatal Card, The_, 302.
+
+  Faucit, Helen, 79.
+
+  Favart, 197.
+
+  Fechter in Hamlet, 78, 158.
+
+  Feuillet, Octave, 222.
+
+  Fielding and the Censorship, 83.
+
+  Fielding Club, The, 109, 115.
+
+  _Figaro, London_, 199, 200.
+
+  _First Step, The_, 309.
+
+  Forster, John, and Macready, 64;
+    at Macready's banquet, 74;
+    letter from Dickens, 102.
+
+  France, Macready in, 45, 73.
+
+  _Francillon_, _Hedda Gabler_, 289, 295.
+
+  French actors in London, 78.
+
+  ---- adaptations, 77, 207;
+    law as to, 208;
+    S. Grundy's, 216.
+
+  ---- drama prevented English, 311.
+
+  Froude, 88.
+
+  _Fun_, Gilbert a contributor to, 140.
+
+
+  Gaiety, The, 194.
+
+  Garneray's Memoirs, 59.
+
+  Garrick, David, the role of, 112.
+
+  Garrick and Hare, 117, 157.
+
+  Garrick school, 40.
+
+  Garrick Club, The, 109, 115, 196.
+
+  Garrick, the first night at the, 259.
+
+  Gautier, Theophile, 41, 78.
+
+  Gerridge, Sam, Hare as, 119, 128, 131.
+
+  German drama in England, 299.
+
+  _Ghosts_, 280, 292.
+
+  Gilbert, irony of, 111.
+
+  ---- and Robertson, 138;
+    literary career, 139;
+    _Bab Ballads_, 140;
+    _Sweethearts_, 140;
+    _Broken Hearts_, 142;
+    his only woman's character, 144;
+    _Engaged_, 144;
+    _Palace of Truth_, 146;
+    his philosophy, 144-146;
+    _Wicked World_, 147;
+    _Pygmalion and Galatea_, 147-152;
+    _Trial by Jury_, combines with Sullivan, _Princess Ida_, _Patience_,
+          _Iolanthe_, 153;
+    _Pirates of Penzance_, _Pinafore_, 154;
+    a lawyer, 155.
+
+  Globe, The, 133.
+
+  Goldsmith, 50, 81, 88.
+
+  Gosse, Edmund, and Ibsen, 277-280, 285.
+
+  _Greatest of These, The_, 233.
+
+  Grecian, The, 194.
+
+  Grisi, 75.
+
+  Grundy, Sydney, 212;
+    first appearance, 214.
+
+  ---- _The Snowball_, 214;
+    _In Honour Bound_, 216;
+    _A Pair of Spectacles_, 217;
+    _Mammon_, 220;
+    _A Bunch of Violets_, 221;
+    influence of the French, 223;
+    _The Glass of Fashion_, 224;
+    _A Fool's Paradise_, _The Late Mr. Costello_, 225;
+    his peculiarities, 226;
+    _Sowing the Wind_, _An Old Jew_, 227;
+    _The New Woman_, 230;
+    _The Greatest of These_, 233.
+
+  ---- and Ibsen, 295.
+
+  _Grues_, 97.
+
+
+  Hamlet, Irving's, 166.
+
+  Hardy, Thomas, and Pinero, 256.
+
+  Hare, John, 117;
+    in _Ours_, 119;
+    in _Caste_, 119, 181, 259.
+
+  _Harold_, Tennyson's, 185, 188, 190.
+
+  Harris, Sir Augustus, 301.
+
+  Hawtree, Captain, Bancroft as, 119, 122.
+
+  Haymarket, The, 46, 101.
+
+  ---- and the Bancrofts, 134, 196.
+
+  Hazlitt, 49, 82.
+
+  Heinemann's, Wm., _First Step_, 309.
+
+  Her Majesty's Theatre, 76.
+
+  Herman, Mr., and H. A. Jones, 296.
+
+  Hippodrama, The, 76.
+
+  _Hobby Horse, The_, 257.
+
+  Homer, 54.
+
+  Hood's _Model Men and Women_, 98.
+
+  ---- supper-parties, 110, 111, 131.
+
+  Horton, Priscilla, 102.
+
+  Hoskyns, David, and Irving, 161.
+
+  Hugo, Victor, and Bulwer Lytton, 65, 68, 70.
+
+  _Humour of a Scholar_ and _Money's_ success, 71.
+
+  Hunt, Leigh, 49;
+    and Macready, 64.
+
+  Hutchinson, Colonel, 49.
+
+  Huxley and Ibsen, 292.
+
+
+  Ibsen, 206, 253, 233.
+
+  ---- England hears of him, 277;
+    translations by Edmund Gosse and others, 278-280;
+    played by The Independent Theatre, 280;
+    and the Critics, 281-283;
+    and theatrical managers, 284;
+    performed at The Haymarket, 284;
+    and the Sagas, 286;
+    _Peer Gynt_, 287;
+    more intelligible than Carlyle, 288;
+    his methods, 289;
+    realism, 290;
+    his message, 291-292;
+    his types, 293;
+    and democracy, 294;
+    and English dramatists, 295;
+    H. A. Jones's adaptation of _A Dolls' House_, 296;
+    divergence from English admirers, 297;
+    and the Puritans, 298;
+    influence on the English drama, 313.
+
+  Icilius and Virginia, 51.
+
+  Imagination in the drama, 252.
+
+  Independent Theatre, The, 280, 305.
+
+  _Iolanthe_, 153.
+
+  Irving, Henry, first plays Hamlet, 159;
+    early days, 160;
+    in the provinces and debut in London, 161;
+    as Digby Grant in Albery's _Two Roses_, 163;
+    secures _The Bells_, 164;
+    in _Charles I._, 165;
+    as Hamlet, 166;
+    in _Richelieu_, 166;
+    on staging masterpieces, 167;
+    and Shakespeare's text, 168;
+    his roles, 168;
+    his method, 170;
+    his position as to realism, 171;
+    as a writer and lecturer, 172;
+    "Sir Henry," 172;
+     his success, 173;
+    and Tennyson's _Becket_, 188;
+    and Ibsen, 284.
+
+  _Ixion_, Burnand's, 93-95.
+
+
+  Jean, Oliver Saint, 72.
+
+  Jerrold, Blanchard, 79.
+
+  Jerrold, Douglas, 55-62;
+    _Rent Day_, 56;
+    _Prisoner of War_, 59;
+    _Black-eyed Susan_, 61, 94;
+    and the Censorship, 85.
+
+  _John-a-Dreams_, 302-304.
+
+  Jones, H. A., 178, 212.
+
+  ---- _A Clerical Error_, _An Old Master_, 234;
+    _The Silver King_, _Saints and Sinners_, 235-240;
+    _The Case of Rebellious Susan_, 236-250;
+    _Judah_, 239-244;
+    _The Crusaders_, 244-248, 259;
+    _The Tempter_, 248;
+    _Triumph of the Philistines_, 249;
+    _The Masqueraders_, 250, 252;
+    on realism, 251;
+    future work, 252.
+
+  ---- and Ibsen, 295-297.
+
+  Jordan, Mrs., 39.
+
+  Josephs, Fanny, 104.
+
+  _Judah_, 239-244, 251.
+
+
+  Kean, Charles, 79, 157;
+    his successor, 166.
+
+  Kean, Edmund, 40-45;
+    death of, 63.
+
+  Keeley, 79.
+
+  Keeley, Mrs., 79.
+
+  Kemble, Charles, 79.
+
+  Kemble, John, 40, 45, 79, 157.
+
+  Kendal as Pygmalion, 147;
+    in _The Falcon_, 181.
+
+  Kendals in _The Greatest of These_, 233.
+
+  Knebworth, Squireen of, 65.
+
+  Knowles, Sheridan, 50, 54, 55.
+
+
+  "La Belle Smidson," 45.
+
+  Labiche, 215, 217, 218, 219, 257.
+
+  Lacy, the bookseller, 107.
+
+  _Lady from the Sea, The_, 292.
+
+  _Lady of Lyons_, 64, 65-67.
+
+  Lamb, Charles, 49, 83.
+
+  Lancival, Luce de, 45.
+
+  Larkin, 104.
+
+  _Late Mr. Costello, The_, 225.
+
+  Law as to adaptations and translations, 208.
+
+  ---- as to foreign dramas, 310.
+
+  Legitimate drama, 156.
+
+  Lemaitre, Jules, 201.
+
+  Lemierra, 45.
+
+  Lewes on Macready's Macbeth, 45;
+    on Macready's last performance, 73.
+
+  _Liberty Hall_, 301, 306.
+
+  Lind, Jenny, 76.
+
+  _Little Eyolph_, 290, 299.
+
+  _London Assurance_, Boucicault's, 88.
+
+  _London Figaro_, 199, 200.
+
+  _London, Lights o'_, 302.
+
+  Lord, Miss H. F., and Ibsen, 279.
+
+  _Lords and Commons_, 256.
+
+  _Love, The Comedy of_, Ibsen's, 278.
+
+  Lyceum, The, 100.
+
+  ---- _The Cup_ at, 184.
+
+  Lyceum, 196.
+
+  Lytton, Lord, 64-72;
+    at Macready's banquet, 74;
+    on Riches and Rank, 116.
+
+
+  Macbeth, Kean as, 41;
+    Macready as, 45.
+
+  Mackayers, Joseph, 214.
+
+  Macready, 40-45;
+    and Dumas, 46;
+    and authors, 50;
+    and _Virginius_, 55.
+
+  ---- manager of Drury Lane and Covent Garden, 62, 63, 64, 65;
+    in _Richelieu_, 67;
+    in Paris, 1846, 73.
+
+  ---- work and farewell performance, 73;
+    last days, 74.
+
+  ---- and Marie Wilton, 99, 157;
+    and Fechter's Hamlet, 158.
+
+  Maeterlink, M., 284.
+
+  _Magistrate, The_, 257.
+
+  Man of the world type, 120.
+
+  Managers, theatre, 77, 308.
+
+  Manning, Cardinal, and Becket, 188.
+
+  Martin, Lady, 79.
+
+  _Master Builder, The_, 290, 295.
+
+  Mathews, Charles, 79, 80, 123, 135.
+
+  Melnotte, Claude, in _The Lady of Lyons_, 66.
+
+  Melodrama, 154, 196.
+
+  Memoirs, Marie Wilton's, 99.
+
+  Merimee, 54.
+
+  Merivale, Herman, 177.
+
+  Merritt, 195.
+
+  _Michael O'Dowd_, 91.
+
+  Millard, Evelyn, 306.
+
+  Mitchell, the Bond Street bookseller, 78.
+
+  _Model Men and Women_, Hood's, 98.
+
+  Moliere, 88, 236.
+
+  _Money_, 64, 70-72;
+    Marie Wilton in, 121.
+
+  _Moor of Venice_, Kean in, 42.
+
+  Moore, George, 289.
+
+  Morals of the stage, Byron's effect on, 97.
+
+  Morris and the Sagas, 285.
+
+  Mortimer, James, 199.
+
+  Munich, Ibsen at, 277.
+
+  Music, a rival to the drama, 75.
+
+  Music halls, 194.
+
+  Myles-na-Coppaleen in _Colleen Bawn_, 91.
+
+  Myrine, 151.
+
+  Mystery in the drama, 252.
+
+
+  Neilson, Adelaide, 159.
+
+  Nesville, Juliette, 249.
+
+  _New Woman, The_, 230-233.
+
+  _Night's Adventure, A_, Robertson's, 107.
+
+  _Norah_, Ibsen's, 279.
+
+  Norway and England, affinities between, 287.
+
+  _Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, The_, 276.
+
+
+  Oakley, Macready as, 41.
+
+  _Octoroon_, 91.
+
+  Official Censorship, 83.
+
+  _Old Jew, An_, 227-230.
+
+  _Old Master, An_, 234.
+
+  Olympic, The, 107.
+
+  _Oonagh, The_, 90.
+
+  Operetta, The, 93, 194.
+
+  Origin of Official Censorship, 83.
+
+  Orleans, Duc d', in _Richelieu_, 69.
+
+  _Our American Cousin_, Sothern in, 112.
+
+  _Our Boys_, 134, 178.
+
+  _Ours_, 117;
+    Marie Wilton in, 121.
+
+  "Owls' Roost," 115.
+
+  Oxenford, John, 82;
+    on Irving, 164.
+
+
+  _Pair of Spectacles, A_, 217-220.
+
+  _Palace of Truth, The_, 146.
+
+  Pantomime, the, 76, 98, 194.
+
+  Parker, Louis N., 301.
+
+  Parliamentary Commission, 64;
+    and Bulwer Lytton, 65.
+
+  Passion in the drama, 252.
+
+  _Patience_, 153.
+
+  Pauline in _The Lady of Lyons_, 66.
+
+  _Peep o' Day_, 90.
+
+  _Peer Gynt_, Ibsen's, 278, 279, 287.
+
+  Penley, Mr., 284.
+
+  Pettitt, 195.
+
+  Phelps, 76, 157.
+
+  _Pilgrim, The White_, 177.
+
+  _Pillars of Society, The_, Ibsen's, 279, 280.
+
+  _Pinafore_, 154.
+
+  Pinero, Arthur W., letter to Mr. Bancroft, 136, 212.
+
+  ---- personal, 254;
+    an actor, 255;
+    _The Squire_, _Lords and Commons_, 256;
+    _The Magistrate_, _Dandy Dick_, _The Hobby Horse_, 257;
+    _The Times_, _The Cabinet Minister_, 258;
+    _The Profligate_, 259-264;
+    _Lady Bountiful_, 264;
+    _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, 264-274, 276;
+    _The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith_, 276;
+    and Ibsen, 295.
+
+  _Pink Dominoes_, 178.
+
+  Pippo, Marie Wilton as, 102, 103, 121.
+
+  _Pirates of Penzance_, 154.
+
+  Plautus, 88.
+
+  Playgoers' Club, Mr. Tree at, 284.
+
+  Plays, Examiner of, 84.
+
+  Plessy, Madame Arnould, 78.
+
+  "Pocket Ibsen," A, 282.
+
+  Polhill, Captain, 62.
+
+  Prices under the Bancrofts, 135.
+
+  Prince of Wales's Theatre, 105 (see Queen's), 113.
+
+  ---- Robertson's plays at, 114.
+
+  ---- last visit to, 137.
+
+  _Princess Ida_, 153.
+
+  Princess's, The, 195.
+
+  Princess's translator, The, 78.
+
+  _Prisoner of War_, Jerrold's, 59.
+
+  "Privileged" theatres, 40, 62-64, 156.
+
+  _Profligate, The_, 259-264.
+
+  _Promise of May, The_, 182.
+
+  Provincial touring, 46-49.
+
+  Ptarmigant, Lord and Lady, 116, 127.
+
+  Puckler-Muskau, Price, 63.
+
+  Puritans and the Stage, 236.
+
+  ---- and the Censorship, 310.
+
+  _Pygmalion and Galatea_, 147;
+    the critics on, 148-152.
+
+
+  _Queen Mary_, Tennyson's, 178, 185, 187, 190.
+
+  Queen's Theatre, 104 (see Prince of Wales's).
+
+  _The Promise of May_, 182.
+
+
+  Raval, 79.
+
+  Ray, Katharine, and Ibsen, 279.
+
+  Realism, H. A. Jones on, 252.
+
+  ---- English horror of, 289;
+    Ibsen's, 289.
+
+  _Rebellious Susan, The Case of_, 236, 250.
+
+  Rehan, Ada, 174.
+
+  Rejane, 197.
+
+  _Rent Day, The_, Jerrold's, 56.
+
+  Reynolds, 50.
+
+  Rhythm of English dramatic verse, 44.
+
+  _Richelieu_, 64, 65-70.
+
+  Richelieu and Cromwell, 68.
+
+  _Richelieu_, Lytton's, 69.
+
+  Robertson, Forbes, 306.
+
+  Robertson, Madge, as Galatea, 147;
+    in _The Falcon_, 181.
+
+  Robertson, T. W., early life, 106;
+    quarrel with Farren, 107;
+    at journalism, 109;
+    in Bohemia, 109-111;
+    writes a play for Sothern, 112;
+    _Society_ and Marie Wilton, 112, 113;
+    success, 117;
+    a wonderful reader, 118;
+    his insight into Marie Wilton's genius, 121;
+    cause of the success of his comedies, 122;
+    only half a realist, 123;
+    characteristics exemplified from _School_, 124;
+    method of character-drawing, 127;
+    his characters, 127-132;
+    marriage, 132;
+    death, 133;
+    and Byron, 134;
+    and Gilbert, 138.
+
+  Robins, Miss, and Ibsen, 281.
+
+  Robson, Mr., 79, 306.
+
+  Roche, Madame, 158.
+
+  Romanticism in France, 45.
+
+  _Roses, The Two_, 133.
+
+  _Rosmersholm_, 292.
+
+  Rorke, Kate, 306.
+
+  Royalty, The, 95.
+
+  Ryder, 79, 158.
+
+
+  Sadler's Wells, 76, 157.
+
+  Sagas, The, 285.
+
+  Saintine, X. B., and _Richelieu_, 68.
+
+  _Saints and Sinners_, 235-240, 244.
+
+  Salaries of actors, 135.
+
+  Sarcey, Francisque, 201.
+
+  Sardou and the Bancrofts, 134, 209, 210, 215, 252, 312.
+
+  Savage Club, The, 109, 115.
+
+  Scandinavian Society, British, and Ibsen, 279.
+
+  School of Common Sense in France, 51.
+
+  _School_, 117;
+    Marie Wilton in, 121;
+    scene from, 125.
+
+  Scott, Clement, and _The Oonagh_, 90;
+    and Tom Hood's parties, 110;
+    on Robertson's reading, 118;
+    on Irving, 164, 197, 198, 199, 200.
+
+  Scribe, 81, 215, 216, 224, 252, 312.
+
+  Sedaine's _drame bourgeois_, 51.
+
+  Shakespeare, 40, 42, 44, 45, 48, 50, 63, 73, 76;
+    and French actors, 78;
+    in Irving's hand, 173;
+    resuscitation, 175;
+    and melodrama, 196.
+
+  "Shakespeare made Easy," 156.
+
+  _Shaugraun_, 91.
+
+  Shaw, G. B., and Ibsen, 283.
+
+  Shelley, 64.
+
+  Sheridan, 50, 81, 88.
+
+  Shylock, Kean as, 43.
+
+  Siddons, Mrs., 40.
+
+  _Silver King, The_, 235.
+
+  Sims, G. R., 195, 301.
+
+  Smith, Albert, 109.
+
+  Smithson, Miss, 45.
+
+  _Snowball, The_, 214.
+
+  _Society_, Robertson's, 112;
+    first performance, 114;
+    success, 117.
+
+  "Song of the Gentleman," by Brough, 111.
+
+  "Songs of the Governing Classes," by Brough, 111.
+
+  Sothern and Robertson, 112, 118.
+
+  ---- and Irving, 162.
+
+  _Sowing the Wind_, 227.
+
+  Spanker, Lady Gay, 75.
+
+  Spectators, three classes, 305.
+
+  Spencer, Herbert, and Ibsen, 292.
+
+  _Squire of Dames_, 302.
+
+  _Squire, The_, 256.
+
+  St. James's Theatre, 78, 181, 196.
+
+  Standard, The, 194.
+
+  Strand, The, 96, 99, 101;
+    Dickens at, 102, 104, 112, 121.
+
+  Stirling, Mrs., in _Caste_, 135.
+
+  Sullivan and Gilbert, 153.
+
+  Surface, Joseph, Macready as, 41.
+
+  Surrey, The, 194.
+
+  Swanborough, Mrs., 96, 112.
+
+  _Sweethearts_, Gilbert's, 140.
+
+  Swinburne's dramas, 192.
+
+
+  Talma on the actor's emotions, 170.
+
+  _Tanqueray, The Second Mrs._, 264-274, 276, 289.
+
+  Taylor, Tom, 87.
+
+  ---- _Our American Cousin_, 112.
+
+  Taylor, Tom, on Marie Wilton and Robertson, 118.
+
+  _Tempter, The_, 248.
+
+  Tennyson and Macready, 74;
+    and Gilbert's _Princess Ida_, 153.
+
+  ---- as a dramatist, 178;
+    and the critics, 178;
+    _The Falcon_, 180;
+    _The Promise of May_, 182;
+    _The Cup_, 183.
+
+  ---- _Queen Mary_, _Harold_, _Becket_, 185;
+    his sense of history, 186.
+
+  Terence, 88.
+
+  Terry, Miss Ellen, 167, 174, 178, 189.
+
+  Theatre-goers of 1850, 77.
+
+  Theatres, number of, 86.
+
+  Theatre, commercial decadence of the, 62.
+
+  Theatres, "Privileged," 40, 62-64, 156.
+
+  Theatre managers, 77.
+
+  Thomas, Henry, 159.
+
+  Thomas, Moy, 198.
+
+  _Ticket of Leave Man_, origin of, 207.
+
+  _Times, The_, Pinero's, 258.
+
+  Toby and Crumbs in _The Rent Day_, 57.
+
+  Toole, John, first appearance, 100.
+
+  Tour, on, 46-49.
+
+  Translations of foreign plays, law as to, 208.
+
+  Travelling companies, 46-49.
+
+  Treaty of Berne, 208.
+
+  Tree, Mr., and _The Tempter_, 248.
+
+  ---- and Ibsen, 284.
+
+  ---- in _John-a-Dreams_, 302;
+    his staying, 307.
+
+  _Trial by Jury_, 153.
+
+  _Triumph of the Philistines_, 249.
+
+  Tussaud's, Madame, Kean and Macready at, 41.
+
+
+  Van Ambrugh, 76.
+
+  Vaudeville, The, 133.
+
+  Victoria, 39.
+
+  Victoria, The, 194.
+
+  Virginia and Icilius, 51.
+
+  _Virginius_, Knowles's, 50-55.
+
+  Virginius's character, 52.
+
+
+  Walkley, A. B., and Ibsen, 283.
+
+  Wallington, Nehemiah, 49.
+
+  Wallis, Miss, as Cleopatra, 159.
+
+  Walpole and the Censorship, 83.
+
+  Waring, Mr., and Ibsen, 281.
+
+  Watson, Malcolm, 301.
+
+  Wells and the classical drama, 177.
+
+  _Wicked World, The_, 147.
+
+  Willard, Mr., 306.
+
+  Wills's _Charles I._, 165, 177;
+    _Claudian_, 177;
+    his conceptions, 178.
+
+  Wilton and Kean, 43.
+
+  Wilton, Marie, and Macready, 99;
+    at the Lyceum, 100;
+    at the Haymarket, 101;
+    Coquelin on, 101;
+    Dickens on, 102;
+    partnership with Byron, 103;
+    her first company, 104;
+    secures _Society_, 113;
+    and Robertson, 118;
+    her parts in Robertson's plays, 121;
+    early days in Liverpool, 138.
+
+  Wilton, the Sisters, 104.
+
+  Wingfield, Hon. Lewis W., 95.
+
+  Woman, the English, and Ibsen, 293.
+
+  Wyndham, Charles, 196, 306.
+
+
+  Yates, Edmund, 62.
+
+  Yates, Frederick, 41.
+
+
+
+
+  PRINTED BY
+  MORRISON AND GIBB LIMITED
+  EDINBURGH
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Berlioz did so literally, and married her.
+
+[2] William Archer, _Life of Macready_.
+
+[3] "Write me a drama," said Macready to young Browning, "and save me
+having to go off to America." The drama was written, but attained only a
+fourth performance, and did not save the actor from his impending
+expedition.
+
+[4] As a matter of fact, Bulwer had not even the merit of inventing this
+arrangement for himself. His play was founded on the novel by X.-B.
+Saintine.
+
+[5] Charles Mathews played at the _Varietes_, in French, in _L'anglais
+timide_, an adaptation of _Cool as a Cucumber_, by Blanchard Jerrold.
+
+[6] 10 George II. cap. 19.
+
+[7] In _Thirty Years at the Play_, Clement Scott gives an account of the
+first night of _The Oonagh_, which has come down to us as a tradition. At
+two o'clock in the morning the play was still in progress. The house was
+empty save for a few critics slumbering in their stalls. The actors were
+on the stage all in a line facing the public, as was then the custom, and
+there was no sign of the ending, when suddenly the machinists pulled back
+the carpet on which the chief characters were standing. They collapsed
+simply!--with the piece, which was never brought to its real conclusion.
+
+[8] T. W. Robertson in _The Illustrated Times_.
+
+[9] Founded on the famous French play _Paillasse_.
+
+[10] To the fourth line he added a footnote to the effect that the name
+was _not_ Johnson really.
+
+[11] Henry Morley, _Journal of a Playgoer_.
+
+[12] These lines appeared in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, on September 15,
+1895. Less than three months later the Kendals produced, for the first
+time in the provinces, a new drama by Mr. Grundy, _The Greatest of These_.
+This play, which was performed later in London, is a work of real value.
+In it Mr. Grundy has forgotten his French models, and has painted English
+life and English characters with a freedom, a fidelity, a power, worthy of
+that Ibsen to whom he will not have it that he owes anything. He has put
+aside his wit in order to be more moving. There is not a weak spot or a
+trace of bad taste in the whole piece. The scene which takes up most of
+the third act is equally beautiful, whether regarded from a psychological,
+a literary, or a purely dramatic standpoint.
+
+[13] His debut was in 1874, when he was nineteen. He has given an account
+of some of his Edinburgh experiences about this time in a pleasant Preface
+to Mr. William Archer's _Theatrical World in 1895_.
+
+[14] When this episode was reached on the night of the first performance
+of _The Master Builder_, a critic turned to Mr. Archer and said, "Will you
+explain _that_ symbol to us?" "I am not sure," Mr. Archer replied quietly,
+"that it _is_ a symbol." Upon which, a lady sitting near them interposed:
+"Excuse my breaking in upon your conversation," she said, "but you may be
+interested to know that many women are like Mrs. Solness in this. I myself
+have all the dolls of my childhood safely preserved at home, and I look
+after them tenderly." It is well known, too, that the Queen's collection
+of her dolls is preserved at Windsor Castle.
+
+[15] I should have wished to determine the influence exerted by the
+contemporary German drama upon the dramatic movement in England, but I can
+find no trace of any such influence at all. Only a single work of
+Sudermann's has so far been translated, and this came from America. An
+attempt was made in 1895 to found a permanent _Deutsches Theater_ in
+London, and works by Freytag, Sudermann, Hauptmann, Otto Hartleber, Max
+Halbe, and Blumenthal were produced there. I do not know whether the
+attempt, made under modest, and indeed almost mean, conditions, will be
+renewed. The critics attended the performance, but the general public paid
+but little attention to them.
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_.
+
+Punctuation has been corrected without note.
+
+The following misprints have been corrected:
+  "had had" corrected to "had" (page 112)
+  "uninterruped" corrected to "uninterrupted" (page 115)
+  "made" corrected to "make" (page 117)
+  "Pgymalion" corrected to "Pygmalion" (page 151)
+  "protraits" corrected to "portraits" (page 166)
+  "aquainted" corrected to "acquainted" (page 200)
+  "is is" corrected to "is" (page 277)
+  "105" corrected to "50" (index)
+  "succces" corrected to "success" (index)
+
+Other than the corrections listed above, inconsistencies in spelling and
+hyphenation have been retained from the original.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The English Stage, by Augustin Filon
+
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